Short Supplies

In Moscow last week, basic foods were in ominously short supply. To combat hoarding, bakeries were plastered with posters urging DONT BUY MORE BREAD THAN YOU NEED. Potatoes had vanished from government-controlled stores, while in the "free" markets, they were selling for up to 45 kopecks (50-c-) a pound, or 900% higher than the standard state-fixed price.

Shortages outside the capital were more severe. At Moscow's nine railway stations, hordes of villagers could be seen lugging bundles of food homeward. This drain on the capital's supplies had led police to cut train service and confiscate food at the terminals. Last week a despondent traveler told TIME Correspondent John Shaw that he had been caught with 175 Ibs. of cabbage he was trying to take to his village. Police seized 150 Ibs. of his haul. "I'll be back next week," he said ruefully. Pravda reported long queues at bakeries in Gorky, a major industrial center, while travelers said that in cities as widely scattered as Saratov, Yaroslavl and Kharkov, cereals had been virtually unobtainable for weeks. Northerners from the Barents Sea port of Archangel complained that their rationed potatoes were "not much bigger than peas."

The Soviet Union is suffering from its worst food shortages since the crop failures of 1963--as Agriculture Minister Vladimir Matskevich recently acknowledged. Such admissions are rare. As Russian trade officials in Washington pressed last week for rapid delivery of 11 million tons of American wheat and other foodstuffs, the Soviet press maintained silence about the $ 1.5 billion worth of agricultural produce the U.S.S.R. has contracted to purchase from the West through June.

Distribution of part of these purchases is expected soon to alleviate scarcities of staple foods, especially bread. The Russians intend to mill the fine-quality American and Canadian wheat for flour. Their own sparse grain crop will be used to provide cattle feed. But present shortages of feed have forced the Soviets to slaughter precious livestock herds that are insufficient even in the best of times. Although this may provide a temporary bonanza of meat this winter, it will also diminish supplies of dairy products.

Breaking Point. The shortages are caused by a combination of Russia's capricious climate and the country's inefficient system of production and distribution. In 1971-72, European Russia was bedeviled by a freak winter, when little snow fell to insulate seeds against record spells of frost. This was followed by a drought during the hottest summer of the century. The resulting crop damage and late harvest taxed the Soviets' inadequate technology to the breaking point. Trucks, harvesting machinery, railroad cars, granaries and manpower all seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

In August and September hundreds of thousands of agricultural machines, and an equal number of city dwellers and students, were shipped to the worst-hit areas in an attempt to salvage the harvest. Still, the grain yield alone in 1972 is a critical 30 million tons under total expectations of 190 million tons. The only area where harvests are adequate is the "virgin lands" of Kazakhstan, the once idle steppes that Nikita Khrushchev plowed up for grain in the late 1950s. Until now, this project was routinely denounced as one of the late Premier's "harebrained schemes." But this year's satisfactory virgin-lands harvest was attributed by Pravda to "the wisdom and foresight of our party's agrarian policy."

Still, the cost of that policy is proving huge. The hard currency the Soviets sorely need to buy Western industrial equipment and technological know-how is now being spent for food. In 1972 such expenditures already exceed the value of all Soviet imports of Western technology during the previous five-year plan. The Russians have also lost the $30 million a year they earned until recently from their grain exports to Western Europe. To make matters worse, prospects for the 1973 harvest look bleak, as planting this fall runs 25% behind schedule. This probably explains the Soviets' ready compliance with U.S. demands that they pay premium rates to American ships that will carry grain and other foods to Russia. Besides this $180 million deal concluded last week, the Kremlin also agreed to pay $722 million in settlement of their $11.1 billion wartime Lend-Lease debt to the U.S. (see BUSINESS).

The Soviets are also planning to pour an impressive 21.5% of their total capital investment during the next three years into more machinery, fertilizers and land improvement to increase productivity on the farms. Still, Western analysts predict that the U.S.S.R. will become a permanent importer of grain, unless radical reforms of the agrarian system are undertaken. At the Supreme Soviet meeting in Moscow this fall, agricultural planners expressed their determination to take vigorous but unspecified "measures" to prevent a recurrence of this year's mortifying failures. Last week the Kremlin moved to reallocate 20 billion rubles from other economic sectors to the agricultural budget.

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