Bread and Autocracy in Putin's Russia - Notes
Bread and Autocracy in Putin's Russia
Introduction
Food is political power, especially when unequally distributed. Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, food availability was not a major political issue outside the global South. Since the conflict, Russia has used food as a shield and weapon, impacting vulnerable countries. The Putin regime has focused on food independence to prevent domestic unrest and counter Western sanctions. Russia's emphasis on nutritional self-sufficiency distinguishes it from other autocracies, where import substitution policies often target industrial goods. Food is a lens for understanding autocracy in Russia, shifting focus from institutions and repression to broader authoritarian stability mechanisms. The Kremlin's food-import substitution policies have had mixed results. They have successfully reversed reliance on imports, helping Russia withstand sanctions and geopolitical isolation. However, prioritizing political needs has reduced competition and concentrated food production among a few well-connected companies, making long-term food autarky economically unsustainable.
Historical Context
Early states' rise and fall were linked to grain cultivation and storage. Food was central to Rome's "bread and circuses" governance. Food insecurity remains a major source of political and social vulnerability. In wealthier countries, food's political importance has decreased, but it remains significant in the global South, where "urban bias" affects state-society relations. Governments risk peril when they lose control of food allocation to cities. In 2008, protests against food price spikes occurred in many countries, leading to violence and government overthrows in Haiti and Madagascar. Food shortages in Russia in 2010 contributed to demonstrations in Egypt, demanding "bread, freedom, and social justice," which ultimately led to the fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. The relationship between food prices and political stability is correlated, with access to food linked to political violence and mass protests.
Cheap food for cities benefits urban constituencies in the short term. However, urban bias can cause instability as disadvantaged farmers move to politically volatile urban slums. China avoided these dangers through repression, migration restrictions, and rural investment. Putin chose nutritional self-sufficiency to feed cities and employ the countryside, bucking the trend of prioritizing industry over agriculture. However, rising food prices in Russia due to war and the pandemic are straining household budgets, causing the regime concern.
Putin's Response
Given Putin's belief in nutritional autarky, the government increases state intervention, controls prices, and limits exports, exacerbating threats. If Russia's conflict with the West is short-lived, Putin's strategy might succeed. Prolonged isolation, however, poses a severe internal threat.
Food and Politics in Russia
The link between food and politics is pronounced in Russia. Major developments in Russian and Soviet history since 1917 have been driven by food issues. In February 1917, bread shortages and food riots in Petrograd sparked a revolution, ending the monarchy. The subsequent government's failure to improve food supply led to its downfall by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. To feed cities and the Red Army, the Bolsheviks initiated a "food-supply dictatorship" and grain expropriation, causing a famine in which millions died. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, collectivization of farms resulted in another deadly famine.
On June 2, 1962, Soviet troops fired on protesters in Novocherkassk, demanding milk and meat, leading to the Novocherkassk Massacre. Subsequently, Soviet authorities avoided raising staple-food prices for 29 years, despite the costs of inefficient collective agriculture. As the population grew, the USSR shifted from a grain exporter to the world's largest importer. Subsidies and food imports strained the Soviet budget, preventing investments in other sectors and creating geopolitical vulnerability. The U.S. grain embargo after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan exploited this dependence. Food problems peaked during perestroika. In the late 1980s, breadlines and rationing doomed Gorbachev's revitalization plans. After the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991, Russia faced widespread shortages, making food a top priority.
Market reforms in the early 1990s, including opening the market to imports, restocked stores but decimated the agriculture sector. Reformers saw limited domestic production as a welcome outcome of global market integration. Putin recognized food's political importance before 2000. As St. Petersburg's vice-mayor in 1992, he led a food initiative that became a corruption scandal, nearly ending his career. Afterward, Putin aimed to secure Russia's food independence, with Minister of Agriculture Aleksei Gordeev (1999–2009) playing a crucial role. Gordeev viewed food supply as vital to national security, advocating for at least 80 percent domestic food production. He opposed the market reforms under Yeltsin, which deepened reliance on food imports. Imported food was seen as expensive, depleting reserves, and making Russia vulnerable to the West. Investing in domestic food production would lower prices and enhance security.
