Changing Lifestyles : In Moscow, Everyone Is the Family Breadwinner : Shortages and high prices force each member of the household to take part in the hunt for food. Shopping means long lines and citywide foraging.

As part of his Tuesday routine, Leonid A. Ivanov went to the steamy cafeteria at the small technical school where he teaches, took a plastic shopping bag out of his pocket and bought 4 1/2 pounds of hot dogs to bring home to his family.

Empty shelves in Soviet grocery stores have become commonplace over the last year, and people like Ivanov have had to become more resourceful to feed their families. Many depend on food they can buy through their company cafes, which are quite typical in the Soviet Union.

“It costs a little more,” said Ivanov, 36, a teacher of mining engineering. “But I don’t have to stand in line for two hours to get it. And at a state store they could limit my purchase to one pound. Here I can buy enough for the whole week. I can’t imagine what people would do if they couldn’t buy food at work.”

Panic over food shortages in the Soviet Union reached a peak last fall. Soviet consumers feared their economy’s downward spiral would cause famine, and the world sent tens of thousands of tons of food in response to an SOS sent out by Soviet leaders.

Even through the most difficult of times, however, the Ivanovs and millions like them have managed to get by, turning themselves into modern hunter-gatherers, foraging daily in the streets of Moscow.

“Everyone said we would run out of food this winter,” said Ivanov’s wife, Lyudmila, 35. “But up until now, we have not gone hungry. It’s a Russian trait. There’s nothing in the stores, but you visit someone and the table is groaning with food.”

Tracking the shopping and eating habits of an average Soviet family over the course of a week sheds some light on how they do it.

For one thing, it’s quickly clear that food shopping is very much a family affair. Everyone pitches in--even the children are sent out to the bread store.

Buying food has become such a central concern of everyday Soviet life that most people keep a constant eye on food stores and markets even when they’re going about other business. A lot of the Ivanovs’ food supplies were bought on the way home from work, while going to the beauty parlor or even while taking an evening stroll with the children.

The cafe at the Moscow Subway Construction Technical School where Leonid Ivanov teaches has been a key food source, providing such essentials of the Soviet diet as sausage, hot dogs, ham or chicken, and sour cream or milk, which have periodically disappeared from stores. But the supply there is unpredictable, and the variety falls far short of the Ivanovs’ needs.

The couple has two children and lives with Lyudmila Ivanov’s mother and grandmother.

During the first week of February, the Ivanovs made 12 separate shopping trips and spent 105.49 rubles for food--about half of the family’s combined average weekly earnings.

Leonid Ivanov earns an average of 350 rubles per month. His wife earns anywhere from 40 rubles to 600 rubles a month as a free-lance florist and teacher of flower arranging. Her mother, Marianna A. Voronkova, 58, an analytical chemist at a Moscow factory, earns 300 rubles per month. And her grandmother, Nina V. Naumova, 85, has a pension that was increased this month from 100 rubles to 141 rubles. She also earns about 40 rubles a month teaching flower-arranging classes. The Ivanovs have no savings.

(At the inflated official rate of exchange, the ruble is worth $1.82; at the commercial rate, however, one ruble is worth 61 cents, and on the black market a ruble is worth less than five cents.)

Voronkova made the month’s first food purchase for the family, stopping after work to buy sausage. She found some in the third store she visited and then had to wait “only 25 minutes” in line to buy it.

“We waste much more time searching for food now than we do actually standing in line,” Voronkova said. “I wasted more than two hours just to buy two pounds of sausage and two pounds of ham. But I do it because my grandchildren love it.”

On average, Voronkova said, she spends three hours every other day scouring the city for food, even though she also manages occasionally to buy food at her factory. “It really wears on your patience and nerves,” Voronkova said. “Let them raise prices three or four times. I’d rather food was more expensive, but available.”

Added Leonid Ivanov: “In some ways, it’s better when the stores are empty. When there was more in the stores, we spent more time in lines. It’s crazy to spend two hours a day in line.”

Saturday afternoon was typical of how the Ivanovs find the food that now fills both of their refrigerators and every spare inch of their tiny apartment in one of Moscow’s castle-like skyscrapers, built in the Stalinist architectural style.

When Lyudmila Ivanov was on the way home from teaching a class Saturday afternoon, she saw long lines snaking out of the grocery store on the first floor of her apartment building. After saving a place in a line for imported canned meat, she ran home to get her husband to stand in another line for butter.

He grabbed a popular novel that satirizes Soviet life on his way out the door, and they returned together to the store. “I’m perfectly content standing in line if I can read a book,” the engineering teacher said.

After an hour in line, the Ivanovs walked away with 15 cans of beef from Frankfurt, Germany, and 4 1/2 pounds of butter.

