Alessandro Riolo
There is a little-known episode from the late Cold War. In 1989, during an official meeting, Mikhail Gorbachev unexpectedly broke protocol and embraced the Sicilian Calogero Mannino, then Italy’s agriculture minister. Those present were puzzled. The explanation lay several years earlier. Between December 1982 and August 1983, under Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani, Mannino had been entrusted with a highly sensitive secret operation. At the time, Italy 🇮🇹 maintained strategic food reserves – including long-life milk – intended for emergency support to West Germany 🇩🇪 in the event of a Soviet ⚒️ invasion. Meanwhile, that winter parts of the Soviet Union – including whole regions such as Georgia and Crimea – were experiencing severe shortages of basic food supplies, including milk. Mikhail Gorbachev, then responsible for agriculture, was under intense pressure, with real risks not just to his position but to social stability. In that context, Mannino, acting discreetly and with scant political cover from Rome, diverted those emergency reserves and arranged for secret shipments of long-life milk to reach the Soviet Union. The operation was kept quiet: supplies originally earmarked for a NATO contingency were instead sent to the other side of the Cold War divide. Those shipments helped alleviate shortages and supported Gorbachev at a critical moment in his rise. Years later, at the height of his power, Gorbachev met Mannino in 1989 and hugged him in front of a room of surprised journalists and puzzled fellow politicians. Mannino, a Christian Democrat, and ferociously anti-Communist, refused to elaborate and only explained the background decades later.
Philippe Lemoine
This was already true under the Soviet Union and it wasn't just true for oil but also for natural gas. The Soviets were extremely dependent on Western technology for pipes and compressor stations, because their industry was always lagging behind. It's actually interesting how this dependence came about. After the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, not only did the West Europeans — with the support of the US at the time — chose not to stop engaging with the Soviet Union, but they actually decided that they should have more of it. This led to the FRG's Ostpolitik and détente at the political level, but at the economic level it took the form of loans to the Eastern European countries and agreements to import natural gas from the Soviet Union, which initially were organized as barter where West Europeans sent pipes and compressors in exchange for gas. The Soviets used that equipment not only to build the infrastructure needed to export natural gas to Western Europe, but also to build their own domestic natural gas supply network, which would have been much more difficult and costly if they had been forced to rely on their own technology. But although hawks today would have castigated this policy as "appeasement", it also made the Soviet bloc economically dependent on the West, which gave the West leverage it wouldn't have had otherwise. The Soviet Union now depended on Western imports and, after loans from private banks dried up as a result of the Volcker Shock, didn't have the financial heft to cover for the external deficits of their Eastern European satellites. This is one of the main reasons why, although this wasn't known at the time because they kept it a secret and tried to exploit the ambiguity, by the time of the 1980-1981 Polish crisis, the Soviet leadership had in effect abandoned the Brezhnev Doctrine and decided that they wouldn't intervene even if Solidarnosc took over the Polish government.