Implementation of Food Independence
Gordeev's goal was aided by the Russian business community (especially grain growers) and Putin's focus on state capacity and sovereignty. The concept of "sovereign democracy" paralleled an independent path in agriculture. The government aimed to saturate the market with domestic produce by the end of the 2000s, focusing on grain. The Kremlin offered low-interest loans via the Russian Agricultural Bank and assisted with acquiring Western machinery through Rosagroleasing. Legislation was liberalized, land ownership reformed, and investments made in storage and infrastructure, including grain elevators and a modern grain terminal at the Novorossiysk port on the Black Sea. During Putin's first two terms (2000–2008), grain production boomed, helped by heavy government investment and a prior recovery. Russia shifted from importing grain to becoming a leading exporter. Russian grain exports grew, with wheat becoming a main agricultural export. By 2018, Russia was the largest wheat provider, accounting for a quarter of global exports. The Kremlin used this success to promote food independence, which became official doctrine in 2010.
Food Security Doctrine
On January 30, 2010, President Dmitri Medvedev signed the "Food Security Doctrine of the Russian Federation." The doctrine, formulated under Putin, treats food security as state security. Unlike the standard definition of food security (individuals' access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food), Russia views it as a national-security concern. The decree, produced by Russia's Security Council, gave the policy elevated status. Russia has only seven "doctrines," all adopted since 2000, covering issues crucial to state survival. The Food Security Doctrine is the Kremlin's statement on food-supply policies. The goal is independence from food exports and domestic production of most food consumed by Russian citizens. Food security is integral to national security and sovereignty. The doctrine sets self-sufficiency goals for grain (95 percent), milk and dairy (85 percent), fish, meat, sugar, vegetable oil (80 percent), and potatoes (95 percent). An updated, more ambitious Food Security Doctrine was signed by Putin on January 21, 2020.
The main goal of Russia’s food independence push was to protect the regime from conflict with the West and prevent food shortages seen in the Russian Empire and the USSR. When Russia clashed with Ukraine, food played a central role in the confrontation.
Countersanctions and Import Substitution
Food's political importance was evident after Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea. The U.S., EU, and other Western governments imposed sanctions, but these did not have the same impact as the 1979 U.S. grain embargo. Putin introduced countersanctions in August 2014, banning food imports from the U.S., EU, Australia, Canada, and Norway. In 2015–16, Ukraine, Albania, Iceland, Lichtenstein, Montenegro, and Turkey were added to the list. The food-import bans, covering 21 percent of Russia's food imports (approximately ), were presented as temporary but aimed at long-term import substitution, exceeding the Food Security Doctrine benchmarks. The Kremlin believed that shielding Russian producers from foreign competition would allow them to replace most banned imports with local food. In 2014–15, food independence via import substitution became a major policy goal. In December 2015, Putin declared that all Russian food would be domestically produced by 2020. In the short term, the countersanctions paid off, with Russian producers assuming control of the food market. The Kremlin presented this as a patriotic measure, maintaining Putin's popularity. By late March 2016, 65 percent of Russians said the food-import ban had not affected their lives.
On October 21, 2021, Putin taunted the West, crediting sanctions for the positive effect on import substitution. Countersanctions pushed Western food producers out of the Russian market, but the country still imported food from Asia and Latin America. Domestic products were more expensive and of lower quality, leading to complaints. For Putin, food availability was more important than cost and quality. Plentiful domestic production shielded the regime from Western food sanctions and the danger of not being able to feed the country in a major geopolitical confrontation.
