Byzantine Practices of Grain Imports from the Black Sea Region: Some Soviet Parallels?

Immediately after the outbreak of WWII in June 1941, one of the most senior members of the highest political body of the Bolshevik Party, Secretary of the Central Committee Andrei Andreev, travelled for several months to the main grain-producing regions of the USSR. These were the territories of Northern Caucasus, which to this day remain Russia's main wheat-producing territory, followed by certain provinces on the Volga and Siberia. In the twentieth century, Andreev, who had been in charge of the North Caucasus region of the USSR in the 1920s, implemented certain reforms intensifying grain production as part of his inspections. This war-related intensification of grain production finds a striking similarity in the Eastern Roman practices. The Cherson theme in the 7th–12th centuries was apparently the last major territory to ensure the functioning in the Roman Empire of the reluctive remains of the ancient Roman institution of annona – subsidized by the state imports of wheat to the imperial capital. In turn, the northern Black Sea coast and the regions of the North Caucasus were the main suppliers of wheat to Cherson, which supplied the imperial armies. Constantine Porphyrogenitus in De Administrando Imperio describes in detail the institution of vasiliki, special envoys to the Chersonese theme. The paper discusses the possibility of the long-term comparison of Soviet and Byzantine practices in the scholarly frameworks. It also investigates the potential of such comparison in solving the ever-present problem of food security in the Black Sea area that remains in the news today.