The state-run Central Supermarket in Kiev had bologna on sale at a good price. Along line of shoppers quickly formed, among them a pensioner who said her name was Anna Aleksandra. “The lines are longer and longer,” she complained, “and it’s getting harder and harder to find food. " The Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, has plenty of food. But the best of it ends up in private markets, where it sells for prices that people on pensions of 140 rubles a month-$4.37 at current bank exchange rate-simply cannot afford. Anna Aleksandra has to buy the cheaper food on sale in state stores; she has to settle for poorer quality and smaller quantities than she is used to. She cannot imagine what she will do if economic reform allows all food prices to rise to freemarket levels. Already, a single restaurant meal–in an establishment that still accepts the nearly worthless ruble–costs more than her monthly pension.
While bologna was on sale in Kiev, the leaders of what is now called “the former Soviet Union” were patching together a transitional government in Moscow. The new arrangement transferred considerable power to the 10 republics that seem likely to remain in the union. It offered the other five a continuing economic partnership. And it gave President Mikhail Gorbachev something to do, if only to serve as a counterbalance to the ambitions of Russian leader Boris Yeltsin. In a week of sweeping change, the three Baltic republics officially gained their independence, and Leningrad was renamed St. Petersburg. But power-sharing deals and political changes may be less crucial to the future of the country than the struggle already underway in fields, food plants and transportation depots to get through the hard months ahead. “The most urgent question is the question of food,” Gorbachev warned last week. “Winter’s coming on.”
Almost no one predicts famine next winter, though the possibility cannot be ignored. What is more likely is that there will be endemic shortages, long lines of unhappy shoppers and perhaps even pockets of outright hunger in areas that are particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of the decrepit transportation system. Food prices are going up; the price of potatoes at Moscow’s state stores is expected to be 800 percent higher than last year. There also may be cold apartments because of fuel shortages in some places. “I’m afraid a tired population won’t stand for this,” says Valery Gavrichkin, an agricultural expert at the daily newspaper Izvestia. If enough people become hungry, cold and disgruntled, the effort to hold together what remains of the union may finally collapse. Widespread discontent could even lead to another coup, possibly supported this time by some of the soldiers who have been living in tents since their withdrawal from Eastern Europe.
Winter will hit the Union of Sovereign States, as the country is to be known, in midstride between the old system and the new. As a result, consumers will have to cope with the scarcities of the centrally planned economy and the rising prices of the market-style regime. “It’s almost better to have a complete centrally planned economy than to have a half-market, half-planned economy,” says Oleksander Savchenko, chief economist for the Ukrainian nationalist group Rukh. As the economy crumbles, food and fuel production is declining across the board. This year’s grain harvest is expected to be about 195 million metric tons, down from 240 million last year. Oil production is expected to drop 10 percent and coal production nearly 12 percent.
Harvesting crops and getting food and fuel to market are jobs that often have to be done the hard way-by hand, using unskilled students and soldiers dragooned for the purpose. At the huge and mostly modern Ramenskoye agro-industrial complex outside Moscow, uniformed cadets from a nearby military academy crouched over the furrows last week, rooting in the soft black earth for carrots. At a military base in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic (page 39), soldiers unloaded a train full of coal without using even shovels, tossing the fuel one piece at a time onto a pile that never seemed to get any larger.
Despite declining production, the Soviet Union still has enough food and fuel to get through the winter. But its transportation system is incapable of delivering all the goods. “More than a quarter of their grain is wasted, and more than half of their fruit and potatoes rot before getting to consumers,” says a senior U.S. Treasury official. “Their railroads are breaking down. They don’t have much of a real trucking industry. And they never had a modern storage system.” If the country runs into serious trouble, it can expect humanitarian aid from the West. But a foreign relief effort would be hampered by the same bottlenecks. “We don’t think it’ll come close to starvation or famine relief this winter,” says the Treasury official. “But if it does, we’ll have trouble reaching everyone, too.”
