Lloyd: Below I pasted an article regarding the extensive history surrounding Russia and bread. Your request prompted my search for this information and I sincerely thank you. In short, it appears bread has been provided by the government for centuries to show the Russian populatior how their government will always care for them. I hope someone with first-hand knowledge will add to this post.
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Bread, Russia's Staff Of Life, Is Now A Bone Of Contention

By Michael Specter

MOSCOW -- It takes a true disaster to enrage the people of this city.
Their president has hardly appeared among them in months, but nobody
cares. NATO is about to sweep across the boundaries of what was
once their enduring empire, yet it seems that few ordinary Russians even
know that the organization exists.

But there are still standards. There are values and traditions, and when
they are violated completely even the most blase Muscovite finally loses
patience.

"Try to cut this," Masha Balganova said to the trembling salesman at her
local bread store. Mrs. Balganova thrust a "fresh" baguette in the poor
man's face. "This bread crumbles when you cut it," she said with contempt worthy of a Parisian. "What on earth is
going on here?"

She is far from the only person asking. Russian bread, a rich black symbol of the health of the motherland and the
warmth of its people, has suddenly come under siege.

Not long ago, Moscow's chief food inspector, Vladimir Nikitin, announced after a routine tour of the city's many new
small bakeries that a quarter of the 2,500 tons of bread made in Moscow each day was "unsuitable for use as food."

Nothing ever reported about the faltering health of President Boris Yeltsin has caused as much distress. The city's
powerful mayor, Yuri Luzkhov, has promised personally to shut any bakery whose products fail to please him.

In its current issue, the country's best-read weekly newspaper, Argumenty i Fakty, said the figure for inadequate
bread in Moscow was closer to 90 percent. And speaking reluctantly and unwilling to be quoted by name, city
inspectors said in interviews that while 90 percent was probably on the high side, the quality of Moscow's bread,
which has nourished revolutionaries, peasants and czars alike, has never been lower.

"This is the last line," said Viktor Petrenko, director of Bread Factory No. 9, which occupies the equivalent of five
city blocks in the center of Moscow. "We are fighting for quality, but it is a fight we are beginning to lose. And if we
lose the battle for bread, we will lose our heritage."

Ridiculous words? Not in a country where bread is given credit for defeating Napoleon and helping millions to
withstand the siege of Leningrad. It is not chanted much these days, but the official slogan of the Soviet Union --
"Above all things, bread" -- was one of the few promises the Communists ever managed to keep.

Where Americans might describe someone as callous, a Russian would call him stale. In the Russian language, the
loss of a person's soul is described as tragic in a phrase that compares it to the loss of a good loaf of bread.

It is simply impossible to exaggerate the role of plain, chewy black bread in the life of Russia or its people. The
Bolsheviks rose to power on Lenin's cry of "Peace, Land, Bread." Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev both fell as
bread lines became symbols of the country they governed.

When two years ago the nation suffered its worst grain harvest in a generation, newspapers mostly wondered what
would happen to Russian bread. (Nothing, really. Much of the grain used by bakers is imported.)

To foreigners the phrase "white nights" usually brings to mind the endless summer light in St. Petersburg. To Russians
it is slang for those periods, usually at the end of the month, when money is too scarce to buy anything but cheap
white bread and perhaps some cherished tea.

Under the reforms of Yeltsin, bread has actually gained in symbolic importance. Once so plentiful and cheap that it
was fed to farm animals, bread has now become the main sustenance for tens of thousands of impoverished retired
people.

The bread crisis, like so many in Russia today, is really a clash of values and expectations. In Soviet times bread cost
pennies -- compared with 50 cents or more for a good loaf now. It was made only by state factories and
manufactured to specific lengths and widths, with ingredients all ordained by the Kremlin.

These days, state factories compete with hundreds of independent bakeries. The factories contend that the bakeries
have no standards and have ruined the good name of bread from one end of the land to the other.

The bakeries, not surprisingly, see things differently.

"The old factories are still run the way they were," said Yuri Katsnelson, director of Bread Filippov, one of the city's
best-known bakeries, and president of the Moscow Guild of Bakers. "They are not innovative. They do not want to
change. The factory owners want to close our bakeries. Is that because we make bad bread, or because we are
selling bread to people who are tired of buying theirs?"

It was Bread Filippov, legend has it, that was responsible for the invention of raisin bread in 1880. Each day Ivan
Filippov sent hot wheat buns to the governor general of Moscow. One day there was a roach in a bun and the
governor became irate. He sent for the baker, who grabbed the half-eaten bun and said it was a raisin, not a roach.

He then ate the roach and the bun and left. When he got back to his bakery, he immediately emptied bags of raisins
into his flour. The trick worked. Within days there was a long line of people outside his shop demanding the new
delicacy.

Katsnelson may be right that there are many fine new bakeries in Moscow. But only 300 are registered; as many as
800 others are not. Overworked city inspectors say clever bakers rent space in former defense factories -- because
there is plenty of space and those plants are usually hard to get into -- making random inspections nearly impossible.

While the state factories still operate under old standards, they at least have standards. Production dates, including
the hour of completion, are often stamped on factory wrappers. Small independent bakeries in Moscow do what
they want, with equipment and ingredients that they choose. Some are excellent; others produce bread that would
make even farm animals howl.

"It is the marketplace," said Yelena Tchaikova, a woman who runs a bakery called Every Day in the city with her son
and daughter. "If you want to pay for good ingredients and good equipment, you can make good bread. If you want
to cheat, you can do that too. There is a lot of bad bread out there now."

Like most bakers here, Mrs. Tchaikova will eagerly steer a customer away from bread she thinks is unsuitable.

"You don't want that," she said to a customer eyeing a standard oval loaf of wheat bread. "There is no fat in it. It's
dry. You want some fat."

On that, if on nothing else, the new independent bakers are seconded by their giant competitors.

"I have been to the West many times, and I see what you people call bread," Petrenko said, spitting out the word.
"There is no sugar, no fat. How can it satisfy you? If you eat a piece of Russian bread you are well fed. Take a slice
of our bread, a little vodka and some butter, and your problems are behind you."

Copyright © 1997 The New York Times