Oleksandra Veselova. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Volume 30, Annual 2008.
The post-World War II famine in Ukraine was directly connected to events taking place in the international and European arenas, as well as to the foreign and domestic policies of the Soviet Union, of which the Ukrainian SSR was a component part. After the war, which ended with the victory of the USSR and its anti-Nazi allies, Soviet influence extended into the countries of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.
After the death of US President Franklin Roosevelt, relations between the USSR, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other states became more complicated. By 1946 these countries were already separated by the Iron Curtain, and the Cold War had begun. Because of territorial issues, the conflict between the USSR and the United States turned into a global competition. The Soviet Union sought to exert its influence in the governments of Europe. However, a fundamental change was set in motion by the address delivered by US Secretary of State George Marshall at Harvard University on 5 June 1947, in which he declared that it was essential to provide economic assistance to the countries of Europe in order to help them overcome the effects of the recent conflict as quickly as possible. The USSR was also invited to discuss the plans for the reconstruction of Europe, but it declined to participate.
Since they owed their positions of power to Joseph Stalin, the leaders of most of the formally independent countries of Central and Eastern Europe were forced to bow to the dictates of the USSR’s ruling All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik) (AUCP[b]), which demanded they follow the Soviet model of building communism. The “communization” of the governments and societies in these “people’s democracies” began, resulting in a division of Europe into two camps.
At the same time, the USSR, which had suffered colossal losses in population and material resources during the war, continued to build state- administrative “socialism.” And although millions of people found themselves in a state of semi-serfdom, serfdom, or outright slavery (in the case of those who were imprisoned), many harbored a faint hope for the advent of democracy. Instead, the totalitarian regime stabilized and became even stronger. Stalin and his associates, convinced that communist totalitarianism had saved their country during the war, restored the system of the subordination of the Soviet republics to the Moscow center. A US State Department document of the day emphasized that “the Ukrainian SSR is not a sovereign independent state, and it does not even possess a sufficiently high level of autonomy. The agreement governing its accession to the United Nations in 1945 was reached under the pressures of wartime. The establishment of diplomatic relations with Ukraine would facilitate the Soviet government’s maneuvers to convince foreign governments that the fictional autonomy of Soviet republics was real.” The decision to create the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Ukrainian SSR was aimed at the goal of securing additional votes in the United Nations and various specialized multinational agencies. In all other respects, however, Ukraine was a colony subordinated to Moscow.
Militarization continued to be the principal goal of Soviet economic policy even in peacetime. On 18 March 1946 the newly elected Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted another Five-Year Plan for economic development for the years 1946-50. The main goals were as follows: to reach the prewar (1940) level in two years-that is, by 1948-and to surpass it substantially by the end of 1950. The more concrete targets of this fourth Five-Year Plan were to complete the Soviet economy’s postwar reconstruction; to exploit the production capacity of the military-industrial complex to boost the economic might of the USSR; ensure the further strengthening of the Soviet Union’s defense capability and equipping of its armed forces with the latest technology; and to surpass the prewar levels of the country’s national revenue and consumption. In support of the last task, a wide range of measures was to be adopted in order to increase food production, develop mass production of consumer goods, increase collective farm revenues, surpass the prewar level of agricultural development by 27 percent, increase commodity circulation, and eliminate the rationing system at the earliest opportunity. That was the plan. But what was the reality?
Traditionally, Soviet heavy industry grew at a much faster pace, and this is particularly true of the USSR’s military-industrial complex. The new postwar task of developing nuclear weapons required immense expenditures, and resources were siphoned off from the consumer sector, since there were no other sources of revenue. Most of the Soviet budget was directed at competing technologically with the West. Stalin considered the buildup of the military- industrial complex to be the USSR’s prime economic goal. As the Soviet leader explained at a meeting of voters in Moscow on 9 February 1946, “metals [are essential] for the production of armaments and equipment; fuel, for supporting the work at plants, factories, and transport; cotton, for manufacturing uniforms; grain, to supply the army with food.” The growth of military production and the militarization of the USSR took place literally on the country’s ruins.
Joseph Stalin, Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, and other Soviet leaders used their control of the party-state apparatus and intensified repressions in order to restore and develop the military-industrial complex and to secure the support of the newly established regimes of the “socialist camp” as future allies in the next world war, for which the Soviet Union was preparing. To this end they militarized the Soviet economy and increased the strategic grain reserves by extracting grain and other agricultural products from the countryside.
In keeping with a decision of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Central Committee of the CPSU, passed on 26 June 1946, the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR and the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine (CC CP[b]U) adopted a resolution on 4 July 1946, setting the quota for grain deliveries from the 1946 harvest at 340 million poods, or 5.4 million tons. On 22 July 1946 the CC CP(b)U and the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR, bowing to the Kremlin’s continuous pressure, increased the compulsory grain delivery quotas for twenty-three oblasts by 50 percent, based on reports of uneven yields in various regions of the republic, which put the quota at 362.75 million poods. Another resolution, adopted on 17 August 1946, again increased the grain delivery quota for thirteen oblasts-Kyiv, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia, Kam’ianets-Podilskyi, Poltava, Stalino (now Donetsk), Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Kirovohrad, Mykolaiv, and Kherson-by as much as 100 percent, citing better than anticipated harvests as justification. Describing this period in his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev, who was then first secretary of the CC CP(b)U, wrote, “I could see that a catastrophe was looming that year. How it would end was difficult to predict.” The Ukrainian leader went on to note that any request submitted to Stalin to reduce the grain quota could brand its author as an “enemy of the people.” According to Khrushchev, “In those days this was done in a flash-in the blink of an eye a door opened and you were in the Lubianka. Although I tried to convince [Stalin] that the notes I had sent represented the true state of affairs and that Ukraine needed help, this only made Stalin angrier.” After having delivered, on the Moscow center’s directives, everything that had been grown, collective farms were stripped of resources to pay for the workday units (trudodni) that the peasants had earned by their heavy labors. The countryside was in the grip of famine.
The causes of the famine were complex: postwar upheavals, drought, the poor harvest of 1946, the economic policies of the AUCP(b) and the Council of Ministers of the USSR that were aimed at increasing the Soviet Union’s military potential by impoverishing the peasantry, forcible state grain deliveries (confiscations), exorbitant taxes levied on the peasantry, state loans, nonpayment of wages, and the elimination of bread ration cards for a large proportion of rural inhabitants and urban residents. After depriving its population of grain, the USSR then began exporting the confiscated grain as well as other agricultural products to various European countries in order to forestall their reliance on imports from the United States. In 1946 the Soviet Union shipped 1.7 million tons of grain to Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.
Numerous archival documents and testimonies of famine survivors bear witness to the methods of “economizing on grain” in the “country of workers and peasants.” As a researcher of this topic, I can personally attest that dependent children were taken off the rolls of the ration-card system. In 1946, my six-month-old sister, ten-year-old brother, and I (a seven-year-old) were deprived of our ration cards in the city of Dniprodzerzhynsk in Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
Scholars are divided over the question of when the postwar famine began. Oleksandr Zadniprovs’kyi suggests the fall of 1946; Michael Ellman, July 1946. According to my own research, starvation began in 1945 and a full-scale famine broke out in 1946. Serhii Pyrozhkov contends that the famine began in January 1947.
Starving Ukrainian peasants were not permitted to travel outside the raions in which they resided. Despite this travel ban, in early 1946 large numbers of starving peasants headed for the western oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR, where there were few collective farms, an adequate harvest had been gathered, and where detachments of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) were mounting armed resistance to the grain confiscations. The UPA issued calls to the population of the western oblasts to provide relief to the starving. The peasants of western Ukraine saved not only their countrymen from death by starvation but also Moldovans who were fleeing the famine, as well as starving Russians from Voronezh, Kursk, Orlov, Kaluga, and other oblasts of the RSFSR. However, the people of western Ukraine also suffered, as a wave of repressions and a forced collectivization campaign descended on them. Some western Ukrainian regions were also struck by famine. Starvation was particularly severe in those regions that had been annexed to the Ukrainian SSR in 1939-41, such as Chernivtsi oblast, where the scale of the collectivization drive in the first postwar years was larger than in other oblasts, and where the mortality rate surpassed the birthrate. A savage famine also ravaged the Izmail area in southern Ukraine (a separate oblast until 1954).
Since the Soviet Ukrainian government suppressed all information about the famine, official mortality statistics were distorted. Data gathered by the demographers Arnol’d Perkovs’kyi and Serhii Pyrozhkov indicate that the number of officially registered deaths stood at 369,000.” Widespread starvation intensified, and in the spring and summer of 1947 it turned into a full- blown famine, even though the Soviet state had considerable mobilizational reserves of 6 million tons of grain at its disposal in 1946 and 4.7 million tons in 1947.
Zadniprovs’kyi believes that the postwar famine peaked in the spring and summer of 1947. Ellman dates the peak to the period between February and August 1947, while Pyrozhkov contends that it peaked in March of that year. My own research places the peak of the famine in the winter and spring of 1947.
Scholars also disagree about the duration of the famine. Pyrozhkov claims that the famine lasted from January to August 1947; Ellman, from July 1946 to 1948; and Zadniprovs’kyi, from the fall of 1946 to 1948. In my opinion, the famine lasted from January 1946 to 1948. Some researchers suggest that the famine persisted from early 1947 until the next harvest.
The famine affected eighteen of the Ukrainian SSR’s twenty-five oblasts, and over three million people starved. Yet, in 1947 the Soviet Union exported 800,000 tons of grain. Klement Gottwald, the president of Czechoslovakia, which took delivery of 600,000 tons of grain, wrote in praise of Soviet aid: “The Soviet Union saved us from famine.” The USSR also provided the countries of the “people’s democracies” with considerable financial assistance.
On 5 September 1947 the Ministry of Procurement of the USSR sent a telegram to Kaganovich, the secretary of the CC AUCP(b). It stated: “We have earmarked another 208,000 tons for export from Ukraine as an amount transferred from the state reserve, as designated by the Ministry of Food Reserves. As a result, the total amount of grain shipped out of Ukraine in September will reach one million tons.” On 14 December 1947 a currency reform was introduced, and the ration-card system for food and industrial goods was abolished. However, these economies, achieved at the general population’s expense, were not channeled into social programs or relief efforts but into the economy, a key sphere of which was the Soviet military-industrial complex.
In early 1947, 448,000 cases of starvation-related dystrophy were recorded in Ukraine. There were 66,651 cases recorded in the cities of Stalino (now Donetsk) oblast; 32,237 in urban centers in Zaporizhia oblast; and 24,480 in Dnipropetrovsk oblast.
However, the famine mostly affected the countryside. As of 1 June 1947 there were 1,074,314 recorded cases of dystrophy throughout Ukraine, 77 percent (828,429 people) of which were rural residents. The highest number of starving peasants afflicted by dystrophy was recorded in Vinnytsia oblast (133,442), followed by Kyiv oblast (66,000), Kharkiv (63,677), Zaporizhia (56,507), Izmail (52,447), Mykolaiv (50,807), Dnipropetrovsk (52,767), Odesa (48,316), Poltava (44,929), Kam’ianets-Podilskyi (44,533), Kherson (36,312) and Sumy (36,427). As of 20 June 1947, Ukraine had a total of 1,154,378 cases of dystrophy. According to incomplete data, the death toll in 1947 reached 628,000 (Perkovs’kyi, Pyrozhkov).
People of various nationalities, the majority of them Ukrainians, suffered and died in cities, towns, and villages. In continuing to implement the repressive policy of grain requisitions that created famine and concealing the truth about collectivization in western Ukraine, during the course of which so- called kulaks (in fact, hard-working private farmers) were deported and thereby condemned to death by starvation, Stalin and the entire totalitarian system, which regarded the agrarian question as the foundation of the nationality question, set out to destroy independent Ukrainian farms-viewed as the social base of “Ukrainian nationalism.” However, it was these very farms, located in Ukraine’s western oblasts, that saved the inhabitants of the large grain-producing regions of the country from starving to death in the postwar years.
