Category Archives: food

by | 17 June 2024 · 5:14 pm

Khmer Rouge Stated Goals

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 78-80:

One day, about a week after the groups and villages are organized, we receive an order to attend a meeting in Tuol Tnaot at 7 p.m. Each family is to send one representative. When we return from work in the evening, we hurriedly eat dinner and head out for the meeting at the appointed time.

Tonight is a new moon and there is no moonlight. We all sit on the ground in front of a wooden house with a tiled roof beside the highway, near the mouth of the road leading to Wat Don Sar. A small kerosene lamp has been lit and casts a flickering light on the meeting.

A revolutionary cadre dressed in black and wearing a black cap on his head and a krama around his neck comes and stands before us to announce the start of the meeting. We don’t know his name or his rank, and we can’t see his face clearly in the dark. He begins to speak:

“Greetings, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, who have just been evacuated from Phnom Penh. The Revolutionary Organization regrets taking so long to get you organized into groups and villages. Our Organization has faced many responsibilities and has been very busy. Now we have gotten you organized, so you ought to understand the political line of the Revolutionary Organization and the way of life in revolutionary society. The Revolutionary Organization has the political aim of annihilating all traces of the regime that ruled the country for sixteen years [Sihanouk, 1954-1970], as well as the five-year, one-month regime [Lon Nol, 1970-1975]. Therefore, anything in the image or spirit of these two regimes must be obliterated. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters who used to live under these two regimes, you must learn to align, temper, and build yourselves to become suitable as a revolutionary people.

“Cast off the morality of vice! The morality of exploitation! The morality of taking advantage of others! Obey the discipline of the Organization! Don’t be free! Don’t have your own opinions! Don’t be vague in your consciousness!

“Food will be distributed according to your labor. Those comrades who work will receive food. The Organization has no need for the lazy or the worthless!

“The wheel of history rolls forward! No one can stop the wheel of history! Whoever puts forth his arm will lose his arm! Whoever puts forth his leg will lose his leg…”

This is our first lesson. We hear them say nothing about returning to Phnom Penh. We hear only the words “revolution,” “annihilate,” “temper.” Now we see clearly: They don’t support Sihanouk’s royalist regime as Dad thought. They will squeeze us because we are the people of the two regimes that the Revolutionary Organization must annihilate.

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by | 14 June 2024 · 4:07 pm

Khmer Rouge “Grandpa Snoopy”

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 76-78:

Starting now, a new administrative structure has been put in place: group, then village, then cooperative. All of the leaders are people who had been living in the liberated zones. My group is led by Pu Et. He is in his sixties, dark skinned, skinny, balding in front, with large eyes and curly hair, about a meter sixty in height. He was born here in Tuol Ampil. He has built a hut about seventy meters to the north of mine. The cooperative cadre who has taken charge of Tuol Ampil is called Phal, a man of about thirty-five who used to live at Boeng Trabek near my house and knows my parents very well.

We are a people who no longer have the freedom to move about or eat as we please. We have become workers who labor as we are ordered, in line with the aims of the Organization, at the appointed hours: from six until eleven o’clock in the morning, and from one in the afternoon until five o’clock in the evening. The Organization provides us with the necessities of survival: rice and salt. Occasionally, we receive a small portion of kerosene. We are to go and receive these supplies at the cooperative headquarters in Tuol Tnaot every day when we return from work at noon.

After the land is divided up, our corn ends up on the common land. We are worried that the Organization will confiscate these crops and make them common property.

I ask the cadre who comes to measure and divide the land, “Excuse me Brother, the corn that I planted before—is it still mine?”

“How much corn is it, Comrade?” the cadre asks.

“About twenty by thirty meters, Brother,” I answer.

“Oh, that’s nothing! You keep it and eat it,” the cadre reassures me. We stop fretting and once again our mouths have spit to swallow.

