The Hungry Empire - The Food Question in Late Imperial Russia (1891-1914)

• Applicant: Dr. Immo Rebitschek
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464411100

Russia’s path into modernity led through disaster: war, disease and revolution shook the state in its foundations, and above all, hunger threatened the very existence of the empire. Since 1891 periodic crop failures and fluctuating crop yields caused food shortages in many parts of European Russia. Provincial leaders and zemstvo officials constantly called for help, asking St. Petersburg to preserve their province from starvation or at least impoverishment. This history of hunger is often told either as a side story of an empire in decline or taken as evidence for the ambivalent course of agricultural change. However, this project draws the focus on hunger to write a history of imperial crisis management. The definition of and struggle with hunger points to a complex set of cultural techniques, social and economic policies. This project makes use of this prism and examines how different agents addressed hunger and famines as economic, political and civilizational challenges; how they evaluated and mastered situations in which the population had limited access to food. How did they manage the consequences of crop failures and how did this challenge affect the mutual views of agents involved – as parts of “state” and “society”?On the one hand the project will show how state officials between 1891 and 1914 developed, adjusted and tested coping mechanisms that were not designed to address structural flaws in Russia’s agricultural economy. This system rather helped to alleviate economic stress and to nourish millions of people, while integrating and mobilizing civil forces against famine as a common cause.On the other hand, it becomes clear that the liberal and revolutionary spectrum did carry this system but also struggled with it. Neither Duma delegates nor activists in the political underground did pursue a consistent strategy for the “food issue” (provodol’stvennoe delo), also because the state ascribed civil forces a limited but effective role to complement the state in its endeavors.Using Kazan province and as a case region the project will demonstrate how the Russian autocracy did not ignore social grievances. It embraced the “food issue” as a political and economic challenge and managed to hold the empire together: by coopting local elites, moderating social forces, fostering a sense of imperial destiny and compensating economic burdens.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants