Just a quick point, Greg, since I'm supposed to be doing other things for the rest of this week: surely the problem with the USSR in the 1930s is that it was a dictatorship, in which the dictator was paranoid and probably a psychopath.

Well OK, I suppose I should hang in long enough to deal with the other stuff too. I suspect I've got it wrong on the grain front, Teribus, for which apologies. Your stats look pretty convincing.

But that doesn't make much of a dent in the argument that the western democracies have been exploiting other parts of the world for generations. I think it was the historian Corelli Barnett (hardly a pinko) who pointed out that the UK traded at a profit in fewer than 20 years between 1850 and 1960. (The implication being that it was subsidised by the colonies and dominions of the empire.)

To compare a country with that kind of advantage with the USSR, which was newly emerged from the iniquities of Tzarist Russia, and which struggled to survive in a world that was overwhelmingly hostile, is at best unhelpful. And to wine about Soviet subsidies to Cuba when those subsidies dried up years ago looks like clutching at straws. So we still need to know how Cuba manages, in the face of economic sanctions by the US, to have a lower rate of infant mortality than Washington DC.