For many, in the final years of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there would always be long queues in front of the store, and this was simply to buy some randomly listed goods. This is also a tragic memory belonging to a generation of Soviets.
Because of the lack of materials, the living standards of ordinary people in the Soviet Union also declined rapidly. According to records, the Soviet people at that time usually had semolina porridge for breakfast, and instant soup for lunch and dinner. As for the sausages and cheese in the movies, they are hardly seen on the table of the Soviet people, and if there is, it is also a price that ordinary Soviet people cannot afford.
In view of this, Gorbachev also vigorously promoted reforms after coming to power, and its intensity not only involved political and economic levels, but also penetrated into the basic life of the Soviet people.
In fact, Gorbachev's reforms were in line with the voices of the Soviet people at the beginning of the reforms. However, most of the Soviet reforms were soup-changing and did not touch on the real drawbacks of the Soviet model. In order to carry out so-called economic reforms, Gorbachev even launched a "prohibition order", which made the Already anxious Soviet people even more confused.
Restricting the production of alcohol may reduce the input of food raw materials, but the drawbacks are also obvious.
To put it a joke, a Russian can eat without food, but he cannot drink without wine, and wine culture has penetrated into the daily life of the Soviet people. Because of this, the Soviets also lived a hard life without alcohol, and people even had to spend hours queuing up to buy a bottle of wine, a time cost that no one could afford.
Despite the remarkable results of prohibition, everyone knows that temporary measures like these will not last long, and there will soon be times when donkey skills are exhausted. What then? And if prohibition is so difficult, how will other measures to change the lack of goods unfold?
On October 31, 1989, the Supreme Council of Soviets of the USSR adopted the 1990 State Plan and Budget, stipulating that the amount of national income spent on consumption and unproductive construction in 1990 would increase from 83.7% in 1989 to 86.7%. In addition, the gross output value of the consumer goods industry will also increase to 6.7%. This was a change unprecedented in the history of the Soviet Union, marking that the center of gravity of the Soviet economy had shifted from heavy industry to light industry.
For decades, the Soviet authorities one-sidedly emphasized the priority of heavy industry, so that the proportion of consumer materials became smaller and smaller, which eventually led to a serious imbalance in the proportion of the national economy.
This situation of production for the sake of production actually ignores the subjective needs of the Soviet people. For a long time, due to the lack of attention to agriculture, the withdrawal of funds from agriculture to supply industrial production caused the agricultural output of the Soviet Union to be often in a state of instability. Can you imagine the Soviet Union, a vast country, that even grain had to rely on foreign imports?
The Soviet Union itself was relatively rich in resources, but due to the phenomena of astonishing waste in social production, there was a serious shortage of raw materials.
It is reported that waste not only existed in the luxurious life of the Soviet high-level, but also was more prevalent in the daily life of ordinary people in the Soviet Union. In the Brezhnev era, due to the rapid development of the Soviet economy, the so-called "golden age" also appeared in Soviet society. For this reason, the Soviet people used the welfare guarantee system they enjoyed to waste all kinds of daily necessities, and the waste of food was even more important.
According to Soviet economists, if the Soviet Union had paid attention to the production and harvesting of agriculture and properly processed it during transportation, there would have been no shortage of food even if land and livestock production were maintained to their current levels. So, in a sense, the Soviet economy was actually a grossly wasteful economy.
After entering the 1990s, the Soviet government had fully realized that the shortage of consumer goods was related not only to the economy, but also to the fundamental stability of Soviet society. Because of this, the Soviet authorities also urgently imported a large number of materials to alleviate the shortage of consumer goods faced by the Soviet people. The economic policies that increased the production of consumer goods in 1989 also gave birth to the vitality of the Soviet economy.
However, we must be clear that this malady of the Soviet economy has a long history and cannot be completely eliminated by simply pursuing a few economic policies. What's more, at this time, the Soviet Union had fallen into a dangerous situation of political chaos and economic collapse, so there was no realistic support for the reform at the end of the Soviet Union.
Based on this, the Soviet Union also appeared a special "queuing" culture, that kind of patience, good order and morality, people can not help but be impressed.