Bubbly Mood Fizzles for Soviets as They Face Champagne Shortage

MOSCOW —  Prof. Iosif Nikolaevsky, standing in line for some cherry wine at a Moscow food store, doubted that he’d be able to obtain champagne for his New Year’s Eve toast.

He shrugged and said, “If I can’t get champagne, I’ll drink tea.”

For most Muscovites, shopping for the traditional New Year’s Eve family feast is the toughest it has been in memory, and what hurts most is the shortage of champagne, geese, chocolates and other holiday delicacies.

“It’s the hardest this year,” sighed pensioner Lydia Sergeyeva, handling the jar of murky fruit compote she had just bought in the Gastronom on central Moscow’s Kutuzovsky Prospekt, and recalling past years when she could purchase meat and sausage easily.

Like a dozen other shoppers interviewed in the store, she blamed supply problems on perestroika, Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s program of reforms, but accepted them with equanimity. “It’s a transitional period. It’s natural for there to be breakdowns,” she said. “But we’re optimists.”

The prospect of toasting the new year without the old bubbly so concerned the government newspaper Izvestia that they launched investigations into the champagne shortage.

“Not to raise a glass of champagne at New Year’s--such a thing was not demanded even during the toughest time of the campaign of total sobriety,” Tass complained Saturday.

Gorbachev brought in an anti-alcohol campaign soon after coming to power in 1985, but it faded after bootleg brewing mushroomed and state income shrank from lost vodka sales. This year’s champagne shortage was clearly not engineered by government teetotalers.

Izvestia determined that the Soviet Union, for all its fame as an exporter of vodka and “golden” champagne, produces yearly only about one bottle of champagne per person.