The famine of 1946-47 was concealed by various means, since documents recording the causes, course, and consequences of the disaster would have revealed the mechanism of its creation and the names of those who were responsible for engineering it-the leadership of the AUCP(b) and the CP(b)U, and the Soviet government. If the party-administrative center had so desired, famine could have been avoided. The state could have redistributed the grain and helped the peasants in the affected districts instead of dispossessing them. The postwar famine in the Ukrainian SSR, which had been engineered by the Soviet government’s policies, continued to escalate.
The majority of Ukrainian peasants tried to save themselves as best they could. In a desperate bid to survive, they were forced to eat grass, tree bark, and various other food surrogates. One survival method was to gather ears of grain that remained in the fields of collective farms. Using millstones that they hewed out by hand, peasants would grind handfuls of the painstakingly gathered grain, mix in chopped leaves and grass, and bake biscuits (korzhi), pancakes (oladky), and pies (matorzhenyky). But the state put an end even to this means of survival by enforcing the notorious statute of 7 August 1932, “On the Protection of Socialist Property,” also known as the “Law of Five Ears of Grain” (Zakon pro piat’ koloskiv), and by handing down a new decree, which was issued by the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 4 June 1947. This law, entitled “On Responsibility for the Theft, Squandering, and Spoliation of Socialist Property,” denounced people driven to desperation as “pilferers” and “thieves.” Many acts of theft of ripening grain were committed by “people in extreme need” (hostropotrebuiuchi)-that is, the starving collective farmers. The authorities waged a struggle against their growing numbers by instituting various punishments and repressions, utterly heedless of the fact that it was the Soviet government itself which, by depriving starving individuals of the means of survival, had pushed them into breaking the law. Ninety percent of all criminal cases brought before the courts in 1947 involved “theft of ears of grain” by ordinary collective farm workers. There were also incidents of cannibalism, committed by people who had been driven insane by starvation.
Humanitarian donations from abroad were refused. The Ukrainian SSR accepted only the assistance offered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA)-not as a republic engulfed by famine (since, officially, there was no famine), but only as a war-torn state. In 1946-47 the Soviet Ukrainian republic obtained food and industrial goods valued at US$189 million. Between the first half of 1946 and the third quarter of 1947 UNRRA shipped 309,966 tons of food to the Ukrainian SSR. The bulk of this aid was distributed among the inhabitants of Stalino (now Donetsk), Voroshylovhrad (today Luhansk), Kharkiv, Kyiv, and Odesa oblasts.
In late 1947 Kaganovich, newly “elected” to the post of CP(b)U first secretary, replacing Khrushchev in accordance with Stalin’s instruction of 3 March 1947, and Khrushchev, the chairman of the Ukrainian SSR’s Council of Ministers, issued a joint report to the CC AUCP(b) on the fulfillment of the grain procurement plan.
Some scholars claim that famine was still raging in 1948, while others contend that the calamity was abating. But even as it was receding, people continued to die of exhaustion and various starvation-related diseases. The enfeebled peasants were forced to work as hard as before, but now they had to meet the targets outlined in the 1948 plan. For adults working on collective farms, the minimum mandated contribution was 120 workdays, and for minors, 50. During the course of the “second dekulakization campaign,” which was launched on Khrushchev’s initiative by means of a secret decree approved by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 21 February 1948, “On the Deportation from the Ukrainian SSR of Individuals Who Are Evading Labor Activity in Agriculture and Who Have an Antisocial Parasitic Lifestyle,” collective farm workers and independent farmers who failed to meet the minimum number of workdays were treated like convicts and deported to unpopulated regions of the USSR. Among the deported were many people who were physically incapable of fulfilling the minimum work quota as a result of disease, the elderly, and women with small children.
The decree was never published because of its patently anti-peasant character. Between 1948 and 1953, as many as 33,266 collective farm workers and 13,598 members of their families were deported from the Ukrainian SSR, but the peak year of deportations was 1948. This was the regime’s idea of tying the peasantry to collective farms. Meanwhile, Soviet grain exports were growing apace, and in 1948-50 they comprised up to 8 percent of the entire disbursement part of the budget.
