Wave dynamics of the development of agrarian foreign trade of Russia and the republics of the "post-Soviet space"

Agricultural foreign trade held a leading position in Russia's foreign trade during several periods of its development. Agricultural raw materials and food constituted the backbone of Russia's exports in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, as well as in the 1920s during the existence of the USSR. In the 1970s and 1980s, the USSR was the world's largest importer of grain. Today, Russia is the largest exporter of wheat. There are a significant number of studies dedicated to the agricultural foreign trade of Russia. However, there are practically no works devoted to the examination of the processes of dynamic and structural changes in the agricultural foreign trade of the country over an extended period as a unified whole. In this regard, the subject of the research in the article is the processes of dynamic and structural changes in the agricultural exports and imports of Russia, the USSR, and the countries of the "post-Soviet space" for the period 1802–2021. The statistical database containing data on the physical volumes of agricultural product imports and exports was created using methods of source study and statistical analysis. In analyzing the created sample, the method of tabular statistical groupings and graphical representation of data was used. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that: based on a substantial body of sources, statistical series were created containing data on the physical volumes of exports and imports of major types of agricultural products – grains, meat, milk, eggs, and products derived from them (after converting the latter into primary products according to official coefficients) over a long period (1802–2021); the processing of this statistical database involved converting the created statistical series of these products to a unified unit of measurement – conditional grain units based on official conversion coefficients, which had been done for trade research for the first time; in analyzing the resulting overall statistical series of exports and imports of the aforementioned products expressed in conditional grain units, a certain rhythm of agricultural foreign trade was identified – three long waves (periods) with varying characteristics lasting 40–50 years each were revealed. The beginning of each wave coincides with the onset of the downward phase of the "long cycle of conjuncture" by N.D. Kondratiev. Since 2009, the current fourth wave has begun.