Yitzhak M. Brudny - Böcker

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.

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.

Between 2000 and 2005, colour revolutions swept away authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes in Serbia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. Yet, after these initial successes, attempts to replicate the strategies failed to produce regime change elsewhere in the region. The book argues that students of democratization and democracy promotion should study not only the successful colour revolutions, but also the colour revolution prevention strategies adopted by authoritarian elites. Based on a series of qualitative, country-focused studies the book explores the whole spectrum of anti-democratization policies, adopted by autocratic rulers and demonstrates that authoritarian regimes studied democracy promotion techniques, used in various colour revolutions, and focused their prevention strategies on combatting these techniques.The book proposes a new typology of authoritarian reactions to the challenge of democratization and argues that the specific mix of policies and rhetoric, adopted by each authoritarian regime, depended on the perceived intensity of threat to regime survival and the regime’s perceived strength vis-à-vis the democratic opposition.This book was published as a special issue of Democratization.

What caused the emergence of nationalist movements in many post-communist states? What role did communist regimes play in fostering these movements? Why have some been more successful than others? To address these questions, Yitzhak Brudny traces the Russian nationalist movement from its origins within the Russian intellectual elite of the 1950s to its institutionalization in electoral alliances, parliamentary factions, and political movements of the early 1990s.Brudny argues that the rise of the Russian nationalist movement was a combined result of the reinvention of Russian national identity by a group of intellectuals, and the Communist Party's active support of this reinvention in order to gain greater political legitimacy. The author meticulously reconstructs the development of the Russian nationalist thought from Khrushchev to Yeltsin, as well as the nature of the Communist Party response to Russian nationalist ideas. Through analysis of major Russian literary, political, and historical writings, the recently-published memoirs of the Russian nationalist intellectuals and Communist Party officials, and documents discovered in the Communist Party archives, Brudny sheds new light on social, intellectual, and political origins of Russian nationalism, and emphasizes the importance of ideas in explaining the fate of the Russian nationalist movement during late communist and early post-communist periods.