Many of the states of the former Soviet Union have experienced a dramatic collapse of output during transition, which has not yet been reversed in a sustainable way. The economics of disorganization, proposed by Blanchard (1997) and tested empirically by Blanchard and Kremer (1997), reasons that...

Like all facets of daily life, the food that Russian farms produced and citizens ate – or, in some years, didn’t eat – underwent radical shifts in the century between the Bolshevik Revolution and Vladimir Putin’s presidency. The modernization of agriculture during this time is usually...