It had become clear by this point that the harvest was going to be bad all over Europe, so Adam Smith's benevolent invisible hand quickly stepped in, creating speculators to make their fortune off others misfortunes. Ship after ship steamed out of Odessa, Russia's great port on the Black Sea, their holds packed with grain destined for the markets of Europe. At the same time, so much grain was shipped across the western frontier during the weeks before the ban finally went into effect that even the superbly efficient German railroads needed more than a month to remove the huge mountains of rye left at K nigsberg by grain dealers anxious to beat the deadline. Well, riot they did. Many of the peasants slashed and burned by the subsequent Cossack crackdown probably considered themselves lucky.
Brutal murder is probably a better way to go than starvation.
Durnovo's ban finally took effect in August, leaving Russia with just enough grain to avert a famine of Biblical proportions. People would die , but if what little grain was left could be distributed efficiently, most starvation could be prevented. Presumably grumpy at not being allowed to sell the grain that was left, Vyshnegradskii no interest in actually distributing the stuff. The man who did had a tough job indeed. Upon visiting one grain station in the south, he found more than eight hundred fully loaded boxcars sitting unattended on a siding.