So What If the Soviets Starve? : Why Washington must be ready with massive food and medicine

The great paradox of the daunting food shortage in the Soviet Union is that the 1990 Soviet harvest was a bountiful one. But in a troubled society that no longer seems to work at even the most basic levels, a near-record harvest does not translate into food on people’s plates. But it does translate into a problem for the United States.

Soviet citizens are in danger of starving not so much because there’s not enough food to go around but because, for one thing, there is no way to get the food distributed and, for another, there is not enough goodwill to go around, either. Farmers are hoarding food, waiting for prices to rise; the transportation infrastructure has a million problems; major cities have announced elaborate food-rationing plans.

The specter of a helpless society poised on the precipice of roiling chaos should, under ordinary circumstances, counsel Washington to keep its distance. What good could possibly come of any aid effort directed at a bottomless pit of social and economic disintegration? But that’s a distanced stance Washington cannot afford to take. The disintegration of the Soviet Union would be a problem for the West of a magnitude that could well dwarf the present crisis in the Persian Gulf to which Washington has devoted so much of its attention. Fortunately, at the moment, the Bush Administration, from all accounts, seems inclined to respond positively to any reasonable request from Moscow for food and medicine. It has not decided to wash its hands of the matter. That’s wise.

The Soviet Union is now embarked on a perilous but necessary voyage into the unknown. The political system of the past has been discredited, but the Soviet Union will need the help of those who wish it well if it’s going to have the time to find a replacement system that works. That voyage, involving complex negotiations among one reeling central government and the country’s antsy republics, won’t be easy.

But it will never reach its destiny if people are forced to starve along the way.