More Dairy, Less Empire

“I will moo harder!” says Comrade Cow.

 

Some time ago on This Here Blog I wrote very favorably about Yegor Gaidar’s 2007 paper “The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil.” In that essay Gaidar attributed the fall of the Soviet empire to a shortage of the one and a worldwide oversupply of the latter. More specifically: Soviet agriculture stagmated in the 1960s, and the USSR had to import grain to feed a growing population. Lacking hard currency, the Soviets sold oil and gas to pay for the imports. This worked until the oil price collapse of the mid-1980s. Thereafter Soviet officials made up the difference by borrowing abroad, which made their government an economic dependency of West Germany. When Bonn decided it didn’t like the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe, Gorbachev had to agree; Deutschmark uber alles.

 

Gaidar’s explanation was oversimplified, but not incorrect. At any rate, it had the advantage of attributing the Soviet collapse to economic crisis and bad political decisions, a more believable explanation than the dolchstoss theory favored by Vladimir Putin and his minions, or the Victory-through-Star-Wars narrative of American neoconservatives. Mr. Gaidar underestimated, however, how much bad political decisions accounted for the USSR’s later food shortages. I refer here not to the collectivization of agriculture - which, admittedly, didn’t help - but to something just noted by historian Ian Sheldon: Moscow’s decision in the early 1970s to ramp up domestic meat and dairy production. This was part of an overall effort by Eastern Bloc nations to quash political discontent by raising living standards. In the Soviet Union, government ministers believed that more beefsteaks and sour cream would pacify the population and head off challenges to Moscow’s authority.

 

The peoples of the USSR got a temporary improvement in their diets, but the cost was the reallocation of grain to livestock, and substitution via an unstable raw-materials market and then excessive borrowing. It proved a dumb decision in the long run, but the Soviet system (five-year plans to the contrary) prioritized short- and medium-term fixes. Such are the consequences of filling one’s leadership cadre with decrepit septuagenerians, lifelong drunkards, and great shambling bags of Lorezepam (looking at you, Leonid).  

 

In his article “Ukraine: The Breadbasket of Europe” (link above), Sheldon reports that the fall of the USSR ended Moscow’s subsidization of the meat and dairy industries, and the larger republics (like Ukraine) began privatizing most of their farms. Corn and wheat production took off, and by 2010 Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine exported more grain that the entire Soviet Union had imported in 1990. By 2020 many other nations had become dependent either on Russian and Ukrainian foodstuffs or Russian hydrocarbons, which is what made the outbreak of war between the two former Soviet republics so economically devastating. 

The price of eliminating communism was finding something to fill the ideological gap, in this case a combination of regional authoritarianism and neoliberalism, both of which have proven widely damaging to a vastly more interconnected world.