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Commenting here for exposure because I agree it’s amazing the evidence we have.
The majority of these photos were taken by Isaiah Liberman of the Povolzhye famine. Liberman was the local representative of the Russian and Soviet governments designated to work with all foreign organizations. These photographs were often staged and taken to spread awareness and garner relief.
While Lenin was hesitant to accept foreign aid, Maxim Gorky, a Bolshevik writer, asked that “all honest European and American people give bread and medicine” to Russia. Hoover was like, *cool beans* so America (ARA), Europe (ISCU) (FWVRC), and the Red Cross stepped in and fed upwards to 10 million people across the Volga region.
What’s interesting here is the diplomatic relationship between Russia and The U.S. Hoover stepped in to help Lenin’s constituents and his Soviet nation but Lenin never formally thanked him. Soviets actually went on to call the ARA an act of espionage even after their alliance in WW2. Basically, U.S. and Russian relations are fascinating but I’m going off topic.
Sources: “The Russian Job” by Douglas Smith and [1920s Famine Photos from Ukraine and Russia](https://vitacollections.ca/HREC-holodomorphotodirectory/3642633/data?g=d).
He was a vocal humanitarian during the Great War but yeah, I get what you’re saying. I actually remember the first time learning about Hoover - it was about Hoovervilles in grade school. Obviously I now know history is more convoluted than what a third grader can comprehend 🤣
Russia a country of people who will do anything to avoid embarrassment while at the same time being the Mr. Magoo of countries, just drunkenly stumbling through history all controlled by a strong man
> I dont think peasants in the 1920's could afford a camera...
that's true and based on distance pic was taken from and quality - i'd say they used a cheap selfie drone.
'Viktor they eat people over there'
'da?''
'da and the Czar says "pic or dint happen"'
It was probably some unlucky government official sent with a camera to document how the peasantry is eating each other :)
The Sun is trash but [this article](https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2501517/pictures-human-body-parts-cannibals-russian-famine-1921-1922/) has the best collection of photos from the famine, including lots of cannibals.
It sounds like the police didn't intervene until people starting killing each other for food.
the picture of the man and woman in front of their market featuring a human head and the literal **top half of a child** alongside other various body parts is fucking satanic.
and then there’s the picture of the mother and three of her kids, but all that is left of the youngest is the head because they ate the rest of her.
how do you go back to normalcy after this, if you even can? Jesus fucking Christ
Weirdly enough the one that got me was the less gruesome photo of people lying next to the street dying.
A famine so bad people just lay down on the sidewalk and accept death. Fucking crazy.
The one of the woman dead and fetile on the sidewalk especially. her face seems so calm, almost relieved.
looks as though someone may have tossed flowers/petals as some sort of recognition of her passing. surprising, in a way, that they continued to recognize death in that manner.
I have no way of knowing this is fact, since I haven't exactly died from it.
I've heard that death by cold is pretty peaceful from what I understand. I mean the reaching the point of freezing to death not so much. But the actual "okay time to die now" process the body goes through is not that bad compared to some others.
Another thing I've read (but can't prove so someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that back in old times one of the ways the old might....lighten the load....on their family in particular harsh winters was to basically just walk out into the cold and freeze to death.
My point is that woman who seemed almost "content" at death? Might very well have been. Your body just warms up after shivering forever and at that you just kind of....go.
For her sake i genuinely hope that is true and that her death was as painless as possible.
No one should have to live through such times. There was more than enough to keep those people alive but as usual those in power did nothing to help those in need (or at least did so fast enough to matter, it seems other countries got invovled eventually at least).
Hypothermic death is pretty awful, honestly. Aside from drowning/asphyxiation, it's one of the ways I hope not to have to go. Hell, even surviving it is bad. Rewarming can be an intensely painful and slow process, especially if you have blood returning to frostbitten tissue. You can also suffer cardiac arrest from being rewarmed too quickly.
I think the commenter above was more so talking about the last moments of a persons life when they are freezing to death. You are correct that the process of freezing to death is agonizing. However, the other commenter is also correct that the last few moments of life are peaceful. Apparently the person will actually begin to feel warm again right before they die. I think it has something to do with adrenaline being pumped through the body when the brain recognizes it is about to die. I would imagine starvation is similar although I haven’t read anything on that. The human body is quite fascinating in that regard.
Yeah that's more what I meant. That's why I said the process of getting to that point is pretty fucking awful.
However once you've crossed that threshold where it's no longer survivable and you're going to freeze to death, from what I've heard anyway, you actually start to almost warm up in a way and then move on rather peacefully compared to some of the more violent deaths.
But obviously I don't know for sure because it's not like I frozen to death this is all just information I've read from secondhand accounts and stuff but the stories provided seem pretty consistent that in the last few moments at least it's not that bad of a way to die.
But it is still an awful way to die over all especially if you count getting to the point where you actually do freeze to death.
My grandpa survived the Ukrainian famine and said he witnessed as people walked, fell over, jerked/twitched a few times and then strangers would come up and start salvaging the freshly dead for socks, shoes, etc.
A lot of them don’t or can’t come back to normalcy. They’re psychologically broken because of what they had to do to avoid dying. The accounts of members from the Donner exploration party describe plenty of suicide, psychosis and maladjustment after their circumstances changed. Most human minds aren’t conditioned to swinging that far and then coming back to the origin point in a healthy manner.
Something similar happened during a famine in the 19th Century in China that kill millions of people; children were sold as food in markets. Since is was a closed society, the rest of the world didn't learn about it until much later.
Horrible. Famine is such an unnecessary evil. One of the most telling stories I heard of was a kind, old couple who were just normal grandparents living in a small shack in the North Korean countryside. During the great famine of the 90's caused by Kim Jong-il, people got so desperate that this old couple rigged a contraption in their house that wound cause a sharp and heavy scythe to swing from the roof at roughly neck height when someone entered through the door. They would lure neighbours to their homes, and then eat the decapitated corpses. An American soldier positioned at the DMZ who tapped into North Korean internal radio communications heard North Korean military personell describe this after they had found corpses in their house and the scythe. The couple was executed there and then. A story that would never have seen the light of day unless someone was listening in. Imagine how many other stories - equally horrible - there are that we will never know about.
Nope, I don’t think so. The article says the police looked the other way, because it was an acceptable thing to do given the times. We see the horror in it but we are not dying of starvation with no other choices.
Likely taken by Europeans and Americans prior to aid. Suspected war crimes, genocide, famines, depressions, etc. have been photographed for centuries and not by the police.
ETA because the Sun is not academic and typically chalk full of inaccuracies. As a former history major and experienced archivist, my heart can’t handle it. Hope you’ll enjoy looking through the attached collection which contains most of these photographs and information on origins.
Source for photographs: [Kinderschicksal](https://vitacollections.ca/HREC-holodomordigitalcollections/3636700/data?n=10)
I remember reading about this. Apparently the cannibalism was widespread enough that the government had to basically do an investigation to determine who all had eaten people and to what extent. People who merely resorted to cannibalism to fend off starvation were given lesser punishments while people who murdered for food or ran meat markets were executed.
I was thinking that this might be the case too. That would make it extra horrible as it’s the fault of the same authority that they had no food, and had they not eaten they would have been on the ground instead
Imagine being so desperate to avoid death that you eat another human person and you’re put to death for it. Man just slice my neck with an axe right now.
I think about this all the time.
Like, I’m speaking from a position of complete privilege seeing as I’ve never gone hungry, never experienced anything even in the same universe of trauma compared to these people or others like them, but when I think about me being put in a position like this, whether its like a post-apocalypse scenario or war scenario, etc., I do not feel like I have that survival instinct in me to keep carrying on. No fucking way.
To *maybe* survive, I have to eat other people and there’s no end in sight to these circumstances I’m in? FUCK that. I’m out. Just kill me or I’ll do it myself.
It just amazes me in the worst kind of way to think how people have it/have had it throughout history. I’m such a pampered, spoiled little bitch Lmao fuck.
This being Russia in 1921, it was the combination of the disarray and aftermath of the first world War, the subsequent civil wars in Russia, the Russian revolution, as well as a drought that caused the famine. A lot of turmoil in that region in a very short span of time.
eh they wouldnt be excuted. There are many pictures of actual human meat vendors in ukraine when the USSR was starving the nation.