In the years from 1948 to 1950, 12,000 “people’s verdicts” (hromadski vyroky) were handed down against peasants, but this type of repression brought little benefit to the regime.
Famine in the Ukrainian SSR persisted in a number of oblasts even after 1947-48, and in many areas it continued to be felt until the end of the decade. Furthermore, the population suffered from undernourishment until well into the mid-1950s. This postwar famine was one of the consequences of the Cold War. Essentially created by the totalitarian system, it was practically a carbon copy of the depredations visited upon the Ukrainian countryside during the 1930s Holodomor—a war waged by the government against its very own people. Once again, the Soviet authorities covered up the famine, turning it into a state secret.
Thus, the 1946-47 famine in the Ukrainian SSR, a colonially dependent and impoverished country that had been devastated by the recent war, was the result of the deliberate policies of the ruling Communist Party and the government of the USSR, which inflicted a postwar crisis on an exhausted people. Continually oppressed by the party and its command-administrative leadership, the Ukrainian countryside was subjected to the greatest pressure from state grain deliveries and taxation policies in the first postwar years.
Because of the paucity of sources, it is very difficult to calculate the number of victims of the postwar famine in Ukraine. Scholarly opinions differ on the death toll. They range from 100,000 (Bilas), 800,000 (Makoviichuk and Pyliavets’), over 1 million (Veselova), and as high as 2.8 million (Iashchuk). Also due to war losses, Ukraine’s population did not return to its prewar level until 1960. The preponderant majority of researchers consider this famine to have been intentionally created, while several scholars, including Iosyf Antokhii, Ivan Bilas, the author of this paper, Vasyl’ Pakharenko, and Petro Iashchuk, are convinced that it was a deliberate act of genocide against the Ukrainian people. Article 2(c) of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 9 December 1948 stipulates that “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” constitutes genocide.
If one compares the two major Ukrainian famines, one must first of all note that the state was led by the same group of men both in 1932-33 and 1946-47. Another similarity is to be found in state policies. The Holodomor in the 1930s was caused by a policy that was aimed at accelerating industrial development in the Soviet Union and by the forced channeling of funds to industry from the countryside through changes in economic relations there. In the 1940s rural regions were once again cast in the role of donor, supplying the financing for the development of industry aimed at the militarization of the USSR.
The Holodomor in the 1930s was created by the forcible collectivization of agriculture, dekulakization, the confiscatory state grain deliveries, taxes, and the state exploitation of peasants, which rose to unprecedented heights. Whereas in the early 1930s collective farms were created and existed for the most part to make it easier for the authorities to “take” the peasants’ grain-for which purpose terror by famine was applied under the newly recreated system of serfdom, which forbade collective farmers to leave their villages-after the war the peasants became genuine serfs within the collective farm system that served as an extraordinarily handy means for confiscating agricultural products. Just as in the 1930s, after the war collective farmers were forbidden to leave their villages without permission, they were not issued passports, and the elderly did not receive any pensions. Both in the 1930s and the 1940s the peasants were chased out to work, like slaves. The model statute of a postwar agricultural collective (Rus. artel’) thus consolidated a harsh form of serfdom throughout the Ukrainian countryside.
In both famines the peasants faced the same dilemma: a choice of “the collective farm or the grave” And the main cause of both famines was Stalinism itself, with its absolute disregard for laborers-human “cogs”-and the command-administrative system of serfdom. In the 1930s and the 1940s the creators of the famines utilized identical methods of repression. The differences lay in the circumstances and background against which the events that brought such tragedy to the people of Ukraine unfolded. During both the 1930s and the 1940s these events were extraordinarily complex. Whereas the climatic conditions in Ukraine in 1932-33 contributed to a good harvest, in 1946-47 the contrary was true: in 1946 Ukraine’s southern and eastern oblasts were affected by drought. In 1947 Ukrainian peasants managed to bring in a decent harvest, but once again drought decimated grain crops, leaving the residents of the southern oblasts-Izmail, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhia, and Dnipropetrovsk-without grain and vegetables. In the second half of the 1940s the poor harvest was exacerbated by the consequences of the bloody and ruinous world war and by the desire of the Moscow center, as in the 1930s, to establish total control over Ukraine in the postwar period. In the 1930s the ideologues of socialism considered the peasantry a “petty bourgeois element” In the 1940s this accusation was amplified by the peasants’ “fault” for having lived on German-occupied territory: in the view of the Soviet authorities, the peasants had come under the influence of enemy propaganda and needed to be “reeducated.”
