Bread and Autocracy

Bread and Autocracy focuses on the political role of food in post-Soviet Russia. In less than twenty years, Putin's Russia moved from heavily relying on imports to feed the population to being one of the world's leading food exporters. The authors provide a comprehensive analysis of this transformation, as well as its causes and consequences for Russia's domestic politics and foreign policy. They 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.