[sphinx]

The Black Sea region is one of the great breadbaskets of the world, along with the American midwest and the north China plain. The Greeks and Romans ran grain ships into the Black Sea. The only times in history that the region didn’t produce an exportable surplus were when the Mongols rolled through and killed everyone, and when the communists ran it on the basis of collectivization.

[RayChuang88]

However, the Soviets loosed up the strict collectivization rules by the middle 1950's given the BAD experience of what happened in 1928-1934. That's why Nikita Khrushchev privately told Mao Zedong to stop the Great Leap Forward in 1959 and in fact pulled out 15,000 Soviet advisers out of China in 1960 because Mao wouldn't take Khrushchev's advice.