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0.5 liter of vodka? What were they supposed to do the other 29 days of the month?
Is that not a lot of sugar for how few ingredients to use it with?
I imagine there are food items which aren’t rationed, because there’s no fruit or vegetables here. If you grew your own fruit and had sugar you could preserve it as jam. The sugar helps prevent spoilage. Or if you grew rhubarb you could make a pie, which would be pretty darn sour without sugar.
It’s the cigarettes that kill me!
Not sure. It may be that it looks like a lot simply because we’re used to modern foods having sugar pre-added?
I wonder how they used it. Fancy baked goods the first days, then a rush to bake long lasting good before the perishables spoil? Did widowers ask family to bake with their rations?
Sounds like a miserable existence. You’re going to need a lot more vodka than that to cope.
Rationing in the early 80s is considered to be one of the major agitating factors that led to increased labor union activity and, thus, the eventual end of the Communist regime in Poland. Would seem that it was not nearly enough vodka to quietly cope!
I can see why. Like if I was flat broke, these rations would be super welcome, but as an ongoing totality of what I could have for all of my labor? No, fuck that! The people at the top were obviously hoarding all the wealth, which seems to always happen every time this form of government is tried.
Well, you still had to purchase the food, you were just limited by ration cards in how much of certain goods you could purchase.
Oh shit, that’s even worse!
Lmao 2.5kg of meat? Forget it. If you got any, it was a day to celebrate. You couldn’t get shit for stamps and you had to stand in long queues to get the scraps that you could get. You waited for hours for a delivery that immediately disappeared or didn’t come at all. You literally bought what you could. People used to barter the stamps and a grey market to get what you needed popped up. The only way to get what you wanted was to pay with dollars.
You sound like you were actually there? If so, please continue.
My wife was born in ( but too late to remember) a former Soviet state.
Talking with her grandma is pretty interesting. Recently with global inflation, some of the grandmas friends were speaking fondly about government controlled price of bread.
Then my grandma (in law) who still has more of her marbles than any 91 year old I’ve ever met said “lol, yeah that was the price on the sign, but there was no bread in the store!”
“Ooooohhhhh yyyeeaaaaahhhh…”
The Soviet Union was a fun place. People whose great grandparents happened to be German were put on a train to Kyrgistan and just dumped out onto the steppe.
The 50% who survived the first winter and actually managed to build up villages were later banned from buying or selling at the local market, forcing them into the black market to survive, which was obviously illegal as well.
But they weren’t allowed to emigrate to Germany either.In the 90‘s they were allowed. And Germany welcomed them.
“would you like your tea with no milk or no cream?”
More on the history of this photograph here: https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/food-rationing-communist-poland/
Thank you for the effort, that was an interesting read.
That’s like, half a days worth of vodka
And far too few darts
Meet the black market.
How many cigarettes do I get if I trade in all my soap, washing powder, flour and rice?
Two.
worth it!
Seriously. It’s what I’m buying for myself for a gaming evening if I don’t want to get drunk.
I find it funny that a lot of people seem to be assuming that this is everything that they were allowed to eat. Fruits and veggies have been completely banned, in this world! Haha
Fruit is often hard to grow, but simple veggies like potatoes and onions are a no-brainer. Garlic too!
Have fun obtaining them.
Would they have been expected to grow their own vegetables, or did they just embrace the average young male diet?
I believe vegetables weren’t rationed
What was the reason for rationing, was it inflation, unemployment, drought or what? I though Poland economy was free to do what it wanted, or was it subject to the same problems as the Soviet Union?
Same essential problems as the SovUnion, but in the early-mid 1980s, the Polish economy was struggling.
I fail to see how limiting how much product can be bought and sold would stimulate an economy, outside of a major excess issue like the one that led to The New Deal in the USA.
You’re thinking too much in market terms. It should be more “Our allocation of production has resulted in shortages of these goods; we must figure out a way of distributing these goods without resorting to ‘highest-bidder’ style market economics.”
Typically, in market-oriented economies, this happens during wartime when the government doesn’t trust market economies (rightly) to deliver the needs of the war while there are still civilians willing to outbid the government. In command economies, this happens whenever the priorities of the government and the civilian population are at odds (such as Poland exporting most of its sugar to the SovUnion despite massive domestic demand for sugar and higher sugar production per capita than ever before).
I have a game wishlisted on Steam called Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic that I’m hoping might prove educational to better understand how that system worked because sometimes it seems so foreign to me.
Market economies are very psychological - “How do you encourage people to consume/produce X?” But command economies are simpler in a sense, because it’s all very material - “What do we make, and who do we give it to?”
Excellent game, btw
It’s hard to take your very legitimate explanations seriously when your username is bolded as OP, and top of mind to me. Haha. Seriously though, thanks for taking the time to type it out.
Four and a half kilos of carbohydrates and sugars, goddamn.
For a month, that’s only about 600 kcal/day from carbs. Maybe potatoes are unrationed.
That’s a starvation diet for a full grown male. Hell, that’s even less than a very small female adult would need.
A loaf of bread is about half a kilo of flour, that’s not much for a whole month!
I wonder why it’s 1.3kg. The soviet union adopted the metric system, so it seems like an odd choice. Maybe Poland had a historical measure that size.
lot of problems, but not diabetes
Is that like for a whole family?
Individual, I believe.
The meat and sweets for the adults, the ciggies and vodka for the kids
500 ml of vodka? Bullshit, there was plenty of vodka and it was distilled legally and illegally.
This is just what the State determined was necessary for a person’s needs, and issued to them as their communist rations. People could and did engage in capitalism to get what they actually needed.
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No see. US imperialism is bad therefore communism good.
