Scenes of Starvation and Survival Cannibalism: Colonial Food Security and Violence in Seventeenth-Century Siberia

Based on published records, the article focuses on state-funded food security in seventeenth-century Siberia. It explores the local dynamics and failures of food distribution in exceptional circumstances: exile, captivity, shipwreck and disaster. First, the article highlights the most food insecure individuals and groups: the religious dissident Avvakum Petrov and his household as well as the Indigenous captives. Next, it revisits two concurrent cases of survival cannibalism that unfolded among military service personnel and settlers in the 1640s. The article argues that in each case food security was constitutive of the overlapping, interconnected structural forces, such as institutional deficiencies, local-based agency, Indigenous food encounters and violence. My reading seeks to connect several episodes of human degradation in order to construct a sustained narrative of food security and its absence in the crucial period of early modern Russia’s empire building.