The Soviet Famine of 1946–1947, the Weather and Human Agency in Historical Perspective
Abstract This article considers the famine of the immediate post-war period of 1946–1947 in relation to the food problems experienced by the USSR in World War II and to the impact of the weather conditions from 1941. It is argued that the timing and nature of the extreme food problems experienced in this famine conform to a general pattern of Soviet famines in which urban food supply problems over a number of years give 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.
The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines
This paper presents an analysis of the economics of the 1947 Soviet famine, using data from recently declassified archives. It is argued that the best estimate that can currently be given of the number of excess deaths in the range 1.0-1.5 million. The demographic loss was greater. During the famine, surplus stocks in the hands of the state seem to have been sufficient to have fed all those who died of starvation. The famine was a FAD2 (preventable food availability decline) famine, which occurred because a drought caused a bad harvest and hence reduced food availability, but, had the priorities of the government been different, there might have been no famine (or a much smaller one) despite the drought. The selection of victims can be understood in terms of the entitlement approach. Copyright 2000 by Oxford University Press.
Party Revivalism and the Death of Stalin
After the XIX Party Congress…everyone in the orchestra was playing on his own instrument anytime he felt like it, and there was no direction from the conductor. N.S. Khrushchev Some time ago a leading biographer of Joseph Stalin observed with a touch of irony that de-stalinization was a process “not only made possible but actually initiated by the death of Stalin.” Accordingly, some have turned to events in the final months of the dictator's life for evidence that, to the last, Stalin retained a firm grip on the levers of power; others have pointed to the new era of moderation in agriculture, literature and criminal justice which appears to have set in following Stalin's death. It was, so it seems, only with the conclusion of Stalin's reign that the hopes for stability and liberalization first raised at the end of World War II could finally be met. Only the dictator's death, it has been argued, could have put an end to absolute autocracy and opened the way for a new era of oligarchical rule.