Food Independence and the Pandemic
The second major test for Russia’s food-supply system came in early 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. The ensuing global health and economic crises spurred a substantial increase in food prices and demonstrated the inherent weaknesses of autarky. But the Kremlin’s food independence ensured that the global upheaval did not lead to food shortages in Russia and thus did not threaten the regime’s stability. Putin’s response to the crisis—heavy state intervention in the market— clearly demonstrated that the Kremlin views food availability as a key political (rather than economic) concern.
By the time the pandemic hit, Russia was, on paper at least, fully nutritionally self-sufficient. The country was even earning more from agricultural exports than from weapons exports. Some observers believed that sanctions and countersanctions had made Russia impervious to the global trade disruptions unleashed by the pandemic. And, in fact, the food autarky designed to insulate Russia from such tumult did ultimately hold in the face of dual crises—the pandemic and the war on Ukraine—but not easily. Russia’s food system is still well integrated into the world economy and thus affected by global trends.
In Russia, as elsewhere, the pandemic caused real incomes to shrink and consumption to decline. Ordinary Russians had to curtail spending, even on staple foods. To compensate for decreasing domestic demand, food producers switched to exporting, mostly to China. More ominously, as Russian produce increasingly left the country, countersanctions prevented food from the West from coming in. Scrambling to recoup lost profits, retailers responded to decreasing demand by raising prices. Cash-strapped Russians were thus forced to buy less, leading to even larger losses for the food industry. A vicious circle of rising prices, reduced consumption, and growing food insecurity ensued. From March 2020 to March 2021, the average price of staple foods increased by percent. The cost of several of the most popular products such as potatoes, sugar, buckwheat, and sunflower oil rose even more substantially.
Food soon became a source of major political concern for the Kremlin. In March 2021, the Levada Center reported that percent of Russians considered rising prices to be the country’s most acute social problem. In contrast, only percent viewed the crackdown on democratic rights and freedoms as a significant concern. Putin’s response to the crisis demonstrated once again that food supply is a key priority for the Kremlin that outweighs almost all other considerations, and that massive, direct, and repressive state involvement in the market is the preferred approach. In two December 2020 public appearances, Putin blamed food-price increases on greedy domestic producers who used higher global prices to spike domestic ones and promised to get the matter under control. He reassured the public that price increases would be reversed “within days or weeks,” and that the government would monitor food prices closely.
That same month, the government began issuing restrictive policies to combat rising food prices, including a range of regulations to fix the prices of key staple foods. The package of regulations, presented as a temporary three-month measure, included “voluntary” agreements among the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Trade and Industry, food producers, and supermarket chains to cap wholesale and retail prices, and introduced severe export restrictions on grain (wheat, rye, barley) and corn. Just weeks after the package was announced, the regulations were rushed through parliament and enacted into law. Authorities began investigating alleged price fixing by food producers, and an agribusiness oligarch who dared to complain about the heavy restrictions was publicly reproached by Putin and found himself subject to a tax audit. Notably, increasing competition and reopening Russia’s domestic market to banned Western imports was not even considered. The economic crisis subsided in 2021, thanks mainly to rising oil and gas prices. Yet the Kremlin showed no inclination to let the market once again determine food prices. In his annual address to the Federal Assembly that year, Putin again pledged to keep food prices affordable and to avoid acute food shortages. The measures to achieve these goals were the same as before: heavy government intervention in the economy and state subsidies.
In 2020, the Kremlin called out allegedly profit-hungry domestic actors and greedy producers and supermarket chains for causing food prices to escalate. But in late May 2021, Putin shifted the blame to wider global trends—that is, external forces—thus shirking any responsibility for the hardships and providing ideological justification for doubling down and not relinquishing control of food production. Price freezes, price caps, and import bans continued. Putin’s heavy-handed policies might have been ineffective at preventing food-price hikes, but they did prevent food shortages. In mid-2021, a Reuters reporter visited Novocherkassk to understand why a city famous for a bloody protest in 1962 did not see any antigovernment mobilization in 2020–21. When asked to explain, a local leader replied, “Is there enough food? There’s enough.”
