1946-1947 - Famine in Ukraine
In 1946-1947 famine struck another blow in Ukraine. The famine began with a drought that devastated the southern oblasts of Ukraine. Instead of organizing aid to this region, Stalin cynically connected this famine to manifestations of "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism."
Of the three major famines that occurred in the Soviet Union (1921-1922, 1932-1933, 1946-1947) historians know the least about the last. This is partly due to the greater effectiveness of the Soviet government in controlling information after the War, and partly a consequence of historians’ preoccupations with earlier periods of Soviet history. It is clear, however, that as in the other two cases (and as indeed seems endemic to famines worldwide) a combination of factors was responsible for mass starvation in the Soviet countryside in 1946-47.
The year 1946 was a time of severe drought especially in Moldavia, most of Ukraine, and parts of the central black-earth and lower Volga regions. The grain harvest was only 39.6 million tons as compared to 47.3 million in 1945 and 95.5 million in 1940, the last full year before the war. The timing and nature of the extreme food problems experienced in this famine conform to the general pattern of Soviet famines in which urban food supply problems gave rise to increasing pressure on the peasantry and a general reduction of stocks, which when complicated by drought and harvest failure produces a rural famine.
On 15 October 1946 Khrushchev, who until Lazar Kaganovich's arrival was the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and head of the Ukrainian SSR, sent a letter to Stalin, explaining that the drought has lowered grain yields by half, in comparison with the original estimates. This letter and subsequent ones request that the grain-procurement plan be curtailed. Khrushchev recalled Moscow's reaction: "Stalin sent me a most brutal, insulting telegram saying that I am a dubious person: I write notes in which I argue that Ukraine cannot fulfill agricultural procurements, and I request a huge number of cards to feed the people. This telegram had a devastating effect on me. I understood the tragedy that was threatening not only my own person but also the Ukrainian people, the republic: famine was irrevocable, and soon it began."
From the beginning of 1946 a large number of the hungry from their own initiative headed to Western regions of the republic where a few kolkhozes were established, where peasants gathered good harvest, and where subdivisions of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army were mounting resistance to the export of grain. Appeals made by the UPA urged peasants to help the hungry; hundreds of thousands of people came there for help.
Farmers, workers, peasants who came to western Ukrainian villages were exchanging their belongings for bread, porridge, potatoes, or buying food with money, and then were coming back to their families. Some of them were hired to work either temporarily or permanently. Peasants from Western regions were saving from starvation not just Ukrainians, but also starving Russians from Voronezh, Kursk, Orlovsk, Kaluga and other regions of Russia, as well as Byelorussians and Moldavians. But population of Western Ukraine was also suffering from forced collectivization and repressions, and in some regions also from famine. The most severe famine was in Chernivtsi region, where in the first post-war years collectivization was more widespread than in other regions, and mortality rate was exceeding birth rate.
On 26 November 1946 Stalin and Zhdanov sent a telegram to Nikita Khrushchev and Demian Korotchenko, the secretary of the CC CP(b)U, accusing them of halting grain procurements. The telegram demands that they put an end to their non-Bolshevik attitude toward the fulfillment of the grain procurement plan and to punish those who are concealing grain. Considering Khrushchev to be insufficiently "hard," in March 1947 Stalin dispatches Kaganovich, the head of the CC CP(b)U until December1947, to Kyiv. Kaganovich "did not complicate" the causes of the famine, for, just like in the early 1930s, he viewed the famine as a problem created by enemies.
In the spring of 1947 Khrushchev, wrote several letters to Moscow. According to documented proof in the form of memoirs, Stalin called Khrushchev a "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist" and categorically forbade any assistance to Ukraine. On 12 December 1947 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR "released" Khrushchev from his duties as head of the republic's Council of Ministers and replaced him with D. Korotchenko.
At the time when not only Ukraine was starving but also Moldavia, the Lower and Middle Volga Right Bank region, Rostov oblast, and the Central-Black Soil Zone, the USSR was exporting grain to Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. The president of Czechoslovakia, Klement Gottwald, whose country was one of the beneficiaries of these grain exports, declared: "The Soviet Union has saved us from starvation." Other data indicates that at the very time that people were dying of famine in Ukraine, Poland received shipments of 200,000 tons of grain and France-500,000 tons.
Child mortality rate was very high. In eastern, central, and southern regions of the country there was also stiff resistance to extorionating actions of the state. The OUN and UPA were counteracting repressive measures in western regions, not allowing taking away all food from peasants. 906 various UPA actions were fixed in 1947, armed conflicts and struggles with subdivisions of Ministry of Home Affairs – Ministry of State Security, armed party and state officials who were taking away bread from peasants. But despite of serious resistance to confiscation of bread, the repressions were still a common sight. Regime was violently suppressing any kind of protest. Post-war famine was a large-scale repressive action against population. Hundreds of thousands of the starving were saved from death by peasants from Western Ukraine. Famine hit villages the most. On June 1st, 1947, 1 million 74 thousand 314 people who suffered from dystrophy were registered. Famine provoked massive orphanhood. Saving their exhausted children from hunger, starving peasants were bringing them to cities and leaving them there hoping that kids would be taken to an orphanage. Even though there is a complex of causes of the famine, its spread and massive character, confiscation of bread from peasants was the most important. The famine reached its culmination point in the first half of 1947. During the times of widespread confiscation of bread the famine in Ukraine killed (according to the data of various researchers) from 100 thousand to 2.8 million people, mainly Ukrainian peasants-farmers. In many areas the famine lasted almost till the end of the 1940s. The famine brought death mostly to those who lived in the south: Ismail, Odessa, Kherson, Mykolayiv Zaporizhzhya regions. Those who lived in Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kirovohrad regions were also locked in deadly embrace of the famine. People who lived in villages and cities of Vinnytsya, Zhytomyr, Kamyanets-Podilskyy, Stalino, Voroshylovhrad, Kharkiv, Sumy, Zhytomyr regions were also suffering from hunger. People found themselves unprotected in the face of the system that led them to starvation, dystrophy, and death. The famine hit some regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Belarus, Moldavia, but repeatedly Ukraine was hit the hardest. A horrifying but little known fact is that during this period various branches of the Registry of Births and Deaths in Ukraine alone registered nearly one million deaths by starvation. In recent years several books have been written on the famine of 1946-47. They are based on unique documents revealing the true situation in Ukraine, which was experiencing a third famine. With the aid of Ukrainian currency, i.e., Ukrainian grain, Moscow was feeding the Communist regimes that it had created in Eastern Europe.
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