In July 1972, Soviet agricultural minister Vasily Matskevich quietly sent buyers to the United States and, over several weeks, contracted for roughly 19 million metric tons of American grain at subsidized prices — wheat, corn, feed grains — totaling somewhere north of $1.1 billion. The deal became known as the Great Grain Robbery, and that name tells you everything about how badly the USDA got played. American taxpayers effectively subsidized Soviet grain purchases through export credits while US grain companies like Continental and Cargill pocketed the arbitrage. Nixon's team called it détente and diplomacy; Kansas farmers called it a windfall until domestic food prices spiked 20% and suddenly American consumers were paying more for bread because Brezhnev couldn't run a farm system.
The Soviet agricultural catastrophe resulted from the structural terminus of collectivization, the same disaster Mises predicted in 1920 when he argued that without price signals, central planners cannot rationally allocate resources (the Soviets spent fifty years proving him right at roughly 20 million famine deaths worth of empirical evidence). The USSR controlled one-sixth of Earth's landmass, much of it arable black-soil steppe that had fed Europe for centuries under the Tsars, and they still couldn't feed themselves. By 1972 the Soviet leadership privately understood this, which is precisely why Matskevich's buyers worked so fast and so quietly.
You see this same dynamic replaying constantly — the government-managed system hits a wall, then quietly leans on whatever market it hasn't fully strangled yet to survive. Venezuela nationalized its agricultural sector and now imports food. Cuba rations eggs. And meanwhile the political class in each case keeps the ideological story clean by never admitting the lifeline exists. Nixon got his foreign policy photo op; Brezhnev got his bread; Continental Grain got $700 million in contracts; and the American consumer got an inflation spike their government blamed on speculators.