This could be the Soviet Union’s most painful winter since World War II. Starvation, not just shortages, is again the main concern. A poll published last week found that 62 percent of the Soviet public fears famine this season. Perestroika’s reforms have failed to create a market system that can get food to market–and onto people’s tables. Gorbachev remains at loggerheads with the 15 republics, all of which demand greater autonomy or outright secession. While he lobbies for what he calls a “Union of Sovereign States,” the regional tug of war has shattered what little remained of the country’s food-distribution system. And the hungry public has lost its appetite for Gorbachev’s grand design. His approval rating has dropped to 21 percent, down from 52 percent a year ago.
Regional and local governments are beginning to look after their own citizens first. In Krasnoyarsk, authorities last week refused to deliver 5,200 tons of meat and 10,400 tons of milk to the state. “At such a rate of delivery, we’ll put our people on starvation rations,” said a local deputy. Some 30 percent of all scheduled meat deliveries never reached Sverdlovsk this year, Gorbachev told Parliament Friday. Interregional agreements also are a shambles. “The distribution channels are now gone,” said Aleksei Yemelyanov, deputy chairman of the Supreme Soviet’s committee on agrarian problems and foodstuffs. Ivan Yakushin, a collective-farm chairman, said many farmers bartered their crops directly with factories this year instead of selling to the state. “We had a record harvest of 240 million tons of grain, but the government couldn’t buy it,” he said. Peasants outside Moscow were incensed last summer when the new municipal government issued identification cards to city dwellers and cut off shopping by nonresidents. In retaliation, farmers stopped delivering food. That left the capital with 40 percent less to eat than usual. Leningrad has the same problem; last week it was short 5,000 tons of sausage and 40,000 tons of dairy products. Moscow is considering full-scale rationing, and Leningrad plans to impose it on Dec. 1.
Nationwide rationing may be next. Even so, “there is absolutely no certainty that there will be food to back up the ration cards,” the Moscow daily Pravda warned last week. Russian Supreme Soviet chairman Boris Yeltsin calls for an “anticrisis committee” to inventory all the food in the country and distribute it where it is needed. But the plan hinges on a demand that Gorbachev sack his point man on economic reform, Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, and share power with Yeltsin.
Worst-case scenario: Just how painful will the winter be? The shops look empty, but “there’s a lot more food than meets the eye,” says a U.S. State Department Soviet expert. Still, the Bush administration is studying which aid programs could be used to rush in food if necessary, even by emergency airlift. Europeans are apprehensive. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl last week offered to improve on prior aid commitments worth roughly $10 billion, and he is quietly pressing for a regional relief plan. The worst-case winter scenario–political chaos, regional violence, starvation, repression–could provoke an exodus of millions of Soviets into Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia or Finland.
At the weekend the combined pressures Pushed Gorbachev to action. Addressing the Supreme Soviet again on Saturday, he proposed a reorganization of the government that would grant more power to himself and to the republics–in part by eliminating the Council of Ministers, headed by Ryzhkov. Gorbachev also promised to draft an emergency food-distribution program within two weeks. Typically, Gorbachev didn’t go as far as Yeltsin wanted him to. But with each crisis he faces, Gorbachev moves ever closer to adopting his rival’s proposal for radical reform.
