Back to the USSR: Russia and Ukraine

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. For much of history, it was cheaper to eat out than to eat in. Not anymore. Far from it. Yet the number of people dining out is only going up. We examine the history of restaurants and the economic forces that have shaped them and read any good books lately. Our staff sure have, and we've helpfully gathered up their recommendations for books of the year. Stockings prepare to be stuffed. First up, though, The massing of Russian troops at Ukraine's border continues to be a cause for worry. Russia's President Vladimir Putin has been here before, having piled troops on the border in April. In May, he was quick to back the dictator of Belarus when dissident journalists were plucked from a commercial flight and detained. The recent history of these three Slavic countries has Mr. Putin's fingerprints all over it. To really understand that, you have to go back almost exactly 30 years to a meeting in December 1991 that it seems Mr. Putin wishes hadn't happened. Stanislav Shucavich, the leader of Belarus, was at a hunting lodge hosting his counterparts, Leonid Kravchuk of Ukraine and Boris Yeltsin of the Russian Federation. There, they agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union.

There's little, if anything, left to discuss after today's announcement.

For Boris Yeltsin and the Slav republics have a future. Mr. Gorbachev almost certainly does not.

There was little that Mikhail Gorbachev, the Union's leader, could do. By Christmas, he had resigned. A constellation of Soviet states was suddenly free to fix national economies, to be independent polities, perhaps to tilt towards democracy. But it seems the promise of that hunting lodge pact hasn't been and maybe can't be fulfilled.

I mean, the whole region, this whole Slavic world, is in turmoil and is threatening security of Europe.

Arkady Ostrovsky is our Russia and Eastern Europe Editor.

What we thought was Dill done 30 years ago is very much unraveling and is being revisited.

Well, let's revisit that scene. Why were the leaders of those three countries prepared to do away with the Soviet Union in the first place?

In a way, they were sort of bowing to the inevitable. The fact that the Soviet Union was disintegrating was clear by that time. For several months and possibly several years, Boris Yeltsin, who was by that time already the president of the Soviet Russian Republic, was focused on Russia's future, on the reforms. At that point, the economic situation was getting really desperate. The Soviet Union may be changing politically, but food distribution remains chaotic. These Muscovites have to travel an hour away to get fresh fruit. In order for Russia to pursue reforms, it needed to control its own currency, and it couldn't do that unless it actually exited from the Soviet Union. But there was another reason why things were predetermined, if you like, and that was the referendum in Ukraine today. With only fading election posters to distinguish.

It from any other, Ukrainians went to.

Work as citizens of a new nation.

That was held on 1 December, when 90% of Ukrainians voted for independence. And if Ukraine was not going to sign a union treaty, which Gorbachev wanted to do, there could be no union.

So each of these three leaders, for their own reasons, decides that they're better off independent. But what did they imagine their relationship with one another would look like going forward?

For Yeltsin, it was very natural to assume that Belarus and Ukraine and Russia should stay together, because they have been in a union not just for the whole Soviet period, but they've been in a union since 17th century. For Ukraine, it was very different. Ukrainians could imagine themselves as being independent and were not going to trade their place in the Soviet Union for their place within a new sort of Russian entity, a Russian empire. So I think their visions were very, very. At that point, their visions were actually quite different.

So what happened after these three leaders walked away from the table?

For the next few years, nothing really happened. Each of the three countries got on with their own business. Russians were too busy surviving to think about Ukraine. Ukrainians were doing the same, basically, until about 93, 94. The three leaders had their own problems. Two of them lost power. Shushkevich in Belarus lost to Alexander Lukashenko, who was a populist who came to tell his people in Belarus that don't worry, it's all right. We'll go back to how things were we'll restore stability and order under the Soviet flag. In Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, who signed the initial agreement, lost power to a man called Leonid Kuchma, who was an industrial manager. He was the head of the largest missile plant of the Soviet Union. He was voted in largely and supported by the sort of more industrialist east of the country. In Russia, Yeltsin in 93 faced a revolt by the nationalist hardliners, Communist hardliners. They were the ones who were crying out for the empire and they were the ones who were raising the issue of Crimea as being core Russian territory, etc. At around 6 o' clock this morning, Boris Yeltsin took the fateful step of ordering his troops and tanks to attack the White House and flush out the defenders. Yeltsin literally smoked them out of the parliament building with tank shells.

