In the novel “The Twelve Chairs,” Ostap Bender asks, pointing to the army of parasites warmed up by the caretaker of the 2nd house of the Starsobes: “Children of the Volga region?” Children of the Volga region were constantly talked about in the early 20s. But there was little humor: the newspapers of that time published daily chilling reports about monstrous cases of cannibalism in the starving provinces. Like any terrible period in history, this one provided its own examples of heroism and mutual assistance.
Drought or grain procurements?
The famine was partly man-made: the national economy of Soviet Russia was devastated by the Civil War and. It is significant that it covered a number of provinces even before the severe drought of 1921. Thus, already in the autumn of 1920, the Kaluga, Oryol, Tula and Tsaritsyn provinces suffered from a lack of food, and by winter, famine engulfed five more provinces. The surplus appropriation system, widely used by the Bolsheviks, designed to provide food for the Red Army, workers and managers in large cities, and the tax in kind that replaced it, which turned out to be no easier, created a very difficult situation in many regions of the country. Due to a shortage of labor, a reduction in the volume of seeds available for planting and a number of other reasons throughout the country, the area under grain crops in just one year (from 1920 to 1921) decreased by 8.3%, with the Volga region suffering much more than most other regions .
And it is not at all surprising that the drought of 1921, which struck the main grain-growing regions - the Volga region, the North Caucasus, the south of Ukraine - was such a blow to the country's agriculture: it killed about 22% of all crops, and the overall yield fell by more than half the level 1913. Despite this, the government did not intend to reduce the established amount of the grain tax. The seizure of bread during the so-called one-time food supply led to the onset of mass famine. Thus, in mid-1921, out of 2.9 million residents of the Saratov province, 40% were starving; the figures for neighboring provinces were close to this. At its peak, hunger affected more than 31 million citizens of the country, turning into a terrible national problem.
Children dying of hunger in the Volga region. Photo: staraysamara.ru
Soviet horror story
The peasants tried to replace bread with whatever they could - primarily with quinoa, from which they cooked cabbage soup, or, grinding it into a fine powder, added it to flour. In the fall of 1921, quinoa flour sold for 250 thousand rubles. per pood. They also made flour from acorns. Many remembered a surrogate for normal food, described in Russian chronicles - the linden leaf. “They have been feeding on quinoa alone for six months or more,” wrote eyewitness journalist Semyon Bolshakov. - Without any admixture of flour. A lot of them. 260 thousand people eat quinoa. They pound it in a mortar with some large heavy iron or just a pin from a cart. They pound the grey, crispy one, brew it and bake it into koloboks, such fragile “touch-me-nots” - if you touch them, they crumble. People greedily pounce on gray, tasteless crumbs that do not give strength. “The belly is deceived, and that’s all right,” the skinny, earthy peasant smiles bitterly, taking up his plow... I saw the bread handed out from the canteens, clean bread, the smell of which so painfully squeezes the stomach and makes one’s hands tremble, just like this bread’s parents They give everything to their children. “We will endure more, we will endure... Will we die? It doesn’t matter - we have lived. But they need health: they have a lot more to live. And they are small, they roar! We’ll get over it, so what! And thank you for them,” says the woman, exhausted by hunger, pale, with a terrible smile on her face, a “happy” mother, listening to the friendly chewing of her children. They eat in small pieces, taking tiny bites to prolong the enjoyment of “real food.” Their little eyes greedily run from their own piece to the piece of their brother or sister.”
But if in summer and autumn it was possible to survive on all this, then in winter hell on earth became even hotter - all the cattle that could not eat pasture had to be slaughtered. Many starving people these days ate themselves on fresh meat and died in terrible agony. After the livestock was slaughtered, sawdust, clay, tree bark, and boiled cow hide were used - most of these “products” just gave a feeling of fullness in the stomach and allowed one to forget about hunger at least for a while.
Then the hunger returned. Happiness was to catch a cat, a dog, or at least a gopher. “In the village of Shor-Unzha, out of 162 horses, only 30 remained. All the dogs and cats were eaten, they collect carrion and eat it with gusto. Whole crowds of peasants bring their children to the volost executive committee and leave them there, saying: “Feed!”,” reported a correspondent for one of the Mari newspapers. Maxim Gorky, who was going to Europe to collect help, was amazed at the scale of the disaster in one of his letters: “In August, I am going abroad to campaign in favor of those dying of hunger. There are up to 25 million of them. About six [million] have moved away, abandoned their villages and are going somewhere. Can you imagine what this is? Around Orenburg, Chelyabinsk and other cities there are camps of the hungry. Bashkirs burn themselves and their families. Cholera and dysentery are spread everywhere. Ground pine bark is valued at 30 thousand rubles per pound. They reap the unripe bread, grind it together with the ear and straw, and eat it in small pieces. They boil the old skin, drink the broth, and make jelly from the hooves. In Simbirsk, bread costs 7,500 rubles per pound, meat 2,000 rubles. All the livestock is being slaughtered, because there is no fodder grass - everything is burned. Children - children are dying by the thousands. In Alatyr, the Mordovians threw their children into the Sura River.”
A family of starving people in one of the villages. Photo: topwar.ru
People exhausted by hunger were no longer able to hunt domestic animals, and by the end of 1921, terrible news of cases of cannibalism began to reach the capital. Retelling stories from Soviet newspapers, Anatoly Mariengof writes: “In the village of Lipovki (Tsaritsynsky district), one peasant, unable to withstand the pangs of hunger, decided to hack to death his seven-year-old son with an ax. He took me into the barn and hit me. But after the murder he immediately hanged himself over the corpse of the murdered child. When they arrived, they saw: hanging with his tongue hanging out, and next to him on a block of wood, where they usually chop firewood, the corpse of a hacked boy.” “In the village of Lyubimovka, Buzuluk district, a human body was discovered, dug out of the ground and partly eaten as food” - such news appeared daily on the pages of Pravda and Izvestia.
The famine led to epidemics - primarily cholera and typhus. They completed what they started: in some areas, many more people died from disease than from the famine itself.
Helping hand
The Soviet state could not independently cope with a situation that threatened the death of millions of people. That is why in July 1921 the government turned to foreign powers and public organizations. However, they were in no hurry to help. Enormous credit for its organization belonged to the famous Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who promoted the need to provide assistance to Soviet Russia at meetings of the League of Nations and in newspapers. Finally, by the fall, large-scale relief efforts began for the hungry.
The largest amount of support was provided by the American Relief Administration (ARA, from the English American Relief Administration). This charitable organization was created in 1919 to provide assistance to the population of European countries affected by the First World War. Despite the non-governmental nature of the organization, it enjoyed the support of Congress and was headed by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. An agreement between the Soviet government and the ARA on providing food aid to a million starving people was signed in Riga on August 20, 1921. The negotiations were not easy: the Soviet side feared that the ARA would try to put pressure on the government. However, this did not happen. The organization made a huge contribution to saving the hungry: the food that the organization sent to Russia fed just under 7 million people. The ARA and its supporting charities, as well as private donors, spent about $42 million to help save the hungry. In addition to food supplies, American organizations provided more than $10 million worth of medical assistance to the exhausted and those infected with infectious diseases.
Children in the ARA Canteen. Photo: yarreg.ru
The contribution of other organizations was smaller but still very significant: for example, the Nansen Committee and other societies associated with it were able to collect about 4 million dollars, which were spent on the needs of 138 thousand residents of the Volga region. Other organizations (including religious ones) also made a significant contribution: for example, American Quakers fed 265 thousand hungry people, and the international Save the Children alliance fed 260 thousand people. If it were not for the help of foreign states and international organizations, there could have been much more victims of famine.