The nonpayment or meager recompense for the labor of collective farmers, and the export of grain from Ukraine during the very period when people were starving to death played an important role in both famines. In 1932-33 more than 6.9 million tons of grain were exported to foreign markets, and after the war trainloads of grain from Ukraine were shipped to Germany under the slogan “To the German people from the Ukrainian people” In 1946 and 1947 alone 2.5 million tons of grain were exported abroad, and a significant proportion of it was donated for free to a number of countries.
The most difficult burden for the Ukrainian countryside and its laborers was the fulfillment of the inflated, unrealistic state grain deliveries that were monitored by specially authorized officials from various party and state agencies. Whenever a grain delivery plan was not fulfilled in the 1930s, authorized representatives mandated by Stalin’s directive confiscated food products from collective farms, as well as seed grain and emergency and fodder reserves. Soviet authorities did the same thing in the 1940s. Even if a collective farm managed to fulfill its plan, a new one was quickly imposed. And once there was no more grain-because state grain delivery plans frequently exceeded projected harvest yields and were thus impossible to fulfil—”activists” members of so-called tugboat brigades (buksyrni bryhady) were ordered to make repeat visits to peasants’ homes and yards, where they confiscated the last scraps of food and even personal belongings. In the 1940s the members of these tugboat brigades were often the same “activists” who had looted the starving in the 1930s. The actions of people who resisted the grain expropriations were characterized as “anti-Soviet,” “nationalistic” and “counter-revolutionary” and newspapers regularly published announcements about the execution by shooting of such “wreckers.”
The same punitive system was also in place in the postwar period. Even small children caught picking ears of grain were proclaimed criminals, and the aforementioned “Law of Five Ears of Grain” was still actively applied in the 1940s. Against the backdrop of the complex political situation in Ukraine in the early 1930s, when the top echelons of the imperialistic Soviet state were waging a struggle against opponents and a witch-hunt was launched against the intelligentsia and dissenting workers and peasants, the famine was a unique, sweeping punitive action. A similar picture existed in the 1940s. Between 1946 and 1952, for instance, more than 12,000 dekulakized peasants and their families, who had been accused of “concealment of grain,” “pilfering,” and “sabotage of the state grain deliveries,” were deported from western Ukraine to far-flung regions in the Urals and Siberia.
Just as in the late 1920s to early 1930s, when forcible collectivization and the state grain deliveries in Ukraine triggered social disorder and armed peasant revolts, so too in the 1940s, when harsh repressions were reinstated with renewed force in postwar Ukraine, the peasantry put up both active and passive resistance, often with their last energies, despite the constant pressure on the part of the government. The interests of the collective farmers were frequently championed by war veterans. The repressive measures in Ukraine’s western oblasts were counteracted by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which issued slogans such as “Death to Stalin and his clique-the organizers of the new famine in Ukraine!” and “Down with Stalinist collective farms-a tool for robbing grain and exploiting the peasants!” and actively prevented the requisitioning of agricultural products from peasant farms. Thanks to this resistance, the population of western Ukraine was able to hold onto its grain, although famine also affected parts of the western oblasts.