In all three countries then, nostalgia for the Soviet era has taken hold. But in Russia at least, it's kept at bay. When does that start to change?

I suppose it starts to change after the arrival of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. He uses the idea of Russia being a strong and powerful state because the people want to hear that Russia as a big geopolitical power is back. Putin says effectively to his people, there was a Russian empire, there was a Soviet Union, now there is Russia. It's actually all the same country. There is no division. Putin as a populist basically wants to articulate what he feels is the resentment and the mood of the public. He doesn't have a vision of his own. His vision is enrichment and wealth, and his vision is staying in power.

And since Mr. Putin took power, how has the public become so resentful when it comes to Ukraine?

The best way to think about it is imagine a divorce. One spouse comes and says, okay, I'm off. And that's Ukraine saying, I'm going my own way. And Russia first sort of is shocked and throws a tantrum and then realizes actually nothing much changed and things are just going on as they were. The moment which was crucial and which led us into the conflict really happened in 2013, 2014, when if you like, your former partner says, actually I'm going to marry somebody else. Ukraine is signing or wants to sign an association agreement with the European Union when it says it wants to join NATO, when it's having a revolution in 2013, overthrowing a Kremlin backed thug. And that's when Putin grabs Crimea from Ukraine, which he considers to be historically.

Russian's own territory, as you say, even since 1991. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russians wanted to keep Ukraine close. What has Mr. Putin done to advance or to harm that objective, do you think?

The war that Putin has unleashed in the east of Ukraine in 2014, in Donbas and the annexation of Crimea, I think has made this relationship, for now at least, completely irreparable. I don't know how many generations it will take now to get Russians and Ukrainians sort of back talking to each other. But for now, Putin has achieved something that the three leaders didn't achieve in Belaverzh Forest. He really has broken up that union because just signing away the Soviet Union in December 1991 did not mean breaking the relationship between the people. And Putin has really succeeded in breaking the relationship between two Slavic nations, the Russians and Ukrainians, and alienating a lot of Belarusians who are now subjected to violence thanks to him backing Lukashenko. And he's broken that Slavic unity in a way that was absolutely unimaginable even in 1991.

Arkady, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you. Jason.

Foreign.

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Almost as soon as humans formed societies, they decided that sometimes it's just easier to eat out. In Pompeii, there was a snack bar for every hundred people or so, a ratio much higher than in many cities. In London, cooked game meat and fish were available from at least the 12th century. And Puritans set up shop in Boston in 1630, opening the first American tavern four years later. The basics were come with money, leave with a full stomach, but you'd hardly recognize them as restaurants. So what's changed in the meantime? Our senior economics writer Callum Williams reckons it's, well, economics.

The oldest forms of places where you could get ready made food differed from what we now understand as restaurants in quite a few big ways. So often they were not really places you'd sit down and eat surrounded by other people. They'd be more takeaways or stands where you might buy a drink and there would be a plate of food that was included in the price or and this is something that emerges in the 1700s and 1800s. Roughly. You get these kind of communal tables which involve, in effect, going over to somebody's house and you sit down all at the same time. You have no choice over what you eat. Very different from what we understand by restaurants today.

So why were they like that in the earliest days?

Well, there's a lot of kind of reasons for that. I mean, probably the most important, I guess, is that they were catering mainly to people who didn't have much money. The objective really was to try and provide as much food as possible at the lowest possible cost. For most of human history, it's actually been more expensive to cook at home than it has been to go out and eat. So a total reversal from what we have now where eating out is seen as often an expensive and extravagant option. And primarily that was because the cost of energy was very high for most of human history. And so most people would find it pretty expensive to heat their pots with wood or peat, which is what you had to use. Whereas professional kitchens could get economies of scale and so they could actually provide food more cheaply.

So when did an eating establishment start to look more like something we'd recognize as a restaurant today?

