Beef: The New Opiate of the Russian Masses?

Russian President Vladimir Putin has an ambitious plan to cut his country’s $3 billion annual import bill for beef. He even aspires to return Russia’s beef industry to its pre-revolutionary stature. To get there, however, he’s depending on an unlikely savior: Anthony Stidham, a 48-year-old, third-generation rancher from Oklahoma. At Russia’s largest beef farm, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) southwest of Moscow, Stidham is among a tiny group of foreign cattlemen hired to school locals in livestock-rearing—everything from branding cows to easing a stuck calf through the birth canal. If all goes according to plan, Russia could someday send foreign beef suppliers like Tyson Foods of Springdale, Ark., and São Paulo-based Brasil Foods heading for customs.

With its expanding middle class and a tripling of some wages in recent years, Russia is experiencing a surge in demand for beef. So Moscow has cut import quotas to help revive a cattle-breeding tradition decimated under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Putin wants the country to meet 85 percent of its own meat needs by 2020, compared with 65 percent today; he’s pumping money into the fledgling meat industry and letting it bring in talent—and cows—from abroad.