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Bread and Autocracy

Food, Politics, and Security in Putin's Russia

Yitzhak M Brudny author Janetta Azarieva author Eugene Finkel author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:18th Oct '23

Should be back in stock very soon

Bread and Autocracy cover

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.

The 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 *

ISBN: 9780197684375

Dimensions: 157mm x 236mm x 15mm

Weight: 381g

256 pages