What Soviet Agriculture Teaches Us

0:00He studied his free market economics in Moscow, and that's where everybody should go to study free market economics. He has an MA in history and social sciences, Moscow State University, PhD in economics at the Institute of Labor Research in Moscow. Currently a professor at Carthage College in Kenosha, although I think he's been doing a little bit of side work down in Dallas here lately. He's certainly a man of the world. If you're ever stuck in a foreign place, he is a guy who makes friends quickly and makes connections more rapidly than anyone you can imagine. He has written a wonderful book called The Requiem for Marx that I highly recommend.

0:47Please check that out at the book table. He's going to talk about what Soviet agriculture teaches us. Yuri Maltsev. Well, it's very nice to be here on the crossroads of America for the place which is very well known for its great history, great agriculture, great everything. And so as I was introduced, I am one of the last obstacles before you and consumption of Agricultural Products, and I'll talk about what Soviet agriculture teaches us.

1:34Well, I will tell you a little bit about myself because not many people know. I worked for the Soviet government in the Soviet Union, well, worked as an overstatement in my activities there, definitely. And I was one of economic advisors to Gorbachev's government. I wasn't the advisor, I wouldn't take the blame, because, can you imagine, it's 11 timezones, 11 timezones, one sixth of the world's surface, one sixth of the world's surface, 40% of arable land of developed countries, and failed so miserably, definitely if it was something not too big to fail, that would be, that would be the Soviet Union, and it failed, it was too big not to fail, not big not to fail. And I think that the Soviet Union, The tragic experiment that Soviet people did on themselves, it's a very powerful warning for us in the West, that when people are losing their liberty, what happens to them?

2:33And the Soviet people and the people enslaved in the Soviet Union, at first I think that the scenario was more or less the same as we see right now coming out of Washington, D.C. At first you disarm people, then you destroy their support mechanism, you destroy churches, to destroy families, and then you're naked before big government, and the story of Soviet agriculture is a very sad story of mass murder, of misery, of human sorrow, of immense proportions, of immense proportions. Not many people in the United States know about that. Moreover, we have people who are kind of denying that Soviet, I was just reading Joseph Wether of of the University of South Maine, and he really attacks the myth of the Soviet agricultural failure. He believes it was a great success, that the story is suppressed by conservative academia. I never heard about these people, and maybe all five of them suppressed this.

3:36So that was pretty strange, right? Another socialist agitprop person, Michael Moore, And in his famous book, Downsize This, he promised all of us that we will be spreading manure and the collective farms on North Dakota when the glorious future would come. I'm not making it up, yes, in page 71 of that book, he's saying that all of us, all conservatives, libertarians and other reactionaries, would be spreading manure and collective farms in North Dakota. So I would like to talk a little bit about what these collective farms look like and would be our future if we wouldn't do something today to arrest this kind of developments. Well, first I would like to talk a little bit about Russia before, because many people think, well, the Tsars were very bad, the Tsars were very bad, and then the Bolsheviks, the socialists, came to power and kind of fixed the problem. That's at least official historiography.

4:36If you look at the textbooks in our high schools and the universities, that's what they would tell us. that Tsars were pretty bad, Tsars were probably pretty bad, but on the scale of mass murder, they were just so small, the whole, I read a book published under Tsar Nicholas II, called the history of death in the Soviet Union, in Russia, the history of death in Russia, all 19th century, 638 people were executed in Russia, the whole, in the Soviet Union, from 43 million to 61 million, to the point even that that statistics became completely irrelevant. I mean, whether it doesn't make a difference at 43 or 61, it's unbelievable numbers, unbelievable numbers.

5:27And that's what Stalin meant when he used to say that death of one person is a tragedy, death of millions is just statistics, nothing else. Not many people know, however, in the United States that over half of these executions happened in rural areas of Russia because agriculture was the first industry, the first sphere of economics, which was supposed to be socialized and destroyed by socialists. The agriculture was doing pretty well in Russia before that disaster called the Socialist Revolution of 1917. I am deliberately not using the word communism because communism is no such thing as communism.

6:13Communism was an utopia promised by Marx 500 years from that period, so 350 years we should wait. and probably it can come even closer if we would be sending the same people to Washington, D.C. But communism is a religion, it's a secular religion, it's a utopia, it's a utopia when everything you can go, you can go to like a huge government-run Walmart with no cashiers, you just pick up everything for free, you work for free, so it's a wonderful kind of Neverland and they hooked people with these promises of heaven and earth, on Earth, hooked many people, many people were kind of fell, this promise is the same way as many people today are falling on the promises on Obama administration and other government officials, you can see I was just looking at the stats, 48% of population of United States own this or that form of government support, so have taxis, that's 48%, plus Federal bureaucracy, plus state bureaucracy, so you can see that majority already is not

7:19producing anything, it's kind of a form of social parasitism. Then you can see that only 50%, less than 50% of Americans are paying taxes, are paying taxes, so what kind of country we're going to. And so agriculture in Russia, in Russian Empire, it was in 1861, those of I can kind of refresh you a little bit, history of Russia before the revolution, because that period is not known much. Not many people realize that after Alexander II, Tsar, who liberated Serbs in 1861, then Russia experienced a period of economic boom, unprecedented period of Economic Boom.