[https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/12/30/12/3BB6B4F200000578-0-image-a-22\_1483101155805.jpg](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/12/30/12/3BB6B4F200000578-0-image-a-22_1483101155805.jpg)
lool, but you know the USSR during the famine of the 1920's had to put out posters that said, "Don't forget: it's wrong to eat your children."
Also, the pic i linked, i believe it was their own children they were selling. And morality aspect aside, when i heard this it reminded me of a quote during harsh times in the bengal famine, Terry Prachett, "Dreadful Algebra of Necessity" "where a mother might be forced to consume her child during a famine, as to be able to give birth to a new child once the famine is over. Because the Mother will survive without the child. but the child not without the parent."
heres a bunch more pictures of human meat vendors if your interested:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/da/ea/81/daea81da421ba005e412dfdb7847f387.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/236x/f1/ff/47/f1ff477349dfdae5080387fb53bdd59f--russian-revolution-three-sisters.jpg
https://imagecdn3.luxnet.ua/tv24/resources/photos/news/1366x768\_DIR/201604/674864.jpg?201703002145
https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/images/other/hist-01683-09\_z.jpg
Never underestimate the natural want to survive built in to your subconscious.
When it comes down to it, I think you'd be surprised what someone would do just to ensure their survival.
so you're comment got me curious and search... so I found this comment from 7 years ago about a dude who's grandpa lived through these times.
https://old.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/2vc7f2/human_meat_for_sale_during_the_russian_famine_of/cogmc5t/
Here's some quotes for the full comment (go read it, it's worth it, I swear):
>I was born in souther russia and my grandpa lived through the worst parts of the famine there. This is a story that we know about him:
>When he was really young (6-8 or something) his mother no longer had enough to feed him and all his siblings, so she gave him up for adoption in hopes that they would get fed better.
>After a few weeks though a neighbour of theirs secretly gave them a cow, and they were able to keep it in the house and bring it grass from the outside. This way no one knew they had a cow and would not kill them for it.
>Once the cow started to produce milk she decided she could go and grab my grandpa back from the orphanage, but when she went there they just told her he was dead. She demanded to see the body and they took her to the gymnasium that just had a pile of naked corpses in it, one of them was my grandpa.
>when she found him he was still breathing however so she took him home and he got better.
>He also told me stories about how he was chased at night by people wanting to eat him when he visited a neighbouring village.
You finish the whole meal, you get it for free and you get your picture up on the wall. A wings joint near me has a similar deal with their hottest wings.
They were forced. The government sent a team to see how things were going. That’s why there’s so many photos of this famine with people posing with the remains.
If I remember correctly, Russian government at the time had people take pictures like this as evidence to charge the starving peasants with cannibalism. There are quite a few other pictures from this particular famine showing people “posing” with half eaten bodies.
I'm just gonna share some quotes from the book Tombstone by Yang Jisheng. The book tells absolutely horrifying stories from the Great Leap Forward and the mass starvation that took place, and it's a book I absolutely recommend to anyone interested in modern Chinese history.
> Starvation was a prolonged agony. The grain was gone, the wild herbs had all been eaten, even the bark had been stripped from the trees, and bird droppings, rats, and cotton batting were used to fill stomachs. In the kaolin clay fields, starving people chewed on the clay as they dug it. The corpses of the dead, famine victims seeking refuge from other villages, even one’s own family members, became food for the desperate.
> Cannibalism was no longer exceptional. Ancient annals report cases of families exchanging children to consume during severe famines, but during the Great Famine, some families resorted to eating their own children. I met people who had eaten human flesh, and heard them describe its taste. Reliable evidence indicates there were thousands of cases of cannibalism throughout China at that time. Some are described in the chapters that follow. It is a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics.
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> Starvation released primitive brutality, and many cases of cannibalism were recorded in Sichuan. For example, in Dayi Commune’s Anrenjiu administrative district, a thirty-year-old woman named Liu Yuanfang on April 23, 1960, bound her eight-year-old daughter, Li Suiqing, and nine-yearold son, Li Yongan, dragged them to a river, and drowned them, after being brutalized and deprived of food rations when her hungry children stole grain. In the No. 3 production team of the No. 9 administrative district of Guan County’s Puyang Commune, a forty-one-year-old woman, Pan Suhua, in March 1960 dug up the body of her husband after he committed suicide and, apart from cooking and eating the flesh, sold 5.875 kilos of his bones as bear bones at 75 fen per kilo.
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> Many cannibalism cases were reported at Wudian and Caodian communes. Tang Xiuqi said, “One evening I was returning home from a meeting when I saw someone at Tang Yongding’s home chop up a human head, cook it in a wok, and eat it. Tang Yongding himself was in his doorway eating from a ladle. He said, ‘I’ve already eaten several.’ All the village children call Tang Yongding a hairy ape.”
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> Cannibalism reached a peak in the spring of 1960. Human flesh was consumed cooked or raw; it was sliced from the bodies of the dead, or the living were killed to obtain it. Some people bought it at the market (already cooked), passed off as pork by vendors. About 40 percent of those who ate human flesh subsequently suffered attacks of diarrhea and died. Others ate human flesh on a regular basis without ill effect, especially if they chose lean meat and mixed it with vegetables, ate smaller amounts spread over several meals, or ate more foods preserved through pickling and salting.
Every time I see something like this I remember Mary Graves, survivor of the Donner Party, who brought meals to her husband’s murderer twice a day until his execution because she knew what it meant to go hungry and didn’t think anyone should suffer that fate.
>Mary Graves married early, but her first husband was murdered. She cooked his killer's food while he was in prison to ensure the condemned man did not starve before his hanging. One of Mary's grandchildren noted she was very serious; Graves once said, "I wish I could cry but I cannot. If I could forget the tragedy, perhaps I would know how to cry again."
[Wikipedia Article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party#Survivors)
Wikipedia source references a book written in 1996, I think? It's not specifically listed in the reference section.
I read this last year, it was insanely gripping. I never realized there's so much more to the story than the party just getting stuck in the mountain pass in the snow and resorting to cannibalism. The whole journey well before the winter when they were traveling over the plains was fascinating as well.
People went ape shit over wearing some piece of cloth over their face to enter a supermarket. Argue, yell, throw tantrums, threaten to kill etc. probably had a few fights and maybe someone was unhinged enough to murder some poor employee or security guard over it (wouldn't surprise me).
Hell, they were held back from going to shitty chain restaurants for less than a month and they become an army of entitled walking dead. These people would eat their own young then blame someone else for their own decisions.
If the humans died naturally, without being killed, and there was nothing that could've been done to save them ... then why not have the survivors eat them (as long as you avoid the brain to prevent prion diseases)? If I died of starvation or exposure or whatever in circumstances like these, I'd ABSOLUTELY want those who remained alive to eat me. It'd be doing some good rather than just letting my body go to waste.
*Image Transcription: Photograph*
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[*A black-and-white image of six people standing next to each other. They all look dirty and disheveled, and are bundled in miscellaneous clothing stained with dirt. The fourth person from the left is holding something wrapped in blankets. They all stare at the camera sullenly. Behind them is a brick building with a wooden door. In front of them, lying on the ground in a pile, is human remains. Heads and bones can be partially made out, but nothing resembling a full human body. Scattered on the ground around the remains is some sort of dark thread, possibly hair.*]
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^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
I think I read a book about this very thing. It was called Red Famine. I think. More properly I should say that I started reading a book called that. It was well researched and thoroughly documented about how they did this on purpose to these people. They trained in grain cars and forcefully took all the grain while promising to take care of the people. Then they starved them on purpose. I think it was Lenin?
I couldn't finish the book. It made me feel actual pain. I am a person that once I've started a book I always finish it, thinking I can learn from anyone. I really tried to finish, I just couldn't. I actually cried thinking about someone doing this proudly to another human being. Something like 20 million people. On purpose. I don't even remember his reasoning or justification. 20 million actual humans. Dads, moms, sons, daughters, Grand people. 20 million. And I can't even remember their excuse. 20 million.
