Some spoke of people they knew who tried to survive by eating cookies made of grass.43 Tens of thousands of letters were sent to the authorities seeking help, like one from a town near Voronezh. “We live in frightful conditions,” it said. “We have absolutely nothing, we eat only acorns, and we can scarcely drag our feet. We will die from hunger this year.” From Stalingrad and villages in the area came a similar plea: “There is no bread and we do not know how we shall survive. I have sold everything to save us. There is nothing more to sell.”44 Even in places like Saratov, not occupied by the Germans and therefore relatively intact, food shortages were so bad in early 1946 that people could not redeem their ration cards for basics like bread and potatoes.45
The weather conspired to produce a poor harvest that year, with a drought in Ukraine and Moldova, while in Siberia late-season rains did the damage. The grain crop for 1946 was down by over 15 percent from 1945, which was itself already 2.4 times smaller than in 1940. The potato harvest in 1946 was only 69 percent of what it had been in 1940.46
The famine, however, resulted in part from the actions of the Communist regime, which was still playing the politics of human misery. In Moldova, for example, the government provoked the famine by grain-requisitioning techniques that aimed at alleged rich peasants in the eternal struggle against “kulaks.” Just in that region in this period, at least 115,000 peasants died “from hunger and related diseases.”47
When Stalin heard of the shortfalls in deliveries from the main agricultural areas, he was infuriated, and in October 1946, just as in the early 1930s, he sent his henchmen to the provinces to make sure that they surrendered their quotas.48 Nikita Khrushchev reported the dire situation in Ukraine, including cases where starving people in their delirium had resorted to cannibalism. Stalin’s response was predictable: “This is spinelessness! They’re playing tricks on you. They’re reporting this on purpose, trying to get you to pity them and make you use up reserves.”49
The famine of 1946–47 adversely affected 100 million people, mostly in the countryside but in urban areas as well.50 On September 16, 1946, to curtail demand for food, the regime raised prices in state stores and eleven days later took away the bread-rationing privileges of 27.5 million people who worked in rural areas, but not on farms.51 That day also ended permission for peasants and others to grow food on minuscule private plots that had been appropriated over the years from collective farms. Now their tiny dreams of minimal economic freedom were quashed. Hunger and desperation spread in the countryside, which by and large had not been on rations in the first place. Writing to Soviet leaders and even to Stalin was a common outlet for complaints. Care had to be taken to avoid forbidden words that suggested there might be a famine, because such “slander” got people sent to the Gulag.52
While there was plenty of grumbling and muttering, the will to collective action was too weak and the hold of the police too strong for uprisings to develop. In response to the crisis, Stalin called a rare Central Committee meeting in February 1947. However, instead of offering relief or loosening controls, they clamped down and demanded obedience to “the peasant’s first commandment,” namely to make deliveries to the state and cope with what remained.53
For many there was too little food. However, the data are not precise on the number of “excess deaths” beyond the normal mortality rate. Even so, most historians accept that between 1 and 2 million people lost their lives through hunger and disease.54
The situation deteriorated further in the years 1946 to 1948, when the USSR exported 5.7 million tons of grain to new satellites Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia and even to France and other countries. These moves were dictated by Stalin’s desire to prop up new Communist regimes or to curry favor. The government also increased its grain reserves, as a hedge against an international situation that might get out of control.55
The reflexive popular response to the shortages was increased theft of food. In the autumn of 1946, 53,369 persons were charged with stealing bread, and nearly 75 percent of them lost their freedom.56 It was indicative of the continuing punitive side of Stalinism that in January 1947 the regime began drawing up a new law on theft. As a draft of that measure worked its way through the bureaucracy, Stalin became involved and opted for harsher punishments for all categories of robbery. Whereas in the 1920s and 1930s the penalty for first offenders who stole “state property” was three months in jail, the new law proposed to extend it.
The mighty dictator was angered when the draft law was put before him in May 1947 and penned two new decrees, one each for the theft of personal and state property. Now he wanted a minimum sentence of three years’ imprisonment for the former—with repeat offenders getting six to ten years. For those found guilty of stealing state property, the dictator demanded a minimum sentence of five years and more if the theft was part of an organized crime. When the new draft was ultimately presented for his approval, at the stroke of a pen he increased the minimum sentences yet again, adding a year or two in both cases.57
The law for petty theft affected poorer people, like two women whose case went to the Tomarov district court on July 16. Both were given six years in a corrective-labor camp (the Gulag) for stealing four kilograms (just over eight pounds) of potatoes from a field. That sentence was less than the minimum seven years, though it illustrates the systematic brutalization of the peasantry in the postwar years.58 In the remainder of 1947, a half million people were sent to court under the draconian new law, so that it operated like a conveyor belt to the Gulag. On January 1, 1951, exactly 637,055 people found themselves being punished for this crime.59 The three highest judges in the land eventually concluded that the law was too harsh and appealed to Stalin to lower the minimum punishments. He would not budge.60
The judicial system managed to curb the effects of the tyrant’s wrath in various ways. Either the procuracy or the courts substituted lesser charges than those imposed by the decree, exempted juveniles, or spared at least some by dropping charges. Beginning in 1948, the net effect was a steady decline in the number of cases involving the theft of state and personal property.61
Rationing was finally repealed at the end of 1947 and the currency revalued. In some places there was a festive feeling in the air, and on the eve of the big day of the exchange, goods appeared in shops—if only for a fleeting moment.62 Thereafter food and provisions gradually improved, though even into the 1950s consumer goods were very scarce. For example, each member of an “average worker’s family” could, once a year, get either a pair of leather shoes or a pair of winter boots but not both. They could expect at most three bars of soap and in Moscow’s public bathing facilities could get a proper “washing” (pomyvki) a little more than once a month. In other places public bathing was less frequent.63
Everyday Stalinism was largely what it had been in the 1930s, and that, for most people, was a system that has been compared to a prison/conscript army, a strict boarding school, and a relief agency/soup kitchen.64 Postwar propaganda was a poor substitute for a better way of life.65