Shortages of consumer goods in Stalinist regimes

The testimony of Zekeriya Sertel (2)

Soviet citizens queuing outside a sausage and delicatessen shop in the 1980s.

In the previous article, drawing on a number of observations made by Zekeriya Sertel in his book Olduğu Gibi - Rus Biçimi Sosyalizm (As It Was: Socialism in the Russian Manner), I examined how difficult it was to obtain consumer goods in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in the late 1960s. Sertel’s testimony made it clear that this was not a case of the occasional, temporary shortage of certain goods, but rather of a structural regime of scarcity that steadily turned everyday life for broad sections of the population into a constant ordeal.

Yet Sertel’s book does more than merely describe empty shelves, long queues, shoddy goods and the daily hardships endured by ordinary people. At certain points, he also reflects on the underlying causes of this state of affairs. To be sure, the author does not offer the reader a comprehensive analysis that is theoretically rigorous or economically and politically satisfying. Frankly speaking, Sertel did not possess the theoretical equipment needed for such an undertaking in the first place. Even so, some of his observations on the sources of scarcity are still worth considering, for they offer important clues as to how the Stalinist bureaucratic system functioned.

After drawing, under the subheading The market was completely empty, the picture we discussed in the previous article, Sertel asks, “So what happens to the things produced in this country?” He then offers the following explanation:

To begin with, production is not abundant. The finest and best of such things [fruit and vegetables] are sent to Party depots and, above all, to our “masters” in Moscow. They are then allocated to hospitals, sanatoria, rest homes, hotels and restaurants. Nothing is left for the people. That is why you cannot find anything when you go there. This is how the Soviet Union’s notorious queues arise. When a commodity that has long been nowhere to be seen suddenly appears, the queue seems to stretch on without end. In any case, there are few shops and stores in the Soviet Union. Since the food and clothing available in them are scarce and not always in stock, the people, even after fifty years have passed since the revolution, still cannot escape waiting in queues. (p. 83)

In this passage, several important points are bound up with one another. First, the problem is not merely one of insufficient production. Equally important is the way in which the limited quantity of goods produced is distributed. In the system Sertel describes, the best products are channelled first to the Party apparatus, that is, to the privileged bureaucratic stratum. They are then allocated to various institutions. The people, meanwhile, are left to make do with whatever remains. What we see here, then, is not simply general poverty, but a distributive regime shot through with bureaucratic privilege.

Secondly, queues in this system are not a chance occurrence but a natural outcome of its workings. Because goods do not enter circulation in a regular and adequate manner, people flock to a shop whenever a product that has long been unavailable suddenly appears. The small number of shops, limited stocks and irregular supply turn queues into a permanent feature of everyday life. As Sertel suggests, the fact that, even half a century after the revolution, people had still not escaped the need to wait in queues shows that this was not a temporary “malfunction” but a structural feature of the regime.

Citizens waiting outside a Post, Telegraph and Telephone office in the Soviet Union. In Stalinist regimes, queues were an inseparable feature not only of access to food and consumer goods, but also of public services.

Later in the book, under the subheading Scarcity and hunger after fifty-two years, Sertel returns to the same issue. This time, he speaks not only of basic goods such as meat, flour, pulses, matches, eggs, vegetables and fruit, but also of consumer goods such as oranges, lemons and bananas, which were scarcely produced in the Soviet Union at all. (See pp. 139-151.) More importantly, he attempts to offer some explanation of the background to this scarcity. He refers to the mistaken policy of collectivisation, to the millions of peasants who were executed or perished as a result of the devastation it caused, to the perverse workings of the kolkhoz system and the way it depressed productivity, to the manner in which kolkhoz managers formed a privileged stratum, and to the deep socio-economic inequalities in the countryside. At times, he draws comparisons with China and other Stalinist regimes; at others, he tends to explain the matter in terms of the peasants’ supposed “lack of consciousness”.

The limitations and superficiality of the author’s approach become apparent here once again. Although Sertel offers some highly significant observations, he is unable to grasp them as part of a broader historical and social totality. He lacks the framework needed to explain how the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship paralysed the mechanisms of production, distribution and incentives. Even so, we may say that, in certain concrete examples, he does indeed put his finger on some of the central features of the problem.

