If you read economic histories of the Soviet Union, you will find that what little “private” sector was allowed was in farming. Small private plots that accounted for 3 percent of sown land produced between 39 percent and 66 percent of the output of potatoes, vegetables, meat, milk, and eggs. The rest of the land and output was produced on state-owned or collective farms. This is used to argue that the private sector’s efficiency is unrivaled compared to the public sector. However, even the private farms of the USSR paled in efficiency when compared to other countries.
When the USSR collapsed, agricultural production collapsed too. Imports of food from the west, however, increased dramatically. As one scholar put it, “foreign foodstuffs both raw and processed flooded Russia’s marketplace.” Millions of hectares of cropland were abandoned and recovered by forest and plants – something that we can deem to be a direct environmental benefit.