I guess by proper restaurant what we mean is a place that does obviously give you calories and fills you, but also there's something more to it than that. It's more of a cultural experience. It's entertainment, it's conspicuous consumption, it's showing off. And that really happens around the 1800s. It's to do with primarily the fact that rich people start to view public space as a place that they want to be in. For most of human history, public space was a kind of dangerous, dirty place that you would avoid at all costs if you had money. But then this, particularly with the rise of capitalism and the enlightenment and liberalism changes, and public spaces come to be seen not only as places where people come together to talk, but also places where people come together to consume and to show off what they've bought.

So along with that cultural change, then how did the economics of running a restaurant change?

So there was also a kind of important change, I guess, on the supply side of the restaurant industry. And there's a lot of myth about this, But I think it is fair to say that what basically happened from about the 1800s is that there was a sort of breaking down of certain long standing barriers to trade that had been in place for ages. So, for instance, there were various regulations which said that only the butchers were able to sell Meat. Only the wine merchants were able to sell wine. That kind of changes, which is good for restaurants because obviously they sell all these things together. And then Also in the 1800s, you have this other movement which basically tries to get people to eat and drink at the same time, because there was this great moral panic about people being drunk on the street. And so it's a kind of supply side shift as well as a demand side shift.

But one of the biggest changes you've mentioned is how the relative cost has changed over the years. Going out to restaurants now is. Well, it's an expensive proposition. In most cases it is.

So what you get during the 20th century and also the 19th century is that the cost of going out to eat gets more and more expensive relative to cooking at home. In America in 1930, a meal in a restaurant was roughly 25% costlier than an equivalent meal at home. But by 2014, that difference had risen to 280%. So there's this kind of paradox of how is it the case that restaurants continue to grow in the 20th century even as their cost goes up?

Why is that though? Why, despite the rising prices, we still have rising numbers of people going out to eat.

The biggest thing is that women start entering the workforce in large numbers. What this basically means is that women's leisure time becomes much more valuable, essentially. And so time saving purchases such as going out to eat, start to make a lot more economic sense, even as they become more expensive. The second big thing is to do with immigration, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. After World War II, immigration to rich countries really takes off. And what this means basically is that the quality of the restaurants goes up even as their price goes up. Say, for example, going out to eat in the UK in 1946, the year after the Second World War ended, was not a particularly pleasant experience often. But then you get more Indian restaurants and all that kind of thing, and it gets a lot more interesting and more fun. And then the third thing, which is a kind of more cultural economics, is that you have this reversal of a hundreds, maybe even thousands year process where basically for most of human history, people on low incomes have worked longer hours than people on high incomes. But what you get in the 20th century, and particularly towards the end of the 20th century, is that that process reverses. So what this basically means is that the people who have the most money being paid the biggest salaries are also increasingly the people who have the least leisure time. And so they want to use that leisure time as efficiently as possible. And that means going out to eat.

But how does all this fit into the pandemic era now that, well, the notion of leisure time is very different indeed?

Well, it could have quite profound impacts, I suppose, like a lot of people now over the past 18 months have discovered this love of cooking at home rather than going out to eat. And it's cheaper and you can really enjoy it. And so perhaps that means that demand for restaurants from certain people is going to be lower than it was in 2019. You also have more people who have got into the habit of having food delivery in the longer term. One threat is that the pandemic is going to usher in a new era of low immigration. That's certainly true in places like Australia and New Zealand, and that's not good for the supply side of the restaurant industry. But I think what's going to happen to restaurants is that they'll need to accelerate the process that's been in place for, for hundreds of years. They will need to move further and further away from the utilitarian model that existed in the 1600s and 1700s, where the goal was simply to fill people up as quickly and as cheaply as possible and instead double down on the things that the best restaurants do so well, which is not just to provide food, but provide atmosphere, warmth, love, service, all that kind of stuff. So that's really where I see restaurants going in the medium to long term.

Tell him. Thanks very much for joining us and bon appetit.

Thank you, Jason.