After the disaster
The famine ended thanks to the actions of the Soviet government to supply the disaster-stricken areas, the assistance of international organizations, and most importantly, the harvest of 1922, which turned out to be quite successful. True, in the most problematic regions it was necessary to save the starving until the summer of 1923, when the food situation finally normalized there too.
The consequences of the famine were terrible: it is believed that in two years (from 1921 to 1923) more than 5 million people died (according to some estimates, in the Volga region and Crimea, where the famine came in 1922, about 30% of children died from hunger and epidemics ). Among the social consequences of this disaster is a sharply increased number of homeless people who filled large cities. The famine also led to some changes in Bolshevik policy - for example, under the pretext of fighting this social disaster, they intensified the attack on the church. On December 27, 1921, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee issued a decree “On valuables located in churches and monasteries,” and on January 2, 1922, at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, a resolution “On the liquidation of church property” was adopted, ordering local Soviet authorities to remove from churches all items made of precious metals and stones, donating them to the Central Famine Relief Fund. Patriarch Tikhon agreed to donate precious church decorations and items that have no liturgical use to those in need. However, when on February 23, 1922, a new decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee “On the procedure for the confiscation of church valuables in the use of groups of believers” was issued, which spoke about the confiscation of liturgical objects, the patriarch opposed and prohibited their confiscation from churches, even through a voluntary donation, threatening the laity with excommunication from the church, and for priests - defrocking. This allowed the Bolsheviks to carry out a series of trials of the clergy, effectively destroying the independence of the church. In total, church valuables worth 2.5 billion gold rubles were confiscated, only a small part of which was actually spent on purchasing food for the hungry.
The famine of the early 1920s is an example of the fact that a criminal and ill-considered government policy in its consequences can be comparable to a war: after all, the number of victims of the Civil War was only 3 million higher than the number of deaths from famine. And this is probably only because international organizations responded to the government’s call for help.
Further in the section Localization sometimes turns out not to be the transfer of advanced production and technologies from abroad to Russia, but a banal trick that helps to avoid sanctions and remain in our market Read in the “History” section One of the most successful pilots of the Second World War, Nikolai Dmitrievich Gulaev, was born on February 26, 1918.90 years ago, on January 30, 1922, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) prohibited the publication of reports about mass cannibalism and corpse-eating in starving areas of the country. Vlast columnist Evgeny Zhirnov found out how the party and government brought people to the point of losing their humanity.
"They ruthlessly sweep away everything down to the grain"
In Soviet times, people wrote and talked about the famine of 1921-1922 in the Volga region in a monotonous and rather boring way. It was usually said that in the summer of 1921 there was a drought and in some areas of the country the harvest was lost and famine began. But the working people of all Soviet Russia, and after them representatives of progressive humanity, came to the aid of the victims, and within a short time the famine and its consequences were eliminated. From time to time, however, articles and brochures that fell out of the general order appeared, in which it was said that the American Relief Administration (ARA), which delivered food from abroad and fed the starving, in addition to charitable purposes, also pursued other, not at all noble goals. Its employees were engaged in espionage, preparing conspiracies against the Soviet regime, and only thanks to the insight and vigilance of the security officers, their secret intentions were revealed, and the Americans were expelled from the country.
Actually, this was the only information about the Volga famine for a wide range of readers. In those years, few Soviet ideologists and propagandists could have imagined that in the foreseeable future the archives of the party and its punitive agencies would become accessible, albeit not completely. So the picture of the famine in the Volga region can be restored in all details and, first of all, it will be possible to understand that the famine arose not only and not so much because of the weather.
Food difficulties arose everywhere and regularly during the Civil War. Moreover, often the lack of food in rural areas was a consequence of their ruthless seizure by the Soviet government, represented by representatives of food commissions at all levels, with the support of specially created armed food detachments. And any evasion from the delivery of pounds of grain, meat, pounds of butter, etc., established during food allocation, led to merciless repression. So, at times, even employees of the Cheka expressed dissatisfaction with the actions of food commissions and food detachments, which disrupted the process of establishing relations between the new government and the peasantry.
For example, on January 5, 1920, a special department of the Saratov provincial Cheka reported to Moscow on the state of affairs in this Volga region:
“The mood of the population of the province, in particular the peasantry, is not the same everywhere. In those districts where the harvest was better, the mood of the peasantry is also noticeable better, since this district has the ability to more easily carry out state allocations. Quite the opposite is observed in those districts where the harvest was bad. It should be noted that the peasantry values every pound of grain and according to the psychology of the peasant as a small owner, a materialist. A lot of misunderstandings are observed during the allocation. Food detachments, according to the peasants, mercilessly sweep up everything down to the grain and there are even cases where they take hostage those who have already completed the allocation. In addition Moreover, not a small, but even a big disadvantage for the successful implementation of the allocation is the fact that the allocation is disproportionately laid out. From the statement of the Red Army soldier we received with the attachment of documents from the village Council, it is clear where the village Council testifies in one case about the existing property status with digital data, and another document, issued later, indicates the amount of the imposed appropriation, the latter being 25% more than the actual amount certified by the Village Council in the first document. On the basis of such inattentive attitudes towards appropriation, discontent of the peasant masses is actually caused."
A similar picture was observed in other parts of the country, where famine later began. The peasants were indignant and sometimes even rebelled. But after the arrival of the armed units, they humbled themselves and gave more than they could actually give.
It often turned out that everything was handed over, right down to the seeds for the next sowing. True, the workers' and peasants' government promised help to the peasants and in the spring gave loans from grain taken from them. But this happened differently in different parts of the country. Accordingly, the results of the care shown by the state turned out to be completely different.
For example, in the report of the Tomsk gubchek "On the situation in the province for the period from April 15 to May 1, 1920" sent to the capital. said:
“The famine has reached terrible proportions: the peasantry ate all the surrogates, cats, dogs, and at the present time they are eating the corpses of the dead, tearing them out of their graves.”
“The peasants complain that they waste a lot of expensive time obtaining all kinds of certificates and permits, running uselessly from one institution to another, and often to no avail. For greater clarity, we will give one of the most numerous examples of how the provincial food committee pays attention to the requests of the peasants and fulfills them in a timely manner. Peasants, members of one rural communal society, petitioned the provincial food committee to give them seeds for sowing their fields, noting that the spring thaw was approaching and the seeds needed to be obtained urgently. For a long time there was no response, and permission to export the seeds from the nearest dumping point was received then, when the road had already deteriorated and it was not possible to remove the seeds."
As a result, the spring sowing of 1920 in Tomsk, and in some other provinces, was essentially disrupted. And in the fall we had to hand over the grain again according to surplus appropriation, and there were even fewer seeds left for autumn sowing. The information report of the All-Russian Cheka for August 1-15, 1920, prepared for the leaders of the party and state, reported on the situation in the provinces:
"Saratovskaya. In the province, due to the current complete crop failure and the almost complete absence of grain for the autumn sowing of fields, very favorable soil is being created for counter-revolutionary forces."
The same picture was observed in the Samara province, where the peasants had not only no grain left for the next sowing, but also no supplies to survive until spring. In some Volga regions, peasants even tried to massively refuse to carry out surplus appropriation. But the Soviet government, as usual in such cases, did not stand on ceremony. The Cheka news report for October 26, 1920 stated:
“Tatar Republic... The peasants are unfriendly to the Soviet government for reasons of various duties and allocation; given the shortage of crops this year, in some places in the republic they refused to carry out the allocation. In the latter case, armed detachments sent to such places have a pacifying effect.”
However, by spring the situation became critical. There was simply nothing to eat or sow. The peasants tried to return the grain brought to the state dump points. But government officials used proven methods. The Saratov gubchek reported to Moscow on March 19, 1921:
“In the Saratov district, the peasants made demands for the distribution of the collected grain, and if they refused, they threatened to take it by force. We sent a detachment, and the same demands were made by the peasants of two more districts.”
