About Food (1970-80's)


In Leningrad my wife's plant was connected with a radio engineering plant in the town of Novgorod (300 kilometers from Leningrad). My wife many times took a business trip to that plant. Always the engineers (her coworkers) from that plant asked her to bring food to them from Leningrad. We bought boiled sausage (each piece more than 2 kilograms (5 lbs)), butter, and cheese. I went with my wife to the train station. In Novgorod her engineers met her.

In Leningrad we did not have any other kind of sausage at that time. In the shop there was a limit to give a customer only 400 grams of sausage, but salespeople who wanted to sell quickly sometimes could sell one piece of sausage (more than 2 kilograms). That boiled sausage you had to eat the same day because the next day it became slimy (even in the refrigerator). I could not eat it. I heard they fried slimy sausage. If those engineers had a business trip to Leningrad they bought products themselves.

It is very interesting. Novgorod had big factories, which produced sausage and milk products, but Moscow ordered all the production sent to Leningrad.
When I had a holiday one woman from a province told me, "The whole country worked to supply Moscow and Leningrad."

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