Before the war, many authorities believed in fact that those countries with substantial agrarian sectors and grain exports, including the Russian Empire, would switch to food autarky and overcome war hardships more easily than those countries that imported grain (Broadberry and Harrison 2005). Russian difficulties with grain procurement were not well anticipated. Ten days later, the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government and seized power in Russia, holding it for more than 70 years.ĭownload the Vo圎U eBook, The Economics of the Great War: A Centennial Perspective, here As it turned out, his fears were realised.
Prokopovich worried that open clashes over grain distribution between producers and consumers could destroy the Russian army and state (Prokopovich 1918). On the Eastern front, St Petersburg and the Russian army in the south had grain reserves for a week, but armies in the north had grain for little more than one day and some of their regiments were beginning to starve. On 29 October 1917 (16 October in the old Russian calendar), Sergei Prokopovich, the Russian minister of food procurement, had to acknowledge in public that there was little or no grain in government storage to feed the army and residents of the capital.
