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...

In August the Soviet government agreed to the second one-year extension of the US-USSR grain agreement, which has regulated grain trade between the two countries since 1976. Although a net exporter of grain for the best part of this century, the USSR has become increasingly dependent on imports...