The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham

Author:Lizzie Collingham [Collingham, Lizzie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101561317
Publisher: The Penguin Press
Published: 2012-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

14

The Soviet Union –

Fighting on Empty

Hunger and cold held our people in their merciless grip.

(Victor Kravchenko, head of the Department of War Engineering Armament for Russia)1

For every Briton or American that died as a result of the war, eighty-five Soviet citizens lost their lives. The Soviet Union suffered by far the highest death toll of all the combatant nations. The Japanese, in comparison, lost seven people to every Briton or American, the Germans lost twenty. The total Soviet death toll is estimated to have been somewhere between 28 and 30 million – a total which would have satisfied the Nazi architects of the Hunger Plan who intended to starve this number of Soviets to death. It represents 15 per cent of the pre-war Soviet population and about a third of all the people who died worldwide during the war. The human price the Soviets paid for victory was colossal.2

Of the 28–30 million dead 9 million were military, which leaves a figure of 19–21 million civilian casualties.3 The evidence is simply not available to give a breakdown of the causes of civilian deaths. A large proportion will have been starved or shot in the German-occupied areas. But conditions in the unoccupied Soviet civilian rear were also harsh; ‘food was in extremely short supply and sickness was rife’.4 If 1 million Soviet citizens starved in Leningrad alone, then another 1–2 million Soviet deaths are almost certainly attributable to starvation. It is known that tens of thousands of prisoners starved in the Soviet gulags where the wartime decline in the food supply subjected the inmates to famine conditions.5 In the countryside the peasants were living on the very margins of existence and a proportion of the young, the old and infirm will have succumbed to hunger. Circumstantial evidence suggests that even if famine conditions were not reached, large numbers of the vulnerable starved in the towns and cities. In Moscow in 1942 ‘the sight of men and women falling dead of starvation on [the] streets became too commonplace to attract crowds’.6 Even valuable industrial workers starved. A worker in an aviation plant in Kuibyshev described how ‘there were cases when people fell over from hunger’ on the assembly lines. ‘Some people died on the job. I personally saw two people die because of hunger.’7 James R. Miller, writing about the impact of the Second World War on the Soviet Union, argues that the figure of 30 million war deaths does not even include ‘war-related physical consequences such as those caused by chronic malnutrition’.8 The disintegration of the agricultural sector and the food supply system meant that all but the most privileged Soviets were affected by hunger and malnutrition. This chapter asks to what extent the critical food situation in the Soviet Union threatened its ability to fight.

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