One of these concerns logistics. After noting that no artificial fertiliser was sent to the kolkhozes and sovkhozes [*] until 1960, and that even after it began to be supplied the results fell short of expectations, Sertel goes on to say:

(…) After 1960, artificial fertiliser began to be sent to the kolkhozes and sovkhozes. But this too failed to bring the expected results. The fertiliser dispatched remained piled up at railway stations and never reached the villages. The reason was that the kolkhozes lacked the vehicles needed to transport it to the villages and fields. A study carried out in 1967 found that the fertiliser was lying in great heaps at the stations, dissolving away in the open air under snow and rain. (p. 150)

This example is particularly significant. For the issue here is not simply one of “insufficient production”. Even the inputs that do exist cannot be delivered to the right place, at the right time, by the necessary means. However belatedly, it was recognised that fertiliser had to be supplied to the sites of agricultural production, yet the transport process could not be completed. Fertiliser lying in great heaps at railway stations and dissolving away in the rain is one of the starkest symbols of the Stalinist economy: a bureaucratic mechanism incapable of using even the resources already at its disposal in a rational way to meet social needs.

Sertel goes on to explain that the same weaknesses also severely hampered Khrushchev’s famous Virgin Lands Campaign:

Khrushchev thought he had discovered a new way of overcoming the country’s shortages. In Kazakhstan, hundreds of thousands of hectares of land lay uncultivated. By bringing this land under cultivation, it was thought possible to produce vast quantities of wheat. With a single order, Khrushchev had these lands sown.

(…)

Millions of roubles were poured into the scheme. Thousands of people perished. The harvest was nowhere near as abundant as had been hoped. Worst of all, no silos or granaries had been built to store the crop. The wheat that was produced was left in huge heaps, exposed to rain and snow. Because there was not enough transport, the harvest rotted where it lay. After that, the deserts of Kazakhstan were no longer spoken of. (pp. 150-151)

A 1958 Soviet stamp glorifying the Komsomol youth who took part in the Virgin Lands Campaign.

This passage confirms the same fundamental truth. From above comes a sweeping command, issued without allowing any room for democratic participation or debate, followed by a vast mobilisation, grand declarations, enormous expenditure and, in the end, immense waste. Sowing is ordered, yet no thought is given to how the harvest will be stored. Production is to be increased, yet the transport infrastructure is left out of account. In this way, an initiative launched in the name of overcoming scarcity ends up reproducing it by another route. This, too, is one of the most typical features of the Stalinist economy: instead of producing rational solutions grounded in democratic planning, it substitutes bureaucratic will for material reality.

As noted above, we cannot say that Sertel formulates all this with theoretical clarity. Yet the examples he provides clearly show one thing: in Stalinist regimes, shortages of consumer goods do not arise solely from the quantitative inadequacy of production. They are also continually reproduced by privileged channels of distribution, distorted forms of organisation that hamper production, severe deficiencies in transport and storage, and a top-down, authoritarian and anti-democratic mode of decision-making. In other words, scarcity is not a malfunction of the system but one of the consequences of the way it operates.

Sertel’s book contains many further examples of shortages of consumer goods, especially clothing and footwear. But I would like to conclude this article by recommending the book itself, which, though it does not provide a deep or fully developed analysis, is nonetheless rich in striking observations and anecdotes. And I shall leave the final word to a profoundly painful scene related by Sertel:

(…) once or twice a year, oranges appear in the shops. Women who have not been able to give their children even a single orange all year long rush to the shops where they are on sale. They wait for hours in the queue outside for a kilo of oranges. In the meantime, tempers fray and quarrels break out. The militiaman (policeman) at the head of the queue shouts:

- “For fifty years now, and still we haven’t managed to teach you how to queue!”

For fifty years, the Soviet people have been standing in one queue after another. (p. 122)

[*] Kolkhoz refers to a collective farm in which peasants worked on the basis of collective labour, while sovkhoz denotes a state farm directly owned by the state and operated by wage labourers. Both were fundamental institutions of the Stalinist agrarian regime, though sovkhozes were more directly state-run in character than kolkhozes.

To be continued

The testimony of Zekeriya Sertel (1)

Queue etiquette in Stalinist Albania