The Soviet famine of 1946–1947 was a major famine in the Soviet Union. It was also the last famine in Soviet and Russian history.
The estimates of victim numbers vary, ranging from several hundred thousand to 2 million. Recent estimates from historian Cormac Ó Gráda, state that 900,000 perished during the famine. Regions that were especially affected included the Ukrainian SSR with 300,000 dead, and the Moldavian SSR with 100,000 dead. Other parts of the Soviet Union such as the Russian SFSR and the Byelorussian SSR were also affected with 500,000 deaths. Elsewhere, malnutrition was widespread but famine was averted. The famine is notable for very high levels of child mortality.
The famine has been attributed in part to the effects of World War II, and in part on government policy. The war had destroyed part of the country's agricultural infrastructure, and the post-war demobilization of the Soviet troops is thought to have caused a new baby boom. The increase of the population at the time of an already ongoing food shortage was one of the causes of the famine. A severe drought in 1946 resulted in a poor harvest, while the Soviet government raised the food prices and made food unaffordable. The government continued exporting food during the famine, and declined to seek international assistance.
Causes Several leading causes of the famine have been identified by historians.
World War II resulted in massive infrastructural damage, especially in the agriculture in the west of the country, as well as over 25 million deaths among the Soviet citizenry. The return of demobilized troops from the war resulted in a concurrent spike in births that the system was unprepared for. The hardships of the war, especially food shortages, lasted beyond August 1945 and were still pressing issues in summer of 1946. The drought of 1946 stifled the desperately needed recovery of Soviet agriculture, and resulted in a harvest significantly lower than the harvest of 1945. The drought was described as the most severe since 1891. The Soviet government was overzealous in its determination to advance economic reform, and reduced eligibility to ration cards in late 1946, while at the same time raising food prices. To avoid the appearance of global weakness, the Soviet government continued food exports and declined to seek international assistance.
The famine peaked in early 1947 and declined in severity over the course of the year. After the reasonably successful harvest of 1947, mass starvation disappeared by the beginning of 1948. The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature was adopted by the Soviet government in late 1948 in response to the famine.
In Soviet historiography, the 1946–1947 famine has been largely overshadowed by the previous 1930–1933 famine, and it took until the 1990s for the 1946–1947 famine to receive notable historiographical attention.
Background The Soviet famine was the third and final of the major Soviet famines which occurred between the 1920s and the 1940s.
This "triune famine" resulted in millions of casualties by starvation, and it also left lasting cultural and economic scars on the affected regions. Michael Ellman counts the time which spanned the years from 1941 to 1945, during World War II, as its own famine, which would make the famine of 1946–1947 the fourth rather than the third major famine.Michael Ellman , The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines Cambridge Journal of Economics 24 (2000): 603–630. The second major famine, which mainly lasted from 1930 to 1933, has attracted considerable attention. Sometimes called the Holodomor or the "terror famine," the proceedings of this famine which occurred across most of the Soviet Union, most notably in the Ukrainian SSR were recognized as a genocide by the government of Ukraine in 2006, and since then, they have been recognized as a genocide by the governments of several other countries. The Soviet state had received considerable international aid during the Russian famine of 1921–1922 from the American Relief Administration (ARA) and other organizations. While the Soviet Union had accepted this help in July 1921, it did not request or accept any large scale assistance in 1932–1933, and would again fail to request foreign assistance in 1946–1947.
While each famine had elements which made it unique, all three of them were partially aggravated by the ideologically driven government policy of the Lenin and Stalin governments, such as grain requisitioning, red trains, or forced economic collectivization.
Several main reasons for the famine of 1946–1947 have been identified by historians: The devastation caused by World War II, the 1946 drought, the lack of autonomy of the Soviet peasantry, and the Soviet government's inability to implement effective policies to counteract the starvation and the famine.
The impact of World War II The Soviet Union was engaged on the Eastern Front of World War II between 1941 and 1945, and suffered more than 25 million casualties.
