I don’t live in the U.S., but I was in Moscow for a good chunk of 1992 when prices (formerly ALL government-controlled) were set free and I am reminded of it all now after the way this past week has played out for the U.S. dollar.
Back in 1992, when I arrived, some Russians, who were well-off Moscow intelligentsia, showed us the stockpile of food they had amassed in their flat. They had done their thinking and spent, obviously, a whole lot of time and rubles in Soviet-style shopping lineups all over town and subsequently had huge reserves of tins of fish, rice, and other dry goods packed into every shelf, closet and crevice of their flat. Although they had saved for their retirement and had significant savings, they chose to invest in food supplies.
I saw them, 5 months later, spending the last of their retirement savings on bread and kolbassa sausage.
I didn’t speak or understand a word of Russian at that time, though along the way I did pick up some of the basics. It was frustrating not to understand the language, given the large amount of general RANTING about the state of things, and I would have loved to understand more of what was going on in the conversations I found myself in the same room with.
I remember saying to one of my hosts: “what is ‘geeper-eenflatzi’?”
In Russian, a lot of the words are similar to English: a general rule is that the sound “h” is changed to ‘g’ in Russian – for example, ‘hamburger’ is pronounced ‘gamboorger’; ‘hyper’ is ‘geeper’….
Pizza Hut’s Russian outlets broke from this convention, I noted with amusement, and chose the gutteral-sounding ‘xh’ sound (like the German ‘ch’ – like a phlegmy ‘k’) instead of Russianizing their name to “peetsa gut’.
But I digress… ‘geeper-inflatzia’ means hyperinflation. It was a truly amazing and frightening thing to watch.
There was also much ranting about speculators (‘SPEKULANTEE!’ – I never heard this word uttered in a normal tone of voice; always with contempt and rage), none of which I was very savvy about, being in my mid-20s and a bit more ignorant than I am now….
Hyperinflation is something I believe the U.S. will have to endure soon. It means that it’s a very smart thing to go to the store *now* and buy as many flats of tins of salmon, tuna, spork, or spam, bags and boxes and crates of pasta, rice, flour, dry milk… whatever you like.
And I mean NOW.
Maybe some people will find this alarmist or bizarre, but any food you can buy now that you don’t have to buy when it’s 100 times the price and your money has run out is a really good investment.
I currently regard tins of salmon as a type of ‘hard currency’.
The Russian government tried to contain the chaos as best it could. Every day was a new bizarre horror story on the news. I remember the government trying desperately to gain revenues by planning outrageous personal and corporate income taxes from the people/organizations who/which were able to profit from the chaos.
I think when I arrived, that one U.S. dollar bill would buy about 25 rubles, and by the time I left, it fluctuated every day, averaging around 100 rubles to the U.S. dollar. The government-run currency exchanges offered some bizarrely low exchange rate but the usual way of exchanging currency was to go to the Xotel Rossiya where the hotel’s Currency Exchange Wicket was always un-manned and a swarthy Georgian gangster was always sitting at a bench nearby and would do money exchanges at a realistic rate in a businesslike manner.
Throughout my stay in Russia, at least the price of bread and milk were still controlled, although milk was something you could not even buy unless you stood in a lineup all morning and brought with you irrefutable government-issued documentation proving that you had young children in your household. I remember someone giving me some baby formula to whiten my coffee, since it often came with humanitarian aid packages and Russians look somewhat askance at baby formula anyway. I didn’t drink milk for the duration of my stay there.
This post is getting boring, I’m afraid, but I hope that anyone who reads it will at least go and stock up on some food supplies, as they are still available cheap at the grocery store. Whether or not people realize it, food is an extremely undervalued product in North America. The days of cheap food are about to end. Nevermind petroleum, I think we’ve all figured that out by now.
Invest in your own food stocks and encourage others to do so too – I don’t want all of you at my place for dinner 
when a tin of salmon costs $100 if you can find a seller.
Turn off your computer and go to the store now, OK?
