--- title: Ukrainian Wheat Is Once Again Changing the Course of History description: Ukraine's fertile and vital wheat fields have long shaped world history and helped fuel the Russian Revolution in 1917 canonical: https://time.com/6159061/ukraine-wheat-changing-course-of-history/ author: TIME article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2022-03-21T16:04:47.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:42:37.127Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Ukrainian Wheat Is Once Again Changing the Course of History og:description: Ukraine's fertile and vital wheat fields have long shaped world history and helped fuel the Russian Revolution in 1917 og:url: https://time.com/6159061/ukraine-wheat-changing-course-of-history/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9cf4c5b761cc1bc0/698a301a09208fe249418fb2/GettyImages-1225709367.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: Wheat og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Ukrainian Wheat Is Once Again Changing the Course of History twitter:description: Ukraine's fertile and vital wheat fields have long shaped world history and helped fuel the Russian Revolution in 1917 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9cf4c5b761cc1bc0/698a301a09208fe249418fb2/GettyImages-1225709367.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Ukrainian Wheat Is Once Again Changing the Course of History > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Inside TIME: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Inside TIME is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. A closer look at TIME's latest cover and our most compelling stories. Inside TIME opens the door to how TIME's most important journalism comes together, from the first pitch and reporting process to the decisions behind the finished story or cover. Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs takes readers inside the newsroom, revealing the journalists, ideas and editorial choices behind the stories shaping the global conversation. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: Ukraine: A Glossary of Terms [Watch (HLS stream): Ukraine: A Glossary of Terms](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/OM8MLV7Y.m3u8) (5:41)  _Published 2022-03-15. When it comes to learning about the conflict in Ukraine, there are a lot of terms that get thrown around. Here are a few you should know._ by [Scott Reynolds Nelson](https://time.com/author/scott-reynolds-nelson/) ## Scott Reynolds Nelson Mar 21, 2022 4:04 PM UTC  Wheat grows in a field near Uzhhorod, Zakarpattia Region, western Ukraine in 2020\. - PHOTOGRAPH BY Wheat grows in a field near Uzhhorod, Zakarpattia Region, western Ukraine in 2020\. - PHOTOGRAPH BY Serhii Hudak- Ukrinform/Future Publishing by [Scott Reynolds Nelson](https://time.com/author/scott-reynolds-nelson/) ## Scott Reynolds Nelson Mar 21, 2022 4:04 PM UTC The forty-mile convoy that was stalled between Prybirsk and the airport northwest of Kyiv is a metaphor: for inattentive tank maintenance, for battalions dependent on artillery, and for a poorly-planned Blitzkrieg. Those tanks and supply vehicles—now dispersed and sinking in the mud—suggest how every human endeavor relies on lines of supply that can only be seen by satellite. Vladimir Putin’s [desire to control](https://time.com/6140996/putin-ukraine-threats/) Ukraine’s flat prairies above the Black Sea is not just hubris. Russia’s most productive wheat lands are directly north of Ukraine, and much of its grain passes south through Odesa to foreign markets. The Soviet Union (1917-1991), and the Russian Empire before it (1721-1916), built an empire in part by seizing control of the flow of Ukrainian wheat that traveled over those roads on their way to the rest of the world. Putin hopes to restore it. Peter the Great envisioned a Russian Empire in 1721, but Catherine the Great realized it beginning in 1768 by sending invasion forces south into the steppe region we now call Ukraine. The route was the same as the present-day path through Kyiv. In a near-continuous series of wars between 1768 and 1856 she and the tsars who followed her seized much of modern day Ukraine, and learned to tax the roads that carried life-giving grain to the Black Sea. Without that bounty, without those roads, Russia would have remained under the shadow of Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth whose timber and grain supplied Europe and whose armies and navies dominated the Baltic Sea. Russia needed to invade southward. No one understands that better than Vladimir Putin. But in his quest to take Ukraine he has ended up harming Russia’s own grain economy, with exports now stalled on cargo ships on the Black Sea, unlikely to reach their intended markets until the war ends or sanctions lift. That, as much as sanctions, will doom this endeavor to reconquer Ukraine. The medieval Ukrainian term for those travel corridors is _chorni shlyakhyy (_the black paths) and imperial strategists understood that those paths could feed an empire by selling grain to a hungry world. The person who understood this better than anyone was a grain trader and communist intellectual named Israel Alexander Helphand. His pen name was Parvus, and he is the most important intellectual of the twentieth century you have never heard of. As a young man in the 1870s he worked on the docks of Odesa, watching grain leave its port for London, Liverpool, Antwerp, and Amsterdam. His neighbors, mostly Jewish merchants, made long-term contracts to buy