As Moscow dithers, shortages across Russia bite MOSCOW, Sept 9 (Reuters) - Russia's economic crisis has emptied shops, made basic goods scarce and stoked popular anger from the Pacific Ocean to the Baltic Sea, a survey by Reuters reporters across the country showed on Wednesday. While Moscow's central authorities are deadlocked over President Boris Yeltsin's attempts to appoint a prime minister, the rouble's free fall has caused a desperate rush for basic necessities not seen since the dying days of the Soviet Union. In the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, prices of sugar had tripled, flour had doubled and vegetable oil all but disappeared, the last few bottles trading hands on the street for more than five times their usual price. Buckwheat, a staple of the Russian diet, had vanished from shops and was being traded in 30 and 40 kilo (50-60 pound) sacks on the street. Coffee was nowhere to be found, and only the most expensive sorts of tea were left. ``Two women got into a vicious fight over our last piece of margarine this morning,'' said a saleswoman at one shop. At Novosibirsk's emergency hospital Number One, head doctor Nikolai Akenkev told Reuters there was only enough medicine on hand for 20 more trauma cases. Patients at the hospital were no longer being fed milk. Supplies of buckwheat, sugar, butter and meat would last only five more days, he said. A local government official in Vladivostok, Russia's main port on the Sea of Japan, said he was worried about unrest. ``In Moscow they have long forgotten about us and cannot solve their own problems. Here the population will soon take to the streets out of hunger and poverty, bash in shop windows and hang us,'' the official, who requested anonymity, said. Vladivostok has issued regulations making it illegal for shopkeepers to raise their prices, but the moves seem likely only to make the situation worse. ``Just about all our goods come from outside the province. If we cannot raise our prices along with the dollar rate, firms will simply burn out,'' a shopkeeper said. Shops in the Urals industrial city of Yekaterinburg were sold out of salt, sugar, buckwheat, macaroni and vegetable oil. ``They are sucking out all of our money. The banks, the shops are all speculating. What can you say if the dollar has gone up by three times and the prices have gone up seven or 10 times?'' said Sergei Solovyov, 27, a police employee. In Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave tucked between Poland and Lithuania, governor Leonid Gorbenko earlier this week declared an ``emergency situation.'' The wording was so alarmingly similar to a military ``state of emergency'' that Moscow protested, although it seemed to involve little more than asking producers not to raise their prices. A local journalist said there were lines outside shops. ``War goods -- buckweat, matches, salt -- have disappeared,'' Maksim Fyodorov, news editor at Kaliningrad television said by telephone.... -- Gregory Schwartz Department of Political Science York University 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada Tel: (416) 736-5265 Fax: (416) 736-5686 Web: http://www.yorku.ca/dept/polisci
