Alexandre Fenelon ---------------------- Yeah, but as I just pointed out, the Soviet food source was only in a part dependent on the official collective or cooperative farms. The rural population had their own land plots (which were much more productive than the kolkhozy), as did many city-dwellers. Also, if you live out in the country, you supplement your diet through hunting and foraging (even Muscovites do this, mostly for entertainment, hunting and gathering berries and mushrooms are very popular forms of recreation). If you live in Siberia or the Far East, you hunt and fish. Siberia is still mostly untouched wilderness replete with game animals -- Yakutia, which is the size of India, has a population of 100,000 people. You can fit all of Western Europe into Kamchatka, which has a population less than that of Iceland. Evem here, in Moscow, you start coming across bears pretty soon after you leave the city limit.
People way off on the fringes of Russia outside of industrial centers, especially the native peoples (Chukchas, etc.), and especially in the Far North, basically lived the sort of life they had been living for hundreds of years throughout the Soviet epoch. They are hunter-gatherers; they hunt reindeer, whales and so forth. As late as the 60s, they would occasionally find isolated groups that didn't know that the Soviet Union existed. Russia is BIG.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal