If we are to speak seriously of the meme "in the USSR bread was bread, the crusts were tasty and the crumb heavenly, that's what Canadian wheat does for you", then the Soviet Union began buying wheat from Western countries as early as 1963, a year that wa

Nature sent a drought, and the government, as luck would have it, chose that very moment for another piece of folly. Instead of wheat they sowed maize and fodder crops, to feed the livestock that had been taken from private households since 1959; the cultivation of the virgin lands faltered; as little land as possible was left fallow, which meant that winter varieties were sown only after the fields had been cleared, already in the cold, and simply froze to death; and the gradual growth of grain shortages in previous years had by then almost emptied the strategic grain reserve.

A critical 30% shortfall in the harvest prompted an appeal for supplies to the West, namely to Canada. From that year the USSR bought grain from the capitalists of Canada, France and the USA every year, right up to the 1980s.