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Notes -
And one of the things they were reduced to importing was food. There were a series of droughts and heatwaves there in the early 80s (combined with mismanagement, I'd guess) that led them to miss grain production targets by 25%, 50 million tons a year deficit.
The same thing had happened a decade earlier, albeit to a lesser extent and at a time when they could better afford it (the global price spike that time shocked everyone). I wonder if the most important thing about the 80s wasn't "a succession of bad harvests", but rather "Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s conviction that the country should acknowledge that it has had failures as well as successes". Glasnost in both directions punctured a lot of illusions. A few years later was when Yeltsin went to Texas for a scheduled tour of NASA JSC and was instead blown away by his unscheduled tour of a grocery store. "Even the Politburo doesn't have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev." "He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution.""
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