"There is massive mortality due to starvation"
The result was not long in coming. In the late spring and early summer of 1921, pockets of famine began to appear in different regions of the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, the North Caucasus and Ukraine. The Cheka news report for April 30 and May 1, 1921 stated:
“Stavropol province... The mood of the population of some counties is bad due to the lack of food. In Alexandrovsky county, a crowd of peasants came crying to the executive committee building, demanding bread. The crowd was persuaded to wait until April 26, the county executive committee abdicated responsibility for the events that may arise, if by this time there is no bread.
Bashkir Republic... The political condition of the republic is unsatisfactory. There is massive mortality from starvation. An uprising broke out in the Argayazh canton due to the crisis."
However, since starving areas alternated with quite prosperous ones, the Soviet leadership did not take the situation seriously. Messages from the field added even more confusion. From the same provinces there were reports either of deaths from starvation or of an expected good harvest. Local leading comrades either reported on the terrible drought, which burned everything and everyone, and the onset of locusts, which should have destroyed all the remaining plants, or joyfully reported on the past rains and overcoming the consequences of the heat.
As a result, even the Soviet People's Commissars could not understand what was really happening in the Volga region and other famine-stricken areas. On July 30, 1921, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin wrote to Lev Kamenev, member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP(b):
“Dear Comrade. It is necessary to introduce systematicity and deliberation into the published information about the state of the harvest and the situation in the starving provinces. What we publish fluctuates between extremely alarmist pictures and comforting indications that it is not at all so bad, potatoes were a success or buckwheat was a success etc. Reading our information radios, I consider myself not to have the right to suspend official information of this kind. Moreover, I do not have the right to stop the transmission of this information on the radio within Russia. Meanwhile, our domestic broadcasts, no less than our foreign radios, are listened to and are intercepted in Western countries. I myself, reading our official information, in the end, do not know whether there is a transformation of a dozen provinces into a complete desert, or whether there is a partial shortage of crops after the rains corrected the situation. Our official information is characterized by inconsistency and thoughtlessness This is being actively used abroad. Those who want to present our situation in a catastrophic form grab our alarmist news, others grab our reassuring news. Lloyd George (Prime Minister of Great Britain.— "Power") in the House, responding to an inquiry, stated that he was confused by radio and telegraph news from Russia that the rains had passed and the situation had improved."
As a result, a commission of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) went to the Volga region, and work on organizing relief for the starving, as they said then, began to unfold. Across the country, collections of money and food began to benefit the hungry. ARA and Red Cross organizations from various countries got involved in helping.
The replacement of surplus appropriation with a tax in kind, carried out in the spring of 1921 after the announcement of the new economic policy, was also supposed to help the affected areas. As the Bolsheviks argued, the tax in kind greatly facilitated and improved the life of the peasants. But in reality everything depended on local authorities and, above all, on the notorious food commissions. The KGB reports said that in some provinces tax in kind is established according to the area of land cultivated or available to a peasant family. In addition, taking advantage of the illiteracy of the peasants, food workers overestimated their available area by half. So the tax could exceed the grain harvest in the most productive years. At the same time, taxes in kind were collected even in the places most affected by the 1921 crop failure, for example in the Crimea. The Cheka news report for September 24 and 25, 1921 stated:
"Crimea... The receipt of tax in kind has decreased recently. The food conference recognized the need to use armed force, form food detachments and prohibit trade in markets in places that have not paid tax in kind."
As a result, despite the charitable assistance, hunger in the country grew and deepened. And besides, epidemics began. On November 18, the Cheka informed the country’s leadership about the state of affairs among the Volga Germans:
“The number of starving people is increasing. In the Mamadysh canton, the number of starving people is 117,156 people, of which 45,460 are disabled, there were 1,194 cases of starvation. The number of diseases is increasing. According to the People’s Commissariat of Health, 1,174 people fell ill with typhus, 162 people died. Children’s diseases are increasing.”
“The White Guard press,” wrote People’s Commissar Nikolai Semashko (pictured in the center) in the Politburo, “intensively savors the ‘horrors of cannibalism in Soviet Russia’.”
"Hunger is intensifying. Child mortality is increasing. There is an acute shortage of medicines. Due to the lack of material resources, the fight against hunger is weak."
"The food situation in the northern and Trans-Volga districts is extremely difficult. Peasants are destroying the last livestock, not excluding draft animals. In the Novouzensky district, the population eats dogs, cats and gophers. Mortality due to hunger and epidemics is increasing. The organization of public catering is hampered by the lack of food. ARA contains 250 thousand children."
“Hunger is intensifying, deaths due to hunger are becoming more frequent. In November and October, 663 children, 2,735 sick people, and 399 adults died from hunger. Epidemics are intensifying. During the reporting period, 269 people fell ill with typhus, 207 with typhoid, and 249 with relapsing fever. "The Swedish Red Cross Commission took in 10 thousand children for its support."
A completely logical result was the information about the Samara province received by the country’s leadership on December 29, 1921:
"Epidemic diseases are increasing due to the lack of medicines. Cases of starvation are becoming more frequent. There have been several cases of cannibalism."
"An unprecedented phenomenon of rampant cannibalism"
In the new year, 1922, reports of cannibalism began to arrive in Moscow with increasing frequency. On January 20, reports mentioned cannibalism in Bashkiria, and on January 23, the country’s leaders were informed that in the Samara province the matter had gone beyond isolated cases:
“The famine has reached terrible proportions: the peasantry ate all the surrogates, cats, dogs, and at the present time they are eating the corpses of the dead, tearing them out of their graves. Repeated cases of cannibalism have been discovered in Pugachevsky and Buzuluksky districts. Cannibalism, according to members of the volost executive committee, is accepted among Lyubimovka mass forms. Cannibals are isolated."
The party press also began to write about the horrors occurring in the starving areas. On January 21, 1922, Pravda wrote:
“The Simbirsk newspaper “Economic Path” published the impressions of a comrade who visited hungry places. These impressions are so vivid and characteristic that they do not need comments. Here they are:
“I myself, in the end, don’t know whether there is a transformation of a dozen provinces into a complete desert, or whether there is a partial shortage of crops.”
“The two of us drove into a remote abandoned village to warm up, relax and have a snack. We had our own food, we just had to find a corner.
We go into the first hut we come across. There is also a young woman lying on the bed, and in different corners on the floor there are three small children.
Not understanding anything yet, we ask the hostess to put on the samovar and light the stove, but the woman, without getting up, without even rising, weakly whispers:
- There’s a samovar, install it yourself, but I don’t have a power supply.
- Are you sick? What happened to you?
— For the eleventh day there was no crumb in my mouth...
It became creepy... We looked around more closely and saw that the children were barely breathing and were lying with their hands and feet tied.
- Why are you and your children sick?
- No, my dears, we are healthy, but we also haven’t eaten for ten days...
- But who tied them up and scattered them in the corners?
- And I came to this myself. After being hungry for four days, they began to bite each other’s hands, so I tied them up and put them away from each other.
We rushed like crazy to our little basket to give the dying children a piece of bread.
But the mother could not stand it, she got out of bed and began to beg on her knees so that we would quickly remove the bread and not give it to the children.
I wanted to reproach this mother, to express my indignation; but in a weak, weeping voice she spoke:
“They suffered painfully for seven days, and then they became quieter, and now they don’t feel anything. Let them die in peace, otherwise you feed them now, they will go away, and then again they will suffer for seven days, bite, in order to calm down again... After all, neither tomorrow nor in a week no one will give anything. So don't torture them. For Christ's sake, go away, let him die in peace...
