Shortages of consumer goods in Stalinist regimes

The testimony of Anatoly Chernyaev

Anatoly Chernyaev is a name familiar to regular readers of this blog. A bureaucrat who served in the upper echelons of the Soviet party and state apparatus, Chernyaev offers, through the diaries he kept from 1972 onwards, a first-hand account of the inner workings of the Stalinist bureaucracy and of the Kremlin’s relations with other Stalinist regimes and parties.

Aleksei Sundukov, Queue, 1986. Long queues were one of the most visible expressions of consumer-goods shortages and of the bureaucratic system of distribution in Stalinist regimes.

The passage I shall examine in this article is taken from Chernyaev’s diary entry of 6 January 1976. In fact, the person making the direct observation here is not Chernyaev himself - who, as a senior bureaucrat, lived largely insulated from the daily struggles of ordinary people in a world of privilege - but his secretary, who travelled to Kostroma for his stepdaughter’s wedding over the New Year period. Chernyaev simply recorded his secretary’s account in his diary.

Kostroma, the place mentioned in the text, is a historically important regional centre situated to the north-east of Moscow. The city lies some 320 to 330 kilometres from the capital. Chernyaev’s reference in his diary to “400 kilometres” should, of course, be understood not as a precise geographical measurement but as a rough indication of distance. The essential point is that the place in question was not some remote village, but a fairly substantial city serving as a regional centre.

In his diary entry of 6 January 1976, Chernyaev wrote:

For New Year’s my secretary went to Kostroma for her stepdaughter’s wedding. I asked her:

“How are things there?”

“Bad.”

“How come?”

“There is nothing in the stores.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Just that. Herring that has turned a yellowish color. Canned soup – borscht, cabbage soup, you know the kind? Here in Moscow it spends years gathering dust on the shelves. Over there nobody buys it either. There are no sausages, no meat products at all. Whenever there is a meat delivery there is a huge crowd at the store. The only cheese they have is local from Kostroma, but I hear it’s not the kind we get in Moscow. My husband has a lot of friends and relatives there. In the course of the week we visited a bunch of people and everywhere we were treated to pickles, sauerkraut, and marinated mushrooms, i.e. the things people stocked up in the summer from their gardens and the forest. How do they live there!”

I was struck by this story. We are talking about a regional center 400km from Moscow, with a population of 600,000! (Anatoly S. Chernyaev, Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev (1976), trans. Anna Melyakova, ed. Svetlana Savranskaya, pp. 13-14.)

This passage reveals not only the widespread and acute shortage of consumer goods in a major settlement not far from Moscow, but also the social relations and distributive realities produced by the regime. What we encounter here is not simply a logistical disruption. Empty shelves, yellowing herrings, tinned soups that no one wanted to buy, the large crowds that formed whenever meat arrived at the shop, and the fact that people had to preserve for winter what they gathered from their gardens or from the forest in summer - all this points to the structural nature of the problem.

A Soviet-era propaganda poster promoting canned borscht as a practical and appealing consumer product. The image of abundance and convenience promised by official discourse often stood in sharp contrast to everyday reality, which was marked by empty shelves, poor quality and chronic shortages.

In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky emphasises that, in a backward country, nationalised property and central planning can foster the growth of heavy industry, yet this alone cannot guarantee an adequate level of consumption. In a society where consumer goods are scarce, the “struggle for necessities” does not disappear; on the contrary, it is channelled through bureaucratic mechanisms of distribution. In such a system, the plan must be constantly tested against real needs and continually reworked accordingly; for that, the democratic control of the working class and the other labouring masses is indispensable. In Stalinist regimes, however, there is not even the faintest trace of the democratic control that is indispensable to the construction of socialism.

To be continued

The testimony of Anthony Barnett

The testimony of Zekeriya Sertel (2)

The testimony of Zekeriya Sertel (1)

Queue etiquette in Stalinist Albania