adults; this resulted in mass arrests and imprisonment of teenagers, mostly for petty theft. In May 1935 the local Commissions on the Affairs of Minors were abolished, and responsibility for all juvenile crime was shifted to the courts. Punishment replaced an earlier commitment to pedagogical correction. The 1936 laws also marked a turn in attitudes toward law and family. Jurists condemned as “legal nihilism” earlier notions that the law and the family would “wither away.” Many legal theorists of the
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1920s, including Yevgeny Pashukanis and Nikolai Krylenko, were arrested and shot. See also: FAMILY CODE OF 1926; FAMILY CODE ON MARRIAGE, THE FAMILY, AND GUARDIANSHIP; FAMILY EDICT OF 1944
Goldman, Wendy. (1991). “Women, Abortion, and the State, 1917-1936.” In Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, eds. Barbara Clements, Barbara Engel, Christine Worobec. Berkeley: University of California Press. Goldman, Wendy. (1993). Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sharlet, Robert. (1984). “Pashukanis and the Withering-Away of Law in the USSR.” In Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-31, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick. Blooming-ton: Indiana University Press.
The famine of 1891-1892 was one of the most severe agricultural crises to strike Russia during the nineteenth century. In the spring of 1891 a serious drought caused crops to fail along the Volga and in many other grain-producing provinces. The disaster came on the heels of a series of poor harvests, its impact worsened by endemic peasant poverty and low productivity. The population of the affected areas had few reserves of food and faced the prospect of mass starvation.
Beginning in the summer of 1891, the imperial Russian government organized an extensive relief campaign. It disbursed almost 150 million rubles to the stricken provinces, working closely with the zemstvos, institutions of local self-government responsible for aiding victims of food shortages. The ministry of internal affairs established food supply conferences to coordinate government and zemstvo efforts to find and distribute available grain supplies. When massive backlogs of grain shipments snarled the railroads and threatened the timely delivery of food, the government dispatched a special agent to remedy the situation. The heir to the throne, the future Nicholas II, chaired a committee designed to encourage and focus charitable efforts. Many public-spirited Russians-Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Korolenko and others-rushed into the countryside on their own initiative, setting up a large network of private soup kitchens and medical aid stations.
The relief campaign was remarkably successful. More than 12 million people received aid, and starvation was largely averted. Mortality for 1892 rose in the sixteen famine provinces-about 400,000 deaths above normal-much of it due to a simultaneous cholera epidemic. But compared to contemporary Indian and later Soviet famines, this loss of life was minimal. Still, the famine aroused public opinion. Many blamed the government’s economic policies for causing the disaster, and its relief efforts were often unfairly criticized. Consequently, the famine proved to be an important turning point in Russian history, beginning a new wave of opposition to the tsarist regime. See also: FAMINE OF 1921-1922; FAMINE OF 1932-1933; FAMINE OF 1946
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Robbins, Richard G., Jr. (1975). Famine in Russia, 1891-1892: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press. Simms, James Y., Jr. (1977). “The Crisis of Russian Agriculture at the End of the Nineteenth Century: A Different View.” Slavic Review 36:377-398. Wheatcroft, S.G. (1992). “The 1891-92 Famine in Russia: Toward a More Detailed Analysis of its Scale and Demographic Significance.” In Economy and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1860-1930: Essays for Olga Crisp, eds. Linda Edmondson and Peter Wal- dron. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
This devastating famine, comparable only to that of 1932 and 1933, most seriously affected the Volga provinces, Ukraine, and the Urals, and to a lesser extent several other regions, from late 1920 to mid-1923. At its peak in the summer of 1922, some thirty million people were starving (statistics from this period are uncertain), in towns as well as villages. One of the largest relief efforts in history, including foreign and Soviet agencies, reached most of these people despite enormous logistical and ideological obstacles.
Severe droughts in 1920 and especially 1921, as well as locusts and other natural disasters, most
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directly caused the famine. One-fourth of the crops failed overall, and many other areas had low yields. Agrarian developments during World War I and the Civil War also contributed to the crisis. The peasants’ subdivision of landlord estates, the collapse of industrial production, and massive inflation led increasing numbers of peasants to orient production toward subsistence. From 1918 to 1920, many peasants sold or bartered food to townspeople despite Bolshevik efforts against private trade, but these sales declined because of requisitions by tsarist and provisional governments, the German-Austrian occupation in Ukraine, and the White armies and Bolsheviks, which depleted peasants’ grain reserves. With insufficient seed, draft forces, and deteriorating equipment, peasants in 1921 succeeded in planting only two-thirds to three-fourths of the cropland farmed prior to the wars and much less in some regions. Yet even this would not have caused the disaster that occurred without the droughts of 1920 and 1921.
The Bolshevik government responded to the 1920 drought by ceasing requisitions from the central provinces and, in February 1921, by forming a commission for aiding agriculture in the affected regions, distributing food relief and seed, and importing grain. By late May 1921 it was clear that the country was in the midst of a second drought even more severe than that of 1920. Peasants resorted to eating weeds and other food surrogates, and cannibalism, trying to save their seed for the fall planting. Thousands of peasants fled from famine districts to Ukraine and other regions, often with government assistance, which sometimes spread famine conditions.
During the summer of 1921, the Bolshevik government distributed limited seed and food relief to famine regions, often by curtailing rationed supplies to towns, and appealed for food relief at home and abroad. Many groups responded. The International Red Cross set up an International Committee for Russian Relief, under the leadership of Fridtjof Nansen. Other agencies offering help included the International Committee of Workers’ Aid, the American Friends Service Committee, and the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
By far most aid came from the American Relief Administration (ARA), headed by Herbert Hoover. In the Riga agreement of August 1921, the Bolsheviks allowed the ARA to distribute its own relief. Investigation of the Volga region led the ARA to attempt to aid as many people as possible until the 1922 harvest. Hoover persuaded the U.S. Congress to allocate $20 million for food supplies; these were shipped and distributed in a “corn campaign,” conducted from January to August of 1922, which had to overcome the catastrophic disrepair of the railroads and the incompetence and ideologically motivated resistance of some local and central government officials. By the summer of 1921, some eleven million people received food from foreign relief agencies.
The ARA also organized medical aid and international food remittances, many sent to Ukraine. In October ARA personnel went to Ukraine and found famine conditions that the Moscow Bolsheviks had not mentioned, as well as a Ukrainian government that refused to accept the Riga agreement. Only after negotiations in December was Ukraine brought into the relief effort. The ARA and other groups also provided medical aid that reached more people than the food relief.
By the summer of 1922, Soviet government food relief had reached some five million people in the Volga, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Many ordinary Soviet citizens also contributed to famine relief. Soviet and foreign seed aid supported a 1922 harvest. Although grown on an area about 20 percent smaller than that of 1921, the 1922 harvest was much larger than that of the previous year because normal rainfall had returned. Still, famine conditions continued in many regions and especially among abandoned children (besprizorniki). The ARA continued relief into mid-1923 against intrusive Soviet efforts to limit its operations. A few small relief programs continued, but the 1923 harvest basically ended the famine.
Estimates of famine mortality vary, with the most widely accepted being five million deaths, most resulting from typhus and other epidemics spread by refugees. So vast was the famine that the combined relief efforts at
