How would you feel if hundreds of billions of federal dollars failed to make things better? How would you feel if poor farmers burned your private estate, or if your business were plagued by endless inspections and banks made it impossible for you to withdraw your lawful deposits?
How would you in America like it if your president, instead of putting your own house in order–tapping enormous domestic potential–decided to go begging for money from former archenemies? If he tried to sell the country’s oil to overseas customers and stood by while all incoming foreign aid disappeared into some kind of black hole? Would you in America ever tolerate such a president? Would you be proud of his “reforms”?
And finally, how would you feel if your failed president’s lenders really thought he was a dedicated reformer and the free press in their countries neglected to tell what was really going on? I can tell you how I feel: bewildered, angry and ashamed.
My country is no Ethiopia. The Soviet Union has plenty of good land. The Ukraine, where I come from, has the best soil in the world. We have plenty of equipment. Since the late 1980s the U.S.S.R. has been manufacturing five times more tractors and 10 times more combine harvesters per capita than the United States. Last year’s harvest was the largest in Soviet history. We have good willing workers. I have talked to scores of them in the Ukraine, the Russian Republic, Armenia, Kazakhstan.
So why does Gorbachev need grain credits, to say nothing of billions of other aid over the coming years?
For one thing, we have a system of “telephone rule,” known by the Russian word vertushka (rotary dial). It consists of the network of special four- and three-digit phone numbers isolating the members of the ruling class from everyone else. If you have one of those phone lines in your office, you are able to avoid the horrible lines shown so often nowadays on American TV; if you are in the ruling class, you have access to the Russian caviar reserves.
People in the West don’t understand that communism collapsed in the Soviet Union decades ago and it is the vertushka that still makes the system tick. What the four-digit people really fear is giving the masses freedom to do business, to buy and sell land, to grow beets and not potatoes, to raise cows and not pigs.
That is why an ex-Russian Australian, who recently returned to his homeland last year to start a private farm near Vladivostok, soon found out he could not withdraw his Australian earnings deposited in a Soviet bank. That is why a private stock breeder from central Russia who began to sell beef to the McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow was denied access to state-controlled storage space. The McDonald’s trucks had to get filled elsewhere. That is why a couple of farmers from Ohio who spent half a year on a west Ukrainian state farm, supposedly to share expertise, were never invited to the management meetings.
We have too many rotten carrots, too many dirt roads where horses routinely drown during autumn rains, too many ghost villages, too few people to repair machinery and equipment. Trying to reform this mess is more than the vertushka can handle.
But we have oil. Discovered and undiscovered. Something we can sell for good solid greenbacks. Now the jigsaw puzzle is complete: since the four-digit elites are afraid of freedom and find dealing with real problems disgusting, they want to trade oil for grain. In 1963 they set up a committee on grain purchases which has been operating without regard to the needs of the country but with great concern about its own well-being. Gorbachev is part of a vertushka, too-the internal Kremlin one. He has been part of four- and three-digit lower-level vertushkas for most of his career. As long as Gorbachev remains connected to the elite, the future of real market reform in the Soviet Union will remain bleak.
That is why Gorbachev is so happy now that George Bush is inclined to invite him to the Big Seven economic meeting in July. There the Soviet president is expected to offer the West more Soviet oil. But will Gorbachev allow more economic freedom? Will he ease the minimum 80 percent tax on hard-currency earnings that enterprising Soviets must pay within the U.S.S.R.? Will he finally give farmers land of their own? Why has he been dragging his feet on all this?
These are vital questions. I would not want my country to produce the harvest of sorrow, as it did in the early 1930s when foreign investment flowed into the Soviet Union, diplomatic relations were established with the United States and up to 6 million people were starved to death in my home Republic of the Ukraine as a result of the forced collectivization of farming.
However dramatic Gorbachev’s pleas are, I do not want you in America to waste money on us in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet elite knows your prices and pays accordingly, but it won’t pay a Soviet farmer even a $10 wage, which is roughly how much the average Soviet monthly salary is worth on the ruble/dollar exchange. An estimated 30,000 Soviets now work on the farms in Poland for $40 a month, and for them that is good money. For $100 a month they will move mountains at home. They are ready to turn the field of nightmares into the field of dreams. They hope you in America understand them and will not pay dozens of billions to keep the old vertushka dialing along.
