Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev released his famous trilogy of memoirs, recalling his wartime and statesman’s path: “Malaya Zemlya,” “Vozrozhdenie,” “Tselina.” The 72-year-old General Secretary’s health was deteriorating, and in the Kremlin the old guard practically worshipped him, because Brezhnev was the guarantee of political stability.
That year, the cult of Brezhnev’s personality reached its peak. On his birthday the General Secretary became a three-time Hero of the Soviet Union. Bypassing all laws, Brezhnev was also awarded the highest decoration of the marshals of the Great Patriotic War—the Order of “Victory.” The “Victory” order was given only to commanders of fronts and to army commanders of states, while Brezhnev was a major general.
In 1978, shortages of goods intensified: the amount of money in the population’s hands, thanks to Brezhnev’s wage increases, increasingly exceeded the quantity of goods. Even despite the Kremlin’s hard-currency purchases in socialist countries, there was less and less worth buying in the USSR, and shortages spread to new shelves.
In an ordinary store in Ukraine, there was still an abundance of canned goods in 1978. What about canned stewed meat?
The first sign was the rise in coffee prices in March 1978; then chocolate and chocolate candies became more expensive. Then gasoline and car repairs rose in price, gold became more expensive, and newlyweds after the civil registry office had the right to get 90% of the increased cost of wedding rings reimbursed by the state.
In 1978, for the first time since the war, food coupons returned. Publicly, there was no ration-card system, but in the Volga region and the Urals, regional CPSU committees introduced coupons with an allowance of half a kilo of sausage and a third of a kilo of butter per person per month.
“Order tables” appeared, where veterans were given food packages for May 9; food was issued for weddings, funerals, anniversaries, and other occasions. But in Moscow there were no problems with food, and everyone went there for sausage. And in this moment of shortage, a rumor swept through Moscow: pensioners had found black caviar in canned sprats!
The branded “Ocean” retail chain became a paradise for speculators, because fish could be written off as a perishable product and sold on the side—and caviar jars could also be counterfeited. Thus began a criminal corruption case in the “Ocean” chain of fish stores, where, using falsified paperwork, directors sold expensive caviar, crab, and salmon to restaurants, passing it off as sprats. In the “fish case,” Andropov would imprison dozens of people.