Odesa and the Ukraine that should have been

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has sent the prices of many commodities skyrocketing. And it is not just oil and gas. From a humanitarian point of view, the soaring price of food, especially wheat, may be an even bigger problem. Before the war, Russia and Ukraine produced almost a quarter of the world’s wheat, much of it exported. The direct effects of the war and the sanctions imposed on Russia are disrupting that supply. Nobody knows how long this disruption may last or how much suffering high food prices will cause, especially in poor countries.

But how and when did the world become dependent on wheat from parts of the former Soviet Union? (The U.S. Department of Agriculture refers to the major wheat exporters as KRU, for Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine.) That is a more interesting story than you might think, for KRU became the world’s breadbasket not once, but twice.

Communism did many things badly, but one of the things it did worst was produce food. Josef Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture led to the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 — the Holodomor — which killed millions. In its final years, the Soviet Union wasn’t starving, but it was dependent on large-scale imports of grain.

After the Soviet collapse, however, this turned around. Starting around 20 years ago, KRU, taking advantage of the fertility of its famous “black soil” and the rise of globalization, began to export increasingly larger quantities of grain.

But although this was something new, it was also something old. As students of economic history know, globalization began in the 19th century, made possible by the revolutionary technologies of railroads and steamships.

If we think of globalization as something more recent, that is only because world trade went into retreat in the face of world wars and the Great Depression, recovering to pre-world War I levels only around 1980. And KRU initially became a huge wheat producer during that first era of globalization.

What was the epicenter of this great agricultural complex? The city of Odesa, which in an economic sense became more or less the Chicago of the East, the place where railways gathered the abundance of a vast agricultural heartland and shipped it to the world. The city wasn’t even founded until 1794 — by Catherine the Great — but it mushroomed along with the region’s foreign trade, becoming the fourth-largest city in the Russian Empire, after St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw (there is a reason the Poles are especially concerned about Putin’s aggression).

And the Odesa of 1913 seemed well on its way to becoming one of the world’s great cities, and not just economically. As a gateway to the world, it attracted an unusually diverse population. As part of the Pale of Settlement — the part of the Russian empire in which Jews were allowed to reside — it was especially attractive to thousands of young people seeking escape from the confines of the shtetl; Jews made up about onethird of its population.

This mixing of people seeking freedom as well as opportunity led to a cultural efflorescence. Odesa was famed for its cafes, its literature, its music. Then history intervened.

I don’t think it is silly or anachronistic to say that the things that made Odesa special, that should have made it one of the world’s great metropolises, were precisely the things that ethnonationalists, then and now, hate: ethnic and religious diversity, intellectual curiosity, openness to the world. On the eve of the Russian invasion, it looked as if Ukraine was finally managing to recover some of those things — which is, in turn, part of the reason Putin decided it had to be conquered.

Remembering what Odesa might have become should help remind us how important it is that this attempted conquest fail.

Paul Krugman was the recipient of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.