I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about the true horrible reality of Communist Russia.
The average married worker had to make do with less than half as much bread and flour and less than two-thirds as much sugar as his counterpart in St Petersburg in the early 20th century. People were short of fat, milk and fruit. Meat and fish consumption in the 1930s was five times less than at the turn of the 20th century. Well, the Russians were better off under the Tsar than under Stalin.
In Penza, thousands of villagers who have travelled 200 kilometres to buy bread sleep outside shops. 'We queue for bread from midnight, and even if you are starving, they give you a kilo loaf at most,' wrote a woman from a collective farm in Yaroslavl to her husband. Yes, in the supposed workers' paradise of the USSR, there were queues for hours for this basic foodstuff, and it was not even certain that people would get it. They often ended up starving and dying. And, of course, other goods were not available either, such as milk, butter, vegetables, not to mention meat. Even fish in areas with developed fishing couldn't be bought, because somehow they weren't. Even such common things as salt, soap and matches were missing from the shops. In the early 1930s, even vodka was impossible to find. Clothes, shoes and other consumer goods were also hard to find. In the factory canteens, workers queued not only for food, but also for cutlery, because there was a critical shortage of that too.
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