Corn Crusade is a fascinating study devoted to Nikita Khrushchev's plan for expanding corn culture. It shows in eight thematic chapters the different dimensions (political, technical, administrative, propagandistic) of this policy so tightly associated with the former first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. It tries to explain the relative failure of the ambitious program, while reassessing the role of the leader in this project.

Subtitled “Putting food on the Russian Table,” the work by Stephen Wegren, Alexander Nikulin, and Irina Trotsuk aims to understand the successes of Russian agriculture after 2000 and to analyze the new characteristics of food production and consumption in Russia after a long period of fragility and chaos (post-Stalin's USSR and 1990s Russia).

At first glance, these are two very different volumes. The first one is the essay of a historian. Aaron Hale-Dorrell earned his PhD at UNC at Chapel Hill. The latter is a collective work written by political scientists and sociologists. Hale-Dorrell's book deals with Khrushchev's thaw in the USSR whereas the second analyzes contemporary Russia. Even methodology differs: when Wegren and his colleagues focus on “policy output” and therefore leave the field clear for the study of “policy making” (51), Hale-Dorrell's main goal is precisely to use archives to understand the functioning of the Soviet State. This has consequences for the sources employed by authors: Wegren and coauthors use mostly published and official, central documents. They also draw their work upon various sociological surveys. Hale-Durrell, for his part, does not limit his sources to central ones but additionally tries to mobilize them at the regional level (Vilnius, Kiev, and Stavropol). This effort is highly praiseworthy, even if it could have been increased: more local sources could have thrown some very interesting light on the implementation of Moscow's decisions.

Both, however, deal with food policy and food security in the Soviet Union and Russia. Their parallel reading allows highlighting critical features of the Soviet/Russian food system, and improvements and innovations, as this review will show. Each asks the question of the success or failure of a policy and tries to explain it.

Corn crusade rightfully refers to the “Post-Stalin Soviet Union,” rather than calling the country Khrushchev's or associating it with the Thaw period. This is very much a book on “getting out of Stalinism.” Hale-Dorrell's is a precious contribution to efforts to understand the consequences and decipher the traces of Stalinism, which did not vanish in a single day in March 1953.

This question of being done with Stalinism concerns not only actors of Khrushchevan society but scholars who for a long time also tried to grasp the post-Stalin USSR through a Stalinist perspective. Hale-Dorrell deconstructs convincingly the idea that control of political power would have been enough to get reforms enacted. Khrushchev also had to cope with “functionaries whose practices encumbered efforts to implement policies” (168). For the author, this is more about the functioning of the Soviet system itself than about a form of resistance (“a conscious or programmatic effort to reverse central policy” [195]). Most of the work is devoted to such center-periphery relationships and, in the end, to the limited agency of Moscow in “the undergoverned countryside” (86). Although a whole chapter is dedicated to local elites (Chapter 8), a more thorough exploration of local archives would have been appreciated, as at some point the reader gets the impression that central sources influence the perspective of the scholar. The impossibility of reform due to the resilience and conservatism of local leaders is a typical Soviet narrative, even a Stalinist one. One of the main points of Hale-Dorrell is to partly rehabilitate Nikita Khrushchev, who was mocked as a “kukuruznik” and criticized for his insufficiently realistic policies. He shows how the political and technological orientations of Khrushchev were consistent. For Hale-Dorrell, the USSR was neither a hapax nor an antithesis of the western world. He convincingly includes the USSR in a more general trend of modernization as part of the history of science and technology.

Wegren, Nikulin, and Trotskuk propose a very structured study, with a limpid plan. Some unwelcome typos notwithstanding, their book presents some very important conclusions. Even when weakened, Russians have never had to cope, after the 1950s, with a major problem of food insecurity. The three authors show the relative elasticity of food practices and the rural and urban populations’ power of adaptation. Temporary difficulties affected food habits, patterns of food consumption, and the structure of food origin. The Soviet/Russian diet was less based on meat and fish, and food expenditures (even today) are comparatively greater proportion of the family spending than in other developed countries (29% of a family budget vs. 9% in the UK in 2014). A relative improvement during the last ten years changed these overall trends only marginally.

The assessment of the Russian food system is particularly clear and useful. The authors analyze the food producers, highlighting the traces of the Soviet system as half of the production is still imputable to so-called “farm enterprises,” successors of Soviet kolkhozes and sovkhozes (with more than 100 employees). The latest trends are also enticingly described: concentration around agroholdings, diminution of the role and place of household production that has been so crucial during Soviet times and, finally, the development of private farms and entrepreneurs more than twenty-five years after they began to appear. The study of food distribution is less convincing and more expected. The three authors evaluate the evolution of a web of supermarkets. They also focus on food publicity and, lastly, test the hypothesis of Russia as a fast-food nation. The recent development of restaurants could, however, have been also interesting. More detailed attention to geography in these studies would have also been useful and appreciated.

The fruitful confrontation of these works allows focusing on some transversal questions. Both books show convincingly how food security and food problems have been a crucial political issue in the USSR and in Russia. Hale-Dorrell recalls the importance of food for Khrushchev, who had been witness/actor to two famines (the last one took place less than ten years before his arrival to supreme power). His political interpretation of food questions is crucial to his overall policy of “building communism,” and corn was part of it. The state was therefore thought of as a crucial actor in food politics. State intervention into the food question has indeed been a recurrent feature of Soviet and post-Soviet politics: from food brigades during the civil war to the development of collective catering throughout the first five-year plans to Khrushchev's corn policy. The chaos of the 1990s was certainly synonymous with a state withering away. When the situation was restored, state intervention came back, as convincingly shown by Wegren, Nikulin, and Trotsuk. Politicization, however, does not only mean state intervention; it also implies a political exploitation of food questions. This was the case in the early Soviet years, when access to food was determined by your social (and political) status (“He who does not work shall not eat”); but this was also the case during the 2000s when food policy was affected by the rise of nationalism. As “most Russians are not food insecure. . .concern over national food insecurity is a manufactured fear by an insecure regime” (149). This is an important point made by Wegren, Nikulin and Trotsuk (163–69), as is their study of Rossel΄khoznadzor, the federal agency in charge of food quality and health standards (31–34).

Both books also raise the question of the rural world's place in Russian society and politics. Hale-Dorrell, in a brilliant chapter (107–36), shows how corn politics were also a way to form new citizens. The meaning of the rurality in an increasingly urban society, however, was not easy to convey. The same question is asked of the Russian authorities after 2000. Their main aim is to keep people in a rural world that annually loses population, where peasants belong to the world of yesterday. How to maintain the viability of this world is still a topical question. Trends such as agritourism or organic farming that may be detected elsewhere among the developed countries are still very much stammering in Russia.

The way the western world is used as a benchmark for Russia is another fascinating recurrent dimension in both books. Hale-Dorrell insists on the importance of the American model (industrial farming, utilization of hybrids) for Khrushchev. The Soviet leader, however, was convinced of the neutrality of the technology. For him, a truly Soviet model based on American technology was viable. Hale-Dorrell offers very good insight on this. The west as an element of contrast in terms of standards of living could be found in Khrushchev's motto “to catch up and overtake” the west. The authors of Food policy also regularly use the comparison with the west to evaluate the situation in Russia.

Both books are a welcome contribution to the developing field of food studies in the Soviet and Post-Soviet space.