hate to break it to you

and loss of market share cost them hard currency without which they couldn't buy grain, let alone guns or other forms of energy:

The Search for Loans

The money was suddenly gone. The Soviet Union tried to create a consortium of 300 banks to provide a large loan for the Soviet Union in 1989, but was informed that only five of them would participate and, as a result, the loan would be twenty times smaller than needed. The Soviet Union then received a final warning from the Deutsche Bank and from its international partners that the funds would never come from commercial sources. Instead, if the Soviet Union urgently needed the money, it would have to start negotiations directly with Western governments about so-called politically motivated credits.

In 1985 the idea that the Soviet Union would begin bargaining for money in exchange for political concessions would have sounded absolutely preposterous to the Soviet leadership. In 1989 it became a reality, and Gorbachev understood the need for at least $100 billion from the West to prop up the oil-dependent Soviet economy. According to chairman of the State Planning Committee Yury Maslyukov:

We understand that the only source of hard currency is, of course, the source of oil. . . . If we do not make all the necessary decisions now, next year may turn out to be beyond our worst nightmares. . . . As for the socialist countries, they may all end up in a most critical situation. All this will lead us to a veritable collapse, and not only us, but our whole system.[7]

Ryzhkov commented at the same meeting:

The Vneshekonombank's [Soviet Foreign Trade Bank] guarantees are needed, but it cannot provide them. . . . If there is no oil, there will be no national economy.[8]

It is fascinating to hear now the opinion that Eduard Shevardnadze, then foreign minister, "betrayed" the interest of the Soviet Union--especially when documents that were prepared for him at the time are available. In reality, a number of Soviet agencies urged him to secure at any cost these "politically motivated credits."[9]

In the meantime, the Soviet Union started to have severe food shortages, and grain deliveries were not being made to large cities. One of Gorbachev's closest associates, Anatoly Cherniayev, described the situation in Moscow in March 1991:

If [the grain] cannot be obtained somewhere, famine may come by June. . . . Moscow has probably never seen anything like that throughout its history--even in its hungriest years.[10]

From the Soviet Collapse article.

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