ABSTRACT
Russia and China are characterized by a greater scale and frequency of major food problems in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, culminating in the largest of all modern famines: in the USSR in the 1930s and in China in 1958–1961. This chapter seeks to explain what the societal responses to these frequent and severe famines were. The explanation requires us to understand more fully why these food problems arose so severely in these two countries. All states need to ensure that food is provided for the non-food producers engaged in running, developing and defending the state, i.e. the army, a group of administrators and other non-agricultural workers and employees engaged in industry, trade, education and culture. In the 1850s the Chinese government began running into difficulties, just as did the different Russian governments in 1917–1922. They both began to experience extremely deep and intractable ‘times of troubles’ with regard to food provisioning that turned them both into ‘lands of hunger’.
