Monday, January 31, 2011

1990 bread line in Riga, Latvia

"It's all these 'gatherers' and 'sharers' going around counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing and we never see most of the stuff again.
Hob Hayward, Hobbit farmer, The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Prior to to "requesting" to join the Soviet Union in 1940, Latvia exported grain. Fifty years later, the bread line, one of the less deadly symptoms of communism, is seen in this photograph taken in Riga by Mrs. Marathon Pundit's friend Harijs Liepins.


Of course there were many other bread lines throughout the Soviet Union until its fall. Mrs. Marathon Pundit says "they happened all of the time."

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1 comment:

  1. Sir Galen of Bristol10:51 AM

    When I was a USAF Russian linguist back in the early 80's, I heard this joke in Russian, now translated as best I can into English:

    A man goes into a store and asks the clerk: "Excuse me, but you wouldn't have fish here, would you?"

    "Oh no," answers the clerk. "At this store we don't have meat. At the store across the street they don't have fish."

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