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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