Each day Dad leads his two granddaughters, Sophal and A-Lin, by the hand to go sit and watch the corn so that cows don’t eat it. The corn is already starting to produce some ears. The rice that we transplanted with Mom in the water in front of the hut is starting to look nice. One day Pu Et, our group leader, comes to my family and says, “The Organization is taking your corn. Don’t touch it!”

This news causes all of us to lose heart and despair, especially my father. He says nothing, and he stops bothering to sit and watch the corn as he used to. One day, as I am going to collect our rice ration at Tuol Tnaot, I ask the advice of the cooperative chairman on the corn problem. He assures me that there is no problem, that we should keep it for the benefit of our own family. His assurance alleviates our anxiety, but with no one to stand guard and protect the corn for a few days, the cows have already eaten nearly half of it.

Pu Et is a very jealous and strict man. He has just arrived from the liberated zones, and he has nothing yet. None of his plants have had time to bear any fruit, so when he sees that others’ plants have already borne fruit, he gets jealous and wants them for himself. If we have better food than he does, he is unhappy. If he catches anyone sneaking off to trade things at the villages along the highway for rice, bananas, or yams, he confiscates their spoils and then “builds” them, guiding them in the way of the Revolutionary Organization, forbidding free movement and trade.

Each day he walks by and pokes his head into our hut at about eight or nine o’clock to see who has what to eat and who hasn’t gone out to work. How we despise this attitude! We, all of the “new people,” give him the name “Grandpa Snoopy.” When we see him coming from a distance, we call out or whisper to each other, “Here comes Grandpa Snoopy!” Both his wife and his daughter act haughty, as though they, too, are our leaders and supervisors.

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by | 13 June 2024 · 3:03 am

Leaving Phnom Penh, 1975

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 56-59:

Between dawn and 11 a.m., we are finally able to cross the Monivong Bridge, and we continue beyond to the Chbar Ampov subdistrict headquarters building where we stop to rest and prepare food. Here there are tamarind trees with cool shade. My brothers and I go to look for water for cooking rice. We figure that drawing water from the river will be easier than searching for well water at local houses. We walk through Chbar Ampov Market (the old market on the south side of the highway) and head for the river.

This is the first time in my life that my eyes have ever witnessed such an awful scene. Only four days ago, this was a battleground, and large brick-and-cement houses have been demolished, with chunks of brick and cement of all sizes, shards of roof tiles, dishes, pots and pans, tables, and chairs littering the ground all over the road. In the gendarmerie post, the body of a woman lies face up on a desk, naked and swollen, maggots perforating her flesh. Along the riverbank lie the bloated corpses of soldiers, some on the banks, others floating half in and half out of the water. Some bob up and down on the water’s surface, occasionally washing up against the bank. The water here, which appeared from above to be decent, is in actuality covered in a slick of dark-green foam mixed with grease from the corpses. The river water is undrinkable, and we return empty-handed.

…

As our thoughts drift with the smoke into the sky, suddenly the sound of gunshots pierces the air: bang! bang! bang! Startled and shaken, nearly losing my grip on the bicycle handlebars, I look around, worried that someone has just been wounded or killed. I think this because as we rested a little earlier, we heard that this morning a soldier shot and killed two people who took rice from a warehouse on the west side of the river. But I can’t see that anything has happened. The crowd continues walking forward. Then a military vehicle comes driving against the flow of foot traffic with two or three black-clad soldiers sitting on the hood. They are the ones who fired the shots, to open the road. We squeeze together on the right side of the road to allow the vehicle to pass.

We have walked another 200 meters when suddenly a mid-Pisakh [=April/May] rain shower begins to pour down without the slightest warning. Our bundles of bedding and clothes are soaked. We continue forward in the rain until we are nearly to Wat Niroth before finding shelter.

The locals here have all been evacuated. We take shelter in a wooden house with a corrugated iron roof whose owner was a fisherman. Up in the house, there are still several old fishing nets of various types and sizes. We salvage one small net and one larger net to take with us. We rest at the house for two nights until our bedding and clothes are dry and then continue our journey.

