Soviet famine of 1946–1947

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Soviet famine of 1946-1947 killed people who had already survived one of the deadliest wars in human history. Soldiers had come home. Cities were rebuilding. And yet, across the Ukrainian SSR, the Moldavian SSR, and wide stretches of Russia and Belarus, people were dying of hunger at a rate that would eventually claim somewhere between 900,000 and 2 million lives.

  What makes this famine so striking is not simply that it happened, but how it happened. A devastating drought in 1946 triggered the crisis, but it did not act alone. The Soviet government was simultaneously exporting grain abroad, stripping millions of citizens of their ration cards, and refusing to ask for outside help. Stalin's government knew famine was spreading. Foreign governments knew it too. And the world largely looked away.

  This is the story of the last major famine in Soviet history, one that took until the 1990s to receive serious scholarly attention, and one that remains tangled in questions of policy, politics, and culpability that historians are still debating today.

• 2. The War's Long Shadow

  ›

  World War II had left the Soviet Union with more than 25 million dead among its own citizenry. The damage to agriculture was staggering, particularly in the western parts of the country where fighting had been heaviest.

  When soldiers came home after 1945, they brought with them a birth spike that a broken food system was completely unprepared to handle. The number of births per 1,000 people climbed from 15.9 in 1945 to 24.9 in 1946. The Central Statistical Directorate registered 4.1 million births in 1946 and another 4.5 million in 1947. These infants would become among the most vulnerable victims of the famine that followed.

  The war had also produced a vast population of abandoned children. At the beginning of 1945-36,000 homeless children were wandering the streets of Moscow alone. These besprizornyye, as they were called, were a massive social problem that the government's patronat program struggled to contain. The program housed around 600,000 children during the war years, but hungry children kept arriving faster than beds could be found.

  In the Ukrainian SSR alone, 129 buildings officially belonging to the Ministry of Health were still occupied by the military on the 1st of January 1946. Bureaucratic fights between demobilized soldiers and civilian institutions meant that hospitals sat unavailable even as malnutrition cases grew. Bread shortages had not been an emergency response to the drought; they had already been a persistent reality throughout 1945, with payment and wages in grain and money having stagnated or fallen since 1940 across most of the country.

• 3. The Drought and the Harvest

  ›

  The summer of 1946 was catastrophically dry. The Soviet government itself called the drought the worst since 1891, and international observers including British Foreign Office officials and journalist Alexander Werth noted the visible distress it caused among rural populations.

  The harvest that followed was the second lowest in Soviet history, yielding 39.6 million tons of grain, surpassing only the 1921 harvest of 36.2 million tons. Every major crop failed badly: grain yields came in at 64% of 1940 levels, sugar beets at 42%, sunflowers at 56%, and potatoes at 69%. This was measured against a 1940 baseline that had itself been shaped by the hardships of collectivization and political purges.

  Agriculture's physical capacity had been gutted by the war. Between 1941 and 1946, the number of tractors at machine tractor stations fell from 435,000 to 327,000, a drop of roughly a quarter. The horsepower available from those tractors fell to 71% of prewar levels. The number of horses on collective farms collapsed to 46% of the 1941 figure. Ukrainian collective farms retained only 69% of their large horned cattle compared to prewar levels, 27% of pigs, and 35% of sheep and goats. To compensate for the shortage of work animals, the Soviet government deployed political prisoners in agricultural labor.

  Historian Stephen G. Wheatcroft has noted that exact statements about Soviet grain yields are complicated by the systematic falsification of government statistics. Some figures accepted as authentic by earlier historians turned out to be distorted records designed to project strength rather than report reality.

• 4. Policy as Accelerant

  ›

  On the 26th of February 1946, the Soviet government cut commercial prices on food staples in an attempt to undercut black market activity. The result was immediate chaos. Bread lines of 500 to 600 people formed outside new stores in cities like Gorky and Molotov. In Stalingrad, all available bread sold out within two hours of the stores opening.

  By September of that year, policy had reversed course sharply. The Council of Ministers and the Central Committee launched the "campaign to economize on bread", raising ration prices for bread while delivering wage increases that did not come close to keeping pace. Then, on the 27th of September 1946, Decree No. 380, titled "On Economizing in the Consumption of Grain", took effect on the 1st of October. It was initiated by Stalin in direct response to letters from Boris Dvinski, Minister of Grain Products, dated the 7th and the 23rd of September, warning of the catastrophic harvest failure.

  The decree stripped ration cards from 23 million rural Soviet citizens, plus another 3.5 million urban residents, mainly unemployed dependants. The goal was to reduce grain consumption by 520,000 tons over eight months. Workers in the Ukrainian SSR at state farms who failed to meet grain quotas lost their food access entirely, as did their children and unemployed relatives.

  At the same time, grain exports continued. Between 1946 and 1948, the Soviet Union exported 5.7 million tons of grain, excluding cereals. The government was aware of the growing catastrophe. Andrey Andreyevich Andreyev, then Soviet Minister of Agriculture, pleaded with Stalin in October 1946 to redirect heavy machinery toward the agricultural sector. Stalin called a plenum of the Central Committee for February 1947 to address the issues, but it emerged at the plenum that Georgy Malenkov, who had been placed in charge of the Agricultural Section of the Central Committee, was largely ignorant of agriculture.

• 5. Children at the Breaking Point

  ›

  The famine killed people of all ages, but children were among its most prominent victims. Child mortality was massive, with hundreds of thousands dying before their first birthday.