8:06In Russia, the number of slaves, the number of serfs, which were more or less like slaves in the United States, was staggering 75% of population, can you imagine, 75%. So if you are talking about the impact of slavery on public mentality, I think Russia would be a horrible place to begin with, and I think that was one of the reasons that they They fell victims to this socialist promises and communist neverland utopia. Because people, because people, you know that slaves, whether public slaves or private slaves, they do not have choices. So freedom is choice. So somebody else was making choices for them. And many people gave up idea of choices. They just, because choice implies responsibility as well.

8:57and so they fell out for them. Russia by 1913, they were one-third, 34.5% of world agricultural supplies, so at that time one-third of all grain in the world sold in international markets came from Russia, at that time Ukraine for example, part of Russia, of Russian Empire at that time, now independent country, has 25% of the most fertile Black dirt, so-called, black dirt. The soils have a very high content of humus, up to 12 percent. It's just amazing. Their soil was so fertile that you could use it as a fertilizer for other soil. So it was the breadbasket of Europe. Russia was the first in the world, even the head of the United States, in experts of rye.

9:50and try, second in experts of wheat. So it was a country which was growing at the rate of 7-8% per year since 1881 to 1913. And then came the end of civilization in the form of the First World War and then the disastrous revolution. And at that time the Marxists, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and the likes, they thought that agriculture is the most dangerous is potential of returning back to capitalism, because if you are an individual farmer, then you cherish these ideas of property, of fruits of your labor, and that, and Lenin was writing in 1922, said, this is the last backbone we should crush. And they did that in the most ferocious way. Practically peasantry in Ukraine was exterminated by Holodomor, maybe you heard about that. In the winter of 1932 to 1933, 7 million people were starved to death deliberately by the Soviet masters because all of their grain was confiscated. All of their grain was confiscated. They wouldn't leave grain even as seeds. They wouldn't leave grain to

11:03feed their children. And people were doomed to die, doomed to die. There were plenty of The cases of cannibalism, people were eating, dirt eating, eating from the tree bark, so that was the first engineered mass murder of peasants, at the same very time. Not many people know about the murder of Ukrainians, it is well described, if you haven't heard about it or you would like to know more there is a wonderful video called soviet story soviet story it's it's the best inoculation against socialism it's it's especially if you have younger younger people in the family it's it's it's as good as it's my trips to Cuba I would usually take my students to Cuba and show them that that disaster and in how it how it works now we cannot go to Cuba so I I am just advising them this movies.

12:09So then how did they destroy their agriculture? With the Marxist idea of collectivization. So the idea was that you cannot nationalize peasants' property because peasants would fight back. And they did. There were a lot of peasants uprisings which were put down in the most atrocious way when and not only peasants, but members of their family, including children, were murdered. Lenin was writing to his governors in the southern Russia, kill them the way that everybody would tremble 150 miles around, burn their houses, and they did. And they burned churches, burned houses, and still peasants were against it.

12:57So they came up first with a treacherous idea of collective farms. It was designed as a form of cooperative. It was never designed as a form of cooperative. It was designed as a concentration camp for peasants, but it was presented as a form of cooperative. And many people in the West thought that this is fantastic, that Professor Weather, for example, from University of South Maine, he still thinks that was a smashing success that we don't know about and what what did they do they took everything from everybody they left people in their houses however but took all the assets and made their land common property common property of collective farm and sure enough those people who were who were well-to-do peasants who peasants who were more productive than others they resented that idea they resented in 1928 there were riots all over Ukraine, because peasants were, at first they slapped them with very high taxes, confiscatory taxes. If they would pay that taxes, then they would starve to death right

14:07away. So they were very much against that. And then what they did, they confiscated everything they had. They confiscated not only grain, but confiscated everything. Sauerkraut was confiscated. Any kind of supplies people would have. And at that time, amazingly enough, From 1932 to 1933, the Soviet Union sold 55 million tons of this confiscated grain, mostly to Germany, mostly to Nazi Germany. Can you imagine, under Hitler, they would take usually gold from Jews, there was nothing to take from these Ukrainian peasants, definitely there was no gold. So they took everything they had, and they sold it, and they sold it, while their own 4 million people starved to death, and that was a design. That was not a mistake. 4 million people at that very time were starved to death in Volga region, which was another breadbasket for Europe. I came from that area, that's a huge agricultural area, and was extremely productive. And they starved 4 million there, and they sent, on the top of that, 10 million

