1946

1946 28 February
The Plenum of the CC CP(b)U discusses the results of the 1945 agricultural year and preparations for the 1946 spring sowing.
29 August
It is officially announced that “in connection with the drought in a number of oblasts in the USSR and the reduction in state food supplies” the abolition of the ration card system will be deferred for one year. On September 6 local leaders are warned about an increase in ration prices for food.
27 September
The Council of Ministers of the USSR and the CC CP(b)U issue a resolution entitled “About the Economy and the Outlay of Bread,” which lists such measures as reducing the norms for the distribution of bread to dependants and children, terminating food supplies (i.e., eliminating rations) to workers and officials of local industrial enterprises, machine-tractor stations, and Soviet state farms.
5 October
A telegram arrives in Ukraine from the Council of Ministers of the USSR (then headed by Stalin), criticizing the leadership of districts and oblasts for allegedly “still continuing to stand apart from the issue of grain procurements” and for failing to conduct the “crucial struggle for the complete and timely fulfillment of state procurement plans.”
15 October
Khrushchev sends a letter to Stalin, explaining that the drought has lowered grain yields by half, in comparison with the original estimates. This letter and subsequent ones request that the grain-procurement plan be curtailed. Khrushchev recalled Moscow's reaction: “Stalin sent me a most brutal, insulting telegram saying that I am a dubious person: I write notes in which I argue that Ukraine cannot fulfill agricultural procurements, and I request a huge number of cards to feed the people. This telegram had a devastating effect on me. I understood the tragedy that was threatening not only my own person but also the Ukrainian people, the republic: famine was irrevocable, and soon it began.”
4 November
Minister of Grain Procurements of the USSR Dvinsky sends Khrushchev a telegram: “Despite frequent instructions to intensify procurements of food crops, you are not devoting adequate attention to this most important measure. As of 20 October, 120,783,000 poods of rye and wheat have arrived from your republic, 111,097 poods remain to be delivered. I order you to issue district officials responsible for procurements an instruction to carry out a review of food crop deliveries by means of special accounts of collective farms, Soviet state farms, to issue stiff demands for their immediate delivery to the state in the shortest time. Prosecute those guilty of a deliberate delay in the delivery of food crops.”
26 November
Stalin and Zhdanov send a telegram to Nikita Khrush-chev and Demian Korotchenko, the secretary of the CC CP(b)U, accusing them of halting grain procurements. The telegram demands that they put an end to their non-Bol-shevik attitude toward the fulfillment of the grain procu-rement plan and to punish those who are concealing grain.
17 December
Khrushchev sends another letter to Stalin about the most urgent need to provide a forage loan to collective farms in Ukraine. According to oblast party committee estimates, in 1946 Ukraine needed 150,000 tons of grain in order to combat the famine. Throughout 1947 Ukraine received food and seed loans, as well as 140 million karbovantsi to provide free food for the population.

Recalling this situation in his memoirs, Khrushchev cites an account by the then secretary of the Odesa oblast committee of the CP(b)U Oleksii Kyrychenko, who traveled to a collective farm to check on how people were surviving the winter. He was told to visit a certain female collective farm worker. This is what he saw: “I came upon a horrible scene. I saw how this woman was cutting up the corpse of her child on a table, a boy or a girl, and she was saying: 'We've already eaten Manechka, now we will salt Ivanechko for the winter. This will be enough for some time. This woman had become insane from hunger and had killed her two children. Can you imagine?”

In Mykolaiv oblast in 1946, the grain harvest stood at 1.9-3 tsentners [190-300 kilograms] per hectare. According to 1946 agricultural reports, for completed work-day units collective farmers in Kyiv oblast received no more than 150 grams of grain per workday. In other oblasts this indicator equaled 50-100 grams, while farmers in certain areas received neither grain nor money. In 1946 the gross collection of grain crops in Ukraine was 3.5 times smaller than in 1940. In summer 1946, 5,500 collective farms out of a total of 26,397 failed even to gather the same amount of grain that had been sown. The lack of fodder led to a significant decrease in the numbers of large horned cattle, pigs, and horses.

One after another requests for food loans arrive at the CC CP(b)U and the Soviet Ukrainian government. One of these documents, sent from Dnipropetrovsk oblast, paints a clear picture of the situation: “The executive committee of the oblast Council of Workers' Deputies and the oblast committee of the CP(b)U are reporting that in the last while cases of swelling from hunger have been noted among collective farm workers and even entire families in many collective farms in the oblast, particularly in the districts that suffered from the 1946 drought… It has been ascertained that in most cases those stricken by illness are families of soldiers killed in the war, single, elderly people incapable of work, and families with many children, in which either the head of the family is absent or he is unable to work as a result of a disability, people resettled from Poland, and repatriated people. In connection with the fact that the rural inhabitants have no food supplies, particularly those living in districts that suffered from the poor harvest, in the last while the sickness rate among children has risen sharply, and the influx of children from rural areas to the cities has markedly increased… In the last while, cases have been noted of children being abandoned in public areas in cities (train stations, urban executive committees and district Soviets, militia stations, and other institutions) by parents living in rural areas. This situation resulted from the circumstance that in 1946 some collective farmers received a very insignificant amount of grain for completed workday units.”