So far, economic reform has made some things worse. As farmers are freed to sell their crops to the highest bidder, they are understandably reluctant to sell to the state at rock-bottom prices. Collective farms are supposed to sell 30 percent of their grain crops to the government at 400 rubles a ton. The Russian Republic levies a “food tax” on grain farmers, demanding an additional 50 percent at official prices. Like most plans in the Soviet Union, this one doesn’t work. Producers can sell their grain on the commodity exchange in Moscow for as much as 2,500 rubles a ton, generating more than enough extra cash to pay the fines they incur for failing to meet their state obligations. As a result, government grain warehouses are nearly empty. Among other things, that means less grain for state livestock producers and ultimately less meat for consumers. The same economic forces have reduced the supply of vegetables and potatoes, forcing state stores to pay much higher prices for supplies.
The collapse of the Soviet government means that no one now controls the flow of food among all of the republics. Without an iron hand in Moscow, the republics will have to sort things out for themselves. “That could lead to catastrophe,” warns Gavrichkin. “If the center is not around to divert surpluses from one area to another, it’s very likely that producers will succumb to the temptation to sell crops abroad for hard currency, or to barter them.”
It remains to be seen whether the new transitional government will be able to impose efficiency and fairness on the supply system. Under the plan reluctantly approved by the Congress of People’s Deputies last week, most authority is vested in a State Council consisting of Gorbachev, as union president, and the leaders of the participating republics. On paper at least, the council will have virtually unlimited power to run the country, unfettered by constitutional checks and balances or democratic procedures. A new bicameral legislature will be appointed by the republics and will probably be hobbled by their conflicting interests. Another official body, the Interrepublican Economic Committee, still has no program for reforming the economy and no independent enforcement authority. The transitional government will remain in power until a new constitution is written by the legislature and elections are held, a process that could take months or years. The effectiveness of the State Council’s rule will depend largely on how well Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the other republican leaders get along with each other.
Yeltsin promised to be good. He said the Russian Republic “will never be an empire, nor an elder brother” to the other republics. But some of his partners were still wary of his earlier vague threat to redraw borders to accommodate Russians living in other republics. And during a question-and-answer session televised by ABC News, Gorbachev and Yeltsin differed on the most urgent issue at hand. Gorbachev said the interim government would ensure “cooperation” on food supplies. Yeltsin said Russia would take care of itself in a pinch, leaving the other republics to their own devices. “Russia will deal directly” with foreign grain suppliers, he said"without intermediaries.” If a hard winter forces each republic to look out for its own food supply, the new union may still not be enough of an improvement over the old one.
Did Raisa Gorbachev have a nervous breakdown? And where has she been since the couple returned to Moscow? After the failed coup last month, Mrs. Gorbachev emerged from the plane behind her husband. Her face, usually so vibrant, was pale, and she appeared to be weeping. Mikhail Gorbachev said his 59-year-old wife had not been “feeling well”-and rumors of ill health and worse swept around the world.
Raisa Gorbachev herself cleared up some of the mystery last week. In a telephone interview published in Trud, a Soviet national daily newspaper, the First Lady said that since the coup, she has been under medical care for “a hypertension fit accompanied by a speech disorder.” She has been recuperating at home, and can’t stop reliving the horror of being held prisoner at the family’s Crimean dacha. “Those were terrible days,” she said.
According to Mrs. Gorbachev, she was crushed that her husband was betrayed by his advisers. “The bitterness of their treachery was torturing me,” she said. She was also haunted by precedents from the “terrible pages” of Russian history, including the assassination of Czar Nicholas II and his family. Fearing poisoning, she did not allow her family to eat anything delivered to the dacha.
While detained, the Gorbachevs went for walks on the dacha property in hopes neighbors would spot them and see he was not ill. The pressure mounted. On the morning of Aug. 21, the day the coup crumbled, she heard on the radio that KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov was leading a delegation to see how sick Gorbachev was. “I knew … certain actions could follow to turn that lie into reality,” she told Trud. “The tragic outcome could occur very rapidly.” After that, she said, “my state deteriorated.”
Mrs. Gorbachev says she is feeling better-and she has more than her freedom to celebrate. Her memoirs, “I Hope,” are being published this month in the Soviet Union, Europe and the United States. Though much of what she writes about her husband’s policies is now outdated, the book is selling well in her own country. If she ever writes a second volume, Mrs. Gorbachev will have a dramatic tale to kick it off.