We jumped out of the hut, rushed to the village council, demanding an explanation and immediate help.
But the answer is short and clear:
“There is no bread, there are many starving people, it is not possible to help not only everyone, but even a few.”
“In the rich steppe districts of the Samara province, abundant in bread and meat, nightmares are happening, an unprecedented phenomenon of widespread cannibalism is being observed. Driven by hunger to despair and madness, having eaten everything that is accessible to the eye and tooth, people decide to eat a human corpse and secretly devour their own dead children. From the village of Andreevka, Buzuluk district, they report that “Natalya Semykina is eating the meat of a dead person - Lukerya Logina.” The chief of police of the 4th district of Buzuluk district writes that along his route in three volosts he “met ancient cases of cannibalism of ancient Hindus, Indians and savages of the northern region" and that these "experienced cases" were expressed as follows:
1) In the village of Lyubimovka, one of the citizens dug a dead girl of about 14 out of the grave, cut the corpse into several parts, put the body parts in cast iron... When this “crime” was discovered, it turned out that the girl’s head was “cut in two and singed” . The cannibal obviously failed to cook the corpse.
“Hunger is intensifying, deaths due to hunger are becoming more frequent. In November and October, 663 children, 2,735 sick people, and 399 adults died from hunger. Epidemics are intensifying.”
2) From the words of members of the Volost Executive Committee of the village. In Lyubimovka, it is clear that “wild cannibalism” in the village is taking mass forms and that “in the dead of midnight the dead are being cooked,” but in fact only one citizen is “persecuted.”
3) In the village. Andreevka, in the police warehouse there lies in a trough the head without the body and part of the ribs of a sixty-year-old old woman: the body was eaten by a citizen of the same village, Andrei Pirogov, who admitted that he ate and did not give up the head and dead body.
4) In the village. In Utevka, Samara district, citizen Yugov brought a certain Timofey Frolov to the executive committee, “explaining that on the night of December 3, he, Yunov, let Frolov into his apartment and, having fed him, went to bed. At night, Frolov got up and stole one piece of bread, half "He ate it, and put half of it in his bag. In the morning, Yungov's cat, strangled, was found in the same bag."
When asked why he strangled the cat, Frolov explained: for personal consumption. “He quietly strangled the cat at night and put it in his bag so that he could eat it later,” says the act.
The executive committee decided to release the detained Frolov, since he committed the crime due to hunger. Reporting this, the Executive Committee adds that in general the citizens of the village “arrange hunts for dogs and cats and eat the prey they catch.”
These are the facts, or rather an insignificant part of the facts. Some have already been reported, while others escape the attention of society and the press.
What do they do with cannibals? The answer is simple - they will arrest, “prosecute”, and transport the perpetrators “with material evidence” - bloody bags of meat - to the People’s Court, accusing them of cannibalism.”
Despite the fact that the article further accused foreign bourgeoisie and new Soviet entrepreneurs - Nepmen who eat well while the starving are dying, the article made an unpleasant impression on members of the Soviet leadership. People's Commissar of Health Nikolai Semashko on the same day, January 27, wrote to members of the Politburo:
“Dear comrades! I allow myself to draw your attention to the “over-salt” that our press allows in the anti-hunger campaign, especially to the reports that are multiplying every day about allegedly growing “cannibalism.” In just one randomly taken current N of “Pravda” ( from 27/1) we have a message about mass cannibalism (“in the manner of the ancient Hindus, Indians and savages of the northern region”) in the Buzuluk district; in N “Izvestia” from the same date about “mass cannibalism” in the Ufa province, with all the details supposedly reliable descriptions. Taking into account:
1) that many of these descriptions are clearly implausible (in Izvestia it is reported that the peasant of the village of Siktermy left “the corpse of his wife, having managed to eat the lungs and liver”, meanwhile everyone knows what a disgusting place the lungs of a dead man are, and of course, the starving man ate it would be more likely to be meat, “during a search they found the rotting bone of a slaughtered brother” - meanwhile bones, as you know, do not rot, etc.),
2) the White Guard press intensely savors “the horrors of cannibalism in Soviet Russia”,
3) that in general in our agitation we should not get on the nerves of sensitive subjects, but on the feeling of solidarity and organization of the working people -
I propose, in party order, to instruct our bodies:
1) be stricter about printing sensational reports from hungry places,
2) stop publishing stories about any “mass cannibalism.”
"Many people eat human flesh"
Who knows what the reaction of the Politburo members to Semashko’s appeal might have been, but the next day Pravda allowed itself to question the Politburo’s decision on cannibals. After cases of cannibalism were reported, the Politburo decided not to try them, but to send them for psychiatric treatment. And the organ of the Central Committee of the RCP(b) published the following reflections of its employee:
“In front of me is a whole stack of documents about the famine. These are protocols of investigators of the Revolutionary Tribunal and the People's Courts, official telegrams from the field, medical examination reports. Like all documents, they are a little dry. But terrible pictures of our Volga region very often break through the official shell. Peasant of the Buzuluk district of Efimovskaya Mukhin volost told the investigator at the inquiry:
“My family consists of 5 people. There has been no bread since Easter. At first we ate bark, horse meat, dogs and cats, picked out bones and ground them. There are a lot of corpses in our village. They are lying around the streets or piled up in a public barn. I made my way in the evening to the barn, took the corpse of a 7-year-old boy, brought it home on a sled, chopped it into small pieces with an ax and boiled it. Within 24 hours we ate the entire corpse. Only the bones remained. In our village, many people eat human meat, but they hide it. There is several public canteens. Only young children are fed there. The two youngest of my family were fed in the canteen. They give a quarter pound of bread per child, watery soup and nothing more. Everyone in the village lies exhausted. Unable to work. There are about 10 people left in the whole village horses for 800 households. Last spring there were up to 2,500 of them. We currently do not remember the taste of human meat. We ate it in a state of unconsciousness."
Here's another document. This is an excerpt from the testimony of a peasant woman from the same volost, Chugunova:
"I am a widow. I have 4 children: Anna, 15 years old, Anastasia, 13 years old, Daria, 10 years old, and Pelageya, 7 years old. The latter was very sick. In December, I don’t remember the date, I didn’t have any products. The older girl gave me the idea to slaughter the smaller, sick one. I decided on it, stabbed her at night when she was sleeping. Sleepy and weak, she did not scream or resist under the knife. After that, my eldest girl, Anna, began to remove the dead , that is, throw out the entrails and cut it into pieces."
“The food detachments, according to the peasants, mercilessly sweep away everything down to the grain, and there are even cases where those who have already completed the allotment are taken hostage.”
“What to do with cannibals?” asks the chief of police of one of the districts of Buzuluk district. “Arrest? Put on trial, punish?” And local authorities are at a loss before this terrible truth of hunger, before these “experienced cases” of Indian cannibalism. A characteristic touch: almost all cannibals confess to the local authorities: “Better arrest, better prison, but not the same daily pangs of hunger.”
“I just ask you not to return me to my homeland now,” says peasant Semikhin from the village of Andreevka, Buzuluk district, “take me wherever you want.”
“I know that many people like us are allowed to go home,” says Konopykhin, an arrested peasant from the village of Efimovka. “My wife was also allowed to go home, but she didn’t want to, because she would have to die at home.”
What are these, criminals? Mentally abnormal? Here is the protocol of a medical examination carried out by a private assistant professor at Samara University:
“No signs of mental disorder were found in all the witnesses. From the analysis of their mental state, it turns out that the acts of necrophagy (eating corpses) they committed were not carried out in a state of any form of mental disorder, but were the end of a long-term growing and progressive feeling of hunger, which "gradually broke down all obstacles, broke the struggle with oneself and immediately attracted to that form of satisfaction that turned out to be the only possible under the given conditions, to necrophagy. None of those testified showed inclinations towards deliberate murder or the abduction and consumption of corpses."
