To be fair, 1946 and 1947 were not easy years in the Soviet Union.
My grandfather’s mother had to send him to an orphanage during the war because she couldn’t feed both him and his baby sister, and he wasn’t fed enough at the orphanage either. He survived by stealing crops from the fields of nearby farmers. Bad things would have happened to him if they had caught him, and it’s hard to blame the farmers because everyone was hungry (except for the “vanguard”).
I don’t know when she was able to take him back. His father had been killed during Stalin’s purges so she didn’t have support and I doubt that the food supply was restored instantly after the war ended, especially for the children left without a family to advocate for them.
(Don’t get me wrong - I think a lot of the blame should fall on Soviet leadership, but any country so devastated by war would have experienced hunger.)
Interesting enough, the point is made in the book quoted that the height of the famine was 47, and that 45 and even most of 46 were, if not great, at least not literal famine conditions. If the source was the disruption of the war, surely it would’ve been at its height during and in the final year of the war - but it was rather a series of decisions in late 46 combined with a poor harvest that led to the famine in 47.
But more pertinent to the meme is the question of debts and payment, wherein the Soviet regime managed to install debt slavery with… fewer steps? Since it was both employer and contract enforcer?
A relatively small part of the Soviet system (some ~4 million teens and young folk, at maximum, were involved in this low-paid labor division from 1940-1952) which generally preferred more overt forms of slave labor, but interesting as part of the very… surface-level differences between the Stalinist system and the capitalist regimes it opposed.
I certainly don’t intend to defend Stalin. There was famine in parts of the Soviet Union even before the war and he was responsible for it. Arguably he did more harm to the people of the Soviet Union than even Hitler. I mean only to express some sympathy for the ordinary people of the Soviet Union. I think they weren’t indifferent to children’s hunger but there simply wasn’t enough food.
These were folk in their mid-late teens, when they say ‘juveniles’. But yes, the Soviet people weren’t indifferent to their children’s hunger, absolutely! Noted by another contemporary report from the Soviet archives:
Having been deprived of rations for bread and food products, the dependants and children in large families are forced to starve. The employees [rabotniki] themselves – the heads of the families – are dividing up their own ration with their children and are driving themselves to emaciation. In connection with this, cases of acute malnutrition, of a sharp decline in labour productivity, of quitting their jobs, etc. have become more frequent.
Parents often choose starvation over their children going hungry, in every society. Not always, of course, we’re all individuals - but parental affection is a hard thing to suppress.
Part of the issue of the famine in 47 was that the Soviet system decided to strip many dependents, including children, of their previously-given ration allocations.
To be fair, 1946 and 1947 were not easy years in the Soviet Union.
My grandfather’s mother had to send him to an orphanage during the war because she couldn’t feed both him and his baby sister, and he wasn’t fed enough at the orphanage either. He survived by stealing crops from the fields of nearby farmers. Bad things would have happened to him if they had caught him, and it’s hard to blame the farmers because everyone was hungry (except for the “vanguard”).
I don’t know when she was able to take him back. His father had been killed during Stalin’s purges so she didn’t have support and I doubt that the food supply was restored instantly after the war ended, especially for the children left without a family to advocate for them.
(Don’t get me wrong - I think a lot of the blame should fall on Soviet leadership, but any country so devastated by war would have experienced hunger.)
Interesting enough, the point is made in the book quoted that the height of the famine was 47, and that 45 and even most of 46 were, if not great, at least not literal famine conditions. If the source was the disruption of the war, surely it would’ve been at its height during and in the final year of the war - but it was rather a series of decisions in late 46 combined with a poor harvest that led to the famine in 47.
But more pertinent to the meme is the question of debts and payment, wherein the Soviet regime managed to install debt slavery with… fewer steps? Since it was both employer and contract enforcer?
A relatively small part of the Soviet system (some ~4 million teens and young folk, at maximum, were involved in this low-paid labor division from 1940-1952) which generally preferred more overt forms of slave labor, but interesting as part of the very… surface-level differences between the Stalinist system and the capitalist regimes it opposed.
I certainly don’t intend to defend Stalin. There was famine in parts of the Soviet Union even before the war and he was responsible for it. Arguably he did more harm to the people of the Soviet Union than even Hitler. I mean only to express some sympathy for the ordinary people of the Soviet Union. I think they weren’t indifferent to children’s hunger but there simply wasn’t enough food.
These were folk in their mid-late teens, when they say ‘juveniles’. But yes, the Soviet people weren’t indifferent to their children’s hunger, absolutely! Noted by another contemporary report from the Soviet archives:
Parents often choose starvation over their children going hungry, in every society. Not always, of course, we’re all individuals - but parental affection is a hard thing to suppress.
Part of the issue of the famine in 47 was that the Soviet system decided to strip many dependents, including children, of their previously-given ration allocations.