Introduction: Setting the Table

In 1998 Boris Yeltsin and his team of liberal reformers faced a problem: the price of bread was rising, and with it, the government’s hold on Russia’s econ omy and the country’s future was slipping. Bread is so central to the Russian diet and cultural identity that Yeltsin’s reformers excluded Soviet-era bread factories (khlebozavody) from the extensive privatization in the early 1990s. Municipal authorities continued to operate bread factories and tried to control bread prices while hyperinflation wreaked havoc across other sectors of the economy. In the fall of 1998, however, rising prices for key ingredients collided with price controls,