“I want to work with all my strength, just to be well-fed. I know how to sew mittens, I used to be a coachman, I worked as a helper in a bakery. Give me a job,” asks Semykin, who ate the woman. Millions of Semykins of our Volga region are asking for the same thing. Will their request be heard?"
But criticizing the Politburo, and even publicly, was too much even for the party’s favorite and editor-in-chief of Pravda, Nikolai Bukharin. The Politburo supported Semashko and on January 30 made the following decision:
“1. Be stricter about printing sensational reports from hungry places;
2. Stop publishing stories about any kind of “cannibalism.”
True, by keeping silent about the facts of cannibalism, cannibalism itself has not disappeared. For example, the Cheka news report for March 31, 1922 stated:
“Tatrepublic... Hunger is intensifying. Mortality due to hunger is increasing.
In some villages, 50% of the population died out. Livestock are mercilessly destroyed. The epidemic is reaching alarming proportions. Cases of cannibalism are increasing."
The last message about cannibalism came to Moscow on July 24, 1922 from the Stavropol province:
“In Blagodarnensky district, hunger does not stop. Several cases of cannibalism have been registered. The population feels an acute shortage of food. There is physical exhaustion of the population due to malnutrition and complete inability to work.”
"315 cases of cannibalism have been recorded"
With the end of the famine, the terrible time, it would seem, should have disappeared forever, and the country's leadership could draw appropriate conclusions from what happened. But it turned out that history soon repeated itself down to the smallest detail. Only they took every last grain not from specific peasant families, but from collective farms. A school friend of the head of the Soviet government, Vyacheslav Molotov, land surveyor Mikhail Chirkov, wrote to him on September 6, 1932 about a strange approach to collecting grain from collective farms in the North Caucasus region. The winter crop harvest, as Chirkov wrote, was not successful for many reasons (pests, lack of tractors and horses). And grain for supplies to the state was demanded in a disproportionate amount:
“Rainy weather during harvesting completely ruined the already meager harvest and, in addition, spoiled the grain. Thus, it turned out that the actual wheat yield per hectare this year is reduced to 1-1.2 centners, i.e. they are only returning only seeds; and the wheat yield was set at 3.5 centners per hectare, and a grain supply plan was developed based on it. I even came across such a case on one of the collective farms, where for 500 hectares of wheat sowing (with an established yield of 3.5 centners) there was a grain procurement plan given not 1750 centners, as it should be arithmetically, but 2040 centners. The Germans (collective farm - Natsmenovsky - German) are doubly surprised. Firstly, how will they carry out the harvesting when, according to completed and strictly accounted threshing, the wheat yield turned out to be 1.2 centner per hectare (i.e., the gross harvest is only 600 centners), and most of all, they are surprised at what kind of head calculated the grain procurement plan, when the collective farm’s assignment for it exceeds even the gross harvest according to the wheat yield per hectare projected by the authorities.”
But they demanded everything from the collective farms at once, and repressive measures were immediately applied to those who resisted. The same picture was observed in Ukraine. And when famine began again, there were also reports of the consumption of surrogates, dogs and cats. And then about cannibalism. The Secret Political Department of the OGPU reported on April 26, 1933 about the North Caucasus region:
“From February to April 1, 108 cases of cannibalism were identified in the region... In total, 244 people involved in cannibalism were identified, of which 49 were men, 130 were women, 65 were accomplices (mainly minor family members).”
“In areas affected by acute food difficulties, cases of cannibalism, corpse-eating, eating carrion and various surrogates are common. If in February, March and the first half of April 206 cases of cannibalism were registered in Ukraine in 166 settlements in 76 districts, then from April 15 to On June 1, according to incomplete data, 315 cases of cannibalism were registered in 201 settlements in 66 districts. Cases of corpse-eating were 113 as of April 15, and 368 as of June 1. Mostly children are killed for the purpose of cannibalism. These phenomena occur especially in Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk regions."
Specific examples were no less terrifying than those that took place in 1922. However, as it turned out, the same scheme of bringing people to complete hunger despair and cannibalism worked later - during the Great Patriotic War, and in the far rear, in areas from where every last grain was taken for the front and Victory. And again the security officers reported to the top leadership of the country, and again measures were taken when many people could no longer be returned.
But, in general, there is nothing strange about this: in a country where everything was done for great purposes, they never paid attention to the life and death of ordinary people.
Causes of hunger
- severe drought of 1921 - about 22% of all crops died from drought; in some areas the harvest did not exceed the number of seeds spent on sowing; the yield in 1921 was 43% of the 1913 level;
- the devastating effects of the Civil War;
- the destruction of private trade and money carried out by the Bolsheviks (surplus appropriation system and war communism).
Historian A. M. Kristkaln lists the backwardness of agriculture, the consequences of the civil war and intervention, and surplus appropriation as the main causes of famine; to the secondary ones - drought and the disappearance of landowners and large peasant farms.
According to the conclusions of some historians, among the causes of the famine were the inflated volumes of food appropriations in 1919/1920 and 1920/1921, as a result of which the peasants lost part of the sowing seeds and necessary food products, which led to a further reduction in sown areas and grain harvests. The surplus appropriation system and the grain monopoly that had been in effect since the spring of 1917 led to a reduction in the production of food by peasants only to the level of their current own consumption. The absence of a legal private grain market in the absence of any significant grain reserves from the governments of the Soviet republics and the devastation in transport and the new institutions of power that had just begun to operate also caused the famine.
Help for the hungry
Six peasants accused of cannibalism in the vicinity of Buzuluk, and the remains of the victims they ate
The lack of any significant food reserves among the government of the Soviet republics led it to turn to foreign states and the public for food aid in July 1921. Despite numerous requests, the first minor aid was sent only in September. The main flow of assistance came after an active public campaign organized personally by Fridtjof Nansen and a number of non-governmental organizations in Europe and America at the end of 1921 - beginning of 1922. Thanks to a much better harvest in 1922, mass famine ended, although in the previously most affected regions, famine relief was provided until mid-1923. The 1921–23 famine also caused a massive increase in homelessness.
To fight hunger and save the population of Soviet Russia, the state mobilized all institutions, enterprises, cooperative, trade union, youth organizations, and the Red Army. By decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of June 18, 1921, the Central Commission for Famine Relief (Central Committee Pomgol) was formed as an organization with emergency powers in the field of food supply and distribution. It was headed by the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee M.I. Kalinin. Famine relief commissions were also created under the Central Executive Committees of the republics of the RSFSR, under provincial, district and volost executive committees, under trade unions and large enterprises.
In July (no later than the 9th) of the Predsovnarkom V. Ulyanov (Lenin) wrote:
If a region, plagued by crop failure and starvation, embraces a territory with 25 million people, then shouldn’t a number of the most revolutionary measures be taken from this exactly the region's youth in the army in the amount of about 500 thousand bayonets? (and maybe even up to 1 million?)
Goal: to help the population to a certain extent, because we will feed some of the hungry, and, perhaps, by sending home bread we will help the hungry to a certain extent. This is the first one. And second: to place these 1/2 million in Ukraine so that they will help strengthen food production, being purely interested in it, especially clearly recognizing and feeling the injustice of the gluttony of rich peasants in Ukraine.
The harvest in Ukraine is approximately determined (Rakovsky) to be 550-650 million poods. Subtracting 150 million poods for seeding and 300 (15 x 20 = 300) to feed the family and livestock, we get the remainder (550-450 = 100 ; 650-450 = 200 ) on average about 150 million pounds. If you put an army in Ukraine from the hungry provinces, this remainder could be collected (by tax + trade + special requisitions from the rich to help the hungry) fully.