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by | 11 June 2024 · 12:10 pm

Evacuating Cambodian Cities

From Prisoners of Class: A Historical Memoir of the Khmer Rouge Revolution, by Chan Samoeun, tr. by Matthew Madden (Mekong River Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 45-46:

I dash into the house and call out, “Dad! Mom! They’re forcing everyone out of the city!” But my neighbors and family are busy celebrating peace and the end of the war and the spoils of victory at the hands of the Organization; they are not interested in what I have to say.

I have just spent a day filled with worry and fear. My family has just spent a day celebrating with a happiness that they haven’t seen for five years. Everything that I had just imagined to myself was all wrong—especially the reaction of my parents. In fact, my parents haven’t worried a bit about my absence. They feel that everything is going wonderfully. They have figured that I was gone all day tasting the joy of the birth of a new Khmer society.

The neighbors who have been going back and forth to gather loot from the Chamkar Mon warehouses know perfectly well that people are being evacuated from the city. But they assume that this matter does not affect them, that they won’t be ordered out by the Organization, because the Organization has allowed them to take freely from the warehouses.

Almost every family goes out to collect loot and stockpiles it in their house. My younger brothers procure three sacks of rice, several cases of beer, two or three mattresses, and large amounts of salt, fish sauce, soy sauce, and soft drinks, and pile them all over the house.

A French proverb says that “a single swallow does not herald the arrival of Spring.” I am but a lone swallow, the one person who desires to instill fear and an awareness of what will come. But no one believes me! They only believe in what is plain: that they have become wealthy without the necessity of effort. Let the neighbors refuse to believe, but I must win over my own family. My mother doesn’t matter; my father is the one who controls the power in the family.

I attempt to speak with my father about what is on my mind, but he objects, saying, “A-Moeun! You aren’t thinking straight. If they have just taken the city, what is the point of forcing us out? Do you remember what happened last year? People in Steung Mean Chey and Boeng Tumpun fell prey to propaganda that they would be forced out, and they fled in the middle of the night all the way to the riverfront by the palace. When they went back home, all of their stuff was gone.”

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by | 4 May 2024 · 3:38 pm

Introduction to Sicily

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. xxv-xxvii:

The celebrated words from The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, that form the epigraph to this book—words spoken by Prince Don Fabrizio Salina to a Piedmontese officer in 1860, some months after the capture of Sicily by Garibaldi—encapsulate the island’s history to perfection and explain the countless differences that distinguish the Sicilians from the Italians, despite the almost infinitesimal distance that separates them. The two differ linguistically, speaking as they do what is essentially another language rather than a dialect, a language in which the normal final o is replaced by u and which nearly all Italians find incomprehensible. In their place names, they have a passion for five-syllable words with a tum-ti-ti-tum-ti rhythm—Caltanissetta, Acireale, Calascibetta, Castelvetrano, Misterbianco, Castellammare, Caltagirone, Roccavaldina—the list is almost endless. (Lampedusa gives Don Fabrizio’s country estate the wonderful name Donnafugata.) They differ ethnically, a surprising number having bright red hair and blue eyes—characteristics traditionally attributed to their Norman forebears, though it seems likelier that the credit should be given first to the British during the Napoleonic Wars and more recently to the British and Americans in 1943. They even differ gastronomically, with their immense respect for bread—of which they have seventy-two separate kinds—and their passion for ice cream, which they even demand for breakfast.

Wine is also a speciality; Sicily is now one of the most important wine-producing areas in all Italy. It is a well-known fact that the very first grapevine sprang from under the feet of Dionysus as he danced among the foothills of Etna. This slowly developed into the famous Mamertino, the favorite wine of Julius Caesar. In 1100 Roger de Hauteville established the winery at the Abbazia S. Anastasia near Cefalù; it is still in business. Nearly seven hundred years later, in 1773, John Woodhouse landed at Marsala and discovered that the local wine, which was aged in wooden casks, tasted remarkably like the Spanish and Portuguese fortified wines that were then extremely popular in England. He therefore took some home, where it was enthusiastically received, then returned to Sicily, where by the end of the century he was producing it on a massive scale. He was followed a few years later by members of the Whitaker family, whose descendants I well remember and whose somewhat oppressive Villa Malfitano in Palermo can be visited on weekday mornings. So too can the nearby Villino Florio, a riot of art nouveau and much—in my opinion, at least—to be preferred.