15:15wealthy peasants from European Russia. They sent them to Siberia, and most of them perished Perish there on the way. Perish with their families. Aleksandr Yakovlev, who was the architect of Perestroika and the confidant of Gorbachev and he was the only person I think he knew what he was doing because people like Gorbachev would not, they all the time would like parrots repeat that we are to reform socialism, not to get rid of it. We need to new social with a human face and would not. They didn't realize that such a thing does not exist, that you can only enforce socialism at certain points. and with mass murder. In the United States, now they are trying to enforce socials with promises. At a certain point when the promises would be broken, there is just a logic of history to resort to violence, to crude coercion. So that's the, sure enough, agricultural production plummeted. The country, which was breadbasket of Europe, became dependent on on imports of agricultural products. I worked in Washington, D.C., which is also an overstatement

16:26of my activities, in the Congressional think tank, which most government think tanks didn't think at all, but again, we were tanking quite a bit. And over there, I testified before the Agricultural Committee of the House. It was pretty interesting. I wouldn't say it and Life-Changing Experience, but because I felt like I'm back in Moscow. It was Dan Glickman at that time was chairman of the committee and later became Secretary of Agriculture. And now he is one of the leading figures in something called Bipartisan Policy Center. That's I think our future will be. We'll have a one party system which will be called Bipartisan Party.

17:12And we will be members of this bipartisan party and that's at least some people. and so on. Some people, I think, are designing it for us in Washington this year. There's an interesting book about bipartisan party written by another Russian emigre, his name is Garry Sternberg. He's teaching in Columbia University. Very, very interesting that our Soviet future exposed. So I was testifying before that and it was very interesting for me that people who were For testifying before me, I thought that maybe they just, I didn't know what kind of dope they are. I mean, because that was impossible to comprehend. Like an undersecretary of agriculture of the United States was telling with a straight face to the members of committee that the major problem in Russian and Ukrainian and and other agricultures is that people don't know how to save the harvest, for example, how to warehouse, how to transport, because they had presumably very high harvests. The harvests were just bumper harvests. The only thing they didn't, that's another myth, that

18:26they had this bumper harvest. It was just a socialist reporting, propaganda kind of thing. And so they had this fantastic harvest, but they cannot save it, they cannot, it's a lot of waste, a lot of up to 40%, as he mentioned, waste. And so now he said, we have a group of 23 PhDs in a group of 48 people, we'll go to Russia and Belarus and Ukraine and tell them how to do things. And so it was portrayed by United States Department of Agriculture as a purely technical issue. And I was speaking after him, and Mr. Glickman said, what do you think about this previous speaker's presentation, because Glickman is a Democrat and that was a Republican, and George Herbert Walker, the George the First administration, and so, and I said, I just can't believe what I heard, yeah, I think that even if you sent 40 PhDs from the Department for Agriculture, never can teach people to pick up potatoes for free for somebody else.

19:36Because that's the issue. The Soviet Union, any kind of socialist regime would deteriorate at certain point into a system of public slavery, nothing else, which you only can keep slaves working for you if you shoot enough of them. And that's what they did. And Lenin in 1922 I was writing to Felix Yerzhinsky, the first leader of the KGB, the first chair of the KGB, saying that I'm telling comrades and they don't listen. So he's telling them to work and they don't listen. How about we'll take a couple of absent-minded like that and shoot them publicly? And they did, and then when they came to shoot people in millions, then attention span definitely improved.

20:24So that was the secret of the so-called successes of Soviet agriculture. And so that definitely USDA and other government officials in the United States, not only are destroying agriculture here in the United States, but they are destroying agriculture all over the world, all over the world. If you will, you can just Google, you wouldn't believe it. If you will put map, worldwide map of USDA offices, and you would see that USDA is present in almost every country of the world. They have their offices. In Russia today, they have four offices, four offices. They have two offices in Ukraine.

21:10They have two offices in Georgia, in little Georgia, Russian Georgia, Soviet Georgia, Soviet Georgia, so smaller than the state of Indiana. Well, they have probably hundreds of offices in the state of Indiana. But that's what they did. They did a lot of irreparable damage to countries which were not sufficient in food. Because what USDA is doing, I don't believe the conspiracy theories, but conspiracies happen all the time. Left and right, and mostly left, I think. and one of the greatest conspiracies is to undermine, to blow up agricultural markets everywhere else. So can you imagine when the Soviet Union collapsed and they had all these weak countries like Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, whatever, and the United States Department of Agriculture began to dump free food on them, free food, destroying markets, driving these very weak The Soviet system of agriculture had two forms of property, which was both phony.