Lenin V.I. Complete works. Ed. fifth. T. 44. M.: Political publishing house. Literary, 1974.- P. 67.
Formally, at this time Ukraine was not part of the RSFSR. In 1921, famine began in Ukraine (especially in the southern regions).
In addition to the head of the Russian government (in 1921), the head of the German government spoke about food parcels from Ukraine (in 1941).
On August 2, 1921, the Soviet government turned to the international community with a request for assistance in the fight against famine. “The Russian government,” the note said, “will accept any help, no matter from what sources it comes, without connecting it at all with existing political relations.” On the same day, V.I. Lenin wrote an appeal to the world proletariat, and even earlier (July 13), Maxim Gorky, with the knowledge of the country’s leadership, called on the Western public to prevent mass deaths in Russia. As of February 9, Soviet Russia allocated about 12 million 200 thousand dollars for the purchase of food from the United States alone. In just two years, the United States purchased food worth $13 million. Significant resources were also mobilized within the starving country. By the first of June 1922, over 7,000 Soviet canteens (canteens of foreign organizations up to 9,500) had been opened in the hungry provinces.
Confiscation of church property
Poster for aid to starving regions of the RSFSR “The spider of hunger is strangling the Russian peasantry.” The most starving regions are marked in black (Lower Urals-Volga region, Crimea, southern Ukraine). Allegorical streams emanating from various religious institutions (Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim) strike the body of the “hunger spider”
<…>We found it possible to allow parish councils and communities to donate precious church decorations and items that have no liturgical use to the needs of the hungry, which we notified the Orthodox population on February 6 (19) of this year. a special appeal, which was authorized by the Government for printing and distribution among the population.
But after this, after sharp attacks in government newspapers in relation to the spiritual leaders of the Church, on February 10 (23), the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, in order to provide assistance to the hungry, decided to remove from churches all precious church things, including sacred vessels and other liturgical church objects . From the point of view of the Church, such an act is an act of sacrilege... We cannot approve the removal from churches, even through voluntary donation, of sacred objects, the use of which is not for liturgical purposes is prohibited by the canons of the Universal Church and is punishable by It as sacrilege - laymen by excommunication from Her, clergy - defrocking (Apostolic Canon 73, Double Ecumenical Council, Canon 10).
Valuables taken from the church were sent to Gokhran. According to the summary statement of the Central Committee Posledgol of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on the number of confiscated church valuables as of November 1, 1922, the following were confiscated:
- Gold 33 poods 32 pounds
- Silver 23,997 pounds 23 pounds 3 lots
- Diamonds 35,670 pcs.
- Other precious stones 71,762 pcs.
- Pearls 14 pounds 32 pounds
- Gold coin 3,115 rub.
- Silver coin 19,155 rub.
- Various precious things 52 pounds 30 pounds
In total, church valuables worth two and a half billion gold rubles were confiscated. Of these funds, only approximately one million rubles were spent on purchasing food for the hungry. The bulk of the funds raised went to “bringing the world revolution closer”
Help from foreign organizations
Food, material and medical support for the victims was provided by: the International Workers' Relief Committee (Mezhrabpom) (Created on the initiative of the Executive Committee of the Comintern on August 13, 1921), the Organization of Pan-European Famine Relief to Russia (headed by F. Nansen - it united 15 religious-religious groups under the auspices of the International Red Cross). charitable societies and committees) and a number of other religious and charitable societies and committees (Vatican Mission, “Joint”, etc.). The bulk of assistance was provided by the American Relief Administration.
American Relief Administration
In July 1922, 8.8 million people received food in the ARA canteens and rations of corn, and in August 10.3 million. At the peak of activity, 300 American citizens and more than 120 thousand people employed in the Soviet republics worked for the ARA.
In just two years, the ARA spent about 78 million dollars, of which 28 million was money from the US government, 13 million from the Soviet government, and the rest from charity, private donations, and funds from other private organizations. From the beginning of autumn 1922, aid began to be reduced. By October 1922, American food aid in Russia was reduced to a minimum.
The International Committee for Assistance to Russia under the leadership of Nansen from September 1921 to September 1922 delivered 90.7 thousand tons of food to Russia.
The League of Nations and F. Nansen’s calls to provide assistance to starving Soviet Russia
The same area as in the photo in the title of the article, from a different angle. The photo was used on a charity card for the F. Nansen Foundation. It said: Famine in Russia. The edge of a cemetery in a devastated country. If the governments of Europe had agreed to help them in response to their requests in October 1921, all those starving to death would have been saved.
On September 30, 1921, Fridtjof Nansen spoke at a meeting of the League of Nations in Geneva. In it, he accused the governments of the League member countries of wanting to solve the problem of Bolshevism in Russia through famine and the death of 20 million people. He noted that multiple and repeated requests for 5 million pounds sterling (half the cost of the battleship) to European governments remained unanswered. And now that the League of Nations has adopted a resolution, this resolution only says that something needs to be done for Russia, but refuses to do so. Moreover, the representative of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Spalajkovic, proposed a resolution placing full responsibility for the famine on the Soviet government. Commenting on this, he noted - “We will not give a penny to the guys from Moscow... of the two evils - hunger and Bolshevism, I consider the latter to be the worst.” According to the correspondent, other delegations had a similar opinion - but they expressed it in a more streamlined form.
Scope and consequences of the Famine
Territories affected by drought, and, accordingly, crop failure and famine in the Russian Empire and the RSFSR
Famine researcher V.A. Polyakov came to the conclusion that the measures taken by the Soviet government to eliminate the famine and its consequences were ineffective. About 5 million people died from the famine and its consequences. Mortality increased 3-5 times (in Samara province, Bashkiria and the Tatar Soviet Republic, mortality increased from 2.4-2.8 to 12.3-13.9 people per 100 people per year). Those who died were predominantly those without sowing (23.3) and, to a lesser extent, those with little sowing (11.0), medium-sown (7.7) and large-sown (2.2) (mortality per 100 people) peasants.
In addition, famine to one degree or another affected almost all regions and cities of the European part of the Soviet Republics. The most difficult situation was in the southern provinces of the Ukrainian SSR (Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Nikolaev, Ekaterinoslav and Odessa), throughout the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic and the Don Army region.
The police entered again... into a period of famine... cases of police officers dying from hunger and exhaustion appeared... the state of the police in terms of food was extremely close to catastrophic
From the report of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of Ukraine N. Skripnik on August 3, 1921
In the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in November 1921, the number of starving people was 1 million 300 thousand people, and in March 1922 - 1 million 500 thousand people.
Losses during the famine are difficult to determine, since no one was counting the victims. The greatest losses were observed in the Samara and Chelyabinsk provinces, in the autonomous region of the Volga Germans and the Bashkir Autonomous Republic, the total population of which decreased by 20.6%. Socially, the rural poor suffered the most, especially those who did not have dairy cattle, which saved many families from death. In terms of age, the famine hit children the hardest, depriving a significant part of those who managed to survive of their parents and shelter. In 1922, more than one and a half million peasant children, left to their own devices, wandered around begging and stealing; The mortality rate in shelters for homeless children reached 50%. The Soviet Central Statistical Office determined the population deficit for the period from 1920 to 1922. equal to 5.1 million people. The Russian famine of 1921, apart from military losses, was the largest disaster at that time in European history since the Middle Ages.
Assessments of what happened
In Soviet sources of the 20s - mid-30s of the 20th century, famine was assessed as “ the last message from tsarism and the civil war" Western publications widely discussed the activities of the ARA, pointing out the main cause of the famine as the one that was voiced in 1921.
