Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2019 number

The article is devoted to the analysis of the food situation in the Ural village in the mid-1930s. This problem has not been sufficiently covered in the historical literature. Materials from a number of publications do not give a clear idea about the famine that broke out in the Ural countryside. It is connected with the fact that historians use data on food consumption according to sources in annual average (publications by S.A. Nefedov and other authors). The article objective is to determine the food situation in the Ural countryside in the summer of 1936 - summer of 1937. Numerous historical sources show that the rural population’s is nutrition turned out to be critical due to the crop failure caused by drought. Already in the late autumn of 1936, the famine broke out and gained strength; there was no timely state aid, seed and food loans began entering the collective farms only before spring field work. The nutrition situation of the collective farmers is analyzed based on the energy index - the ratio of calories received and expended by collective farmers and their family members. The sources’ condition made it possible to compare the peasant nutrition in the 1926/27 fiscal year and collective farmers in 1936, which showed decreasing nutrition energy index of the Ural rural residents for this period. The average data for 1936 do not permit reporting about the famine which broke out in the village, they only indicate the unfavorable food situation. Calculations on main products (crops, flour, meat, milk, butter, potatoes and vegetables, etc.) were based on monthly budget surveys of collective farmer families in Sverdlovsk Region in the administrative boundaries of 1936-1937. The compiled graphs vividly reflect a rapid drop in the collective farmers’ consumption in the spring-summer of 1937, which allow reconstructing the hunger stages of rural population in the region. The article concludes that famine hit not only rural, but urban areas in the region as well. The authorities once again, as in 1932-1933, failed to cope with supplying food to population. The help rendered to the starving persons turned out to be untimely and insufficient.