Food Politics and War
On February 24, 2022, while still grappling with the pandemic, Putin invaded Ukraine. Unprecedented Western sanctions aimed at crippling the Russian economy swiftly followed and continue to expand. They covered multiple key sectors of Russia’s economy and led more than a thousand Western companies to leave the country. Interestingly, the sanctions have not targeted the food sector, possibly because Western policymakers recognize that Russia is no longer vulnerable to pressure in this sphere. Yet even without formal sanctions, numerous Western restaurant chains and food producers, including McDonald’s (850 branches, 62,000 employees, and 160,000 suppliers), Pizza Hut, Starbucks, and Coca-Cola, decided to leave Russia. At the same time, four food and agriculture giants—Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Louis Dreyfus, and Bunge—declared a scaling down of their local activities, but remained in the country to continue “the production and transport of essential food commodities and ingredients.”
The war thus quickly overtook the pandemic as the biggest challenge to Russia’s food system. Combined, the sanctions and the sharp decline of the ruble in the early days of the war caused panic buying in major Russian cities. In March 2022, staples such as buckwheat, flour, pasta, rice, salt, and sugar suddenly disappeared from Russian supermarkets. The timing could not have been worse, making this a potential political nightmare for Putin and forcing senior government officials to reassure the public that there was plenty of food in the country. Yet even though prices continued to increase, panic buying quickly subsided and Russian food stores remained well stocked. A repeat of the 1979 U.S. grain embargo, issued as a punishment for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is unthinkable in 2022, simply because Russia does not rely on Western products to feed its people. Furthermore, to prevent even the slightest danger of food shortages, on March 15, 2022, the Russian government issued a temporary ban on the export of grain (including wheat, rye, barley, and corn) and sugar. Once again, the short-term focus on nutritional self-sufficiency paid off. But the war has also exposed the longer-term fragility of Russia’s food-supply system.
The sharp rise in prices during the pandemic years accelerated once the war started, and there is little that the Kremlin can do to stop it. As long as Russia’s food industry is integrated into the world economy, sanctions on key Russian banks remain in place, and Western companies refuse to do business with Russia, disrupting supply chains, total government control of the system will remain elusive. A case in point is the sharp yet predictable increase in the price of sugar since the war began: From February 26 through March 25, it rose by a staggering percent. Even though sugar is domestically manufactured, Russia still imports percent of sugar-beet seeds, the main source of Russian sugar. Russia’s Food Security Doctrine concentrated on domestic production, but did little to ensure independence from essential foreign items that such domestic production requires. The solution was a rapid push for even more comprehensive nutritional independence. So in April 2022, the Kremlin committed to diverting domestically produced fertilizers to Russian agriculture (thus limiting hard-currency revenue from exports) and investing heavily in seed-growing and animal-breeding centers. Yet rapid substitution of these crucial imports is problematic, and inferior domestic alternatives might endanger Putin’s food-independence project precisely when it is needed most.
Nutritional self-sufficiency shielded Russia from severe food disruptions during the early stages of the war, but as the fighting could drag on for months and possibly years, the system will come under increasing strain. The benefits of import substitution are most pronounced in the short term; its drawbacks will take longer to manifest. The future of Putin’s nutritional self-sufficiency project will ultimately depend on the ability of Russian food producers to insulate themselves from global supply-chain disruptions and to overcome the disappearance of traditional trading partners. It will also depend on whether the regime can back up its rhetoric with massive financial support for the agroindustrial complex and consumer food subsidies that would keep staple foods even minimally affordable. Russia also needs the international food giants to continue their operations in the country so that it can access their expertise, global trade networks, and capabilities. Grain is still the key to Russia’s domestic food production, and the country has it aplenty. Grain is also an easily stored product. So even if the system eventually unravels, it might take years for serious food shortages to arise.
