Droughts and famines in Russia and the Soviet Union
The causes of the famine were different, from natural (droughts, crop failures, low rainfall in a certain year) and economic and political crises; for example, the Great Famine of 1931–1933, colloquially called the Holodomor, the cause of which was, among other factors, the collectivization policy in the USSR, which affected the territory of the Volga region in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
[7] The Red Cross staff also reported to the Minister of Agriculture and the head of the Committee for the provision of medical care to the population Alexey Ermolov that he was unable to identify any deaths directly from starvation.
The deadly Russian famine of 1921–1922 happened as a result of the ongoing civil war and garnered wide international attention, the most affected area being the Southeastern areas of European Russia (including Volga region, especially national republics of Idel-Ural, see 1921–22 famine in Tatarstan) and in Ukraine [uk].
[13] Fridtjof Nansen was honored with the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize, in part for his work as High Commissioner for Relief In Russia.
[15] After the outbreak of the Russian famine of 1921–1923, the European director of the American Relief Administration, Walter Lyman Brown, began negotiations with Soviet deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, in Riga, Latvia.
The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Soviet Russia.
[17][18] The ARA's operations in Russia were shut down on June 15, 1923, after it was discovered that the Soviet Union clandestinely renewed the export of grain to Europe.
Major causes include the 1932–33 confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities[1] which contributed to the famine and affected more than forty million people, especially in the south on the Don and Kuban areas and in Ukraine, where by various estimates millions starved to death or died due to famine related illness (the event known as Holodomor).
In addition to direct and indirect deaths associated with the famine, there were significant internal migrations of Soviet citizens, often fleeing famine-ridden regions.
A sudden decline in birthrates permanently "scarred" the long-term population growth of the Soviet Union in a way similar to that of World War II.
The legacy of Holodomor remains a sensitive and controversial issue in contemporary Ukraine where it is regarded as an act of genocide by the government and is generally remembered as one of the greatest tragedies in the nation's history.
[40] Robert Conquest held the view that the famine was not intentionally inflicted by Stalin,[41] while Michael Ellman's analysis of the famine concludes that there were several factors, primarily focusing on the leadership's culpability in continuing to prioritize collectivization and industrialization[22] due to their Leninist stance of regarding starvation "as a necessary cost of the progressive policies of industrialisation and the building of socialism", and thus did not "perceive the famine as a humanitarian catastrophe requiring a major effort to relieve distress and hence made only limited relief efforts.
"[42] During the Siege of Leningrad in Russia during the Great Patriotic War, as many as one million people died, while many more went hungry or starved but survived.
[43][44] The last major famine in the USSR happened mainly in 1947 as a cumulative effect of consequences of collectivization, war damage, the severe drought in 1946 in over 50 percent of the grain-productive zone of the country and government social policy and mismanagement of grain reserves.
