As the recent situation on world food markets has been increasingly volatile and has been associated with relatively higher food prices, contributing to demonstrations and riots across the world, Russia’s agriculture has attracted much attention from economists, experts and policy-makers because they believe that the country could become the world’s largest and most reliable grain producer and exporter in the future and could therefore play a key role in global food security challenges. In fact, Russia, among other former Soviet Union countries such as Ukraine and Kazakhstan, has acquired a significant role in world grain markets in recent years as the expansion in domestic wheat production has resulted in increased exports. This late shift in global markets is far from being trivial, considering that the region is endowed with a large quantity of land with the most fertile soil (i.e. black soils) and that a relatively small proportion of land is dedicated to agricultural production. Some have already predicted that the region would supplant the United States as the wheat breadbasket of the world in the next decade (Liefert et al., 2010). However, the great potential for agricultural production and export in the region also seems particularly constrained by ad hoc policy decisions, the lack of financial liquidity or the existence of institutional and infrastructural issues (Fellman and Nekhay, 2012). Furthermore, the role of the region has been shaped by structural changes in the farming sector and rural areas which have resulted from the transition from a planned economy to a market economy.