Sausages padded out with shreddded paper

Reading Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith at the moment, a thriller set in Stalinist Russia, and it's brought back a few memories of my time in Moscow as a student in 1991, just before the August coup. Mostly, I remember gray. There wasn't much to eat, sometimes eggs or sausages that were padded out with shredded paper – not so tasty. The bread shop sometimes had something to buy, but the queues were long and people grew angry if you bought too much (decadent westerners trying to eat!). You could...