By mid-May, widespread food shortages had appeared in Budapest. Soaring grain prices had already scraped away the last bit of wealth from the people's pockets.
To maintain order, the Republican Government had no choice but to begin implementing a food rationing system.
In Budapest at this time, vegetables and fruit had become luxuries. Meat had also vanished from ordinary people's tables, becoming the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy.
All the government could provide was the bare minimum: five hundred grams of black bread per person per day, along with three hundred grams of potatoes and two hundred grams of corn.
Even with so little in supplies, government bureaucrats were still profiting from them. Shorting people on weight was merely standard practice.
The truly black-hearted even sold black bread mixed with impurities like leaves and sawdust, potatoes that had sprouted and changed color, and multicolored corn. Anyone with a weak digestive system could drop dead at any moment after eating such things.
There was only what one could not imagine, not what they could not do. The integrity of the Republican Government's officials could be called a model for the capitalist world.
Budapest's food shortage was limited to the lower classes. The ruling class did not lack food. Even though the enemy was already at their doorstep, their banquets had never stopped.
Through the underground black market, they even began plundering the wealth of the middle class and petty bourgeoisie. Food prices had been driven into the sky; a piece of black bread without additives required silver coins of equal weight.
At this time, an ordinary residential house in Budapest could be bought for merely fifty kilograms of bread. Even a prosperous shopfront was worth no more than a few hundred kilograms of bread.
In the corners of the city, streetwalkers