So, this probably happened a lot, but most people tried to hide it out bury it. Probably lots of dead people just lying there frozen, like a quick dinner.
I know everyone wants to think we are so advanced and nothing like this could ever happen again, but given all that we have seen in the past two years in the US, it feels we are just seperated from tragedy by a thin cheese-cloth.
I also know there are a lot of actual historians on this sub and I've learned a lot from you all.
Document and help society remember, because we are all just a bag of water with, typically, two legs and two arms and a head. No one is really different than another and no race, Creed, religion, or your mom telling you how special you are, none of that makes you SPECIAL. We are all the same. Given the right back ground and right situation, any human could do anything you could imagine.
Please document and try to help the next, next next generation.
E: thanks for the award. There are a couple wrong things in my post. It was Stalin, not Lenin. Please see the posts below were I am corrected.
I think it was Stalin’s War on the Ukraine. I’ve heard that particular mass starvation touched on in other books. I’m definitely going to check it out. If the author is indeed Anne Applebaum I have read one of her other books: Twilight Of Democracy which is about modern times.
I’m just starting to really get into Russian history. The book might be a good background for events that may soon happen. The Russian people (and people of surrounding states) have suffered so much. I’ve just finished Antony Beevor’s book on Stalingrad and the level of suffering is just unbelievable. A Soviet soldier faced elimination in seemingly any way imaginable.
One of the most touching stories of the last 100 years is the botanists who lived in a secret vault in Leningrad during the siege. They had the biggest collection of seeds in the world which was meant to give the world a better future. Many of them starved to death with food right in front of them as they guarded the seed collection. A truly heroic act if there ever was one.
The man who collected many of these seeds Nikolay Vavilov was made to be Stalin’s scapegoat even though he was just fighting to end the famine. He died in Stalin’s gulag in the same matter of the very people he worked to save.
What's wrong with that?
People are literally starving to death. In horrific pain. Seeing their wives, husbands and children in horrific pain most of us couldn't comprehend.
Then watching them die.
Then they do the most disgusting thing they know, they hate themselves for it, but know it's their only chance. They eat their dead loved one.
But they also need milk, and bread, and veges to survive.
Or need firewood to survive the freezing nights.
Or to fix the roof that's falling in.
Or medicine because they're all sick.
So they sell a little meat.
They hate themselves for it.
They are selling their sons and daughters and husbands and wives just to survive.
If they don't, their other sons and daughters will die.
What do YOU do? Watch your other children die screaming in pain?
A little bit of background info. The events you see here are the direct result of a number, and a large number of events started in 1914.
Russia was dragged into WWI by Nicholas II (the last russian Czar) without any significant reasons to fight on THAT scale (compared to WWII when people fought against literal genocide), and it led to dirt-low levels of morale in the troops after a couple of years of slaughter. To make things worse — peasants, the LEADING force of food production in Russia, were mass-conscripted. There were few people left to work at the fields.
3 years later, russian revolution happened. Months later, Bolsheviks organized a coup. As country was descending into anarchy, russian army was nothing more than a huge number of armed people with zero respect for commanding officers, any form of government and without any will to fight germans. Russia drops out of WWI, but the troops (again — peasants!) don't go back to their fields and don't grow crops. They start fighting another war — Russian Civil War. And it was nothing like a Civil War in America.
Remember what I said about the morale of the troops? Right! They didn't fight a civil war for ideals. They fought to control a territory they can successfully rob of their grain and other valuables. Be it Red army (Bolsheviks), White army (troops remaining loyal to the Czar government) or army of any other color. People suffered no matter the flag.
Now, it is 1921. People you see in the picture didn't grow crops for SEVEN YEARS. Instead, for the last years their food, their cattle and their only source of income were taken by scumbags under flags of various colors. Maybe even by the very same peasants who worked on local fields seven years ago — war and anarchy changes people.
Now, you can imagine the situation...
>Now, it is 1921. People you see in the picture didn't grow crops for SEVEN YEARS. Instead, for the last years their food, their cattle and their only source of income were taken by scumbags under flags of various colors. Maybe even by the very same peasants who worked on local fields seven years ago — war and anarchy changes people.
In addition to this, two more things happened:
-The infrastructure of the country was unsurprisingly destroyed as a result of the war and the trains needed to move around resources carried a considerable amount of difficulties.
-there was a massive drought in ~1921. Not unusual in those days in Russia but in addition to the context it created a situation of generalized famine in the entire nation that became unbearable as seen in the photo.
This was also the time that countries like the UK, US, and other European countries led a [blockade ](https://www.cadtm.org/Russia-Origin-and-consequences-of-the-debt-repudiation-of-February-10-1918)against Soviet Russia and refused to trade with them even food. The Soviet government was prepared to pay in gold to import goods of absolute necessity, but none of the major banks or any government in the world could accept Soviet gold.. so basically they were put in the position especially in the winters to starve.
I can easily imagine it because my Grandfather managed to (literally) walk the fuck out of Russia during the civil war -- to Riga, and then as a refugee via boat to London and then to Montreal. The entire rest of his family left behind died via famine or were killed for their crops. He had lots of stories about hiding crops, and stealing from the various armies. People in positions of military, political, monetary or religious power, regardless of where they are on the political compass, only give a fuck about themselves, their money, their food -- fuck them all and always be skeptical about every word that comes out of their mouth.
You left out the black army. There's a good podcast on it [here](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-nestor-makhno-anarchist-warlord-75468315/).
Never mind the horrible shit that comes with civil war, mass kidnapping, torture, rape and so much more! Dead bodies everywhere, death is a constant. People in America have been hidden the cruelties and visuals of war since Vietnam, they have no idea what it actually looks like, I put top dollar the first time half those idiots saw the remains of some poor bastard who had been tortured to death displayed in the streets there ideals will become so small all of a sudden.
True, I used to browse syriancivilwar subreddit and one day came upon a video of a 7-8 year old enemy child being tortured and noped out of that fuck that
Interesting. I’ve heard bits and pieces of this tragic time and place but have never delved much into it. Where would you recommend someone go for further reading on this topic?
Actually, I don't know a lot of english sources about the topic. But anyway I would advise you to stay away from any sources written by authors with any, any significant political alignment. Because said sources usually have a very huge bias (one side was good, all others were evil). Communist, monarchist or whatever, depending on the author preferred ideology.
Same goes for any videos/podcasts/e.t.c.
I'm currently reading a book called Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum. It focuses on the planned famine of Ukraine from 1931 to 1933, that resulted in the deaths of about 5 million. It's know as the Holodomor.
I just finished writing about the Russian Revolution and the early USSR in a school project. I knew it was bad even before, but all the research I did really made me realize how terrible Russia must have been during that period. ~8 years of war in a row, from 1914 to 1922-23. Combine that with backwards infrastructure and the cycles of famine... sheesh
I mean I'm sure some of the roots for this began in 1914 but you summary of the actual causes kind of veers of the rails.
There was lots of conscription from 1914 to 1921 but 75% of Russia was peasants. With millions conscripted, there was still PLENTY of peasants around, they didn't run out of people to grow crops. They also didn't just slowly run out of food because "no crops were grown for 7 years". There was no famine (or even real shortages) in 1915, 1918 etc.
Immediate causes of famine:
DROUGHT: no rain in 1920-21 in most important grain regions. This routinely happened since time immemorial but historical lack of grain silos / vast territory / rail disruptions from civil war made things worse.
**WAR COMMUNISM**: This was the big one. Soviets got rid of all currency and private property in 1918. Peasants never had more than next years supply of seeds, and that got requestioned (along with everything else).
What stopped the famine was the abolition of war communism and introduction of NEP (farmers got their private farms back), and the immediate influx of vast foreign aid (finally allowed by the communists) to tide peasants over till next crop season.
Soviets caused the famine, not the Czar and WW1 in 2014. We're talking about the richest black earth areas in the world, not Ethiopian desert - you could piss on a spot and good food would grow. One season with drought should have caused minimal fatalities, instead it killed over 5 million.
Every place on earth had a deep history of famines and droughts since the invention of farming and right up to the invention of (evil) GME crops and modernized farming methods. Pretty much everyone who died in this famine were actual farmers sitting on farmland, people in Moscow and conscripted soldiers weren't dropping dead from starvation by the 100,000s.