Any conversation about Sicily is bound to produce a question about the Mafia; and questions about the Mafia are notoriously difficult to answer, largely because it contrives to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We shall look at it rather more closely in chapter 16; here, the important thing to be said is that it is not a bunch of bandits—the average foreign visitor will be as safe in Sicily as anywhere in western Europe. Indeed, he is extremely unlikely to come into contact with the organization at all. It is only if he decides to settle on the island and starts negotiating for a property that he may receive a visit from an extremely polite and well-dressed gentleman—he could well be a qualified lawyer—who will explain why the situation might not be quite as straightforward as it first appeared.

Finally, a word or two about Sicily’s writers. Two Sicilians have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Luigi Pirandello and Salvatore Quasimodo (the pen name of Salvatore Ragusa). Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author was an early example of the Theater of the Absurd and provoked such an outcry at its premiere in Rome in 1921 that he was forced to escape through a side entrance; since then, however, it has become a classic and is now performed the world over. Pirandello himself became an ardent Fascist and enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Mussolini. Quasimodo’s poems are hugely popular in Italy and have been translated into over forty languages. But if you want the true feel of Sicily, you should go not to these giants but to Leonardo Sciascia (pronounced Shasha) and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. Sciascia was born in 1921 in the little town of Racalmuto, between Agrigento and Caltanissetta, and lived there for most of his life. His best novels—The Day of the Owl, To Each His Own, Sicilian Uncles—are first-rate detective stories with a distinctive Sicilian flavor; but they also analyze the tragic ills that beset his island, such as political corruption and—as always—the Mafia. Lighter, but still irresistibly Sicilian, are the crime novels of Andrea Camilleri, which have recently been adapted to make a superb television series about his hero, Detective Inspector Salvo Montalbano, chief of police in the fictional city of Vigata. So popular has the series been that Porto Empedocle, Camilleri’s birthplace, has recently had its name formally changed to Porto Empedocle Vigata.

As for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, he is for me in a class by himself. The Leopard is certainly the greatest book about Sicily that I have ever read; indeed, I would rank it with any of the great novels of the twentieth century. To anyone interested, I would also enthusiastically recommend David Gilmour’s admirable biography, The Last Leopard. Several other works of interest are listed in the bibliography.

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by | 19 February 2024 · 5:49 am

Australian Convict Fecundity, 1790s

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 227-228:

In early 1791, Rose Hill [now Parramatta] had a population of about 550 people but only 16 children. This meant that the young received extra attention from everyone and were often spoilt. Many convicts had left families behind in England, so seeing small children brought them both sadness and joy. The First Fleet arrived in January 1788 with only 54 children on board. Over 80% of the transported females were of childbearing age, between 15 and 45 years, so it is not surprising that a further 59 children were born to the colony by February 1790. Child numbers surged with the arrival of later fleets, and by the end of 1791 there were 249 (half below the age of 2) in the colony, and 39 of them lived in Rose Hill.

Because of the supposedly low food intake of convict women, the high birth rates in the early years of settlement have puzzled historians and medical scientists. One explanation for the high fecundity is that the atrocious diets in English gaols had kept the women’s body weight below that needed for fertility, whereas the adequate rations aboard the transport ships and at the settlement had reversed this. The prompt conception of baby Robert Rope was evidence of Elizabeth’s robust health when she stepped from the Prince of Wales in January 1788.

Concomitantly, during the colony’s “hunger years” (1789-1790), one might have expected female fertility in the settlement to drop. Diaries and letters from the first two years of the colony show that the above average birth-rate surprised the government administration. Watkin Tench credits this to the healthy climate:

I ascribe the great number of births which happened, considering the age and other circumstances, of many of the mothers. Women who certainly would never have bred in any other climate here produced as fine children as ever were born.

