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this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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Reminds me of the propaganda of the communist leaders looking at an American grocery store and the massive amounts of food, how if their citizens saw it they would give up communism or some BS. The one thing we supposedly have going for us more and more people can't even afford, the little treats.
It's a pretty common cultural shock story, but it has to do with the fundamentals of how the American and Soviet economies were organized. The Soviet economy projected demand and sent exactly the amount of food they expected to need to a grocery store, which meant that the people shopping there all naturally adapted to the rhythm of showing up on the day things were delivered and getting in line to get the first pick, while in America it became commonplace for grocers to overstock and throw out excess because there's a psychological effect that makes people buy more when they see more. You can guess which one is far more wasteful and doesn't really result in a better outcome for anyone beyond being able to say "look at this decadent cornucopia!"
so many/most/all of those "starvation bread lines" were actually just "people lining up to get the freshest bread lines
(i was a kid during the fall and only remember hearing the first part on the news, that it was a lack of food overall)
After WW2 at least, yeah.
Also underappreciated is that the worst non-war-related shortages experienced in the USSR happened under Gorbachev and were a direct result of his first privatization reforms.
I thought his privatizations were in response to shortages. Or was it just to get the US off their back?
There were no major shortages prior to Perestroika. There was slower economic growth as a result of the oil crisis of the 1970s, but otherwise the economy of the socialist bloc was doing fine pretty much until the USSR decided to liberalize. They did this primarily for ideological reasons, not material ones. Then everything became severely fucked up and this had downstream effects on other socialist countries, where you had the dual shock of losing the strong economic anchor of the USSR coupled with their own liberalization reforms inspired by the ideological movement for liberal reform that was emanating from the USSR, which then destroyed the basis of their socialist economies. Even countries such as Romania, which did not liberalize and which was doing very well up until the 1980s with some pretty incredible growth, had the rug pulled out from under them when the USSR started wrecking its own economy and abandoning its allies, and this forced Romania to go into austerity to repay IMF loans which in turn created the shortages.