This photo of 'suseks' was taken in Nizhny Novgorod Region. Insider (CC BY-SA)In the old days, a ‘susek’ was a container for storing grain or a partitioned off part of the barn where grain or bread was kept. In Russian, there is another word with a similar meaning, ‘zakroma’, formed from the word ‘edge’ (‘kromka’). But, ‘suseks’ were used for "spare" bread, when the ‘zakromas’ were already full, that is, they were a kind of emergency reserve. Today, the phrase "to scrape through ‘suseks’" means to pick up the last of the stock.