For more tasty analysis like this from our international network of correspondents, take out a subscription to the Economist. Get a great introductory deal@Equality.com IntelligenceOffer the link is in the show notes. Groucho Marx once said, outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. Comedians may have had a hard time plying their trade this year, but authors have been as busy as ever. So how to narrow down the best of those best friend books? Our correspondents and editors are here to help.

Every year we put out a call to all our correspondents to suggest their books of the year. We take their recommendations and we kind of mix them up with books that we've reviewed favorably throughout the year. And according to a secret proprietary algorithm, we come up with our final list of the books of, in this case, 2021.

Andrew Miller is the Economist's culture editor.

And it's a pretty varied selection, as readers will see in the paper, themes ranging from God to the opioid epidemic in America to China and. And even cannibalism.

Did you say cannibalism?

Yeah. This was actually one of my favorite books of the year. But let me reassure you, Jason, that it's a work of fiction and the cannibalism is imaginary rather than real. It's a novel called Mother for Dinner by Charlo Mauslander, and it's about a family of cannibal Americans who are part of the most reviled minority community in a place where, according to the book, everybody seems to be embracing their own separate identities. And really, it's a satire, a laugh out loud, but also deadly serious satire on identity politics. And asks what is really a profound question amid all the hilarity, which is what do individuals living today owe to the history of their groups?

And on the subject of America, the year started with the Capitol riots, the inauguration of a new president in America. I imagine there's plenty of US themed stuff in the submissions.

Yes. Several of our colleagues, Jason, suggested books about American politics, and in particular several that picked over the presidency of Donald Trump. Our colleague Tamara Gilkes Bohr suggested one that we included called how the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith.

This book is really about the ways that our historical institutions both accurately depict slavery but also hide aspects of it. Clint Smith has a poetic way of writing that is very descriptive and almost lyrical. He takes a topic that is incredibly serious and makes the journey almost enjoyable.

But it was striking that among the books that were submitted by our colleagues and those we chose in the politics and current affairs category, in our final list, there were just as many about China as there were about America. One in particular is called Invisible China, and this was selected and praised by our foreign editor, Robert Guest.

Invisible China, by Scott Roselle and Natalie hall, is a stunning piece of research about a huge problem that hardly anyone knows. About 2/3 of Chinese children are rural and they are doing terribly in school. Many are undernourished or anaemic or have intestinal worms that SAP their energy and make it hard to concentrate. A third of rural 11 and 12 year olds have poor vision but no glasses, so they struggle to read their school books. These problems would be laughably cheap to fix. But if they aren't fixed, China will struggle to achieve the broad prosperity the government promises.

And among the categories must surely be economy and economics. A real fixation, obviously, for the publication.

Yes, it's a crowd pleaser in these parts, Jason, as you know, and our colleague Matier Favas, a finance correspondent, picked a fascinating sounding book called the Future of Money.

The book takes you on a journey from very ancient forms of money like the Greek drachma to gold coins. But importantly, it takes you also to.

The present day, when cash, which is.

What most people think about when they.

Think of money, is disappearing very fast.

And it shows you how the images.

Of new forms of money, like cryptocurrencies.

Like central bank digital currencies, may transform.

Our financial systems and much more than.

That actually transform our daily lives.

And coming back to fiction, is there a non cannibalism fiction category? What's good from there?

As you'd expect, Jason, we get a lot of submissions in the fiction category, but one that was suggested by more than one of our colleagues, in fact, is an entertaining book called Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters. And one of those who recommended it was Amy Hawkins.

It's about three characters, a trans woman, a CIS woman, and a man who had recently detransitioned who decide to bring.

Up a child together.

And what I really loved about this book is that it's a truly bracing interrogation of gender and relationships without ever being overly worthy or preachy.

And for readers who like traveling further afield in their fiction, another novel that we recommended is Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Walsoyinka. It's both a sophisticated thriller and a raging denunciation of Nigeria's political class. The story is narrated by a doctor who finds that a trade in human body parts is being run from his own hospital, and it's really a gripping read.

Well, that's plenty to be getting on with. And I know that there's also a list of books not just suggested by, but written by our economist colleagues, so, well, plenty to keep us busy through the holiday period. Andy, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks for having me, J.C.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and see you back here tomorrow.