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FOOD FOR PEACE? OR FOR CIVIL WAR? If we are not careful, the food we send to feed hungry Soviets will serve merely to strengthen the socialist hard-liners against the democratic forces. Why is the Soviet Union hungry? Why does the biggest and potentially the richest country in the world have empty shelves in the stores? The hunger is real. In the United States people consume more than 53 pounds of meat per capita per year; in the USSR, if you count the bone and gristle, just 26 pounds. Okay, maybe Americans eat too much meat. But what about fruit? Americans eat three times more fruit than people in the USSR do. Even these figures are for more normal times. These are not normal times. Real hunger looms in the land that was once the breadbasket of Europe. So, unless Americans and Europeans want to see Soviet children on the nightly TV news, they are going to have to ship food to the Soviet Union. Done the right way, such food aid can help feed the truly hungry. Done the wrong way, it can hasten a civil war. Russia has an image as a freezing country where nothing really grows. But the Soviet Union’s food crisis has nothing to do with resources. The country has vast and fertile lands—470 million acres of rich black earth. (Compare that to the approximately 250 million acres that make up the U.S.’s corn belt.) In the Republic of Georgia, people say that if you drive a stake into Georgian land, tomorrow you will see grapes there. This year the country again had a blessing of a crop and a curse of a system; 230 million tons of grain were borne by the fields, while the USSR was buying 30 million tons abroad. This is not a problem of equipment. The USSR has 200,000 more grain harvester combines than the U.S. has. Soviet tractors, the Belarus and the Vlamidirets, are of good quality, but the farmer is not Forbes, January, 12, 1991, pp. 39–41. food for peace? or for civil war? 537 interested in using them. Why bother? The land does not belong to him. Are Russians lazy? Not by nature. Only by training—goofing off is the only way you can beat the system. In such matters one can’t divorce current events from history. The roots of today’s food problem in the USSR go back to 1917, when the October Revolution took agriculture from the people and gave it to the state to use for state purposes. By 1910, well before the revolution, the reformist Prime Minister Piotr Stolypin had pushed through a reform to give land and economic freedom to the peasants. Some peasants used their new freedom wisely; some squandered the fruits. The entrepreneurial peasants got the name ‘‘kulaks’’—literally, ‘‘fists’’—meaning that they grasped their households firmly in their hands. By 1913 the kulaks had created solid, strong farms and even small agro-industrial complexes. Not only did they produce their own grain, they raised cattle, invested in equipment for cattle raising and milk production, and developed transportation networks to get their goods to market. At that time the kulaks, together with well-to-do peasants, constituted 35% of all peasant households. A full one-third of Russia’s peasantry was well on its way to middle-class status. The curtain began to fall on Russian agriculture in the autumn of 1917. Lenin’s Bolsheviks ignited the hatred of illiterate, shiftless drunkards against the kulaks. Starting with the October Revolution, whatever the kulaks earned was taken away. They were murdered; their farms, created by long labor, were set on fire. Hard workers were the people’s enemies. Building on Lenin, Stalin sent trainloads of hungry and naked kulaks , along with their exhausted sick babies, and dumped them in the depths of the frozen desert. It was one of the worst genocides in human history—all done in the name of the people. For the Bolsheviks this was sound policy: A prosperous peasant would never make a good communist. A city, well fed by the state, might. The Bolsheviks took over from the kulaks, and here are some of the results as calculated by the Moscow University agrarian specialist Professor Aleksei Yemelyanov: From 1928 to 1934, cattle and meat production fell 40%, production of eggs more than 70%. In 1929, 5.8 million tons of meat were produced. In 1934, only 2...

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