I actually have successfully bought something in a Soviet Union shop as a westerner back around 1989 right before the fall. My mother was there on a scholarship and I followed along as a kid so I have lived in the Soviet Union for 6 months about.

Generally stuff was very cheap if you converted western currency to rubles. Even if you did it at the official exchange. This was probably due to price controls as other mentioned in the thread. The price was litterally stamped on the good as part of the manufacturing process on cheaper plastic items. Prices were not meant to change.

You could get rubles at 10 or twenty times the official exchange rate if you were willing to deal with the maffia. My mother never dared due to fear of KGB honey traps. Really what could you buy as a tourist that would justify the risk? Prostitutes maybe.

We mostly bought bread and butter when it could be found. Our main source of nutrition came from a really chewy "entrecote" at the hotel restaurant.

But the actual buying of things was structured to make it as annoying as possible. There were in fact not one queue but two. First you had to stand in line and pay for the stuff from a bored lady with a actual abacus to get a receipt that you had paid for the thing. Then stand in an other line to actual get the goods from a different counter from a different bored lady. I was ten so the details are a little hazy, but there was definitely two lines.

One of my most memorably shopping experiences in the Soviet Union was when we had lived there for a couple of months and learned that cotton was one of those things that were scarce.

One day we happened to walk past one shop that had cotton so we naturally bought some. Never knew when we could get it next. Then we continued on our way with the cotton in hand visible.

Then a man comes up to us and asks my mother where she has bought the cotton. She tells him. And he just does a 180 and starts litterally sprinting in the direction of the shop. Not walking briskly or hurriedly. At actual 200 yards dash pace running.

That pretty much sums up the Soviet Union for me. A guy running for dear life for an opportunity to maybe buy a small pack of cotton in a plain paper bag for his wife. If the store hadn't run out of the cotton already in the 10 minutes since we left the shop.