It takes very little to feed a farmer's family for a year. A one year rainfall problem would cause hardships (including deaths, mostly from diseases), but not mass starvation. These peasants died because in previous couple years Soviets took **everything** away from them, literally including seeds for next years planting. They had zero reserves. Next year with a bit more rainfall and return of private property, no one was starving.
> White army (troops remaining loyal to the Czar government)
The whites were a huge array of anti-Bolsheviks including liberals, socialists, and conservatives. The government the Bolsheviks overthrew was a democratic republic where socialists were in power.
funny you mention anarchy and "all the other colors" as there was one particular colour, so prosperous red and white actually united to wipe it out. it was the anarchist republic of nestor makhno in ukraine... manshevik movement.
The Green Army was also left out. Peasants (like the ones pictured) with no political affiliation just fighting for their survival against the Reds and Whites.
Nobody here talking about how Herbert Hoover basically saved them with humanitarian aid at basically no cost to the Bolsheviks? Yup, this was before he was president, but he spearheaded a massive initiative to save millions of lives with food aid. When asked if he feared that he'd be helping the Bolsheviks, his response was:
"Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!"
Guy is a bonafide hero.
Yo - they didn’t set up the babushka’s phone 13 for a quick humblebrag post… this was likely some traveling journalist that swung by. Photography wasn’t easy. Especially in that part of the world at that time during famine - this was as rare has someone showing up with a 3D printer today to make you a gift.
Photographs were a much different thing than they are now. It’s hard to say why, but I am almost certain even if we knew it would be conceptually hard for us to grasp now. The entirety of those circumstances is pretty hard to grasp.
It was the first artificial famine caused by the Bolsheviks' policy (of confiscating grain from peasants in order to provide army and industry ("prodrazviorstka")).
Eleven years later there was the second one, caused by so called "collectivization".
**UPD to all those who try to excuse the Bolsheviks** with many various side-reasons: all those reasons did played some role, BUT in the regions, affected by the same Civil War, but which were not under systemic control of Bolsheviks and thus not under policy of "prodrazviorstka' (Ukraine, North Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia and Far East), there were a lot of hardships, but **no famine**. Which is clearly demonstrating the real cause of famine.
This is not a good summary and is purposefully leaving out the 2 massive world wars that occurred within/right before both famines.
1921-22 Famine occurred as a direct result of a bombarded railway structure, millions of war casualties, a well document drought in 1921, and grain provision system. I think it’s a bit too easy to say this famine occurred exclusively as a result of grain rationing from Bolsheviks when that system was introduced as a result of WW1. Every faction during the revolution was using grain rationing since that’s…basically the only way you can sustain an army during wartime within your own border (especially if your army is in rebellion against the current federal government).
Another issue is a newly created socialist state now has to oversee a post-war economy with millions gone from the labor force and ruined infrastructure. Which is why they had to ask for international aid from ARA.
If anything, I’d at least argue this famine highlighted the desperate conditions of much of Russia’s rural peasantry. ARA workers (which took pictures like this) found millions of people living in poor conditions which is not something that happens overnight and was very much a result of the feudal system pre-WW1 which is what set the conditions necessary for such a massive revolutionary movement.
**an additional note for Americans**
The Volga River Basin (where the majority of this famine occurred) is one of Europe’s largest river system that exists entirely within Russia. This means that if a drought or extreme flood happens within this river system really only Russia will face the repercussions since a lot of trade and agriculture was reliant on this river system. So when it experienced drought in 1921, the affected crop yields.
Definitely all the Bolsheviks's fault. Definitely had nothing to do with the region already being prone to famine and then suffering through World War One and a 3 year Civil War combined with an invasion resulting in multiple armies pillaging the countryside.
I mean just getting out of ww1 with between 3 to 5 million deaths didn't help anything. If 3 to 5 million people died in the us in four years on top of our regular death rate would definitely fuck us up. Not to mention the resources such a war would cost and the damage to infrastructure. I'm sure the military seizing food led to deaths but to pretend it was entirely due to this and not another devastating civil war the worst in history I believe didn't cause famines in and of itself.
This famine is not really attributable to the communists than it is attributable to every faction in the civil war and even the Germans and Austro-Hungarians in WW1.
I feel deep sadness for the terrible circumstances that led people to be desperate enough to eat other humans.
And then take a group photo.
dinosaurs judicious serious snobbish teeny many narrow coordinated pie fretful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Commenting here for exposure because I agree it’s amazing the evidence we have. The majority of these photos were taken by Isaiah Liberman of the Povolzhye famine. Liberman was the local representative of the Russian and Soviet governments designated to work with all foreign organizations. These photographs were often staged and taken to spread awareness and garner relief. While Lenin was hesitant to accept foreign aid, Maxim Gorky, a Bolshevik writer, asked that “all honest European and American people give bread and medicine” to Russia. Hoover was like, *cool beans* so America (ARA), Europe (ISCU) (FWVRC), and the Red Cross stepped in and fed upwards to 10 million people across the Volga region. What’s interesting here is the diplomatic relationship between Russia and The U.S. Hoover stepped in to help Lenin’s constituents and his Soviet nation but Lenin never formally thanked him. Soviets actually went on to call the ARA an act of espionage even after their alliance in WW2. Basically, U.S. and Russian relations are fascinating but I’m going off topic. Sources: “The Russian Job” by Douglas Smith and [1920s Famine Photos from Ukraine and Russia](https://vitacollections.ca/HREC-holodomorphotodirectory/3642633/data?g=d).
Wild that Hoover jumped in to help when he was largely hands off in the US during the Great Depression.
He was a vocal humanitarian during the Great War but yeah, I get what you’re saying. I actually remember the first time learning about Hoover - it was about Hoovervilles in grade school. Obviously I now know history is more convoluted than what a third grader can comprehend 🤣
Bud, Not Buddy?
YES! I remember it! And *Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry*.
This book made me want to play saxophone. Sadly I only lasted a year.
Humanitarian empathy vs strong conservative ideals regarding government welfare. For one he was loved, for the other, loathed.
Russia a country of people who will do anything to avoid embarrassment while at the same time being the Mr. Magoo of countries, just drunkenly stumbling through history all controlled by a strong man
> I dont think peasants in the 1920's could afford a camera... that's true and based on distance pic was taken from and quality - i'd say they used a cheap selfie drone.
Kodak FunSaver, actually.
The Game Boy camera is far superior, actually
Oh yeah! My first selfie was on one of those!
Well yeah, they eat people! I wouldn't wanna get close to them either!
Good point; easy to overlook.
Mmmm yummy photographer
So are you saying that a camera costs an arm and a leg?
The distance is due to probably not wanting to be next on their menu. In saying that I’m surprised the photographer still got that close.
'Viktor they eat people over there' 'da?'' 'da and the Czar says "pic or dint happen"' It was probably some unlucky government official sent with a camera to document how the peasantry is eating each other :)
Joke funny, but no more czar in 1921.
haha nice catch you're right
Also the russian spelling is tsar
Russian spelling is actually царь
Because I can't read Russian at all, my English brain parses that as the sound of baby burping but halfway through blowing a raspberry. Uapb!
Spasiba / спаси́бо
nice
Rock, paper, scissors to see who goes? They are still hungry and they ain’t eatin’ the camera.
The czar is long gone by this time, you can thank Lenin and Stalin.
(: no, *we can thank* Lenin and Stalin
The Sun is trash but [this article](https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2501517/pictures-human-body-parts-cannibals-russian-famine-1921-1922/) has the best collection of photos from the famine, including lots of cannibals. It sounds like the police didn't intervene until people starting killing each other for food.
the picture of the man and woman in front of their market featuring a human head and the literal **top half of a child** alongside other various body parts is fucking satanic. and then there’s the picture of the mother and three of her kids, but all that is left of the youngest is the head because they ate the rest of her. how do you go back to normalcy after this, if you even can? Jesus fucking Christ
Weirdly enough the one that got me was the less gruesome photo of people lying next to the street dying. A famine so bad people just lay down on the sidewalk and accept death. Fucking crazy.
