Short answers, pulled from the story.
A severe drought struck the Soviet Union in 1946, described by officials as the worst since 1891. Grain yields fell to 64% of 1940 levels while potato harvests dropped to 69%. Agricultural machinery numbers had plummeted during the war years and work animals suffered massive losses.
Estimates of victim numbers vary widely ranging from several hundred thousand to two million. Cormac Ó Gráda states 900,000 perished during the famine while Timothy D. Snyder suggests around one million. Child mortality reached massive levels with hundreds of thousands dying before age one.
The Fourth Five-Year Plan demanded these exports as part of economic reform goals. Between 1946 and 1948, a total of 5.7 million tons of grain were exported from the USSR excluding cereals. Stalin proceeded regardless of local party officials expressing concern that these policies would provoke consumer outrage.
The 1946, 1947 famine remained overshadowed by the earlier Holodomor until the 1990s when serious academic study began. Venjamin F. Zima published Golod v SSSR 1946, 1947 godov: proiskhozhdeniie i posledstvia in 1996, marking the first full-length monograph on the event.
At the start of 1945, Moscow alone housed 36,000 wandering homeless children. The number grew to 323,422 by 1946 and reached an estimated 360,000 by 1947. These orphaned youths became known as besprizornyye or homeless children.