The Russian attack on Ukraine serves as a shocking reminder of how things have changed since the hopeful years after the fall of the wall in Berlin in 1989. Then, and throughout the nineteen-nineties our farm hosted what seemed to be a steady stream of visitors from Europe especially including eastern Europe. It seemed to me at the time that a bunch of organizations had gotten the idea that communications among farmers worldwide was something they wanted to foster. We had, in addition to perhaps three different groups of Swedes and a delegation from Japan a group from Latvia which gifted us with a small wallhanging made of stones and dust of amber from the Baltic sea, pasted by hand to a scrap of wall paper in the shape of a sea scape and framed. It seemed at the time to be a thing made because anything purchased would be difficult to afford. That alone makes it precious. That amber display still hangs in a place of honor in our house.
And of course, the Hungarian. He sticks out in my mind because he was not part of a group and his visit was difficult to say the least, and unforgettable. He came with a driver/interpreter and we walked through our pastures, took a quick look at the crops and a tour of the barns and then stood on the yard and talked for what must have been three hours. He was just a bit shorter than I and powerfully made. Our visitor and I both knew and loved farming. I knew not a word of Hungarian. He knew no English. Our interpreter, an earnest young woman, knew both English and Hungarian, but nothing at all about farming. This slowed us up as much as the language barrier to say the truth.
He started by telling us about the breakup of Soviet style farms and agriculture in Hungary and a few of the particulars about how he and his family got access to a few hectares of land. By the time he-and she-had reached this point I understood that I was talking to someone as passionate about agriculture as I was. This was nineteen-ninety-five and I was just beginning to move into grazing. We had pigs in the pasture for farrowing and several hundred ewe/lamb units that we were grazing. But the major business of the farm then was pig production.
This seemed to excite my visitor most. He liked to talk about pigs and his references to crops such as barley and rye were interspersed with statements more about garden things, cabbage, turnips and so forth. By this time he was pretty wound up and had moved to within three feet or so of me and was yelling Hungarian at me in an effort to make me understand what he was excited about. I give the interpreter credit here as we were moving into a situation that would have flustered a lesser woman. But she gamely held on, through one of us or the other impatiently informing her what a gilt was and what farrowing meant, and the finer points of castration.
The Hungarian reduced himself to simple declarative sentences: “Suppose I have a pig” the interpreter informed me. “So I feed the pig what I think it needs. My grandfather is some help with that.” Next, she said (remember it is the interpreter speaking to me, the Hungarian fellow right now is someone who is pretty worked up with his failure to communicate and appears to mostly be a boiling kettle of overwrought feelings) “as the pig grows, I have to decide what the best weight to market it may be.” “Because”, she informs me, the public changes. “Now they want this, then they want that. . .” “Or there may be no market at all when the pig is ready” she says. “Then I have to think what to do about the pig and how I will do without the money I thought I would get for it.”
It was then that something of the total picture of this man’s life began to dawn on me. He and the others of his nation were building an economy and a life from the ground up, one painstaking piece after another. In an instant I realized how much the mental and emotional furniture given to me almost accidentally by my parents and the people surrounding me as I grew up had become the very tools I thought with. And that not all others had the same set of tools as a birthright.
And it was also then that the visitor seemed to calm somewhat and return to his senses. Thinking about it since, I realize that something of what was happening in my head, the very enormity of the effort required by him and others must have shown on my face to the visitor, something he didn’t need to rely on the interpreter for. There was a connection. As an American farmer, the circumstance where there really is no market was temporarily beyond my comprehension. I grew in understanding that day. And that knowledge has stood me in good stead as we took the farm on an increasing tangent from standard operation and into the kind of world we hoped was coming.
Now of course, thinking about what our market is and how much we can sell is second nature to us. No more ‘building the production and someone will want it’ for us. This was really the start of my experience of what it must be like when a totalitarian system falls apart and everyone must somehow figure out how to cope on his/her own. And I am filled with admiration for the Hungarian.
Well, we eventually wound down and I accompanied the guests over to their car. By this time the Hungarian farmer was brimming with good cheer and what I took to be gratitude for the experience. Most of what was said and done in those few minutes didn’t require an interpreter, going in either direction. The woman doing the translating folded herself behind the steering wheel looking totally exhausted from her hours of making each of us understandable to the other. I thanked her and asked if she thought she was up to the hundred plus mile drive back to the city. She assured me she was. She undoubtedly looked forward to speaking only Hungarian for awhile.
This world is different from what it was in nineteen-ninety-five. And just as I think there is more than one nation to blame for the atrocity being visited upon the people of Ukraine I think that it is imperative we look beyond the immediate and obvious conclusion that it was the communists that tore apart peasant agriculture in Hungary and the rest of east Europe creating misery in the process. It was of course, but it is not communism that carries on that destructive work today.
When I was in high school, we were taught in geography class that the two most fertile and richest places on earth were the American midwest and the Ukraine. Politcal and economic analysis today will show that the midwest is among the poorest areas of the US, while Ukraine is thought to be the poorest country in Europe. Try to get your mind around the gigantic modern screwup that allows residents of the most highly fertile places on earth to be increasingly impoverished in terms of average income of the residents and also their sense of agency and hope for the future. How does a civilization bungle things that badly? It takes an economist.
Russia is no longer communist. It is instead a dictatorship run by fabulously rich oligarchs who were allowed to(encouraged to?) steal the assets of the people of Russia when communism fell apart. They are further advanced than our American version of oligarchs, but they are all headed in the same direction. And they are coached and encouraged by the international set of economics gurus who have been elevated by too many of us as all purpose prophets and soothsayers. So the same economists-ag economists for instance-who have had so much to do with producing justifications for the tearing apart of rural lives and communities in our country are hard at work in Russia and east Europe as well.
I can be wrong. I often enough am. But this is what I see when I look beneath the news headlines. It is no longer democracy against communism. Now it is oligarchs against the rest of us.
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