Bread and Autocracy : Food, Politics, and Security in Putin's Russia

Food has been crucial to the functioning and survival of governments and regimes since the emergence of early states.Yet, only in a few countries is the connection between food and politics as pronounced as in Russia.Since the 1917 Revolution, virtually every significant development in Russian and Soviet history has been either directly driven by or closely associated with the question of food and access to it.In fact, food shortages played a critical role in the collapse of both the Russian Empire and the USSR.Under Putin's watch, Russia moved from heavily relying on grain imports to feed the population to being one of the world's leading food exporters. In Bread and Autocracy, Janetta Azarieva, Yitzhak M.Brudny, and Eugene Finkel focus on this crucial yet widely overlooked transformation, as well as its causes and consequences for Russia's domestic and foreign politics.The authors argue that Russia's food independence agenda is an outcome of a deliberate, decades-long policy to bette