The famines of the 1930s and 1940s unfolded in very similar ways. As in the 1930s, in the 1940s large numbers of peasants, weakened from hunger, fell ill with dystrophy, typhus, tuberculosis, and other starvation-related diseases. In particular, large families, elderly people, and the families of soldiers killed in the war suffered during the famine of 1946-47. During both famines peasants tried to flee from their starvation-affected areas, but the Soviet authorities instituted blockades on the border. Starving people flocked to cities, but urban areas also suffered from a lack of bread. In 1933 starving peasants were not permitted to leave their villages to search for food in other regions of the Soviet empire. In the 1940s village residents-the producers of grain-also bore the burden of saving the cities from famine. In 1946, as a result of decisions handed down by the Communist Party and the Soviet government, more than 2.5 million people were deprived of food rations; for the most part, these were rural inhabitants who worked in cities. Both famines led to the rise of mass orphanhood, and common to both famines was the cessation-at the very peak of starvation-of food deliveries to children’s institutions, boarding schools, children’s homes, and orphanages. People ate pigweed, acacia blossoms, sparrows, cats, dogs, etc. Cannibalism, which was widespread during the 1930s famine years, was encountered in the 1940s as well.
The state’s assistance to the starving, which was tardy, insignificant, and did not meet the needs of the starving countryside, consisted mostly of a thin, fat-free broth (balanda) that was provided only to people working on collective farm fields. During both famines the Soviet government turned down donations of food from abroad.
In the 1940s starving peasants from southern, central, and eastern Ukraine received assistance from western Ukraine. The peasants of western Ukrainian oblasts came to the rescue of their starving countrymen as well as ethnic Russians, Belarusians, and Moldovans. The UPA circulated appeals among the peasants of western Ukraine, urging them to provide food to starving peasants who were arriving in search of sustenance. Hundreds of thousands were saved from death by starvation by the peasants of western Ukraine, but the Soviet authorities blocked the routes by which the starving sought to enter western Ukraine.
Just as during the 1930s Holodomor, the international community heard little about the postwar famine in Ukraine; both famines were taboo subjects and thus consigned to oblivion. The decision of the imperialistic Soviet system decision to conceal the famine completely was a feature common to both famines: they were a strict state secret. Stalin, called the “best friend of the Ukrainian peasantry,” and the basic instrument of his rule in Ukraine, the CP(b)U—a loyal unit of the AUCP(b)—sought to demonstrate only the nonexistent “advantages” of socialism and to create the mythical image of a “republic of people’s power and humaneness.”
The differences between the two famines lie above all in the scale of the two catastrophes. The famine of 1932-33 enveloped the entire territory of Soviet Ukraine at the time and led to extraordinarily tragic consequences: according to the findings of various researchers, that genocide claimed the lives of millions. The 1946-47 famine was on a markedly smaller scale: according to incomplete data, nearly 1.2 million people starved to death. With the exception of some western oblasts, this famine affected the population throughout the entire territory of postwar Ukraine.
The similarities between the two famines are confirmed by archival documents that contain the testimonies of people who survived the two tragedies and of other eyewitnesses. The majority of surveyed respondents who compared the two Stalinist-era famines regard them as similar according to their basic markers, even though the postwar catastrophe was not as horrific as the Holodomor of the 1930s. According to Ivan Shuliak (b. 1898), a resident of the village of Poninka in the Khmelnytskyi region, “[The government] was repressing [people] not only before the war, people were taken away and destroyed after the war too…. But the famine of ’47 was smaller than the one in ’33….” Iakiv Pidpaniuk (b. 1921 in the village of Bokova, Dolyna raion, Kirovohrad oblast) testified: “People survived the famine of 1947 comparatively easier than in ’33.” Olena Polishchuk (b. 1923), from the village of Stari Babany, Uman raion, Kyiv (today Cherkasy) oblast, gave the following statement:
In 1947 there was no harvest because of drought; potatoes also did not grow; they were small, like beans. But that was still not a calamity because there were reserves. But the state took away what had been placed in collective farm storehouses and forced the peasants to relinquish their surpluses in order to pay the excessive taxes. Famine soon appeared. Although it was not as big as in 1932-1933, and not everyone [was affected], nevertheless this one too brought lice, disasters, diseases, and death…
Mykhailo Franyshyn (b. 1924), from the village of Hryshivtsi in Vinnytsia oblast, reported:
We starved, not like in ’33, but it was very difficult … It was impossible to go somewhere from the village in order to earn some money for food. At the time peasants were not given passports, and a strict passport system was introduced in the country. A village was fenced off by barbed wire, and no one was allowed out of it without the leadership’s permission. We saved ourselves by taking grain away from gophers. We fought with them, smoking [them] out of their holes…
According to Kateryna Marchenko (b. 1919), who experienced the postwar famine in the village of Kyshentsi, Uman raion (now Cherkasy oblast),
The famine of 1946-47 did not reach the scale of the 1930s famine only thanks to the assistance of western Ukraine, where there were no collective farms yet. The peasants, the individual farmers of western Ukraine, were able to support the starving people from central and eastern Ukraine. However, this too was not easy: it was necessary to fulfill the state grain delivery. It must be remembered that this was done by western Ukrainians, whom the fifth column disdainfully calls “Banderites.”