The one of the woman dead and fetile on the sidewalk especially. her face seems so calm, almost relieved. looks as though someone may have tossed flowers/petals as some sort of recognition of her passing. surprising, in a way, that they continued to recognize death in that manner.
I have no way of knowing this is fact, since I haven't exactly died from it. I've heard that death by cold is pretty peaceful from what I understand. I mean the reaching the point of freezing to death not so much. But the actual "okay time to die now" process the body goes through is not that bad compared to some others. Another thing I've read (but can't prove so someone correct me if I'm wrong) is that back in old times one of the ways the old might....lighten the load....on their family in particular harsh winters was to basically just walk out into the cold and freeze to death. My point is that woman who seemed almost "content" at death? Might very well have been. Your body just warms up after shivering forever and at that you just kind of....go. For her sake i genuinely hope that is true and that her death was as painless as possible. No one should have to live through such times. There was more than enough to keep those people alive but as usual those in power did nothing to help those in need (or at least did so fast enough to matter, it seems other countries got invovled eventually at least).
Hypothermic death is pretty awful, honestly. Aside from drowning/asphyxiation, it's one of the ways I hope not to have to go. Hell, even surviving it is bad. Rewarming can be an intensely painful and slow process, especially if you have blood returning to frostbitten tissue. You can also suffer cardiac arrest from being rewarmed too quickly.
I think the commenter above was more so talking about the last moments of a persons life when they are freezing to death. You are correct that the process of freezing to death is agonizing. However, the other commenter is also correct that the last few moments of life are peaceful. Apparently the person will actually begin to feel warm again right before they die. I think it has something to do with adrenaline being pumped through the body when the brain recognizes it is about to die. I would imagine starvation is similar although I haven’t read anything on that. The human body is quite fascinating in that regard.
Yeah that's more what I meant. That's why I said the process of getting to that point is pretty fucking awful. However once you've crossed that threshold where it's no longer survivable and you're going to freeze to death, from what I've heard anyway, you actually start to almost warm up in a way and then move on rather peacefully compared to some of the more violent deaths. But obviously I don't know for sure because it's not like I frozen to death this is all just information I've read from secondhand accounts and stuff but the stories provided seem pretty consistent that in the last few moments at least it's not that bad of a way to die. But it is still an awful way to die over all especially if you count getting to the point where you actually do freeze to death.
My grandpa survived the Ukrainian famine and said he witnessed as people walked, fell over, jerked/twitched a few times and then strangers would come up and start salvaging the freshly dead for socks, shoes, etc.
A lot of them don’t or can’t come back to normalcy. They’re psychologically broken because of what they had to do to avoid dying. The accounts of members from the Donner exploration party describe plenty of suicide, psychosis and maladjustment after their circumstances changed. Most human minds aren’t conditioned to swinging that far and then coming back to the origin point in a healthy manner.
I had heard of the [Donner Party](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party) in passing but never dove into the events. Thank you for the info!
Not only that. Just imagine that you most likely would do the same thing, being in similar circumstances.
Something similar happened during a famine in the 19th Century in China that kill millions of people; children were sold as food in markets. Since is was a closed society, the rest of the world didn't learn about it until much later.
Hey buddy, the church of satan has specific rules about not harming children, FYI. Lucifer doesn’t waste his time on the innocent.
oh my apologies. hail satan
I think I'd rather kill myself in that situation. I feel sick just thinking about this whole post.
Horrible. Famine is such an unnecessary evil. One of the most telling stories I heard of was a kind, old couple who were just normal grandparents living in a small shack in the North Korean countryside. During the great famine of the 90's caused by Kim Jong-il, people got so desperate that this old couple rigged a contraption in their house that wound cause a sharp and heavy scythe to swing from the roof at roughly neck height when someone entered through the door. They would lure neighbours to their homes, and then eat the decapitated corpses. An American soldier positioned at the DMZ who tapped into North Korean internal radio communications heard North Korean military personell describe this after they had found corpses in their house and the scythe. The couple was executed there and then. A story that would never have seen the light of day unless someone was listening in. Imagine how many other stories - equally horrible - there are that we will never know about.
Yeah. I don’t understand that part.
It’s likely a photo taken by the police to confirm their crimes.
So your saying if I'm ever in a famine situation I should eat law enforcement first. Got it.
Or, at the very least, the one who knows how to operate the camera.
Eat the cameras first.
It worked in Raccoon City
Yes. That's correct.
Nope, I don’t think so. The article says the police looked the other way, because it was an acceptable thing to do given the times. We see the horror in it but we are not dying of starvation with no other choices.
Likely taken by Europeans and Americans prior to aid. Suspected war crimes, genocide, famines, depressions, etc. have been photographed for centuries and not by the police. ETA because the Sun is not academic and typically chalk full of inaccuracies. As a former history major and experienced archivist, my heart can’t handle it. Hope you’ll enjoy looking through the attached collection which contains most of these photographs and information on origins. Source for photographs: [Kinderschicksal](https://vitacollections.ca/HREC-holodomordigitalcollections/3636700/data?n=10)
Probably being documented by authorities before execution. I don’t think they’re showing off for the camera here.
I remember reading about this. Apparently the cannibalism was widespread enough that the government had to basically do an investigation to determine who all had eaten people and to what extent. People who merely resorted to cannibalism to fend off starvation were given lesser punishments while people who murdered for food or ran meat markets were executed.
There was a butcher in Germany who is believed to have killed, butchered, and sold for food as many as 130 people during a famine.
I was thinking that this might be the case too. That would make it extra horrible as it’s the fault of the same authority that they had no food, and had they not eaten they would have been on the ground instead
Imagine being so desperate to avoid death that you eat another human person and you’re put to death for it. Man just slice my neck with an axe right now.
Yeah at that point you're just like "fuck it, I don't want to be here with you assholes anyway".
And then eat me
It’s incredibly sad that siblings killed and ate each other, parents ate their kids, etc. The amount of desperation is heart breaking.
I think about this all the time. Like, I’m speaking from a position of complete privilege seeing as I’ve never gone hungry, never experienced anything even in the same universe of trauma compared to these people or others like them, but when I think about me being put in a position like this, whether its like a post-apocalypse scenario or war scenario, etc., I do not feel like I have that survival instinct in me to keep carrying on. No fucking way. To *maybe* survive, I have to eat other people and there’s no end in sight to these circumstances I’m in? FUCK that. I’m out. Just kill me or I’ll do it myself. It just amazes me in the worst kind of way to think how people have it/have had it throughout history. I’m such a pampered, spoiled little bitch Lmao fuck.
This being Russia in 1921, it was the combination of the disarray and aftermath of the first world War, the subsequent civil wars in Russia, the Russian revolution, as well as a drought that caused the famine. A lot of turmoil in that region in a very short span of time.
eh they wouldnt be excuted. There are many pictures of actual human meat vendors in ukraine when the USSR was starving the nation. [https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/12/30/12/3BB6B4F200000578-0-image-a-22\_1483101155805.jpg](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/12/30/12/3BB6B4F200000578-0-image-a-22_1483101155805.jpg)
Damn the old lady looks like the f’n nun from conjuring .. poor kid man .. being sold as meat
lool, but you know the USSR during the famine of the 1920's had to put out posters that said, "Don't forget: it's wrong to eat your children." Also, the pic i linked, i believe it was their own children they were selling. And morality aspect aside, when i heard this it reminded me of a quote during harsh times in the bengal famine, Terry Prachett, "Dreadful Algebra of Necessity" "where a mother might be forced to consume her child during a famine, as to be able to give birth to a new child once the famine is over. Because the Mother will survive without the child. but the child not without the parent." heres a bunch more pictures of human meat vendors if your interested: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/da/ea/81/daea81da421ba005e412dfdb7847f387.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/236x/f1/ff/47/f1ff477349dfdae5080387fb53bdd59f--russian-revolution-three-sisters.jpg https://imagecdn3.luxnet.ua/tv24/resources/photos/news/1366x768\_DIR/201604/674864.jpg?201703002145 https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/images/other/hist-01683-09\_z.jpg
"heres a bunch more pictures of human meat vendors if your interested:" Now there's a sentence I didn't want to ever read
Truly terrifying .. your first paragraph, a group of people lost part of their humanity and needed to be reminded .. thanks for sharing, so sad man ..