“We never bought in such large quantities before,” Lyudmila Ivanov said. “A year ago we would never have bought 15 cans of meat at one time--but now there’s the constant worry that we will never see it in the stores again.”

Hoarding has become a way of life here. According to a recent poll by the National Public Opinion Studies Center, 58% of Moscow families have substantial reserves of food, compared to only 18% a year ago. “The rest did not stock up simply because they were not able to buy anything,” the economic newspaper Torgovaya Gazeta commented last week.

Salt, tomato paste, flour and yeast are among the basic foods virtually impossible to find in stores these days. Cheese has completely disappeared from the Ivanovs’ diet because they haven’t been able to find it anywhere for months. “Life is sadder without cheese,” she said. “I used to make pizza whenever we had guests. But since there’s no cheese, there’s no pizza.”

Although sugar is rationed in Moscow, the allowance per person is so generous that the Ivanovs can--and do--buy more than 26 pounds a month. “During the summer there was no sugar,” Lyudmila Ivanov explained, “so now that it’s in the store we buy as much as we can, because maybe there won’t be any next month.” The Ivanovs are especially sensitive to sugar supplies because they use large amounts to preserve berries they gather every year at their dacha , or summer cottage.

Although the Ivanovs are willing to pay higher prices to save time in line, they do have limits. They do not shop at the city’s several farmers’ markets, which sell a wide variety of fresh foods at very steep, uncontrolled prices.

For the first time, some state-run stores are also now offering scarce delicacies at greatly inflated prices. Lyudmila Ivanov considered buying some smoked fish but balked at the price of 30 rubles per pound. “I do have some limits,” she said. “It just seemed like too much money to spend.”

The Ivanovs’ diet has been supplemented by a large package Naumova received late last year as part of a mass German donation to Soviet pensioners. The cocoa and dried soup were hits, especially with the kids, but the pudding mix turned into a runny mess because no one could understand the German-language instructions.

Although the Ivanovs’ diet is typically heavy on starches and light on vegetables, Leonid Ivanov does make one trip a week to the local vegetable and fruit market. Last week, he bought a bag of pickled cabbage, five pounds of carrots, three beets, a bunch of green onions, two heads of cabbage and two large green radishes--all for 8.40 rubles.

“This is just an average trip,” he said hoisting a heavy bag of vegetables. “In Moscow, we never felt the shortage of vegetables that they predicted last fall.”

His mother-in-law, Voronkova said: “We no longer talk about buying food. We talk about getting our hands on food.”

Eating With The Ivanovs: The Week’s Menu

FRIDAY, FEB. 1: * Breakfast: Eggs and sausage, bread and butter, cocoa for kids, coffee for adults. (Cream of wheat for 3-year-old Sergei.) * Lunch: Dried vegetable soup “California” from German care package, fried patties of cream cheese, tea with cookies. * Dinner: Fried potatoes, hamburgers, tea.

SATURDAY, FEB. 2: * Breakfast: Eggs and sausage, bread and butter, coffee. * Lunch: Hamburgers, carrot salad, tomato juice, sour cream. * Snack: Coffee and cookies. * Dinner: Leftovers from lunch, hotdogs, tea.

SUNDAY, FEB. 3: * Breakfast: Buckwheat porridge, eggs, tea with milk, cream cheese with sour cream on top, sausage and bread, tea or coffee. * Lunch: “Borscht” beet soup, fried potatoes, sardines, vinegar salad. * Snack: Coffee and cake. * Dinner: Vinegar salad, hot dogs, bread, butter, tea.

MONDAY, FEB. 4: * Breakfast: Eggs and sausage, bread, tea, coffee. * Lunch: Borscht, fried chicken, vinegar salad, tea. * Dinner: Hot dogs, potatoes, cake, tea.

TUESDAY, FEB. 5: * Breakfast: Cream of wheat, fried sausage, apples, bread, tea or coffee. * Lunch: Boullion, noodles, hot dogs. * Dinner: Canned meat, sausage, ham and bread and butter.

WEDNESDAY, FEB. 6: * Breakfast: Buckwheat porridge with milk, ham, coffee or cocoa. * Lunch: Chicken soup, cabbage, sausage sandwiches, tea. * Dinner: Buckwheat porridge with milk, sausage sandwiches, cabbage stuffed “pirozhki” rolls, tea and cookies.

THURSDAY, FEB.7: * Breakfast: Sausage sandwiches, sour cream, coffee or tea. * Lunch: Borscht, sausage sandwiches. * Dinner: Carrot salad, radish salad, cabbage, hot dogs, mashed potatoes, bread, cookies and tea or coffee.