Moscow, December 25, 1991

“Some of this material is stored by your army which throws it out after three years,” Popov admonished the American visitor. “But a three-year shelf life is all right for us.”¹

Some American supplies are now arriving in Moscow. Three days ago, two U.S. military aircraft landed at Sheremetyevo Airport with $200,000 worth of year-old surplus army rations left over from the Gulf War, and limited quantities of sugar, flour, and rice are being delivered to the city’s orphanages and homes for the elderly.

Muscovites will never forget the discontent and shortages of December 1991. University student Olga Perova recalls being sent to queue at 6 a.m. to buy milk for her newborn sister. “There were empty counters everywhere, and everything that had to do with everyday life was horrible.” Anna Pruzhiner, a fifty-two-year-old specialist at the Metro construction company, Metrostroi, is first in line for milk when the doors of the dairy shop are opened each morning, and “there is such a jam that I barely avoid being trampled into the ground.” Tina Kataeva, thirty-two, who works at an art exhibition center, is unable to get “soothers, children’s food, Pampers or anything of that sort,” and when her actor husband returns from a tour abroad, he is quizzed by suspicious German customs officers about carrying so many cans of baby food. Yevgeniya Kataeva, a fifty-five-year-old translator living in Zoologicheskaya Street, is driving on the outskirts of Moscow when she sees a middle-aged man walking down the street with a sheaf of toilet paper strung around his neck like beads. She stops the car and runs over to him to ask where he got the toilet paper. “Naturally I drive there and buy as much as I can. Every time you get something like that, it is a big deal. You feel great, and discuss it over the phone with friends and among your family.”²

Things are so bad that even members of the political elite like Yeltsin’s deputy prime minister Yegor Gaidar have to scramble to buy food. His wife, Masha, and their ten-year-old son join a line for bread at a shop in Nikitskaya Street, and when the boy gets the last bulka, “a woman tries to snatch this piece of bread,” he related. He recalled a city of near panic. “Grim food lines, even without their usual squabbles and scenes. Pristinely empty stores. Women rushing about in search of some food, any food for sale. Dollar prices in the deserted Tishinsky market. Expectations of disaster in the air…. Day and night, the greatest anxiety is bread.”³ Eduard Shevardnadze confides to a visiting American that his wife, Nanuli, hoards any foodstuffs she can find in the near-empty supermarkets. The wife of Lev Sukhanov, Yeltsin’s closest aide, has had to queue for two days to buy sugar. The city is utterly depressed. Rudeness is so common that in the words of Viktor Loshak in Moscow News, “the counter is like a barricade with enemies on either side.”

Because money has run out, trade officials can no longer pay the shipping charges to bring food to Russian ports. The cargo planes that normally haul supplies to the Russian capital are grounded because of a shortage of aviation fuel. Moscow’s airports at Sheremetyevo, Domodedovo, and Vnukovo resemble refugee camps, with stranded passengers sleeping on the floors. Ninety airports across the Soviet Union are closed for lack of fuel. Gas has run out at filling stations along the highways, and even the American embassy has trouble finding fuel for the ambassador’s official car. With the fragmentation of the Soviet Union, Moscow can no longer command supplies from its neighboring republics, where hunger is also a reality.

The country is humiliated by having to accept international charity. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports that the residents of Vologodsky Province northeast of Moscow are receiving aid collected by the wives of Sweden’s richest businessmen. “The Americans were helping a little bit, the French a little bit, the Canadians a little bit. But all this compared to the needs was just a drop in the ocean,” recalled Gaidar. Few people can afford the prices at the peasant markets in Moscow, which are mostly controlled by the mafia. One chicken might cost a month’s wages. Adding to the intensity of this perfect economic storm, the price of oil, the main source of dollars, has plummeted on world markets, and the flow of oil dollars that kept the Soviet economy on life support has fallen to a trickle. The foreign currency bank has stopped all payments except for freight charges to import grain from Canada, animal feed from the United Kingdom, and other foreign food and medicines.