22:41One was collective property circle. That would be collective farms. However, peasants could not leave collective farms. They could not leave. Not many people also realize that socialism at its kind of, at its high level of its development, it would presume it's a necessity to cut on all forms of human freedom. People could not move. In the Soviet Union, you would have to have an internal passport with your residence stamp there. You have this internal passport and peasants were not issued internal passports. They were provided with a piece of paper smaller than this without even their picture saying that such a peasant can visit their county center, county center.

23:31So it belongs to this county, they wouldn't call it county, they call it district. So you can show the police officer this. If police officer have any doubts that it's not yours or whatever, then you will end up in Siberia where the millions ended up. So that's the, so people were set on like slaves, set on this land, set on this land. And what happened after, even after they stopped shooting people, after they ran out of bullets in 1950s or 1960s, Then the whole agriculture imploded because human resources were undermined. Alcoholism became pandemic to the point that the average life expectancy in rural areas was 45 for men and 66 for women.

24:22Mostly because of pandemic alcoholism, because of crime, because of diseases which nobody would take care of. They would spend in the height of the Soviet empire, They would spend $47 per person for health services in urban areas, and only $6 in rural areas per year. So you can have free health care. That's another target for our government is to destroy our health as well. Sure enough, this wonderful person, Dan Glickman, is right now a specialist in public health. in Public Health, in this bipartisan center, in this bipartisan center.

25:09Statistics of Soviet agriculture is so funny that I am not even talking about that. There was a Lazar Wolin, his name was, heivid the chief USDA expert generating tons of statistical indices and what not about Soviet agriculture. In 1955, he and his office, USDA and the CIA, they produced so much of completely worthless This paper about Soviet agriculture that in 1955, just before his death, he admitted that it was just garbage. He admitted that their statistics was based on Soviet statistics. In Soviet statistics, agricultural statistics, it was like a matryoshka doll. And I discussed it, matryoshka doll, there would be different matryoshkas. So they would have official statistics, which would be kind of a very arrogant communist party slogan, nothing else, all the time people would starve but production is going up like that. That people, that statistics only was believed in Harvard University or whatever, nobody in Russia. Then they produce statistics which was classified statistics, classified statistics, which was also propaganda but and more believable. So people, and moreover, people would kind of steal this and break

26:28the law if you are telling this number. But it's kind of like rumors that life is not as good as they tell us, but still pretty good. And then that would be top secret, top top-secret statistics for the few who had an access, which was also funny because in most cases they wouldn't have something called primary reporting, primary reporting, so nobody knew. These top-secret statistics were kind of estimates produced by the Soviet government bureaucrats and GOSCOMSTAT about agriculture, about everything else, and then they would, they would, that statistics would be provided for Brezhnev and Homnod.

27:19And in 1978, I'm not making it up, Brezhnev looked at this secret, top-secret statistics and found out that there is no vegetables in the Soviet Union. He was shocked, I mean, he had almost everything he could, he lived like Genghis Khan, and So what the socialists would do, whether in Moscow or Washington, immediately they created Ministry for Vegetables. I'm not making it up, Ministry for Vegetables. And they appointed certain comrade Pavlovsky, whom I happen to know, as a minister. And this comrade Pavlovsky could not sleep at night. He thought, well, how would I come up with vegetables? And then The only thing, the good thing was that his wife was so nice and she was saying, Pavelusha, they will forget.

28:14They will forget about vegetables. And only in 1988 Gorbachev cut on the cut funds and shut down this Ministry for Vegetables because he said, this is a joke, we don't have. And then I remember in this meeting he kind of sighed and he said, what do we have Minister of Culture as well. So Ministry for Vegetables with No Vegetables and Ministry for Culture without Culture. So that's, I think, to ruin anything, you need a ministry. You need a ministry. And then, and we have this ministry in the United States. And this ministry since 1864, I think, was destroying, destroying our agriculture, but we still have some remnants of Property Rights there and some freedom-loving people, so it's not as destroyed as for example the Soviet Union.

29:04But Soviet, I think that Soviet experiment is a very good warning to us what happens when people are losing their liberty. And just on the last kind of note, I remember I was visiting Tom at University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and it was I think 1990, 1990. And because I came from Moscow, so all local communist party sales members showed up to my speeches and we had this mass exodus and Tom was sharing that session and saying, go, go, and never come back. Yes, so that's really, really sad that the only lesson of history is that it does not teach us anything, that people stage that deadly experiment on themselves and we are and also Rich Wilke gave me this wonderful book, Soviet Agriculture, this would be the matryoshka number two, with a lot of stats, statistics and everything, but statistics, just the last thing, statistics was, I talked to many of my statistical friends and they would say you just stare in the ceiling and you see numbers there, and I said what if

30:22If you don't, say, well, have another drink, and then you see numbers, you take them down, you go to your boss, and the boss will correct you. That's how statistics is made. All right, on this cheerful note, I will go.