Droughts and famines in Imperial Russia and USSR are known to have happened every 10-13 years, with average droughts happening every 5-7 years.
According to the report of Golubev and Dronin, one may distinguish three types of drought according to productive areas vulnerable to droughts: Central (Volga basin, Northern Caucasus), and Central Chernozem Region), Southern (Volga and Volga-Vyatka area , Ural, Ukraine), and Eastern (steppe and forest-steppe belts Western and Eastern Siberia and Kazakhstan). This report gives the following table of the major droughts in Russia.
- Central: 1920, 1924, 1936, 1946, 1972, 1979, 1981,1984.
- Southern: 1901, 1906, 1921, 1939, 1948, 1951, 1957, 1975, 1995.
- Eastern: 1911, 1931, 1963, 1965, 1991.
The first famine in the USSR happened in 1921-1923 and got wide international attention. It was due to the Southern type of drought, the most affected area being the Volga area ("Povolzhye") and Ukraine. Fridtjof Nansen was honored with the 1922 Nobel Prize for Peace, in part for his work as High Commissioner for Relief In Russia. Other organizations that helped to combat the Soviet famine were UISE (Union Internationale de Secours aux Enfants, International Union for Saving Children) and the International Red Cross.
The second famine happened during the collectivisation in the USSR. In 1932-1933 bad harvests, combined with the disruption caused by collectivisation and the resistance of the peasants caused a famine which affected more than 40 million people, especially in Ukraine, where up to 6 million may have starved (the event known as Holodomor). The information about this famine was suppressed by Stalin's regime.
The last major famine in the USSR happened in 1946 due to the severe drought in over 50% of the grain-productive zone of the country.
The drought of 1963 caused panic slaughtering of livestock, but there was no famine: since that year the Soviet Union started importing grain in increasing amounts.
Reference
- Genady Golubev and Nikolai Dronin, Geography of Droughts and Food Problems in Russia (1900-2000), Report of the International Project on Global Environmental Change and Its Threat to Food and Water Security in Russia (February, 2004).