Photographs of the famine of 1921-1923 have been repeatedly used as photographs of victims of the Holodomor in Ukraine.
see also
Notes
Literature
- Polyakov, B. A. Famine in the Volga region, 1919 - 1925: origin, features, consequences. Volufad. 2007. 735 p.
- Patenaude B.M. The Big Show in Bololand. The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford, 2002
- Fisher H. The Famine in the Soviet Russia. The Operations of the American Relief Administration. N.-Y., 1971. (1st ed., 1927.).
- Belokopytov V.I. Hard times: (From the history of the fight against famine in the Volga region 1921-1923). Kazan, 1976.
- Results of the fight against famine in 1921-1922. M., 1922.
- Results Last Goal. M., 1923.
Before World War I, Russia annually exported over 600 million poods of grain to European markets. After the October Revolution, the country experienced an unprecedented food crisis. In the autumn of 1920, mass famine crept up on the population of the Volga region and the inhabitants of the Don, Kaluga, Oryol, Tula and Chelyabinsk provinces. The photographs presented below (mostly from 1921) of this misfortune are preserved in the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents.
The beginning of the disaster
Sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who visited the villages of the Samara and Saratov provinces in the winter of 1921, later recalled: “ The huts stood abandoned, without roofs, with empty window sockets and doorways. The thatched roofs of the huts had long ago been removed and eaten. There were, of course, no animals in the village - no cows, no horses, no sheep, goats, dogs, cats, not even crows. Everyone has already been eaten. Dead silence stood over the snow-covered streets" Exhausted fellow villagers piled up those who died of hunger in empty barns.
By the summer of 1921, widespread famine had spread to an area with a population of about 20 million people. Three months later, the total number of starving people exceeded 25 million.
M. Gorky wrote about the scale and consequences of the unprecedented disaster to M.I. Benckendorf July 13, 1921: “ I am going abroad in August to campaign in favor of those dying of hunger. There are up to 25 million [millions]. Around 6 o'clock they took off, abandoned the villages and were going somewhere. Can you imagine what this is? Around Orenburg, Chelyabinsk and other cities there are camps of the hungry. Bashkirs burn themselves and their families. Cholera and dysentery are spread everywhere. Ground pine bark is valued at 30 thousand [rubles per] pood. They reap the unripe bread, grind it together with the ear and straw, and eat it in small pieces. They boil the old skin, drink the broth, and make jelly from the hooves. In Simbirsk, bread is 7500 [rubles per] pound, meat is 2000 [rubles]. All the livestock is being slaughtered, because there is no fodder grass - everything is burned. Children - children are dying by the thousands. In Alatyr, the Mordovians threw their children into the Sura River.”
Refugees
Massive unauthorized movements of the starving population in search of food worried the central and local authorities much more than the intractable food problem. The provincial authorities began to set up cordons along the routes of escape of peasants from starving regions. Nevertheless, from 600 thousand to 1 million starving people broke through the steppe cordons and scattered throughout the country. Some of them died of hunger on the way, some died in the camps organized for wanderers, but a significant part of those who fled still survived.
In the fall of 1921, when famine swept through the Donetsk, Yekaterinoslav, Zaporozhye, Nikolaev and Odessa provinces, the commissioner of the Ukrainian Red Cross noted in his report: “ Flight became widespread, reminiscent of mass psychosis: people fled, not knowing where, why, not having any means, not realizing what they were doing, selling all their property and going bankrupt completely. The fugitives could not be stopped by any obstacles, nor epidemics, to which everyone boarding the train was inevitably exposed, nor the distance, nor the difficult conditions of movement." That same fall, over 900 thousand residents of the Volga region had to be evacuated to other areas.
Catastrophe
In the late autumn of 1921, cannibalism was noticed throughout the Volga region. Even the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee M.I. Kalinin was forced to admit that in Bashkiria, for example, “the killing of their children by parents both in order to save the latter from the pangs of hunger, and in order to feed on their meat”, in general, in the Volga region, guards had to be posted over fresh graves so that local residents would not dig up and eat the corpses. The situation in the once blessed Crimea turned out to be just as depressing. As Maximilian Voloshin wrote, “The soul has long been cheaper than meat, and mothers, having slaughtered their children, salted them for future use.”
By the first half of 1922, the famine reached its maximum intensity. According to reports from the Cheka, a general famine gripped residents of the Volga region, Crimea and seven other provinces (Aktobe, Voronezh, Yekaterinburg, Zaporozhye, Kustanai, Omsk and Stavropol). The first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia noted that 35 provinces with a population of up to 40 million people suffered from the famine of 1921-1922.
In 1922, it turned out that 30% of the child population of the Volga region and Crimea died from hunger and epidemics. “I also saw children,” testified the first chairman of the All-Russian Union of Journalists M.A. Osorgin, exiled by security officers to the Volga region for participation in the Committee for Famine Relief, - Cheremis and Tatarchats, picked up along the roads and delivered on sledges to the city through the administration of the American Committee (ARA). Those brought were sorted into “soft” and “hard”. The soft ones were taken away or taken to the barracks, the hard ones were stacked row upon row, like firewood in a woodpile, to be buried later.”
An agrarian catastrophe with total starvation of the population turned out to be a natural result of the first three years of Bolshevik rule, which threw the country into an unknown past, to primitive economic systems and subsistence farming. “Our famine is not spontaneous, but artificial,”- wrote V.G. Korolenko to M. Gorky August 10, 1921. The reckless social experiment of Lenin's party demonstrated the inevitability of mass starvation where agriculture is managed by incompetent officials, where the dictator calls on marginalized people for military expeditions into the villages of his own power as part of the state surplus-appropriation program, where there is a food front and armed groups seize peasant crops as part of a combat mission. .
Homeless
Total famine gave rise to unprecedented homelessness with its direct consequences - child crime, child prostitution, child beggary and frequent mental disorders in surviving children and adolescents. According to M.I. Kalinin, in 1923 there were over 5.5 million homeless, neglected and abandoned children in the Soviet state. Some of them filled railway stations in the vain hope of getting on the roofs of carriages to well-fed territories, others begged for alms or sold cigarettes, while others joined moonshine companies or traded in theft and robbery in gangs that proliferated throughout the country and were mad with blood and hunger.
Over 1,700 thousand street children were provided with food by foreign organizations and about 900 thousand children by Soviet organizations. More than 1.5 million homeless people did not receive any assistance. Some of the homeless children were taken into their families by peasants. Less than 1,250 thousand street children were placed in orphanages, trade union institutions and institutions belonging to the Red Army.
All homeless people saved from starvation could repeat every day: thank you to Comrade Lenin for our happy childhood. However, in the 1920s, the propaganda apparatus had not yet achieved the qualifications to come up with and universally implement such an elegant version of the Soviet morning prayer for minors.
Help for the hungry
Unlike Kalinin, who was shocked by the scale of the disaster, the routine of cannibalism, and the level of homelessness, the pragmatic Lenin set out to turn the unprecedented hunger of his subjects to the benefit of the world revolution and his own dictatorship. Lenin brought the idea of the usefulness of total famine to the attention of his comrades in a letter intended for members of the Politburo to V.M. To Molotov on March 19, 1922: “ It is now and only now, when people are being eaten in starved areas and hundreds, if not thousands of corpses are lying on the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most furious and merciless energy and without stopping at the suppression of any resistance.”
The general famine, as the previous three-year experience of war communism had shown, stimulated forced labor, promoted universal obedience and thereby strengthened the proletarian dictatorship. Of course, it was not appropriate to publicly express judgments of this kind, but it was quite appropriate to act in accordance with such considerations. That is why on October 4, 1921, when the first frosts began in a number of provinces and the hungry lost the opportunity to diversify their table with inedible herbs, a special commission of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) allocated 10 million rubles in gold to purchase abroad not food, but rifles and machine guns with cartridges.