The Surgeon’s Mate [name unknown] on HMS Sirius wrote ‘Our births have far exceeded our burials; and what is very remarkable, women who were supposed past child-bearing, and others who had not been pregnant for fifteen or sixteen years, have lately become mothers’. And marine John Nicol, from the Second Fleet, was astonished that ‘old women’ had new-born babies, ‘There was an old female convict, her hair quite grey with age, her face shrivelled, who was suckling a child she had born in the colony. Every one went to see her, and I among the rest. It was a strange sight, her hair was quite white. Her fecundity was ascribed to the sweet tea’. Of course, the stress of prison life and punishments made some convicts look prematurely old – grey or white hair was not really a gauge of age.

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by | 3 February 2024 · 5:55 am

Japan’s No. 1 Problem in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 102-104:

Amidst the rubble of the cities, one of the saddest sights was that of orphaned children with white boxes hanging around their necks. The boxes contained the ashes of their relatives. In some cities, more than a quarter of the population was homeless – with a mass influx returning home from the front. More than five million Japanese were repatriated in the eighteen months after the war. Around 80 per cent were soldiers and the rest were colonists and their families from the empire Japan had conquered but had now lost. They were seldom welcomed back with open arms. Soldiers, in particular, were widely despised – and this in a country where propaganda, and long tradition, had conditioned its people to hold officers and men from the Imperial Army as the fount of all honour. ‘We were not invincible, as we had been told by our superiors,’ one officer recalled wearily, many years later. ‘The big shock was coming home and being shunned. People did not look us in the face.’ Army and people together were not ‘a hundred million hearts beating as one’, as the military mantra went. The people now regarded soldiers not as returning heroes but as discredited failures, and treated them as pariahs. But it was not only that the military had failed lamentably in its mission and left the country starving and ruined: since the defeat, the public had also been inundated with information about the atrocities Japanese soldiers had committed in China, the Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, and South-East Asia. Japan had been dishonoured in the eyes of its own people, for which the Japanese blamed their own soldiers.

But in the immediate aftermath of defeat questions of honour took second place. For at least the next two years food remained the biggest issue for most Japanese. Much of Japan had gone hungry long before the surrender. Shortages had been acute since the fortunes of war had turned in favour of the Western Allies and by the end of 1944 the majority of Japanese were malnourished. South Korea and Formosa (Taiwan) had been colonies since before the First World War and had produced large amounts of food for the home market. But the sinking of Japanese ships in the Pacific meant that these supplies were not getting through. American bombing of the cities had also disrupted food distribution, and 1945 saw the worst harvest since 1910. At the end of autumn 1945 the country was almost entirely out of rice. Thousands had starved to death and officials warned that ten million people now faced imminent starvation. They were exaggerating, but their panic prompted swift action from the occupying army.

MacArthur’s first, decent, instinct was to alleviate hunger and avoid famine. He cut through red tape, ordered the seizure of 3.5 million tons of food that the US Army had stockpiled for emergencies and had it shipped to Japan. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the House Appropriations Committee were indignant and demanded an explanation, but he responded with customary arrogance.

Among my more vivid earliest memories of Japan in the early 1950s was the sight of former Japanese soldiers, dressed all in white except for their green field hats, often missing a limb, begging in pedestrian underpasses or other unobtrusive places with lots of passing foot-traffic.

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by | 1 February 2024 · 5:33 am

Stalin’s ‘Rule by Dining Room’

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 30-31:

Stalin had always been a patient man. While he rose gradually to absolute power over the Communist Party and the State, he was always calculating, waiting for the right time to act. But now he was often irascible, irritable and unpredictable. ‘In the last years, Stalin began to weaken,’ said Molotov, his obedient lackey for decades. ‘Sclerosis comes to all with age in various degrees, but in him it was noticeable.’ He lost his temper and became conceited, ‘which was not a good feature in a statesman.’ Another of his underlings, Nikita Khrushchev, agreed that after the war ‘he wasn’t quite right in the head…He was very jittery. His last years were the most dangerous. He swung to extremes.’ He could still charm and manipulate, but he now grew increasingly autocratic.

