There have been many bad events that have shaken humanity throughout history. Some of them emerged due to political reasons, some of them due to health problems and caused the death of countless people.
This famine, which swept Russia, caused millions of people to die of hunger, epidemics began, and even caused people to eat each other to survive.
Droughts that occur every five to seven years in Russia paved the way for famine.
Russia was a country with large land reserves, but productivity was very low as farming was done mostly with manpower.
In addition, the success of the harvests depended on favorable weather conditions. Drought caused by the decrease in precipitation in the country; caused crop shortages, reduced yields, and food shortages. These droughts were one of the biggest factors affecting this great famine.
Another cause of famine was Lenin’s Policies of War Communism.
At that time, Russia was experiencing economic problems both because of World War I and because of the civil war. The communist leader Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, put forward the “New Economic Policy (NEP)” to strengthen the country’s economy, but the “Politics of War Communism” worsened the situation in the country.
Because the War Communism Policies included the nationalization of all industries and the introduction of strict central government, strict discipline and prohibition of strikes for workers, forced labor tax for those who do not work, restriction of food by central distribution in urban centers, and prohibition of private enterprise.
As such, the villagers decided to migrate from the villages to the cities in order to have easier access to food.
Before the famine broke out, most peasants stockpiled a year’s grain of grain to prepare for crop failure, but Russian granaries were empty due to years of low yields and the constant seizure of grain by war communism.
This being the case, the Russian villagers, who migrated from the village to the city in order to reach the grain more easily, soon realized that the situation in the city was not different from their villages, as they saw people dying of hunger on the way.
The people, who could not reach food in the city, started to eat everything they could get.
According to the reports prepared on the subject, the public; To survive, it fed on seeds, acorns, grass, weeds, bark, even pets.
Government officials, on the other hand, told the starving people that they should scrape the dried animal bones into flour and be fed with this flour. Moreover, he claimed that despite its unpleasant odor, it was 25 percent more useful than rye bread.
Since what they found was not enough, cannibalism ensued.
It was seen that the villagers who were about to die of hunger were pulling the flesh of the recently buried corpses from their graves to eat. In fact, one woman, according to reports, refused to be taken to burial because she would eat her husband’s body.
One of the American volunteers who went to help Russia at that time said the following: “Families were killing and eating their fathers, grandfathers and children. This situation was so legitimized that a person threatened to make a sausage in the market among the rude salesmen cursing each other.”
Since cannibalism was considered a legitimate method of survival, law enforcement did not take any action on the issue.
According to Russian scholars who have studied the great famine, cannibalism was most prevalent near the Volga river, where the famine was most severe.
The famine also led to the trafficking of human flesh in the markets.
Both cannibalism and non-food items consumed for survival caused epidemics such as typhus, typhoid fever, smallpox, influenza, dysentery, cholera, and even bubonic plague.
Unable to control the situation, Lenin initially refused the aid from abroad, but later accepted the aid with an intermediary.
In the early days of the famine, Lenin rejected the aid from abroad because he saw it as “intervention”, but later on, he approved the aid of the American Relief Administration (ARA) through an intermediary, although he did not accept it officially.
Thus, European aid organizations such as “Save The Children” started to help. Although these aids alleviated the famine, they did not help to end it completely.
Polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen was also one of the people who helped famine in Russia.
Nansen, who helped Russia with the “League of Nations”, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
So many people died from the famine that neither the Soviet State nor foreign observers could give an exact death toll.
Although at least five million people are said to have died by historians, this number is thought to be as high as eight million.
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