Description
Book SynopsisFood 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
Trade ReviewThe classic works of comparative politics-Gerschenkron, Moore, and Skocpol, for example-were written by scholars with a keen appreciation for the politics of food supply and the relationship between the city and the countryside. Now a new team has devised a clever and compelling analysis of the same factor for our own era. Azarieva, Brudny, and Finkel offer us a timely and fresh study of food security and regime stability in Europe's most dangerous country: Russia. It is a story packed full of unexpected plot twists and lessons for policymakers and academics. * Jeffrey Kopstein , University of California, Irvine *
The revival of Russian agriculture behind protectionist barriers is one of the few successes of Russia's economy in recent years, and it helps explain the resilience of the Putin regime in the face of Western sanctions. This is a definitive account of the economic strategy behind Fortress Russia. * Peter Rutland, Wesleyan University *
