Sugar rationing (1987)

Background: cutting the drink emptied the sugar shelf

Sugar coupon rationing was an unintended consequence of the anti-alcohol campaign. Under the Central Committee decision and Council of Ministers resolution No. 410 of 7 May 1985, reinforced by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decree of 16 May, alcohol production and sales were cut sharply. Output fell from 199 million decaliters in 1985 to 121 million in 1986 and 93 million in 1987; liquor shops were closed in large numbers and sale hours were restricted (P30-P32, P35-P36).

With the state withdrawing the bottle, households began distilling for themselves. Demand for sugar, the key input of samogon (moonshine), surged. According to a September 1988 memorandum from Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov to the Politburo, sugar sales rose from 7.85 million tons in 1985 to 9.28 million tons in 1987, an increase of 1.43 million tons or 18 percent, and by then sugar was sold by coupon almost everywhere. Goskomstat estimated that 1.4 million tons of sugar went into moonshine in 1987, equivalent to roughly 140-150 million decaliters of samogon and practically offsetting the fall in vodka and liqueur sales (P113).

Introducing the coupon

The problem had already reached official documents in 1986. In a report to the Council of Ministers on 2 December 1987, Trade Minister Kondrat Terekh stated that retail sugar stocks had fallen by 625,000 tons in 1986 and were expected to fall by a further 700,000 tons in 1987. Sugar sales had risen 22 percent in July-December 1986, he noted, and the cause of the shortage lay in the collapse of alcohol sales (P103).

Local authorities responded by introducing coupons limiting per-capita purchases city by city. Coupons were issued through the housing office at one's place of registration or through the trade union at work, and without a coupon the goods were effectively unsellable in state shops. Alongside sugar, restrictions spread to alcohol-containing goods such as cologne, lotions, hairspray and toothpaste (P104).

A chain through the consumer market

Sugar rationing was not an isolated event but one crack in the whole consumer market. In his 1988 memorandum Ryzhkov reported that queues had grown by more than half over three years because of the sharp fall in alcohol sales, and that people who saved money by not drinking redirected demand to food, clothing, footwear and household goods, emptying even moonshine inputs such as candy, gingerbread, fruit juice and tomato paste (P113). A CIA report from the same period, "The Illegal Economy Under Gorbachev," likewise judged that the 1985-1988 campaign sharply increased illegal alcohol production and redirected state-sector revenue to illegal producers and sellers (P108). By the estimate of Abel Aganbegyan, the state lost 57 billion rubles over the three years before the campaign was abandoned in 1988, contributing to the budget deficit (P115).

What the sources leave open

Sugar coupon rationing compresses the campaign's side effects into one episode, but its timing and scope varied from place to place. Ryzhkov's memorandum already described coupon sales as "almost everywhere" in September 1988 (P113), while the coupon system in general expanded on a mass scale in 1989, peaked during the total shortages of 1990-1991, and faded from early 1992 with price liberalisation (P174, P178-P179). A single nationwide end date for sugar coupons therefore cannot be fixed firmly. What the documents establish is that sugar had already passed to coupon sale by 1987, and that the cause was the state's expulsion of alcohol and the expansion of household distilling.