At the same time, a considerable number of eyewitnesses claim that the postwar famine was comparatively more difficult than the preceding one. Varvara Pylypivna Ostapenko (b. 1908), from the village of Havrylivka, Pokrovske raion, Dnipropetrovsk oblast, gave the following statement:
During my life I lived through two world wars, the revolution, the famine of 1921-1923, the Holodomor of 1932-1933, [and] the famine of 1946-1947. We lived through the famine of 1932-1933 much more calmly than the famine of 1946-1947. At the time authorized individuals went around to each homestead; they took away the grain and generally everything that was edible. It was not possible to get something from anywhere. The state did not help us. Many people died…. But each person managed as best as he could. They ate everything that they saw: various grasses, they made corn biscuits, flushed out little gophers. Of course, they ate cats and dogs. During the famine of 1946-1947, I had three children: two daughters and a son. My husband was killed at the front. I had to manage the farm by myself. What a horrible picture! How many people had lethal tumors and died! Many died after the wheat began to produce ears in 1946; people picked and ate them, and then died.
Ivan Shtonda from Kharkiv (b. 1905) was convinced that
[i]t was even worse in 1946-1947 than in 1932-1933. Wheat was being sent abroad. People were not given anything. There was nothing in people’s private plots; there were also no cattle or poultry. For two years people starved to death, like flies. Brutal people grabbed bread out of the hands of people who were selling their ration at the bazaar and threw it into the dirt. They beat them and mucked up the bread in the filth so that it could not be taken from them, and then they ate it. This happened in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and other cities. So that people would not leave the borders of their region, train tickets were not issued at stations. This was explained by the need to carry out sanitary work in order to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. In those days people departed on the roofs of train cars. They tied up their belongings so that they would not fall out. Bandits often threw metal hooks onto these things and pulled them down. Thus, people were left without the hope of exchanging things for some kind of food. Letters to soldiers in the army did not reach them. I had a friend, Mykola Ivanovych Pokrysh. His entire family died. He did not know about this until he returned home. In Kharkiv soldiers did not walk about alone. They had no right to talk to civilians. They were afraid to say a word to one another. They drew up denunciations against each other. It is horrible to remember….
The main cause of the two famines thus was the implementation of decisions handed down by the Communist Party and the Soviet government on the state grain deliveries, during which the state confiscated everything from people, thereby depriving them of any means of survival. And both famines can be considered acts of genocide, one of the clearest features of which is the deliberate creation of conditions aimed at the physical destruction of people. For several months in a row the peasants were not paid for their workday either in the form of bread or other foods.
Therefore, as this incomplete comparative analysis indicates, the two famines had more in common than not.
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As with the 1932-33 Holodomor, the postwar famine had irreversible socioeconomic consequences. Like the former, the latter helped prolong economic and spiritual stagnation. City residents, whose food supply had been ensured by the ration-card system, survived these calamitous times more easily, while the rural population faced horrific conditions. The immense, repressive famine action was directed primarily against the peasants as well as workers and their families. The pillaging of villages by food requisitioning and other oppressive measures enabled the regime to gather the minimum necessary to feed the urban population and to establish reserves for the totalitarian state, even as it condemned the peasants to death by starvation. The extreme curtailment or confiscation of food, a policy that condemned Ukrainians to starvation and death, became part of Soviet practice.
The destructive political, economic, socio-demographic, moral, and psychological repercussions of the man-made postwar famine are still felt today, even in the period of the reconstruction of the Ukrainian state.