(FORTUNE Magazine) – When former President George Bush visited Moscow in June, Russian President Boris Yeltsin welcomed him as an old friend of Russia's young democracy. In general, though, Bush is remembered for supporting something closer to the Russian heart: the Russian stomach.

Since 1991, when the Bush administration gave Russia $35 million in credits to buy frozen U.S. poultry, chicken legs sold all over Russia have been known both affectionately and resentfully as lapki Busha (Bush's paws) or Bushskie nozhki (Bush's legs). Indeed, Russia has become a huge market for American poultry producers, to the detriment of Russian chicken farmers. In 1993, Russia imported 112,000 tons of U.S. poultry and produced about 1.25 million tons of its own. But the balance of birds has shifted: Last year Russians produced 540,000 tons of poultry but imported 990,000-plus tons valued at $793 million--making poultry the largest U.S. agricultural export to Russia by almost a factor of five. About a quarter of all American chicken legs--or one leg of every other American chicken--ends up being sucked clean by a Russian.

Why is Russia so eager to ship chickens halfway around the world rather than eat the ones in its own backyard? The answer, it turns out, is an odd coincidence of cost and taste. First, the cost issue: The Russian poultry industry can't approach the price of U.S. meat. After the Russian government lifted price restrictions in 1992, the price of chicken feed increased 14-fold at a time when inflation was soaring; when the dust and feathers settled, feed cost almost twice as much in Russia as it did in America. On top of that, increased prices for equipment replacements and transport, the absence of any government subsidy, and trickling foreign investment and credit made raising fowl much more expensive. American chickens, even after transport and customs, wound up costing about 15% to 20% less than Russian birds.

Now the taste factor: Russians' tastes, as it turns out, are the exact opposite of Americans'. While we generally avoid fatty, cholesterol-rich dark meat--and are consequently willing to pay only 20 to 30 cents per pound for chicken legs at wholesale, as opposed to 80 to 90 cents per pound for white meat--Russians prefer dark meat four times out of five, according to Iury Trusov, general director of poultry production for the Leningrad region. Americans have a huge supply, Russians have a huge demand...and a chicken market is born.

Lately, of course, that market has seen some turbulence: The collapse of the Russian banking system has temporarily brought chicken importers to their knees. American poultry companies do not want to tie their products to an import price that further inflation might render worthless. "This has been tremendously disruptive to trade," says Erwin Burkholder, a representative of the U.S. Poultry & Egg Export Council. "The flow of new product has basically stopped."

For the moment, Russia is still eating its way through warehouses of poultry, and it probably can continue to do so for several months. But after that, the country will probably have to rely more and more on homegrown birds. Luckily for the Russians, Burkholder has been overseeing a project to teach Russian producers how to feed and grow poultry more efficiently--showing them, for instance, the necessity of raising only one generation of chicks at a time, as Americans do, so that the facilities can recover between cycles. That kind of information is about to become a lot more important to rank-and-file Russians--especially if Bush's legs are giving out from under them.

--Eric Roston