Kitchen Diary by S. Piskunov, sent to Komsomol’skaia pravda, October-November 1990

From October 4th through October 31st, S. Piskunov, a senior at Kiev Polytechnic Institute, documented shortages in his region by keeping a “kitchen diary.” Three days into his project on October 7, he noted that he traveled to the market to buy potatoes, since the store only sold potatoes “the size of walnuts” that “would fall out of a mesh bag on your way home”. At the market, the cost of potatoes varied from 70 to 90 kopecks per kilogram, depending on if you wanted to wait in line or not. If you bought them at 70 kopecks, there were 6 or 7 people in line. For 90 kopecks, there was no line.
Piskunov’s diary responded to a call for “kitchen diaries” put out by the newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda, where he sent his careful documentation in early November 1990. On September 29, 1990, on the front page of the newspaper, an editorial statement asked readers to “keep diaries in the kitchen and send them to us.” While shortages had been a perennial feature of the Soviet command economy, 1990 marked a new juncture. By that year, shortages had again become a chronic problem, provoked in part by economic reforms issued under Gorbachev that aimed to be part of a bigger transformation of the Soviet Union. By summer 1990, reformers including the General Secretary agreed that more radical measures were necessary. The government accepted the “Five Hundred Day Plan” devised by Stanislav Shatalin, economic advisor to Gorbachev. As its name suggested, the Plan aimed to create the foundations of a market economy in roughly a year and a half effectively ending the Soviet centralized economy. The editors of Komsomol’skaia pravda encouraged readers to track shortages during the transition, describing kitchen diaries like Piskunov’s as the “thermometer under the armpit of reform.”
Kitchen diaries show the practices through which Soviet citizens negotiated shortage and late Soviet economic reforms, and the Five Hundred Day Plan in particular. This diary also highlights the role of the Soviet press in mediating the severe effects of economic transition on the broader Soviet population.