In the most terrible months of 1921 and 1922, the Soviet rulers spent millions of rubles in gold, primarily on financing the world revolution and carrying out “the tasks of the Cheka for overseas work,” on the purchase of small arms and aircraft in Germany and payment of indemnity after the inglorious invasion of Poland, on providing security officers food, material and monetary allowances and uniforms for military units of the Cheka and special forces, for the treatment of the most responsible comrades in German clinics and sanatoriums and the promotion of communist doctrine. After the publication of some of Trotsky’s opuses in one of the British newspapers, paid for by the Bolsheviks, curious Europeans calculated that with this money a thousand children could be saved from starvation.
From hunger alone, according to the calculations of the People's Commissariat of Health and the Central Statistical Office of the RSFSR, over 5 million people died during 1921-1922 (from 5,053,000 to 5,200,000 Soviet citizens). For comparison: the total losses of the Russian army (killed and those who died from wounds, disease or gas poisoning) from August 1914 to December 1917 inclusive amounted to 1,661,804 people. Thus, the number of deaths from widespread famine was three times higher than the irretrievable losses during the First World War.
In fact, there could have been much more victims of the widespread famine if not for the help of foreign philanthropists. According to M.I. Kalinina, American Relief Administration (ARA), headed by G.K. Hoover (later the 31st President of the United States), saved 10.4 million Soviet citizens from starvation. Another organization uniting the voluntary Red Cross societies of nine European states (Sweden, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Serbia and Denmark) was formed by F. Nansen, a Norwegian polar explorer, honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1898), supreme League of Nations Commissioner for Prisoners of War (1920-1921), Chief Commissioner of the International Red Cross for assistance to Russia (1921-1922), author of the so-called Nansen passports, which saved almost 3 million Russian emigrants from humiliation and repression, Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1922) . Nansen's team saved 1.5 million Soviet citizens from starvation. Another 220 thousand starving people survived thanks to the constant care of trade unions, Mennonites, the Catholic Mission and a number of other institutions.
Not the slightest idea of the merits of Hoover and Nansen has been preserved in the holey memory of the current descendants of the population who starved at the dawn of Soviet power. And monuments to neither Hoover nor Nansen were erected even in the Volga region (perhaps because the history of the Fatherland, both in the communist and modern interpretation, should be the history of our accomplishments and achievements). But the countless figures of the leader of the world proletariat on granite pedestals still point with an outstretched hand forward the direct path to a hopeless future: you are going the right way, comrades.
Post-perestroika historians are accustomed to explaining the famine in the Volga region in 1921–22 by the malice of the Bolsheviks. Civil war, war communism, surplus appropriation - all this is a familiar set of reasons for this, one of the largest disasters in the history of Russia in the twentieth century. Sometimes, however, a mention is added of the climate catastrophe that has struck the famine territory.
But there were probably other reasons - after all, not all the people died, and not even a third or a quarter of them living in the disaster region, but about 7-8%. Why did some escape while others fell? Igor Orlov, professor at the Higher School of Economics (HSE), answers a number of these questions in his book “Soviet Everyday Life.”
Orlov recalls that the number of people living in the famine territory was 69.8 million people. Of these, 26.5 million people starved (that is, less than a third), and as a result, about 5 million people died. The epicenter of the disaster were two provinces - Saratov and Samara, where 69% and 90% were starving, respectively.
And then the HSE professor begins listing the “indirect” causes of famine, attributing two consecutive very lean years to the direct cause. The Central Volga region generally reacted negatively to the Bolsheviks’ coming to power, and the introduction of surplus appropriation system completely aroused a feeling of deep injustice among the peasants. And starting in 1919, the peasants... diligently began to eat bread - as long as it “didn’t go to the enemy.” Here is a description from the archives of what was happening in 1919−20 in this region: “At first, the peasants tried to eat as much as possible, regardless of the fact that they would later have to starve; they did not spare bread and often added it to livestock feed. The bread was hidden, it rotted or was eaten by mice. They tried to sell the extra pounds to the speculator. As a result, with the onset of spring, a very significant part of the population does not have seed oats, and the land will remain unsown. By spring, the population itself was left almost without bread and starving.”
It turns out that many peasants “flogged themselves” with great enthusiasm, and there is no talk of any seizure of bread by the Bolsheviks.
In the summer of 1920, peasant Kretov wrote in a letter to Mikhail Kalinin: “The peasants of the Lebedyansky district of the Tambov province do not have on average half of their land sown with spring crops.” There were villages that “did not sow their fields at all” in the spring of 1920.
Another reason was the so-called. "peasant mentality" Orlov refers to the research of historian Kondrashin: “These stereotypes are not always humane, but deeply rational, since they are aimed at the survival of those most capable of continuing economic activity.” This “peasant mentality” in particular led to the fact that the population of Mordovian villages drowned their children in the Volga. Is it possible after this to recognize these drowned people as victims of hunger too? A difficult ethical question.
As another example of the special psychology of the peasants of that time, Orlov refers to a dialogue recorded at that time in a Volga village by a certain V. Posse:
“Are there many starving people in your village? - we asked a healthy woman selling milk.
- Yes, there will be about a hundred.
-Are the others full?
- The rest are full.
- Why don’t you, being well-fed, help the starving?
- Why help? To be left without bread?"
The “peasant mentality” also affected the inability of the majority of the population to leave the famine-stricken region. As an opposite example, the book talks about the Germans of the Volga region, who began to move en masse to prosperous territories - mainly to Southern Ukraine. By May 1921, 40% of the Germans left the Volga region, but the Russian population continued to stay and test their fate.
The very concept of famine in the Volga region raises questions; rather, it was a “grain famine.” It turns out that in both 1921 and 1922 there was an abundance of vegetables and fruits in the region. The book cites the remark of statistician Milov, who describes what was happening at the Volga stations at the end of 1921: “The local population sells fruits, vegetables, milk, eggs, meat and offers to exchange them for bread.”
Next, Milov gives a price list of local markets: “Beef cost 2.5 thousand rubles per pound, lamb and pork - 3-4 thousand, fish - 1-4 thousand. But for bread they asked for 3.3-4 thousand per pound, for flour - 150-200 thousand rubles per pound.”
Dear reader, have you ever seen beef costing 1.5 times less than bread? Today, for example, it is 5-7 times more expensive than bread.
And the famine around the great Volga River looks very strange - where there is plenty of fish now, and even more so 90 years ago. In addition, even in the most severe drought, the presence of a reservoir is a guarantee of watering the garden and garden, and therefore the opportunity to obtain at least an average harvest of potatoes, the main food crop of the Non-Black Earth Region.
Another reason that is almost not mentioned today is moonshine, which became terrible in the villages of that time. The “Prohibition Law” was in force in the country until August 9, 1921, and even then the authorities only allowed the production of wine with a strength of up to 20 degrees. And despite the famine, peasants in 1919-1920 produced moonshine en masse (along with the aforementioned desire to feed the grain at least to livestock, so as not to give it to the state). Even according to official data (Orlov refers to them), in the early 1920s, up to 100 million poods of bread were converted to moonshine (according to unofficial data - 150-160 million poods). If a person consumed 1 kg of bread per day, the grain used for moonshine could be enough to feed about 4.5 million people for a year - this figure almost coincides with the number of people who died of hunger in 1921-1922.
Of course, neither Professor Orlov nor we are trying to refute the fact of the famine of 1921-22. We simply urge you to look at this tragedy from a different perspective, distributing the blame for the famine not only on the Bolsheviks and the climate, but also, to put it mildly, on the so-called “human factor.”