  The number of homeless children, which had fallen from 341,134 in 1944 to 296,432 in 1945, rose again to 323,422 in 1946 and to roughly 360,000 in 1947. In just the last four months of 1946, the number of besprizornyye accepted at government checkpoints grew by more than 25%, to 103,923. The number of vagabond children picked up at rail stations rose from 57,260 in the second quarter of 1946 to 77,291 in the third quarter.

  The scale of the crisis forced childcare facilities into impossible decisions about which children to accept and which to turn away. Most child fatalities occurred within a month of admission to the care system, because children were arriving at states of starvation and dystrophy that were already beyond rescue. In the first four months of 1947 alone, 2,103 infants' home beds were added in the Russian SFSR and 5,901 in Ukraine, along with 4,639 children's hospital beds across the full year, but demand far exceeded these additions.

  In the third quarter of 1947, Gosplan lowered the number of meals to be provided to nurseries in Ukraine from 72,000 to 61,200, even as the famine was still killing children.

  One documented victim was Dmytro Kravtsov, born in 1932 in the village of Novooleksandrivka in Kirovohrad Oblast. His father, Panas Kravtsov, a veteran of the Winter War and World War II, had been deported to Kamchatka on a case fabricated by the NKVD. Dmytro died of starvation in 1946 at the age of 14.

• 6. The Cold War Calculation

  ›

  The famine unfolded against a backdrop of rapidly deteriorating relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Each government made choices about the famine based primarily on how those choices served their own geopolitical interests.

  On the 1st of March 1946, the Truman administration established the Famine Emergency Committee under former president Herbert Hoover. But the Soviet Union was not included in its scope. Truman had been briefed on the disastrous situation in Russia at the latest by the 16th of December 1946, and anticipated that Soviet requests for American aid were imminent. They never came.

  By November 1945, the U.S. Joint Intelligence Staff had already concluded that the Soviet Union was so weakened by war that it would not be ready for another major conflict for at least 15 years. Yet the Truman administration chose to allow the Soviet government to maintain its outward posture of strength. This suited American purposes: the appearance of a threatening Soviet Union helped build domestic and international support for the Truman Doctrine, announced in 1947, the Marshall Plan in 1948, and the formation of NATO in 1949.

  The Soviet government, for its part, had declined in July 1946 to join the International Emergency Food Council, formed under the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, because membership would have required disclosing economic statistics. When UNRRA head Fiorello La Guardia met with Stalin on the 29th of August 1946 to discuss the situation, Stalin went against all expectation by strongly underplaying the severity of the crisis rather than overstating it. The UNRRA was shut down under American pressure in early 1947, at precisely the moment famine deaths were reaching their peak.

• 7. Death Toll and Aftershocks

  ›

  Mortality peaked in early 1947. Deaths reached a first peak in March, then a second peak in May and June, and declined afterward as the 1947 harvest proved reasonably successful. Demographic data indicates that famine as a mass phenomenon had ended by the beginning of 1948.

  Estimates of the total death toll range widely. The Black Book of Communism, which has been heavily criticized for inflating casualty figures elsewhere, places the number at a minimum of 500,000, making it one of the lower mainstream estimates. Historian Cormac O Grada, writing in 2019, estimated 900,000 deaths: roughly 500,000 in the Russian SFSR and Byelorussian SSR combined, 300,000 in the Ukrainian SSR, and 100,000 in the Moldavian SSR. Timothy Snyder and Isupov each estimated around 1 million. Venjamin Zima, writing in 1996, estimated 2 million.

  In the Moldavian SSR, recorded deaths linked to starvation between 1946 and 1947 reached 100,000 to 115,000, approximately 5% of the population. Incidents of cannibalism were documented there. In the Ukrainian SSR, in just a few days in October 1947, some 76,192 Ukrainians were deported into the Gulag system as the government cracked down on dissent tied to the famine.

  Civilian living standards across the Soviet Union remained below prewar levels for years after the famine. Urban heavy industry returned to 1940 production levels by 1948. Urban light industry and agriculture took until 1949 or 1950. Civilian living standards overall did not return to 1940 levels until 1953. On the 20th of October 1948, the Soviet government adopted the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature in direct response to the damages of the drought, a large-scale program of land reclamation and windbreaks that would itself become a defining project of the late Stalin era.

• 8. History Written Late

  ›

  Within Soviet historiography, the 1946-1947 famine was for decades buried beneath the massive scholarly and political attention given to the 1932-1933 famine. It took until the 1990s for the later famine to become a subject of serious study.

  Venjamin Zima published the first full-length monograph on the subject in 1996, titled Golod v SSSR 1946-1947 godov: proiskhozhdeniie i posledstviia. Zima argued the famine was intentional, a premeditated punitive measure against the peasantry, drawing parallels with other late Stalin era political campaigns like the Doctors' plot. Nicholas Ganson criticized this framing for placing too much weight on domestic political scheming and too little on the devastation of World War II. Stephen G. Wheatcroft agreed with Zima's three principal factors, which were postwar difficulties, the drought, and food requisitioning, but took issue with Zima's reliance on official Soviet statistics and his claim that the government held large grain reserves it chose to withhold.

  In 2000, Michael Ellman applied Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's entitlement approach to famines, first developed in Sen's 1977 study of the 1943 Bengal Famine, to conclude that the 1946-1947 famine was a preventable food availability decline, meaning a great many deaths could have been avoided if state-controlled food had reached the people who needed it.

  Nicholas Ganson's 218-page study, published in 2009, has become a standard work in the field. Igor Casu of Moldova State University in Chisinau has produced some of the most significant scholarship specifically on the Moldavian experience. The famine remains part of the ongoing conversation in Ukraine about Soviet-era violence, situated by scholar Raphael Lemkin within what he described as a broader pattern of harm to the Ukrainian people spanning from 1920 to 1947.