There was no longer any pretence of anything other than one-person rule. Even during the Great Purge of the 1930s and the early years of the war, there had been a nod to a more collegiate ruling style. Now Stalin simply issued instructions. ‘Sometimes he would listen to others if he liked what they were saying,’ recalled Khrushchev. ‘Or else he might growl at them and immediately, without consulting anyone, formulate the text of a Resolution of…the Council of Ministers and after that the document would be published. It was completely arbitrary rule.’

He took immense interest in the private lives of those close to him but, over time, as he grew ever more isolated from ordinary life and the Russian people, these numbered only the other members of the ruling elite. ‘He often appeared unannounced at their homes to try to establish what the hierarchy was within their families,’ recalled Lavrenti Beria’s son, Sergo Beria, who was often present at these visits. ‘He made sure the families of his underlings did not see too much of each other – he feared friendships would lead to coalitions against him. He did not allow them to be absent for even a few hours without knowing where they were. A conversation between them of any length aroused his suspicion. He did not like them to have evening parties at their own homes. Any meeting without his supervision was suspect in his eyes.’

Stalin’s social life was confined to these ‘business associates’. Several times a week, at his insistence, Kremlin power brokers and, occasionally, visitors from other, mostly Eastern European communist parties would dine with him, usually at Kuntsevo, his dacha about fifteen kilometres west of Moscow. Refusal to attend was unthinkable. Here, work and ‘relaxation’ blurred seamlessly in ‘Rule by dining room’, as one Stalin biographer put it. They were ghastly bacchanals at which Stalin’s cronies would be ritually humiliated in order to provide entertainment for the Red Tsar. But they could be deadly serious. Once, after one of these drinking bouts, Khrushchev was on his way back to his Moscow apartment with another Party chieftain, the planning supremo Georgi Malenkov. With visible relief, he sank back into the seat and whispered, ‘One never knows if one is going home or to prison.’

As he got older Stalin turned more vicious to his entourage, men who – after him – were the most powerful people in the Soviet Union, and who inspired fear amongst their own underlings.

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by | 26 January 2024 · 6:29 am

Fraternization in 1946 Germany

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 49-52:

The Occupation armies had been promised swift demobilisation. But while they waited to go home, many were determined to make the best of their lot. At first, Allied generals issued strict edicts against fraternisation of any kind with Germans. Relations between victors and vanquished were to be strictly official and formal. The Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered American soldiers not to have any contact with locals. They could not visit German homes; no drinking with Germans in bars was allowed, nor shaking hands; no playing games with German children or sports with adults; no inviting them to Allied concerts, cinemas or parties. GIs faced a sixty-five-dollar fine for breaking the rules. Similar orders were issued by British commanders, mainly, as they admitted, as a sop to public opinion at home. Most crucially, there was to be no contact between soldiers and German women. It was hardly surprising that the rules proved impractical, almost impossible to enforce and so frequently disobeyed, they had to be dropped – first by Montgomery and then by the Americans.

…

For German women, friendships – or more – with Allied soldiers – were often the difference between life and death for them and their families; the GIs and Tommies gave them food, milk, medicines, and even luxuries, such as cigarettes and stockings, that they had been without for so long.

…

The conquerors had other attractions, too. There was an acute shortage of men. Two German men out of three born in 1918 did not survive World War Two, and a third of all children in Germany had lost their fathers. In the Berlin suburb of Treptow in February 1946 there were just 181 men for 1,105 women aged between eighteen and twenty-one. Major Arthur Moon, a Guards officer, was struck by what he saw: ‘In our thousands of miles that we travelled Germany, the most outstanding fact of all was the total absence of men aged between seventeen and forty. It was a land of women, children and old men.’ The Lucky Strike cigarettes, fresh coffee, nylon stockings and chocolate bars were appealing, but for the most part the relationships were not just transactional. American and even British men seemed far more attractive than the crippled veterans, returned prisoners of war, with the weariness of defeat about them, and the old men who were left in Germany. The occupiers seemed glamorous and desirable – not least since so many foreign films, books and music had been banned in the culturally oppressive Third Reich.

