Steve Quayle News Alerts

by M. Rostov

During the horror of the Russian Civil War (1918-1921 and 7 million dead), famine was raging for thousands of miles in every direction. Cannibalism was becoming a problem and public executions of cannibals that were caught didn't seem to stop the practice.

In Moscow in the winter of 1919-1920, the food situation was so bad that Lenin and his blood thirsty communists allowed the continued existance of a large open air black market bazaar called the Sukharevka. One journalist described the Sukharevka as "a crowded study in need and greed," where ANYTHING could be had - for a price.

Even Lenin admitted that without the black market, Moscow would have starved to death that winter.

The only cash tendered at the Sukharevka was either barter or gold and silver. Gold and silver got you much more bang for your buck. If all you had was barter, you were basically at the mercy of the food merchants who always got what you had for a fraction of it's worth.

The prices were astronomical.

In the fall of 1919, a single pud (1 pud = 36 US pounds) of flour cost 6,000 to 7,000 gold rubles. That's 4.6 to 5.4 troy ounces of gold per US pound of flour.

In mid-November 1919, one man reported that he was able to buy 10 eggs and 4 pounds of soap for 1000 rubles (27 troy ounces of gold).

By mid-January millet had risen to 9,500 to 10,000 rubles per pud (7.3 to 7.7 troy oz per pound).

Six weeks later at the beginning of March, flour had risen to 13,000 to 15,000 rubles per pud (10 to 11.5 troy oz per pound) and millet had risen to 16,000 to 17,000 rubles per pud (12.3 to 13 troy oz per pound).

For those living in the city, the choices were few. You either paid the price for the food, or you starved. The other options included banditry, cannibalism, or scraping the wall paper paste off of the walls and using sawdust to make your flour go further.

Fuel was almost in as short of a supply as food. To get caught stealing or vandalizing to get wood for fuel in Moscow could easily result in a summary execution.

To put it into perspective, today gold was trading for $304 per troy ounce. That mean that by March during that winter of famine, ordinary flour was going for the equivalent of $3040 to $3496 per pound.

Currently, single 50 pound bags of hard white wheat can be had commercially over the counter for about $18 each. The wheat can keep indefinitely. When ground into 50 pounds of flour and sold under those conditions to the desperate and unprepared, that $18 sack of wheat becomes worth about $152,000 to $174,800 of today's purchasing power in gold.

It's happened before and it will happen again.

Source: personal email to Steve Quayle