grain and load it onto thirty-ox caravans that wended their way from the fertile plains of Russia and Ukraine to the deep ports of London, Liverpool, Amsterdam, and Antwerp which he called consumption-accumulation cities. These ports would turn grain into flour and bread enough to feed a growing working-class in the grain-gobbling countries of Italy, Germany, Britain, and France. Since the 1850s cheap Ukrainian grain and the cheap bread it produced fed the new factory workers who were moving from the European countryside into its rapidly expanding cities. It’s not widely understood that industrialization in Europe depended on a yearly dose of approximately one million tons of cheap Ukrainian grain. **_Read More:_** [**_Ukraine’s Growing Crisis Will Cause Global Hunger_**](https://time.com/6157236/ukraines-fuel-crisis-cause-global-hunger-worsen-inflation/) Helphand witnessed the murderous pogroms that began in Odessa in 1873, most led by the Orthodox Church and directed at Jews like himself, his family, and his friends. By 1881 the brutal reign of the tsars, their local governors, and the Orthodox Church led him to embrace communism, though as a grain trader he found himself disagreeing with important parts of Marx’s doctrine. His revision to Marxism derived from his understanding of how the grain trade had changed in the decade before he arrived in Odesa. By 1881 every trader knew that the world’s leading grain market had become the American juggernaut that had emerged during the American Civil War. In 1863 the Union Army had created a new system of purchase—the futures contract—and of supply, with four competing grain railroads that carried wheat from the American plains to port cities like New York on the Atlantic Ocean. While Parvus did not understand quite how America did this, he did know that between 1863 and 1873 cheaper American grain, sold by telegraph before it even arrived in Europe, had nearly replaced Russian grain in most European ports. What Helphand saw was a financial downturn that started in Ukraine in 1872 and spiraled out to the rest of Europe in what we call the Panic of 1873\. Parvus understand the trade as invisible lines across plains and over oceans, lines of power that reshaped the world. As grain trading patterns changed, new ports were built, and old trading relationships collapsed. Parvus saw an invisible force in those black paths that he was sure could be used to topple the Russian Empire and replace it with something else—the Russian Revolution.  In 1919 German communist politician Rosa Luxemburg talking to the Russian revolutionary Dr. Alexander Helphand (nicknamed Parvus) ullstein bild via Getty Images Parvus knew that the paths from the Ukrainian plains south to the Black Sea and north to Moscow and Petersburg were as fragile as tanks in the spring mud. In 1900 he founded a newspaper called _Iskra_ (the spark) in his apartment in Berlin. By then he was on the run from Russian security agents called the _Okhrana_ who dogged him out of every city in Germany. His associates are better known. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) had become convinced by Parvus’s writings that a revolution in Russia was possible; Rosa Luxemburg (Junius) learned about the power of the mass strike and an international capitalist world order. She revised and extended the story to reach a broader reading public of German workers. She used Parvus’s invisible lines to create a new way of understanding trade that we now call world systems theory. Lev Bronstein (Trotsky) joined Parvus in Petersburg in 1903\. In 1905 the two saw that Russia’s war against Japan was never going to succeed. They went to plot a revolution of workers in Petersburg by forming the first _soviet_, a union of workers’ deputies. That revolution failed, and both Parvus and Trotsky had to escape from prison to avoid execution. They learned over the next twelve years by watching a nation form in Turkey how to create a fighting force that combined education and military service that would come to be called the Red Army. Istanbul, Parvus understood, was also the key to a victory over Russia once World War I began. By then, Parvus had decided to side with Turkey and Germany against Russia, France, and Britain. Bottling up Russian wheat exports in the Black Sea, Parvus reasoned, would prevent Russia from feeding France and Britain through its ports. (By then German U-Boats restricted America from feeding Europe.) Parvus helped secure weapons that would defend Turkish Gallipoli. **_Read More:_** [**_Putin’s War on Ukraine Shows the Dreadful Power of History_**](https://time.com/6154954/putin-ukraine-history-lesson/) In a fateful alliance Parvus persuaded the German government that the way to stop the war on the eastern front was to give him tens of millions of Deutschmarks to fund a grain-smuggling operation on the Baltic Sea. In addition, Germany only needed to send a sealed train of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks to the Finland Station in St. Petersburg. Parvus would use the proceeds from grain sales to pay for Bolshevik newspapers that would convince Russian soldiers and sailors that the war was fruitless and that revolution was the only solution. After the Russian Revolution started in 1917, Bolsheviks interfered with the liberal government’s plans to feed Moscow and Petersburg from Ukraine. They did so by infiltrating Russian railway unions who helped block the roads that would feed the cities. Poverty sharpened the anger at the liberal government and allowed