DOI: 10.4324/9781003161080-15 12 Imperial Biopolitics Famine in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1891–1947 Immo Rebitschek The term ‘biopolitics’ describes rationales for governing life and death in a society. Most historiographical analyses trace these rationales in a frame- work of national population control. The ‘societal body’ of a race/nation was the reference value and the object on whose behalf, life was fostered or ‘disallowed’. 1 This reading refects the experiences of most national states in the frst half of twentieth-century Europe, where nationality and citizenship became intertwined as political privileges 2 and where certain ‘bio-policies’ were used to preserve those privileges. The case of Tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union, however, suggests a different angle. Both were multi-ethnic empires with a diverse societal body. The key to governing these states was not to mobilize a major national narrative but to manage national/ ethnic differences in a wider supra-national framework. 3 This paper argues that biopolitics provided one of those managing techniques. Assuming that imperial rule is the pattern of an unequal relationship between the centre and its multi-ethnic peripheries, 4 ‘imperial biopolitics’ therefore refers to the principles of governing life and death that aim to preserve the imperial body, that is, to maintain control over heterogeneous and dependent socie- ties. Imperial biopolitics thus was about fostering or disallowing life to the beneft of imperial stability and/or control and not about securing a single national body. The modern empire was managing the biological needs and bodies of its different subjects in a concerted and institutionalized manner, treating them according their estate-based role in society. This chapter will follow this assumption by examining hunger relief pol- icies in Russian and Soviet history. The question of how and why famines occur should not be limited to the realm of state policies. The classical defnition of famine as an ‘acute and widespread lack of access to food’ already implies the multicausality of this phenomenon. 5 Still, the question of how states responded to such crises is an essentially biopolitical matter. Famine always brought up life into the ‘sphere of political techniques’. 6 From a very simplistic viewpoint, aid could either be provided or withheld, making famine relief policy an instrument to either ‘let live’ or ‘induce death’. 7 Furthermore, over the course of wars and revolutions, famine is the common biopolitical denominator in Russian history. Both late tsarist Biopolitics in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th Century : Fearing for the Nation, edited by Barbara Klich-Kluczewska, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/thulbjena/detail.action?docID=7077013. Created from thulbjena on 2022-10-14 19:32:50. Copyright © 2022. Taylor & Francis Group. All rights reserved.