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 better prepare the country for a confrontation with the West. Moreover, they show that for the Kremlin, nutritional self-sufficiency and domestic food production is a crucial pillar of state security and regime survival.

Azarieva, Brudny, and Finkel also make the case that Russia's focus on food independence also sets the country apart from almost all modern autocracies. While many authoritarian regimes have adopted industrial import-substitution policies, in Putin's Russia it is the substitution of food imports with domestically produced crops that is crucial for regime survival. As food reemerges as a key global issue and nations increasingly turn inwards, Bread and Autocracy provides a timely and comprehensive look into Russia's experience in building a nutritionally autarkic dictatorship.

Janetta Azarieva is a Research Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of the Scientific Committee of the National Nutritional Council of Israel. Her research focuses on government interventions and food security policies.

Yitzhak M. Brudny is Professor of Political Science and History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been a member of the Editorial Committee of Comparative Politics since 1993. He is the author of Reinventing Russia: Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953-1991, co-editor of two books on post-communist politics, and the author of numerous articles on Russian politics and nationalism.

Eugene Finkel is the Kenneth H. Keller Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He works at the intersection of political science and history, with a focus on how institutions and individuals respond to extreme situations: mass violence, state collapse, and rapid change. He is the author of Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival during the Holocaust and co-author (with Scott Gehlbach) of Reform and Rebellion in Weak States.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Starving Empire: Food and Politics in the USSR

Chapter 2. Food and Market: The Hungry 1991-1993

Chapter 3. Farmers Will Not Feed Russia: The Failure of Yeltsin's Agrarian Reforms

Chapter 4. The Rise of Grain, 2000-2010

Chapter 5. Food, Security and Food Security

Chapter 6. Sanctions and Countersanctions

Chapter 7. Top Feeders: The Government and Russia's Agro-Capitalism

Chapter 8. The COVID-19 Food Crisis, 2020-2021

Chapter 9. The War in Ukraine and Russia's Food Politics

Chapter 10. Conclusions

Notes
Bibliography
Index