Severe food shortages and unremitting hunger served as the background to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed. Hungry Moscow examines the impact of these food shortages on Moscow residents, focusing on the survival strategies they devised to overcome or minimize hunger. Also examined is the interplay between these short-term individual survival strategies and the formulation and development of long-term government policies by the Bolshevik government. Through the prisms of hunger and urban life, this book contributes to our understanding of important issues in early Soviet history, such as the relationship between central and local institutions, rationing, the growth of black markets, Bolshevik social policies, and the reordering of urban life during revolutionary times.

The Author: Mauricio Borrero is Associate Professor of History at St. John’s University in New York. He received his doctoral degree from Indiana University, held a Title VIII fellowship at the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, and taught at the University of Oregon before coming to St. John’s, where he is now Acting Chair of the History Department. He has also published articles on communal dining and the politics of scarcity in early Soviet Russia.