Eastern Europe (Russia and the USSR)

Abstract

Russia and the Soviet Union have endured a particularly large number of serious food crises over the last thousand years, and they persisted into the first half of the twentieth century. The scale and causes of these crises have been greatly disputed, with most recent evaluations of twentieth-century famines concentrating on short-term political factors. This chapter emphasises the need to include long-term historical-geographic factors in our explanation of these crises, and to consider the problematic nature of evaluating normal mortality when we attempt to assess excess mortality. The first two sections discuss these long-term factors in general and the specific problems of the reliabilit..