 He studied his free markets economics in Moscow. That's where everybody should go to study free market economics. He has an MA in history and social sciences, Moscow State University, PhD in economics at the Institute of Labor Research in Moscow. Currently a professor at Carthage College in Kenosha, although I think he's been doing a little bit of side work down in Dallas here lately. He's certainly a man of the world. If you're ever stuck in a foreign place, he is a guy who makes friends quickly and makes connections more rapidly than anyone you can imagine. He has written a wonderful book called The Requiem for Marks that I highly recommend. Please check that out at the book table. He's going to talk about what Soviet agriculture teaches us, Yuri Maltsev. Well, it's very nice to be here on the crossroads of America for the place which is very well known for its great history, great agriculture, great everything. And so as I was introduced, I am one of the last obstacles before you and consumption of agricultural products. And I'll talk about what Soviet agriculture teaches us. Well, I will tell you a little bit about myself because not many people know. I worked for Soviet government in Soviet Union. Well, worked as overstatement, my activities there, definitely. And I was one of economic advisors to Gorbachev's government. I wasn't their advisor. I wouldn't take the blame because I can imagine it's eleven time zones, eleven time zones. One-sixth of the world's surface, one-sixth of the world's surface. Forty percent of arable land of developed countries and failed so miserably. Definitely for something not too big to fail, that would be the Soviet Union. And it failed. It was too big not to fail, not big not to fail. And I think that the Soviet Union, the tragic experiment that Soviet people did on themselves, it's a very powerful warning for us in the West that when people are losing their liberty, what happens to them? And the Soviet people and the people enslaved in the Soviet Union, at first I think that the scenario was more or less the same as we see right now coming out of Washington D.C. At first you disarm people, then you destroy their support mechanism, you destroy churches, you destroy families, and then you're naked before big government. And the story of Soviet agriculture is a very sad story of mass murder, of misery, of human sorrow, of immense proportions, of immense proportions. Not many people in the United States know about that. Moreover, we have people who are kind of denying that Soviet was just reading Joseph Weather of the University of South Maine. And he really attacks the myth of the Soviet agricultural failure. He believes it was a great success that the story is suppressed by conservative academia. I never heard about these people. And maybe all five of them suppressed this. So that was pretty strange, right? Another socialist, I get prop person, Michael Moore, in his famous book Downsized This, he promised all of us that we will be spreading manure and the collective farms on North Dakota. When the glorious future would come. I'm not making it up. Yes, in page 71 of that book, he's saying that all of us of all conservatives, libertarians and other reactionaries would be spreading manure and collective farms on North Dakota. So I would like to talk a little bit about what these collective farms look like and what would be our future if we wouldn't do something today to arrest these kind of developments. Well, first, I would like to talk a little bit about Russia before, because many people think, well, the Tsars were very bad, the Tsars were very bad, and then the Bolsheviks, the socialists came to power and kind of fixed the problem. That's at least official historiography, if you look at the textbooks in our high schools and universities, that's what they would tell us, that Tsars were pretty bad. They were probably pretty bad, but on the scale of mass murder, they were just so small. The whole, I read a book published under Tsar Nicholas II called the history of death in the Soviet Union, in Russia, history of death in Russia. All 19th century, 638 people were executed in Russia, the whole in the Soviet Union anywhere from 43 million to 61 million, to the point even that that statistics became completely irrelevant. I mean, whether it doesn't make a difference at 43 or 61, it's unbelievable numbers, unbelievable numbers, and that's what Stalin meant when he used to say that death of one person is a tragedy, death of millions is just statistic, nothing else. Not many people know, however, in the United States, that over half of these executions happened in rural areas of Russia, because agriculture was the first, the first industry, the first sphere of economics, which was supposed to be socialized and destroyed by socialists. Agriculture was doing pretty well in Russia before that disaster called the Socialist Revolution of 1917. I am deliberately, I'm not using the word communism, because communism is no such thing as communism. Communism was a topia promised by Marx 500 years from that period, so 350 years we should wait, and probably it can come even closer if we would be sending the same people to Washington DC. But communism is a religion, it's a secular religion, it's a utopia, it's a utopia where everything you can go to, you can go to like a huge government-run Walmorts with no cashiers, you just pick up everything for free, you work for free, so it's a wonderful kind of neverland. And they hooked people with these promises of heaven and earth, hooked many people, many people who are kind of fellow, this promise is the same way as many people today falling on the promises on Obama administration and other government officials, you can see I was just looking at the stats, 48% of population of the United States are on this or that form of government support. So have taxiderms, 48%, plus federal bureaucracy, plus state bureaucracy, so you can see that majority already is not producing anything, it's kind of a form of social parasitism. Then you can see that only 50%, less than 50% of Americans are paying taxes, are paying taxes. So what kind of country we're going to? And so agriculture in Russia, in Russian Empire, it was in 1861, those of you who are kind of refreshing a little bit history of Russia before the revolution, because that period is not known much. Not many people realize that after Alexander II, Tsar, who liberated serfs in 1861, then Russia experienced a period of economic boom, unprecedented period of economic boom. In Russia, the number of slaves, number of serfs, which were more or less like slaves in the United States, was staggering 75% of population, you can imagine, 75%. So if we're talking about the impact of slavery on public mentality, I think Russia would be a horrible place to begin with. And I think that was one of the reasons that they fell victims to this socialist promises and communist Neverland utopia, because people, you know that slaves, whether public slaves or private slaves, they do not have choices. So freedom is choice. So somebody else was making choices for them, and many people gave up idea of choices. Because choice implies the responsibility as well. And so they fell out for them. Russia by 1913, they were one third, 34.5% of world agricultural supplies. So at that time, one third of all grain in the world, sold in international markets, came from Russia. That time Ukraine, for example, part of Russia, of Russian empire at that time, now independent country, has 25% of the most fertile black dirt, so-called black dirt. There's the soils with a very high content of humus, up to 12%. It's just amazing. So their soil was so fertile that you could use it as a fertilizer for other soil. So it was a bread basket of Europe. Russia was the first in the world, even ahead of the United States, in experts of rye. Second in experts of wheat. So it was a country which was growing at a rate of 7%, 8% per year, since 1881 to 1913. And then came the end of civilization in the form of the First World War, and then the disastrous revolution. And at that time, Marxists, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and the likes, they thought that agriculture is the most dangerous potential of returning back to capitalism. Because if you are an individual farmer, then you cherish these ideas of property, of fruits of your labor. And that, and Lenin was writing in 1922, said, this is the last backbone we should crush. And they did that in the most ferocious way. Practically peasantry in Ukraine was exterminated by Holodomor. Maybe you've heard about that in the winter of 1932 to 1933. 7 million people were starved to death deliberately by their Soviet masters. Because all of their grain was confiscated. All of their grain was confiscated. They wouldn't leave grain even as a seeds. They wouldn't leave grain to feed their children. And people were doomed to die, doomed to die. People were plenty of cases of cannibalism. People were eating dirt, eating what's from the tree. So bark, the tree bark. So that was the first engineered mass murder of peasants, of peasants. At the same very time, not many people know about Holodomor, that the murder of Ukrainians is well described. If you haven't heard about it or you would like to know more, there is a wonderful video called Soviet story, Soviet story. It's the best inoculation against socialism. It's especially if you have younger people in the family. It's as good as my trips to Cuba. I would usually take my students to Cuba and show them that disaster in how it works. Now we cannot go to Cuba, so I am just advising them this movie. So then how did they destroy their agriculture? With the Marxist idea of collectivization. So the idea was that you cannot nationalize peasants' property because peasants would fight back. And they did, and they did. There were a lot of peasants' uprisings, which were put down in the most atrocious way, when not only peasants but members of their family, including children, were murdered. Lenin was writing to his governors in the south in Russia, kill them the way that everybody would tremble 150 miles around, burn their houses, and they did. And they burned churches, burned houses, and still peasants were against it. So they came up with first with a treacherous idea of collective farms, what means collective farms. It's kind of like it was designed as a form of cooperative. It was never designed as a form of cooperative. It was designed as a concentration camp for peasants. But it was presented as a form of cooperative. And many people in the West thought that this is fantastic, that Professor Weather, for example, for a game from University of South Maine, he's still thinking that was a smashing success that we don't know about. And what did they do? They took everything from everybody. They left people in their houses, however. But took all the assets and made their land common property, common property of collective farm. And sure enough, those people who were well-to-do peasants, who were peasants who were more productive than others, they resented that idea. They resented. In 1928, there were riots all over Ukraine because peasants were, at first, they slapped them with a very high taxes, confiscatory taxes. If they would pay that taxes, then they would starve to death right away. So they were very much against that. And then what they did, they confiscated everything they had. They confiscated not only grain, but confiscate everything. Sourcrout was confiscated. Any kind of supplies people would have. And at that time, amazingly enough, from 1932 to 1933, Soviet Union sold 55 million tons of this confiscated grain, mostly to Germany, mostly to Nazi Germany. I can't imagine it was there. On the Hitler, they would take usually gold from Jews. There was nothing to take from these Ukrainian peasants. Definitely there was no gold. So they took everything they had, and they sold it, and they sold it, and while their own people starved to death, and that was a design. That was not a mistake. Four million people at that very time were starved to death in Volga region, which was another bread basket for Europe. I came from that area, that's a huge agricultural area, and was extremely productive. And they starved four million there, and they sent on the top of that 10 million wealthy peasants from European Russia, they sent them to Siberia, and most of them perished there, perished there on the way, perished with their families. Alexander Yakovlev, who was the architect of Perestroika and the confidant of Gorbachev, and he was the only person I think he knew what he was doing, because people like Gorbachev would not take all the time, like Paris repeat, that we are to reform socialism, not to get rid of it. We need to new social with a human face and whatnot. They didn't realize that such a thing does not exist, that you can only enforce socialism at certain point with mass murder, with mass murder. In the United States, now they're trying to enforce socialism with promises, with promises. At certain point when the promises would be breaking, there is just a logic of history, to resort to violence, to resort to crude coercion. So that's the, sure enough, agricultural production plummeted. The country, which was breadbasket, breadbasket of Europe, became dependent on imports of agricultural products, imports of agricultural products. I worked in Washington D.C., which is also an overstatement of my activities. And in the congressional think tank, which like most government think tank didn't think at all, but again we were tanking quite a bit, and over there I testified before Agricultural Committee of the House was pretty interesting, I wouldn't say it was life-changing experience, but because I felt like I'm back in Moscow. Was then Glickman, at that time, was chairman of the committee, later became Secretary of Agriculture, and now he is one of the leading figures in something called Bipartisan Policy Center. That's, I think our future will be, we'll have a one-party system, which will be called Bipartisan Party, and we will be members of this Bipartisan Party, and that's at least some people, some people I think are designing it for us in Washington, in Washington, D.C. There is an interesting book about Bipartisan Party written by another Russian emigre, his name is Garish Sternberg, he's teaching at Columbia University. Very, very interesting that our Soviet future exposed, kind of. So I was testifying before that, and it was very interesting for me that people who are testifying before me, I thought that maybe they just, I didn't know what kind of dope they are. I mean, because that was impossible to comprehend, like another Secretary of Agriculture of the United States was stealing with a straight face to the members of committee that in the major problem, in Russian and Ukrainian and other agricultures, is that people don't know how to save the harvest, for example, how to warehouse, how to transport, because they had presumably very high harvest. The harvest were just bumper harvest, the only thing they didn't, that's another myth, that they had this bumper harvest, that was just socialist reporting, propaganda kind of thing. And so they had this fantastic harvest, but they cannot save it, they cannot, it's a lot of waste, a lot of up to 40% of human waste. And so now he said, we have a group of 23 PhDs in a group of 48 people will go to Russia and Belarus and Ukraine and tell them how to do things. And so they was portrayed by United States Department of Agriculture is a purely technical issue, technical issue. And I was speaking after him, and Mr. Glickman said, what do you think about this previous speaker's presentation? Oh, because Glickman is a Democrat and that was a Republican in George Herbert Walker, the George I administration. And so, and I said, I just can't believe what I heard. Yeah, I think that even if you sent 48 PhDs from Department of Agriculture, you never can teach people to pick up potatoes for free for somebody else. Because that's the issue, it's the Soviet Union, it's any kind of socialist regime would deteriorate at certain point into a system of public slavery, nothing else, which you only can keep slaves working for you if you shoot enough of them. And that's what they did. And Lenin in 1922 was writing to Felix Zhirzhinsky, the first leader of the KGB, the first chair of the KGB, saying that I'm telling comrades and they don't listen. So he's telling them to work and they don't listen. How about we'll take a couple of absent-minded like that and shoot them publicly? And they did. And then when we came to shoot people in millions, then the attention span definitely improved. So that was the secret of the so-called successes of Soviet agriculture. And so that definitely USDA and other government, government officials in the United States not only are destroying agriculture here in the United States, but they are destroying agriculture all over the world, all over the world. If you will, you can just Google, you wouldn't believe it. You can, if you will put map, worldwide map of USDA offices. And you would see that USDA is present in almost every country of the world. They have their offices. In Russia today they have four offices, they have two offices in Ukraine. They have two offices in Georgia, little Georgia, Russian Georgia, Soviet Georgia, Soviet Georgia. So smaller than the state of Indiana. Well, they have probably hundreds of offices in the state of Indiana. But that's what they did. They did a lot of irreparable damage to countries which were not sufficient in food. Because what USDA is doing, I don't believe the conspiracy theories, but conspiracies happen all the time, left and right and mostly left, I think. And one of the greatest conspiracies is to undermine, to blow up agricultural markets everywhere else. So can you imagine when the Soviet Union collapsed and they had all these weak countries like Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, whatever, in the United States Department of Agriculture, they began to dump free food on them, free food, destroying markets, driving this very weak farmers who was kind of trying to do something, driving them out of business. The same thing is happening in Central. I was just quite recently in Malawi, that's one of the poorest countries in the world. The same thing. We're keeping them in poverty, providing them with free food, with free food and free everything else. So that's the, that's, that's definitely is. So what is collective farms? The Soviet system of agriculture had two forms of property, which was both phony. One was collective property circle, that would be collective farms. However, peasants could not leave collective farms. They could not leave. Not many people also realize that socialism, at its kind of, at its high level of its development, it would presume it's a necessity to cut on all forms of human freedom. People could not move. In the Soviet Union, you would have to have, to have an internal passport with your residence stamp there. You have this internal passport and peasants were not issued internal passports. They were provided with a piece of paper smaller than this without even a picture saying that such a peasant can visit, can visit their county center, county center. So it belongs to this county. They wouldn't call it county, called district or whatever. So you can show the police officer this. If police officer had any doubts that it's not yours or whatever, then you will end up in Siberia where the millions ended up. So that's the, so people were set on, like slaves set on this land, and what happened after, even after they stopped shooting people, after they run out of bullets in 1950s or 1960s, then the whole agriculture imploded because human resources were undermined. Alcoholism became pandemic to the point that the average life expectancy in rural areas was 45 for men and 66 for women. Mostly because of pandemic alcoholism, because of crime, because of diseases which nobody would take care of. They would spend in the height of the Soviet empire, they would spend $47 per person for health services in urban areas and only $6 in rural areas per year. So you can have a free healthcare. That's another target for our government is to destroy our health as well. Sure enough, this wonderful person, Dan Glickman is right now especially in public health, in public health. It is bipartisan center in this bipartisan center. Statistics of Soviet agriculture is so funny that I'm not even talking about that. There was a laser wall in his name, because he was the chief USDA expert generating tons of statistical indices and whatnot about Soviet agriculture. In 1955, he and his office at USDA and the CIA, they produced so much of completely worthless paper about Soviet agriculture that in 1955, amazingly, just before his death, he admitted that it was just garbage. He admitted that their statistics was based on Soviet statistics. In Soviet statistics, agricultural statistics, it was like a matryoshka doll. And I discussed it, matryoshka doll, there's all the different matryoshkas. So they would have official statistics, which would be kind of a very arrogant Communist Party slogan, nothing else. I mean, all the time people would start, but production is going up like that. That statistics only was believed in Harvard University or whatever, nobody in Russia. Then they produced statistics which was classified statistics. Classified statistics, which was also propaganda, but more believable. So people, and moreover, people would kind of steal this and would break the law if you are telling these numbers. But it's kind of like rumors that life is not as good as they tell us, but still pretty good. And then that would be top secret, top secret statistics for the few who had access, which was also funny because in most cases they wouldn't have something called primary reporting. Primary reporting, so nobody knew. This top secret statistics were kind of estimates produced by the Soviet government bureaucrats in Goskomstadt about agriculture and about everything else. And then that statistics would be provided for Brezhnev and Khomnot. And in 1978, I'm not making it up, Brezhnev looked at this top secret statistics and found out that there is no vegetables in the Soviet Union. He was shocked, I mean, he had almost everything he could. He lived like, I don't know, Genghis Khan. And so he, what the socialists would do, whether in Moscow or Washington, immediately they created ministry for vegetables. I'm not making it up, ministry for vegetables. And they appointed certain Comrade Pavlovsky, whom I happen to know as a minister. And this Comrade Pavlovsky could not sleep at night. He thought, well, how would I come up with vegetables? And then I would be shot or demoted or thrown out of the party in my apartment and whatnot. And the only thing, the good thing was that his wife was so nice and she was saying, Pavlusha, they will forget. They will forget about vegetables. And only in 1988 Gorbachev cut on the funds and shut down this ministry for vegetables because he said that's a joke we don't have. And then I remember in this meeting he kind of sighed and he said, what do we have minister of culture as well? And so ministry for vegetables with no vegetables and minister for culture without culture. So that's, I think to ruin anything, you need a ministry, you need a ministry. And then, and we have this ministry in the United States and this ministry since 1864, I think, was destroying, destroying our agriculture, but we still have some remnants of property rights there and some freedom-loving people. So it's not as destroyed as, for example, in Soviet Union. But Soviet, I think that Soviet experiment is a very good, very good warning to us what happens when people are losing their liberty. And just on the last kind of note, I remember I was visiting Tom at University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and it was, I think, 1990, 1990. And because I came from Moscow there, so all local communist party cells members showed up to my speeches and we had this mass exodus and Tom was cheering that session and saying, go, go and never come back. Yeah, so that's, it's really, really sad that the only lesson of history is that it does not teach us anything, that that people staged deadly experiments on themselves and we are trying to repeat it. And that's the, so also Rich Wilkie gave me this wonderful book, Soviet Agriculture. This would be, this would be the Matroshka number two with a lot of statistics and everything. But statistics, just the last thing, statistics was, I talked to many of my statistical friends and they would say, you just stare in the ceiling. You see numbers there. And I said, what if you don't? You said, well, have another drink. And then you see numbers, you take them, you take them down, you go to your boss and the boss will correct you. That's how statistics is made. All right, on this cheerful note.