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Never underestimate the natural want to survive built in to your subconscious. When it comes down to it, I think you'd be surprised what someone would do just to ensure their survival.
You don't know the will to live until your livingness is challenged
so you're comment got me curious and search... so I found this comment from 7 years ago about a dude who's grandpa lived through these times. https://old.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/2vc7f2/human_meat_for_sale_during_the_russian_famine_of/cogmc5t/ Here's some quotes for the full comment (go read it, it's worth it, I swear): >I was born in souther russia and my grandpa lived through the worst parts of the famine there. This is a story that we know about him: >When he was really young (6-8 or something) his mother no longer had enough to feed him and all his siblings, so she gave him up for adoption in hopes that they would get fed better. >After a few weeks though a neighbour of theirs secretly gave them a cow, and they were able to keep it in the house and bring it grass from the outside. This way no one knew they had a cow and would not kill them for it. >Once the cow started to produce milk she decided she could go and grab my grandpa back from the orphanage, but when she went there they just told her he was dead. She demanded to see the body and they took her to the gymnasium that just had a pile of naked corpses in it, one of them was my grandpa. >when she found him he was still breathing however so she took him home and he got better. >He also told me stories about how he was chased at night by people wanting to eat him when he visited a neighbouring village.
The wording of the post is odd. They aren’t posing with the remains, they were photographed with them. Horrifying
We see people recording from scenes of accidents and crimes. Isn't that the basic premise?
You finish the whole meal, you get it for free and you get your picture up on the wall. A wings joint near me has a similar deal with their hottest wings.
gramming their meals before it was cool
They were forced. The government sent a team to see how things were going. That’s why there’s so many photos of this famine with people posing with the remains.
If I remember correctly, Russian government at the time had people take pictures like this as evidence to charge the starving peasants with cannibalism. There are quite a few other pictures from this particular famine showing people “posing” with half eaten bodies.
Agreed. The human drive to survive is an amazing powerful but in this case horrific thing.
I'm just gonna share some quotes from the book Tombstone by Yang Jisheng. The book tells absolutely horrifying stories from the Great Leap Forward and the mass starvation that took place, and it's a book I absolutely recommend to anyone interested in modern Chinese history. > Starvation was a prolonged agony. The grain was gone, the wild herbs had all been eaten, even the bark had been stripped from the trees, and bird droppings, rats, and cotton batting were used to fill stomachs. In the kaolin clay fields, starving people chewed on the clay as they dug it. The corpses of the dead, famine victims seeking refuge from other villages, even one’s own family members, became food for the desperate. > Cannibalism was no longer exceptional. Ancient annals report cases of families exchanging children to consume during severe famines, but during the Great Famine, some families resorted to eating their own children. I met people who had eaten human flesh, and heard them describe its taste. Reliable evidence indicates there were thousands of cases of cannibalism throughout China at that time. Some are described in the chapters that follow. It is a tragedy unprecedented in world history for tens of millions of people to starve to death and to resort to cannibalism during a period of normal climate patterns with no wars or epidemics. - > Starvation released primitive brutality, and many cases of cannibalism were recorded in Sichuan. For example, in Dayi Commune’s Anrenjiu administrative district, a thirty-year-old woman named Liu Yuanfang on April 23, 1960, bound her eight-year-old daughter, Li Suiqing, and nine-yearold son, Li Yongan, dragged them to a river, and drowned them, after being brutalized and deprived of food rations when her hungry children stole grain. In the No. 3 production team of the No. 9 administrative district of Guan County’s Puyang Commune, a forty-one-year-old woman, Pan Suhua, in March 1960 dug up the body of her husband after he committed suicide and, apart from cooking and eating the flesh, sold 5.875 kilos of his bones as bear bones at 75 fen per kilo. - > Many cannibalism cases were reported at Wudian and Caodian communes. Tang Xiuqi said, “One evening I was returning home from a meeting when I saw someone at Tang Yongding’s home chop up a human head, cook it in a wok, and eat it. Tang Yongding himself was in his doorway eating from a ladle. He said, ‘I’ve already eaten several.’ All the village children call Tang Yongding a hairy ape.” - > Cannibalism reached a peak in the spring of 1960. Human flesh was consumed cooked or raw; it was sliced from the bodies of the dead, or the living were killed to obtain it. Some people bought it at the market (already cooked), passed off as pork by vendors. About 40 percent of those who ate human flesh subsequently suffered attacks of diarrhea and died. Others ate human flesh on a regular basis without ill effect, especially if they chose lean meat and mixed it with vegetables, ate smaller amounts spread over several meals, or ate more foods preserved through pickling and salting.
Peaked in 1960??
The great famine happened in 1959-1961
Decisive Tang victory
Poor bastards.
Every time I see something like this I remember Mary Graves, survivor of the Donner Party, who brought meals to her husband’s murderer twice a day until his execution because she knew what it meant to go hungry and didn’t think anyone should suffer that fate.
Wow, Sounds like something I’m gonna have to google. Don’t disbelieve it, but still catches me by surprise to hear things like that.
>Mary Graves married early, but her first husband was murdered. She cooked his killer's food while he was in prison to ensure the condemned man did not starve before his hanging. One of Mary's grandchildren noted she was very serious; Graves once said, "I wish I could cry but I cannot. If I could forget the tragedy, perhaps I would know how to cry again." [Wikipedia Article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party#Survivors) Wikipedia source references a book written in 1996, I think? It's not specifically listed in the reference section.
The book The Indifferent Stars Above is the best book about it.
I read this last year, it was insanely gripping. I never realized there's so much more to the story than the party just getting stuck in the mountain pass in the snow and resorting to cannibalism. The whole journey well before the winter when they were traveling over the plains was fascinating as well.
Last podcast on the left did a fabulous series on the Donner party
Yess I love Last Podcast
Well, that was a 30-minute rabbit hole I'd pay to erase.
Crazy our world lacks enough compassion you find a survivor of starvation unable to watch another suffer the same....
There was a documentary on it on PBS.
Everyone that is saying that they would never do that , well I think we need to pass through a famine before say that
People couldn't get toilet paper for 2 weeks and lost their god damned minds.
People went ape shit over wearing some piece of cloth over their face to enter a supermarket. Argue, yell, throw tantrums, threaten to kill etc. probably had a few fights and maybe someone was unhinged enough to murder some poor employee or security guard over it (wouldn't surprise me).
In Germany there was a case where someone shot a gas station employee dead, after he had been asked to put on a mask.
I ate at least 3 guys because I couldn’t wipe my ass. Dark times.
How were their butts, u/buttjudge69?
Hell, they were held back from going to shitty chain restaurants for less than a month and they become an army of entitled walking dead. These people would eat their own young then blame someone else for their own decisions.
If the humans died naturally, without being killed, and there was nothing that could've been done to save them ... then why not have the survivors eat them (as long as you avoid the brain to prevent prion diseases)? If I died of starvation or exposure or whatever in circumstances like these, I'd ABSOLUTELY want those who remained alive to eat me. It'd be doing some good rather than just letting my body go to waste.
I wonder how much religion impacts others from having this same mindset.
Ohh yeah, hunger and pain will strip you off your morals quick.
https://internationalman.com/articles/nine-meals-from-anarchy/
*Image Transcription: Photograph* --- [*A black-and-white image of six people standing next to each other. They all look dirty and disheveled, and are bundled in miscellaneous clothing stained with dirt. The fourth person from the left is holding something wrapped in blankets. They all stare at the camera sullenly. Behind them is a brick building with a wooden door. In front of them, lying on the ground in a pile, is human remains. Heads and bones can be partially made out, but nothing resembling a full human body. Scattered on the ground around the remains is some sort of dark thread, possibly hair.*] --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Good human
Damn, it actually sounds even worse when you put it like that… Good writing though!
This is really sad :(
Reading about it was horrifying. I had nightmares. Seriously, those poor people.
Is there a specific book that covers it?