…

Social liberals were as shocked as moralists by illegitimacy levels. Nearly a hundred thousand babies were born to unmarried women in Germany in 1946, around a third of all births and three times the 1945 rate. Officially recorded abortions were more than twice that number, but the real, hidden, figure was assumed to be many times higher, though nobody knows for certain the exact figure. The cost of an abortion in 1946, illegally and dangerously obtained in back streets, was high, around a thousand marks – or, in the currency used far more widely, two cartons of Lucky Strikes and a half pound of coffee. A perhaps happier outcome was the number of GI brides: around twenty-five thousand in 1946/1947.

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by | 24 January 2024 · 2:19 am

Soviet Famine of 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 84-86:

Stalin saw threats everywhere, even from those who were starving. The war left famine in its wake, the worst in the Soviet Union since the 1920s and early 1930s. The 1945 harvest was poor, followed by terrible weather in Ukraine, drought in Moldova and unseasonable rain which destroyed crops in Siberia. The following year’s harvest was one of the worst on record. The grain crop was a third of its 1940 level, the potato yield less than half. Between one and a half and two million people died from starvation. And the famine was exacerbated by ideology: the Soviets were sending large quantities of food to East Germany and other parts of its new empire in an attempt to prop up the popularity of local communist parties. They were also stockpiling food in case growing international tensions led to war.

The Kremlin used the same methods that had been adopted in the 1930s – grain was requisitioned from the collective farms and the peasants were accused of hoarding. Stalin sent his henchmen to demand delivery of the quotas of grain each region had been ordered to hand over to the State. Unsurprisingly, the results were the same; the famine worsened.

Typically, Stalin had little sympathy with the victims and blamed them for their own plight. Khrushchev was sent to Ukraine, as he had been in the 1930s when he was Party Secretary there. He was hardened to suffering in the Soviet countryside and had caused a good deal of it himself, sending thousands of people to their deaths in the camps. Now he reported that famine in Ukraine was ‘dire’ and that people were resorting to cannibalism. Stalin reproved him: ‘This is spinelessness. They’re trying to play tricks on you. They are telling you this on purpose, trying to get you to pity them and get you to use up your grain reserves.’

The State raised prices and halted bread rationing among workers in rural areas, but not the peasants on farms, meaning they had virtually no bread though they were producing the grain to make it. The same day, the little economic freedom that they possessed was taken away. Farmers on collectives were banned from growing produce for themselves on the tiny plots of land they had been allowed before.

Thousands of people who complained about the famine publicly were sent to the Gulag. Predictably, theft of food increased. In the summer and early autumn of 1946, 53,369 people were charged with stealing bread; three-quarters of them were sent to jail. New laws were introduced to raise sentences from three months to three years; at the stroke of a pen Stalin personally increased the sentence to five years – and more for repeat offenders. Starving people were sent to labour camps for years for stealing potatoes lying in a field.

In Ukraine, some people fought back. Partisans from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA (Ukrayins’ka Povstans’ka Armiya), fought a low-level guerrilla campaign against Soviet forces, predominantly in western Ukraine and the eastern part of Poland in the Carpathian mountains, where at one point it numbered more than 30,000 soldiers. The UPA’s dream was an independent Ukraine of ethnic Ukrainians and for much of the war they had been fighting Poles as hard as they had fought Soviets. The sporadic fighting was little more than a minor irritant to the Kremlin, though Stalin took no chances. He sent more than 100,000 troops of his own, and pressed the Polish army to join the Russians in combating them. He used tried and tested methods – between 1945 and the end of 1947 more than 182,000 Ukrainians, mostly peasants or civilians who had nothing to do with the UPA, were despatched to the Gulag. The UPA fought on until the end of 1949, when they were finally crushed by the Soviets, though at the cost of over 1,200 Red Army casualties.

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