Communal Granaries in the Russian Empire

The main aim of this article is to examine the rise of famine relief policy in the Russian Empire. It focuses on the institution of the granary, central to eighteenth-century cameralist teaching on famine prevention. At the end of the 18th century the government of Russia began to view communal village granaries as the best means to achieve food sustainability and ensure provision for the people. During the 19th century this developed into an extensive organisation of communal granaries that existed up to 1917 and was of unprecedented scale for all Europe. By the end of the 19th century Russia had accumulated a very large amount of grain in its communal granaries, but still suffered regularly from famines. The idea of communal granaries as a famine relief measure was unrealistic, and the granaries never functioned exactly as regulations foresaw. They did not fulfil their main function - famine relief - but instead created far more problems than solutions for the authorities. However, in spite of all this the Russian government demonstrated at the lowest local level its capacity for pushing through its decisions. From the perspective of administrative capacity, the Russian network of public and communal granaries was a remarkable achievement.