A scarcity of available wheat traced to drought, floods, speculation and a Russian export ban has political leaders and agricultural experts worried about the consequences.

By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

MOSCOW GALINA LITVYAK HAD stopped by the kiosk down the road, wandered through nearby supermarkets and badgered friends for the latest rumors. Nobody knew where to find it. All over her middle-class neighborhood, the stores were filled with an ample selection of goods, reflecting just how much Moscow has changed over the last two decades. With one exception.

The Great Buckwheat Shortage of 2010 was not letting up. As if the summer’s brutal heat, forest fires and drought were not enough, this country is now suffering through one final bit of weather-related misery, a scarcity of a beloved staple that is causing a kind of national time warp.

Russians like Ms. Litvyak, 72, a retired bookkeeper, are falling back on scrounging habits honed under Communism. And not liking it. “I cannot locate buckwheat anywhere, and if I could, it would be too expensive for me to buy it,” she said as she entered a sprawling supermarket called Perekrestok (Intersection), where she would again be disappointed. “I went from store to store.

I would ask, ‘When is the buckwheat coming in?’ and they would say, we don’t know, it’s because of the heat or because of the drought, or something like that. There is no buckwheat anywhere.” Such complaints may seem trivial, but the authorities are taking them very seriously.

Dating back to the czars, public discontent over shortages - of flour or sausage, table salt or vodka - has often touched off political instability in Russia. Russians eat buckwheat all day long, turned into a hot cereal for breakfast, a side dish with meat, stuffing, pancakes and in myriad other ways. Deprive them of it for any lengthy period, and the reaction could be fierce. President Dmitri A. Medvedev has brought up the buckwheat shortage in visits to provincial centers, trying to assure the country that the government is working to alleviate it.

He warned that law-enforcement agencies would crack down on those who manipulate the buckwheat market. The buckwheat crop was undoubtedly affected by the drought, which is likely to cut overall grain production by about a third. But officials from the Kremlin on down insist that there are sufficient quantities of buckwheat available for Russian consumers, especially now that the government has banned grain exports until at least 2011 in order to stabilize the domestic market.

So suspicion has fallen on panic-buying, hoarding and speculation - practices that also hark back to Soviet times. “We need to reduce this panic-buying, including by explaining what is going on,” Mr. Medvedev said . “ Many people, especially the elderly, remember that if something is disappearing, then you have to immediately buy it, because later on there won’t be any.” Before the summer, buckwheat typically retailed for about 50 cents a half kilogram in Moscow. Now it is $1 a half kilogram or more, if it can be found .

Buckwheat is not as central to the Russian diet as wheat, but it is considered more of a distinctly Russian food, a hearty plant that flourishes on the Siberian steppes. Generations of children have been raised on the stuff, which is valued for its nutrients, and school lunchrooms seem to go through it by the ton. In Eastern Europe, it is known as kasha. “For a lot of Russians, this is problem No. 1 now - where are you going to get buckwheat?” said Oksana Sidneva, 32, who was also at the Perekrestok supermarket.

Her son, Dima, 13, chimed in, “It’s the only cooked cereal that I will eat.” The shortage is especially jarring because supermarkets and big box stores in Moscow and many other metropolitan areas have almost everything else . Irina Yasina, an economist and commentator, said the buckwheat shortage demonstrated how Russians were scarred by Soviet hardships. “The reaction to this is absolutely Soviet ? it is a classic, Soviet-style panic,” Ms. Yasina said. “Remember, it has been only 20 years since the Soviet collapse. I am 46 years old.

For 20 years, I have lived under normal conditions. But the rest of the time, I lived under conditions of total shortages. And habits acquired during childhood are stronger than any others. It becomes almost a reflex.” Still, not everyone has been fretting. Some elderly Russians pointed out that the Soviet experience had endowed them with another characteristic: stoicism . “I lived through World War II, when we had nothing to eat, only two potatoes a day,” said Valentina Novikova, 74, a retired teacher.

“In the 1980s, there were such shortages, we stood on such lines. So if there are shortages of buckwheat ? well, it’s nonsense. We lived through that, and we will live through this.

A scarcity of buckwheat, a beloved staple, has many Russians in a panic.
A shopper outside an otherwise wellstocked Moscow supermarket.

In the past, food shortages in Russia have touched off political instability. Lately, there is a lack of buckwheat.