Word: sugars
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There are difficulties for foreigners used to greater wealth exists in the countryside. Beyond the farmlands--which grow corn, bananas, beans and sugar cane amid green, rolling hills in Kakamega--lies a region that is severely undeveloped...
Armed with a list of six items, TIME Moscow correspondent Ann Blackman set out last week to see what Soviet consumers experience when they try to buy even the most basic goods. On Blackman's list: beef, apples, carrots, sugar, laundry soap and toothpaste...
...brown paper bags filled with ground meat, half a dozen scrawny chickens and four packages of beef -- fatty, mostly bone and covered in grimy cellophane -- priced at $1.60 per lb. I stand in line for 14 minutes and buy a 2-lb. package of beef. There had been some sugar that morning, an employee informs me, and there may be some in the afternoon. I pass an outdoor state fruit stand that will not open for nearly an hour. Seventeen people are already in line, waiting for prized tangerines...
...Home at last. Elapsed shopping time: 3 hr. 10 min. Total cost of purchases: $9.42. I never did find sugar. But that's not unusual. What impresses one is the constant struggle the Soviets must go through every day to buy those things that so many Westerners take for granted...
...shortages seem to lend themselves to quick solutions. When sugar suddenly grew scarce 18 months ago, most consumers blamed Gorbachev's antialcoholism drive, which diverted substantial quantities of the commodity into home brewing. Authorities have somewhat relaxed their original strictures on liquor production, but sugar is still rationed in 67 of the Russian Republic's 86 administrative districts. Other goods that are frequently hard to find: good cheese, coffee, chocolate, fresh fruit and bath towels. "Fruit and vegetables have always been scarce in the Russian winter," said a gray- haired man shopping on Moscow's Kutuzovsky Prospekt...