Soviet famine of 1946–1947
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.
[7]: 14 The hardships of war had also left their impact on the diversity (or lack thereof) in nutrition, and most Soviet families survived on diets that almost entirely consisted of bread and potatoes, with only little fruit, vegetables, or proteins.
[30] Early breakdowns in the food distribution system were already visible by December 1945 and January 1946, where bread quality was decreasing and waiting times in front of stores and bakeries grew.
While the effort by SRCRC aid workers on the ground were genuine and well-intentioned, the organization often ran into bureaucratic and financial impasses, and at times even faced obstruction from the Soviet government.
[19] The population groups that continued to be most affected by the famine were children, the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled (including war invalids), and those who were employed in non-manual jobs (such as teachers and clerks).
Most child fatalities happened within a month of admission to the childcare system, as many children entered the hospitals or nursing homes at states of hunger and dystrophy that were already desperate.
[6] The infrastructure of children's nursing homes and hospitals was negatively affected by the "bread-conversation" campaign that the government started in October 1946, as the reduction of food and staff in the state-provided health service threatened the childcare system, which had been ambitiously planned to expand considerably in 1947, with severe understaffing.
The government opened 600 stores in 250 cities on the first day of the reform, hoping to stem the predicted tide of new consumers, but failed to cope with the large demand.
In March 1946, Soviet cities that were affected by significant food shortages included Molotov, Arkhangelsk, Kotlas, Kirovgrad, Izmail, Sambir, Drogobychi, Lipetsk, Borisoglebsk, and Ust-Kamenogorsk (Oskemen).
[23] Cities around the entire union were affected by bread distribution breakdowns, but tight clusters of such incidents were especially notable in southern Ukraine, northwestern Belarus, and southwestern Russia.
[30] Over the course of summer, the advancing drought and the further agricultural impasses that resulted from it turned the economic situation in the Soviet Union to one of outright desperation, especially in the villages and the countryside, as well as small to middle-sized towns.
[23] In spite of the scepticism from local party officials, who were concerned that these reforms would prove unpopular in the face of growing food shortages,[24] the Soviet government controversially continued to export grain to other countries,[28]: 88 including France, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and others.
Stalin, partially receptive to Andreyev's suggestions, called a plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU for February 1947 to address agricultural problems in the postwar period.
This policy particularly affected the rural population, where the workers and administrators of the state farms, the Machine tractor stations (MTSs), and local industrial enterprises were largely kicked out of the ration system.
[24] The unexpected cutbacks in rationing over the course of October devastated the livelihoods of millions of citizens, especially those in the countryside who were not manual laborers, such as foresters, teachers and medical workers, along with unemployed dependants, such as the elderly or the disabled.
If the adult laborers failed to fulfill the expected delivery loads on time, they were under threat of losing their access to payments in the form of food, as were their children and unemployed relatives.
[6] The Kaluga provincial office sent specific stories to the Central Committee, describing employees of state farms, including widowed mothers and veteran tractor operators, receiving far less than the food they earned by work, and contracting malnutrition-related illnesses as a result.
Nonetheless, the currency reform brought a significant increase in the quality and quantity of consumer goods in stores in the larger cities, and many businesses' inventories began to approach the (comparative) abundance of the prewar era.
The SRCRC at times faced red tape and obstruction from the government, particularly when they attempted to cooperate on the local or regional levels with clergy and religious groups.
As news of the imminent price hikes for food spread among the general population in September 1946, some were in disbelief at a policy so apparently in opposition to communist ideology.
Others found the scapegoat in the Western powers, believing that a growing threat of war with the UK and US forced the Soviet government to raise grain prices.
The public explanation made no reference to the ongoing agricultural drought, and the implicit support for the policy by Stalin somewhat appeased those parts of the civilian population that were influenced by the leader's cult of personality.
The population groups that continued to be most affected by the famine were children, the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled (including war invalids), and those who were employed in non-manual jobs (such as teachers and clerks).
Families with only one breadwinner (usually widowed single mothers whose husbands died in World War II) were particularly affected, as were orphaned children who lost both their parents.
While some of these institutions were of considerable effectiveness, some emergency responses, like those organized by Moldavian SSR Minister of Health M. Sukharev in April 1947, when the famine deaths were already in full swing.
The Soviet Union declined participation in this organization, as it would have required disclosure of several critical economic statistics, and as a result lost access to a valuable possible avenue of foreign aid.
The Americans wanted to use the growing Cold War rivalry and Moscow's self-consciousness about Soviet global prestige to lessen the strain placed on the United States by UNRRA contributions, to which the U.S. was the main contributor.
[19] The fact that the Soviet Union publicly obscured its domestic famine, and thus its comparative international weakness, allowed the Truman administration to point to the USSR as an imminent and serious military threat.
Zima's approach was criticized by Nicholas Ganson for being overly focussed on Soviet domestic political history, and putting too little weight on the historical context of World War II.
[58] The book was acknowledged by Stephen G. Wheatcroft as an important work,[22] and has been positively reviewed by J. Eric Duskin, who called the work "important and provocative",[56] and Alexis Peri, who called it "lucidly written" and who elevated as main strengths of the books its intricately detailed analysis of domestic and global political contexts as well as larger Russian history, but who also noted Ganson's overreliance on sources affiliated with the CPSU and his failure to portray the suffering of Soviet peasants as vividly as the conflict between Truman and Stalin.
