Droughts and famines in Russia and the USSR

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Remember Those Who Starve! A Soviet poster from 1921.
Remember Those Who Starve! A Soviet poster from 1921.

Droughts and famines in Russia and the USSR tend to occur on a fairly regular basis, with famine occurring every 10-13 years and droughts every 5-7 years. Golubev and Dronin distinguish three types of drought according to productive areas vulnerable to droughts: Central (Volga basin, Northern Caucasus), and Central Chernozem Region), Southern (Volga and Volga-Vyatka area , Ural, Ukraine), and Eastern (steppe and forest-steppe belts Western and Eastern Siberia and Kazakhstan). [1]

Their report gives the following table of the major droughts in Russia. [1]

  • Central: 1920, 1924, 1936, 1946, 1972, 1979, 1981, 1984.
  • Southern: 1901, 1906, 1921, 1939, 1948, 1951, 1957, 1975, 1995.
  • Eastern: 1911, 1931, 1963, 1965, 1991.

The first famine in the USSR happened in 1921-1923 and garnered wide international attention. It was due to the Southern type of drought, the most affected area being the Southeastern areas of European Russia (including Volga area, or Povolzhye, especially national republics of Idel-Ural, see 1921-1922 Famine in Tatarstan) and Ukraine. Fridtjof Nansen was honored with the 1922 Nobel Prize for Peace, in part for his work as High Commissioner for Relief In Russia. Other organizations that helped to combat the Soviet famine were UISE (Union Internationale de Secours aux Enfants, International Save the Children Union) and the International Red Cross.

The second Soviet famine happened during the collectivisation in the USSR. In 1932-1933 confiscations of grain and other food by the Soviet authorities[2] caused a famine which affected more than 40 million people, especially in the south on the Don and Kuban areas and in Ukraine, where by various estimates from 5 to 10 million may have starved to death (the event known as Holodomor).[2] About 200,000 Kazakh nomads fled to China, Iran, Mongolia and Afghanistan during the famine. The information about this famine was suppressed by Stalin's regime.[3]

While the famine in Ukraine was part of a wider famine that also affected some other regions of the USSR, such as Kazakhstan,[4] parts of Russia and the Volga German Republic,[5] the name Holodomor is specifically applied to the events that took place in territories populated by ethnic Ukrainians.

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% of the grain-productive zone of the country and government social policy and mismanagement of grain reserves.[6] This led to an estimated 1 to 1.5 million excess deaths as well as to secondary population losses due to reduced fertility.[7] Partly as a result of this famine, unlike many countries in Europe and North America the Soviet Union did not experience a Post-World War II baby boom.

The drought of 1963 caused panic slaughtering of livestock, but there was no risk of famine. Since that year the Soviet Union started importing feed grains for its livestock in increasing amounts.

[edit] References and Notes

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Genady Golubev and Nikolai Dronin, Geography of Droughts and Food Problems in Russia (1900-2000), Report of the International Project on Global Environmental Change and Its Threat to Food and Water Security in Russia (February, 2004).
  2. ^ Legacy of famine divides Ukraine
  3. ^ U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, "Findings of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine" [1], Report to Congress, Washington, D.C., April 19, 1988
  4. ^ The Kazakh Catastrophe and Stalin’s Order of Priorities, 1929-1933: Evidence from the Soviet Secret Archives
  5. ^ The NDSU Libraries: Germans From Russia
  6. ^ The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines
  7. ^ M. Ellman, "The 1947 Soviet famine and the entitlement approach to famines," Cambridge Journal of Economics 24 (2000): 603-630.

[edit] General references

  • Zima, V. F. The Famine of 1946-1947 in the USSR: Its Origins and Consequences. Ceredigion, UK: Mellen Press, 1999. (ISBN 0-7734-3184-5)
  • Nikolai M. Dronin, Edward G. Bellinger, "Climate Dependence and Food Problems in Russia, 1900-1990: The Interaction of Climate and Agricultural Policy and Their Effect on Food Problems" (2005) Central European University Press ISBN 9637326103

[edit] External links

[edit] See also