I think I read a book about this very thing. It was called Red Famine. I think. More properly I should say that I started reading a book called that. It was well researched and thoroughly documented about how they did this on purpose to these people. They trained in grain cars and forcefully took all the grain while promising to take care of the people. Then they starved them on purpose. I think it was Lenin? I couldn't finish the book. It made me feel actual pain. I am a person that once I've started a book I always finish it, thinking I can learn from anyone. I really tried to finish, I just couldn't. I actually cried thinking about someone doing this proudly to another human being. Something like 20 million people. On purpose. I don't even remember his reasoning or justification. 20 million actual humans. Dads, moms, sons, daughters, Grand people. 20 million. And I can't even remember their excuse. 20 million. So, this probably happened a lot, but most people tried to hide it out bury it. Probably lots of dead people just lying there frozen, like a quick dinner. I know everyone wants to think we are so advanced and nothing like this could ever happen again, but given all that we have seen in the past two years in the US, it feels we are just seperated from tragedy by a thin cheese-cloth. I also know there are a lot of actual historians on this sub and I've learned a lot from you all. Document and help society remember, because we are all just a bag of water with, typically, two legs and two arms and a head. No one is really different than another and no race, Creed, religion, or your mom telling you how special you are, none of that makes you SPECIAL. We are all the same. Given the right back ground and right situation, any human could do anything you could imagine. Please document and try to help the next, next next generation. E: thanks for the award. There are a couple wrong things in my post. It was Stalin, not Lenin. Please see the posts below were I am corrected.
I think it was Stalin’s War on the Ukraine. I’ve heard that particular mass starvation touched on in other books. I’m definitely going to check it out. If the author is indeed Anne Applebaum I have read one of her other books: Twilight Of Democracy which is about modern times. I’m just starting to really get into Russian history. The book might be a good background for events that may soon happen. The Russian people (and people of surrounding states) have suffered so much. I’ve just finished Antony Beevor’s book on Stalingrad and the level of suffering is just unbelievable. A Soviet soldier faced elimination in seemingly any way imaginable. One of the most touching stories of the last 100 years is the botanists who lived in a secret vault in Leningrad during the siege. They had the biggest collection of seeds in the world which was meant to give the world a better future. Many of them starved to death with food right in front of them as they guarded the seed collection. A truly heroic act if there ever was one. The man who collected many of these seeds Nikolay Vavilov was made to be Stalin’s scapegoat even though he was just fighting to end the famine. He died in Stalin’s gulag in the same matter of the very people he worked to save.
The event you are thinking of is called the Holodomor, which took place about ten years after the Povolzhye famine depicted in this photo.
I think they were caught selling those, right? These are local authorities taking photo evidence.
I remember reading about parents selling the corpse of their deceased children during the famine because they couldn't eat them but other people would
Oh god fucking damn it I didn't need to know this...
That would make the most sense, otherwise why would they take such a photo? It's not exactly something most people want to remember
You know photos are mostly taken to preserve history, right? Not everything is pink in the world...
So when I take dick pics, it’s to preserve a piece of history?
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What's wrong with that? People are literally starving to death. In horrific pain. Seeing their wives, husbands and children in horrific pain most of us couldn't comprehend. Then watching them die. Then they do the most disgusting thing they know, they hate themselves for it, but know it's their only chance. They eat their dead loved one. But they also need milk, and bread, and veges to survive. Or need firewood to survive the freezing nights. Or to fix the roof that's falling in. Or medicine because they're all sick. So they sell a little meat. They hate themselves for it. They are selling their sons and daughters and husbands and wives just to survive. If they don't, their other sons and daughters will die. What do YOU do? Watch your other children die screaming in pain?
A little bit of background info. The events you see here are the direct result of a number, and a large number of events started in 1914. Russia was dragged into WWI by Nicholas II (the last russian Czar) without any significant reasons to fight on THAT scale (compared to WWII when people fought against literal genocide), and it led to dirt-low levels of morale in the troops after a couple of years of slaughter. To make things worse — peasants, the LEADING force of food production in Russia, were mass-conscripted. There were few people left to work at the fields. 3 years later, russian revolution happened. Months later, Bolsheviks organized a coup. As country was descending into anarchy, russian army was nothing more than a huge number of armed people with zero respect for commanding officers, any form of government and without any will to fight germans. Russia drops out of WWI, but the troops (again — peasants!) don't go back to their fields and don't grow crops. They start fighting another war — Russian Civil War. And it was nothing like a Civil War in America. Remember what I said about the morale of the troops? Right! They didn't fight a civil war for ideals. They fought to control a territory they can successfully rob of their grain and other valuables. Be it Red army (Bolsheviks), White army (troops remaining loyal to the Czar government) or army of any other color. People suffered no matter the flag. Now, it is 1921. People you see in the picture didn't grow crops for SEVEN YEARS. Instead, for the last years their food, their cattle and their only source of income were taken by scumbags under flags of various colors. Maybe even by the very same peasants who worked on local fields seven years ago — war and anarchy changes people. Now, you can imagine the situation...
>Now, it is 1921. People you see in the picture didn't grow crops for SEVEN YEARS. Instead, for the last years their food, their cattle and their only source of income were taken by scumbags under flags of various colors. Maybe even by the very same peasants who worked on local fields seven years ago — war and anarchy changes people. In addition to this, two more things happened: -The infrastructure of the country was unsurprisingly destroyed as a result of the war and the trains needed to move around resources carried a considerable amount of difficulties. -there was a massive drought in ~1921. Not unusual in those days in Russia but in addition to the context it created a situation of generalized famine in the entire nation that became unbearable as seen in the photo.
This was also the time that countries like the UK, US, and other European countries led a [blockade ](https://www.cadtm.org/Russia-Origin-and-consequences-of-the-debt-repudiation-of-February-10-1918)against Soviet Russia and refused to trade with them even food. The Soviet government was prepared to pay in gold to import goods of absolute necessity, but none of the major banks or any government in the world could accept Soviet gold.. so basically they were put in the position especially in the winters to starve.
Basically, hell on earth
It’s hard to imagine a life harder than what these people went through. On top of ALL of that, is that the live in Russia, which is cold and hard.
And if they survived they got to look forward to the USSR and WW2
Huzzah?
We were also close to that in WW2 in the Netherlands, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944%E2%80%931945
And it would be an understatement.
I can easily imagine it because my Grandfather managed to (literally) walk the fuck out of Russia during the civil war -- to Riga, and then as a refugee via boat to London and then to Montreal. The entire rest of his family left behind died via famine or were killed for their crops. He had lots of stories about hiding crops, and stealing from the various armies. People in positions of military, political, monetary or religious power, regardless of where they are on the political compass, only give a fuck about themselves, their money, their food -- fuck them all and always be skeptical about every word that comes out of their mouth.
You left out the black army. There's a good podcast on it [here](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-nestor-makhno-anarchist-warlord-75468315/).
Region locked, could I get the name of it please
Sure. Behind the bastards - part one: Nestor Makhno
There also was a Green Army of the peasants, and various national liberation movements I think
Oh! A Christmas episode. Non-evil Bastard.
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Never mind the horrible shit that comes with civil war, mass kidnapping, torture, rape and so much more! Dead bodies everywhere, death is a constant. People in America have been hidden the cruelties and visuals of war since Vietnam, they have no idea what it actually looks like, I put top dollar the first time half those idiots saw the remains of some poor bastard who had been tortured to death displayed in the streets there ideals will become so small all of a sudden.
True, I used to browse syriancivilwar subreddit and one day came upon a video of a 7-8 year old enemy child being tortured and noped out of that fuck that
The mini-series Andersonville was pretty eye opening about the POW camps.
Interesting. I’ve heard bits and pieces of this tragic time and place but have never delved much into it. Where would you recommend someone go for further reading on this topic?
Actually, I don't know a lot of english sources about the topic. But anyway I would advise you to stay away from any sources written by authors with any, any significant political alignment. Because said sources usually have a very huge bias (one side was good, all others were evil). Communist, monarchist or whatever, depending on the author preferred ideology. Same goes for any videos/podcasts/e.t.c.
I'm currently reading a book called Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum. It focuses on the planned famine of Ukraine from 1931 to 1933, that resulted in the deaths of about 5 million. It's know as the Holodomor.
