Can They Move What We Give Them?

The Moscow railroad yard, the Soviet paper Pravda reported the other day, has become a graveyard for food and other urgently needed goods. As of Sunday, 20,000 containers and 300 freight cars packed with 23,500 tons of everything from bananas and meat to medicine and wine awaited unloading. This is in a city where for months store shelves have been bare of virtually anything that humans would consider edible.

In Leningrad and other port cities, ships loaded with flour, meat, sugar and other food from abroad ride low in the water, waiting to be emptied of their cargoes. With winter only a week away, Soviet consumers face the steadily worsening effects of a distribution system that seems to be all but terminally gridlocked. In these circumstances, does it make sense for Washington to provide the Soviet Union with credits so that it can buy American food? It does, for immediate humanitarian reasons and for longer-term political ones.

President Bush is waiving, for the time being, the restrictions of Jackson-Vanik, the 1974 law that denies the Soviet Union trade benefits in the absence of a more liberal emigration policy. Soviet lawmakers have yet to codify such a policy, but in practice increasing numbers of Soviet citizens, especially Jews and Armenians threatened with discrimination and persecution, are able to leave the country. That change warrants the opportunity for relief that suspension of Jackson-Vanik makes possible.

But the United States and other donor nations can’t solve the distribution crisis that, especially in the big cities of the Russian Republic, has kept food and other goods out of the hands of increasingly desperate consumers. The reasons for that crisis are varied, ranging from crime and corruption--up to 50% of all consumer goods, food included, is now thought to be diverted to the black market--to deliberate sabotage by die-hard Communists eager to discredit President Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms. Hoarding, not least by officials, is widespread. Trucks, drivers and storage space to shift goods from ports and rail yards are said to be wholly inadequate.

It’s a mess, and ordinary citizens more and more blame Gorbachev for it, to the delight of his enemies on both the far left and far right. Gorbachev’s own political survival is not, of course, necessarily a vital U.S. interest. But the survival and success of reforms that seek a freer, more productive, humane and moderate Soviet system unmistakably are. It’s up to Soviet officials to clean up the corruption and inefficiencies that dog their distribution system. It’s up to the United States and other countries that have a stake in the Soviet Union’s future to help now, to the greatest extent possible, with humanitarian aid.