While the three major Soviet famines (1921–1922, 1930–1933, 1946–1947) are often seen as parts of a greater whole ("triune famine"), there is a major difference between the 1930–1933 famine and the other two. Both the 1921–1922 and the 1946–1947 famines were immediately preceded by massively damaging major military conflicts, the Russian Civil War (and World War I) and World War II, respectively. Military demobilization concurrently resulted in a large number of unemployed soldiers, disabled veterans in need of government support, and a birth spike as the soldiers returned to their wives.
Additionally, the war had left the children in the USSR particularly vulnerable. Many had lost both parents, and many more had lost their fathers. Hundreds of thousands were homeless, and hundreds of thousands more were dependent on single mothers for survival. The crisis of young parents led to large numbers of parents abandoning their children, and children became one of the primary victim demographics of the famine.
Mobilization during World War II had taken large amounts of manpower out of civilian employment, including agricultural labor, and even after demobilization, many soldiers struggled to find employment. Military demobilization also resulted in a birth spike as the young men returned home, and the number of births per 1,000 people increased from 15.9 in 1945 to 24.9 in 1946, thus greatly increasing the number of children under the age of twelve months (who would be among the main groups of starvation deaths in the famine). The Central Statistical Directorate (TsSU) registered 4.1 million births in 1946 and another 4.5 million in 1947. Additionally, there were constant bureaucratic conflicts between members of the military and the civilian world, notably doctors and nurses, as the Red Army was slow to vacate buildings it had occupied (notably hospitals) during the war. In the Ukrainian SSR alone, 129 buildings that officially belonged to the Ministry of Health were still occupied by other institutions on 1 January 1946, most usually the military.
Many children in the Soviet Union were left orphaned by the war, with many other losing one of their parents (usually the fathers). These besprizornyye (беспризорные, "homeless") became a massive societal and economic problem, with 36,000 homeless children wandering the streets of Moscow alone at the beginning of 1945. The Soviet government worked with the patronat (патронат, "protectorship") program to house orphaned children, housing some 600,000 during the war years, but the number of hungry children was still increasing.
The war had disrupted regular access to a secure food supply for many Soviet citizens, especially those under German occupation or caught in protracted sieges (most famously the Siege of Leningrad), and many tens of thousands were threatened by starvation even in August 1945, as the war was concluding. Even industrial workers, who were ideologically the favored class in Soviet society, complained that their nutrition was not improving even as the war was ending. Bread shortages persisted throughout 1945 and into 1946, and difficulties in the food supply were not isolated local incidents, but a large-scale systemic problem to feed the population.
Payment and wages, which were partially given in grain and partially in money, had also stagnated or declined. In various areas, particularly the Ukrainian SSR and the Saratov Oblast within the Russian SFSR, these declines were massive. Only a handful of areas, like the Armenian SSR, saw workers' pay increase from 1940 to 1945. +Worker pay by regionAverage amount of grain and money distributed to collective farmers per earned workday per regionRegionGrain (kg)Money (rubles)1940194519401945Russian SFSRAt-large1.60.60.640.61Saratov Oblast2.90.70.60.42Altai Krai0.80.40.860.88Krasnodar Krai1.40.81.351.61Ryazan Oblast1.10.60.280.29Kalinin Oblast1.61.10.410.97Voronezh Oblast1.50.40.470.29Ukrainian SSR2.20.51.160.61Uzbek SSR0.30.52.572.55Kazakh SSR1.30.80.971.12Georgian SSR1.92.51.984.08Azeri SSR2.02.32.141.95Kyrgyz SSR1.60.81.591.03Tajik SSR1.81.23.162.31Armenian SSR1.82.21.882.75Turkmen SSR0.40.93.392.79
Weather conditions and drought In 1946, the Soviet Union was affected by a drought. The Soviet government called the 1946 drought the worst drought in Russia since 1891, although such claims have proven difficult to unambiguously prove or dismiss. Regardless of the comparative severity of the drought of 1946, it is beyond dispute that the summer of 1946 was extremely dry, and international observers such as Alexander Werth and the British Foreign Office noted the difficulties inflicted by the harsh weather on the peasantry. The weather was a stark contrast from the war years, during which, with perhaps 1943 the only exception, weather conditions had been favorable to crop production.
Transformation of agriculture and the peasantry