the Soviets to take over in Russia’s major cities. It took nearly five years and millions of deaths in the Russian Civil War. Even then, Russia was too small and too far from the Black Sea to make it on its own. The Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) by including Ukraine and Georgia as semi-independent states. Years later Josef Stalin would eliminate Ukraine’s independent status with a punishing artificial famine in the 1930s. Since the Russian wildfires of 2010 Ukraine’s grain exports have quadrupled, turning Ukraine into the world’s fifth largest supplier of wheat. As Ukraine has returned to its glory days of the nineteenth century it threatens to unseat Russia as the major grain exporter on the Black Sea. The invasion may yet succeed but Putin’s plan to fully integrate Ukraine into Russia are as flat as the tires on so many of the vehicles sinking deeper into the black path that leads to Kyiv. Russia and Ukraine have depended on one another for centuries, but those days are over. ## Transcript President Zelensky once again calling on NATO for a no-fly zone... totality of our economic sanctions... that you hear about the humanitarian corridor... When it comes to the conflict in Ukraine, there are a lot of terms that are being thrown around. Here are a few that you should know. Oligarchs are Russian businessmen, who amass wealth very quickly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Most of them, through friendships and corruption, basically. They control different parts of the Russian infrastructure. So the Biden administration has developed a task force to go after property, such as yachts, and summer homes and things of this nature. And the hope is that this small group, relatively small group of men can apply some pressure to Vladimir Putin to make him stand down this war. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was started after World War Two. Its whole purpose was to stand against the Soviet Union. Nations like France, Britain, United States, they stood up this alliance, which it has a defining principle that, you know, attack against one is attack against all. One of the things that that Putin brings up when he has his list of complaints against the West, is the fact that, you know, Ukraine was being considered as becoming a member of the the NATO alliance. They're not, of course, and they haven't been brought in, but just the threat of that was enough for Putin to, you know, launch this assault into Ukraine. His big fear is that, you know, the alliance would pre-position military forces and capabilities along his border that would threaten the existence of Russia. Sanctions are measures like, hey, let's let's cut Russia off from the global banking system. That's one set of sanctions. Let's all agree not to buy Russian oil. It's a set of agreements between countries on one side of a conflict to kind of politically and economically ostracize a country that is a bad actor. Russia wants to decapitate the Government of Ukraine, they want to overthrow that government and install their own. And the way that they're applying that pressure is by going after major population centers. They've already launched over 600 missiles into major cities creating a humanitarian crisis. And seeing this, Ukraine has tried to cut a deal with Russia to be able to open up a number of corridors in which civilians are allowed to leave combat zones. Russia has already been seen to have violated this and to have targeted these areas. When we think of a nuclear weapon, we think of obliterating an entire city. Tactical nuclear weapons are designed to be more contained to a limited geography, to a smaller area of space. No army, no nation has ever used a tactical nuke in combat before. You know, the United States has said its nuclear umbrella extends to the NATO allies. Of course, Ukraine is not a NATO ally. But just a use of a nuclear weapon would demand that the United States would have to respond in some meaningful way. The United States has had air superiority over every war since World War Two. So the idea with a no-fly zone is that the United States does not allow another military to operate over a specific area. And if any aircraft breached that airspace, the United States or its allies would shoot down the enemy aircraft. This is off limits for the Biden administration because it puts American pilots in direct combat with Russian pilots, the risk of escalation and going into worldwide conflict grows exponentially greater. The United States has done no fly zones before, most recently in Libya, and also in Iraq. But the Air Force has they faced there were largely run down and much smaller numbers. So SWIFT is a messaging system that allows banks to communicate with each other about transactions that are being made. And by cutting Russia off from SWIFT, it means that people and organizations and banks inside Russia can no longer communicate with the outside banking world and complete transactions that are very important to to doing business in the country and doing business internationally. The Bayraktar drones are smaller drone systems that have their Turkish-made. And they've been used to devastating effect on Russian military. The Russian military has been stalled and they've encountered stiff resistance in almost every place that they've gone, you know, they're running out of fuel and food and the logistics problems that they've had, have basically made them sitting ducks they're stalled out. 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