The End of the Cold War. 1985-1991

56 THE END OF THE COLD WAR

accustomed to these purchases. It became an automatic sort of

procedure: we started to buy grain abroad every year; and we got

butter from somewhere or other, meat from somewhere else, milk

from somewhere else again.^12

Andropov attacked the policy:

Of course, you’ll understand that they haven’t given us all this

because they thought we had beautiful eyes. Money is demanded.

I don’t want to scare anyone but I will say that over recent years

we’ve wasted tens of billions of golden rubles on such an expen-

sive thing.^13

He offered no alternative to what had become normal policy, but made
it clear that something had to change.
He entrusted the Party Agricultural Department with overseeing
improvements. The department became famous inside the leadership
for calling for additional massive extra investment in grain and dairy
production. By 1981 the state budget included what has been called
the ‘highest food-and-agriculture subsidy known in human history’ –
it was $33 billion at the official exchange rate.^14
Andropov called for action against the waste and humiliation that
the degradation of the Soviet countryside involved:

How are we to look at this? It’s said that we have the gold lying

around. After all, it can never feed anyone. And so we bought up

food supplies and we fed people. But this is untrue. It’s untrue that

there’s gold just lying around. At the present time, comrades, gold

is not simply lying around. Everyone who follows international

life knows that gold is fighting a struggle at the present time and

that the Americans are conducting a currency war against every-

body and above all against the Soviet Union and the other socialist

countries.^15

He accused Washington of using finance as a weapon. The Ameri-
cans in his view had deliberately brought Poland to its knees and had
started to do the same to Hungary. Their success was encouraging
them to try the same tactic against the USSR: ‘Reagan has descended
to such insolence as to say: yes, we’ll sell grain to the Soviet Union, but
we’ll exhaust them by doing this. Isn’t this correct? Yes, it’s correct.’^16
Andropov would no longer tolerate this situation: ‘We are the sort of
power that really must wage a struggle against the Americans, includ-
ing a currency struggle, at the necessary level.’^17 Again, he proffered no