Investment in food production and Russia’s leading position in the global grain trade might also help Putin not only internally, but also externally. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen purchase at least half their wheat from Russia and Ukraine. Those importers might have to provide Russia with important political support during its growing confrontation with the West or risk the reduction or even cancelation of their grain-import contracts. After all, if Russia can stop natural-gas supplies to Poland, it can suspend grain deliveries to Turkey, a NATO member state, or to key regional powers such as Egypt or Pakistan. Indeed, on April 1, 2022, Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Security Council, warned on his Telegram channel that food sales are a powerful weapon and stated that Russia should supply food only to “friendly countries” and deny it to the unfriendly ones. Weeks later, an article published by the state-owned RIA Novosti echoed the warning: Russia’s food weapon, it said, is more potent than its missiles, for Russia controls almost a quarter of the global wheat market and nearly half of the sunflower-oil market. After all, “one can survive without [mobile] phones and the internet, but not without bread, even if it is baked from totalitarian Russian wheat.”
These threats to global food security ought to be taken seriously in the context of a protracted war. Not only is Russia weaponizing its own food exports, but it is also stealing massive amounts of Ukraine’s grain and agricultural machinery and preventing the export of Ukrainian grain by blockading Ukraine’s ports—triggering, very likely deliberately, a global food crisis. The UN World Food Programme has warned that already vulnerable Middle Eastern and African countries being denied Ukrainian grain could suffer widespread hunger. At a May G7 meeting, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock accused Russia of deliberately turning its war on Ukraine into a global “grain war” and cynically using food as “a deliberately chosen instrument in a hybrid war that is being waged right now.” Russia’s goal, Baerbock said, is to manufacture a global humanitarian crisis that will pressure the international community to give in to the Kremlin’s demands. Putin, meanwhile, predictably blamed the potential famine on Western elites who, he said, “are ready to sacrifice the rest of the world to maintain their global dominance.”
In this global “grain war,” Putin has powerful weapons both as a food provider to the Russian population and as a food denier to the nutritionally vulnerable global South. Russia’s ability to cause a major hunger crisis in the global South is as crucial for Russia’s confrontation with the West as is Russia’s performance on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Conclusion
To understand Putinism, scholars and analysts typically focus on key features of its regime ideology such as statism, conservatism, and anti-Westernism or on factors such as political institutions, corruption, and Russia’s dependence on oil and gas exports. But there is more to the story. Putin views food security as a key national-security and regime-survival issue, and he set out to achieve food independence almost from the moment he rose to power in 2000: By 2008, Russia was no longer dependent on grain imports; in 2010, achieving independence from food imports became official doctrine; and by 2018, the country had become a dominant player in the world grain market.
The COVID pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine are testing the success of Putin’s food-independence project. The results so far have been mixed. These monumental crises—a pandemic, large-scale war, and open confrontation with the West—have not produced the empty shelves, breadlines, and chronic food shortages seen in the Soviet era, thus vindicating the strategy. Russia’s leading role in grain export also allows it to control the food pantries in numerous developing countries and thus to threaten a global famine to achieve geopolitical goals. Yet due to the food system’s inherent weaknesses—such as limited competition, inefficiency, and heavy state intervention—the regime cannot insulate Russians from food-price increases. As long as the Kremlin can ensure plentiful domestic food supplies and keep the most basic food staples, especially bread, minimally affordable, thanks either to price controls or subsidies, Putin need not fear a repeat of the 1917 food riots or the collapse of popular support seen in the late 1980s. Yet if the drive toward complete autarky continues long enough to either impede domestic production or make staple foods unaffordable, the regime will be in severe danger.
Writing about earlier empires, Scott Nelson asserted that they “survive only as long as they control the sources of food needed to feed soldiers and citizens.” Putin’s Russia is no different. In 2014, Vyacheslav Volodin, one of Putin’s senior officials, famously stated, “No Putin, no Russia.” But, we would argue, “no food, no Putin.”