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 Last, the Most Dreadful Resource of Nature”: Economic-Historical Reflections on Famine
The lecture paper focuses on some topics that remain current in famine studies. First, it reviews the link between food prices and the severity of famines as reflected in excess mortality. Second, it places the death tolls from several recent famines in sub-Saharan Africa in historical context. Third, it reviews the impact of famines on fertility. Famines are always associated with a reduction in births; but to what extent are those births lost or births postponed? Fourth, it reviews the literature that invokes famines as a testing ground for the foetal origins hypothesis. Finally, it reviews the prospect of a near future in which famines have been consigned to history.
Stalin and the Peasantry: Reassessing the Postwar Years, 1945–53
The structural transformation that occurred in the countryside in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a consequence of the Stalinist revolution was a truly national upheaval, affecting some three-quarters of the Soviet population. It was also characterized by the most ruthless brutality. Millions of peasants perished, either as a direct result of violence or, more commonly, indirectly, as a result of exile or famine. Millions of others ended up in the Gulags, the forced labour camps, in the inhospitable climes of Siberia or Northern Russia. By the end of the 1930s, the bulk of some 25 million peasant households, the majority of which in 1928 continued to live and work in village communities, had been reorganized into state and collective farms, controlled by the Party. Since the first flickers of glasnost appeared under Gorbachev, work on reassessing these years has been underway in the Former Soviet Union.