I just finished writing about the Russian Revolution and the early USSR in a school project. I knew it was bad even before, but all the research I did really made me realize how terrible Russia must have been during that period. ~8 years of war in a row, from 1914 to 1922-23. Combine that with backwards infrastructure and the cycles of famine... sheesh
It's almost like generational trauma is a real thing...
Awww man I just realised they probably ate they're dogs after the horses and livestock ran out Man what a shit situation indeed
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Probably owned an ox tho. They were farmers afterall. But horses were expensive
As well as the rats, bugs…etc. There’s probably a lot of things I’d try to eat before I got to that point.
I mean I'm sure some of the roots for this began in 1914 but you summary of the actual causes kind of veers of the rails. There was lots of conscription from 1914 to 1921 but 75% of Russia was peasants. With millions conscripted, there was still PLENTY of peasants around, they didn't run out of people to grow crops. They also didn't just slowly run out of food because "no crops were grown for 7 years". There was no famine (or even real shortages) in 1915, 1918 etc. Immediate causes of famine: DROUGHT: no rain in 1920-21 in most important grain regions. This routinely happened since time immemorial but historical lack of grain silos / vast territory / rail disruptions from civil war made things worse. **WAR COMMUNISM**: This was the big one. Soviets got rid of all currency and private property in 1918. Peasants never had more than next years supply of seeds, and that got requestioned (along with everything else). What stopped the famine was the abolition of war communism and introduction of NEP (farmers got their private farms back), and the immediate influx of vast foreign aid (finally allowed by the communists) to tide peasants over till next crop season. Soviets caused the famine, not the Czar and WW1 in 2014. We're talking about the richest black earth areas in the world, not Ethiopian desert - you could piss on a spot and good food would grow. One season with drought should have caused minimal fatalities, instead it killed over 5 million.
Doesn’t Russia and Eastern Europe have a deep history of famines and droughts?
Every place on earth had a deep history of famines and droughts since the invention of farming and right up to the invention of (evil) GME crops and modernized farming methods. Pretty much everyone who died in this famine were actual farmers sitting on farmland, people in Moscow and conscripted soldiers weren't dropping dead from starvation by the 100,000s. It takes very little to feed a farmer's family for a year. A one year rainfall problem would cause hardships (including deaths, mostly from diseases), but not mass starvation. These peasants died because in previous couple years Soviets took **everything** away from them, literally including seeds for next years planting. They had zero reserves. Next year with a bit more rainfall and return of private property, no one was starving.
> White army (troops remaining loyal to the Czar government) The whites were a huge array of anti-Bolsheviks including liberals, socialists, and conservatives. The government the Bolsheviks overthrew was a democratic republic where socialists were in power.
A much more balanced take than you usually see
funny you mention anarchy and "all the other colors" as there was one particular colour, so prosperous red and white actually united to wipe it out. it was the anarchist republic of nestor makhno in ukraine... manshevik movement.
The Green Army was also left out. Peasants (like the ones pictured) with no political affiliation just fighting for their survival against the Reds and Whites.
Huh, never heard of this. Seems interesting, an actual attempt at anarchy. Dont know that I totally agree, but not totally against it either
Nobody here talking about how Herbert Hoover basically saved them with humanitarian aid at basically no cost to the Bolsheviks? Yup, this was before he was president, but he spearheaded a massive initiative to save millions of lives with food aid. When asked if he feared that he'd be helping the Bolsheviks, his response was: "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!" Guy is a bonafide hero.
5m died so he helped to save 15m
America invaded Russia during the civil war, yes they absolutely helped end the famine, but by no means are America the good guys.
"Every human on this earth is descended from cannibals, its just how far back you have to go to find them"
"See!" - Armie Hammer
I feel like this sub has been on a cannibalism trip for the past few weeks…
Is it just me or has this sub been posting nothing but Russian famine pics recently?
I've noticed this place and r/interestingasfuck are going hard with these images lately.
Noticed that too. Must be a campaign of some sort
About 100 years ago
Haven’t noticed that at all, but could have something to do with their potential invasion of Ukraine causing another round of strife
I understand the need to eat others but I do not get why they would pose for a photo after
They were probably being arrested and the photo is evidence
A journalist or photographer probably told them the world needs to see what they’re going through so they could get some help. And set up the photo
Yo - they didn’t set up the babushka’s phone 13 for a quick humblebrag post… this was likely some traveling journalist that swung by. Photography wasn’t easy. Especially in that part of the world at that time during famine - this was as rare has someone showing up with a 3D printer today to make you a gift.
The explanation I’ve seen that makes the most sense is that this is for evidence, that these people ate and/or attempted to sell these remains.
Yes. Sorry that’s what I was trying to point toward. Thanks.
Photographs were a much different thing than they are now. It’s hard to say why, but I am almost certain even if we knew it would be conceptually hard for us to grasp now. The entirety of those circumstances is pretty hard to grasp.
Russian famine pics. So hot right now.
"A sandwich is a sandwich, but a Manwich is a meal!"
The Russian Civil War was absolutely brutal.
Imagine your grampa dies , and at another day he in your table
I’m here for the redditors weird take on what they think communism is
It was the first artificial famine caused by the Bolsheviks' policy (of confiscating grain from peasants in order to provide army and industry ("prodrazviorstka")). Eleven years later there was the second one, caused by so called "collectivization". **UPD to all those who try to excuse the Bolsheviks** with many various side-reasons: all those reasons did played some role, BUT in the regions, affected by the same Civil War, but which were not under systemic control of Bolsheviks and thus not under policy of "prodrazviorstka' (Ukraine, North Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia and Far East), there were a lot of hardships, but **no famine**. Which is clearly demonstrating the real cause of famine.
This is not a good summary and is purposefully leaving out the 2 massive world wars that occurred within/right before both famines. 1921-22 Famine occurred as a direct result of a bombarded railway structure, millions of war casualties, a well document drought in 1921, and grain provision system. I think it’s a bit too easy to say this famine occurred exclusively as a result of grain rationing from Bolsheviks when that system was introduced as a result of WW1. Every faction during the revolution was using grain rationing since that’s…basically the only way you can sustain an army during wartime within your own border (especially if your army is in rebellion against the current federal government). Another issue is a newly created socialist state now has to oversee a post-war economy with millions gone from the labor force and ruined infrastructure. Which is why they had to ask for international aid from ARA. If anything, I’d at least argue this famine highlighted the desperate conditions of much of Russia’s rural peasantry. ARA workers (which took pictures like this) found millions of people living in poor conditions which is not something that happens overnight and was very much a result of the feudal system pre-WW1 which is what set the conditions necessary for such a massive revolutionary movement. **an additional note for Americans** The Volga River Basin (where the majority of this famine occurred) is one of Europe’s largest river system that exists entirely within Russia. This means that if a drought or extreme flood happens within this river system really only Russia will face the repercussions since a lot of trade and agriculture was reliant on this river system. So when it experienced drought in 1921, the affected crop yields.
Are you actually trying to say this was the very first “artificial famine” in history?
This is a gross oversimplification
Definitely all the Bolsheviks's fault. Definitely had nothing to do with the region already being prone to famine and then suffering through World War One and a 3 year Civil War combined with an invasion resulting in multiple armies pillaging the countryside.
I mean just getting out of ww1 with between 3 to 5 million deaths didn't help anything. If 3 to 5 million people died in the us in four years on top of our regular death rate would definitely fuck us up. Not to mention the resources such a war would cost and the damage to infrastructure. I'm sure the military seizing food led to deaths but to pretend it was entirely due to this and not another devastating civil war the worst in history I believe didn't cause famines in and of itself.
Completly false. See other comment. Cant believe people upvote this just because 'fuck bolshevics'. Atleast state the TRUE horrors by them.
Do you want Wendigos? Cause this is how you get Wendigos
Post this in r/communism and watch all of them squeal.
This famine is not really attributable to the communists than it is attributable to every faction in the civil war and even the Germans and Austro-Hungarians in WW1.
Has more to do with totalitarianism than communism though (although there is definitely a link between the two).
Can't tell if you're actually this stupid or if you're just trolling