Famine
MarifetThe Soviet government conducted many campaigns to exterminate different peoples through famines. There were mass famines in 1921-23 and 1946-47 and the Holodomor of 1932-33, which are some of the most tragic pages in the history of the Ukrainian people. However, the Soviets sought to exterminate not only Ukrainians but also the inhabitants of the Crimean Peninsula.
Many factors preceded the mass famine in Crimea in the early twenties of the previous century. One of the reasons was the overstated reporting of the Crimean Revolutionary Committee. A report sent to Moscow stated that 9 million poods of bread had been harvested in Crimea, while the actual numbers reached only 2 million.
In 1922, the RSFSR People’s Food Committee determined a food tax of 1.2 million poods, prohibiting sowing fields until it was paid. This was followed by the forcible confiscation of grain from peasants using a policy of hostage-taking: in case of non-compliance with the established plan, hostages were shot.
The inhabitants of the mountainous parts of Crimea were the first to experience the famine. In November 1921, the first deaths were recorded, and in December, according to archival data, approximately 1,500 people (mostly Crimean Tatars) died.
There was no reaction from the local authorities; on the contrary, they were actively involved in the campaign of helping the starving people of the Volga region. Relevant committees were set up throughout the peninsula to collect taxes and take food out of Crimea.
The head of the Crimean representative office in Moscow, Veli Ibragimov, appealed to the praesidium of the Moscow Provincial Committee of Aid to the Starving, but his attempts to call on the Central Executive Committee to act were unsuccessful: they refused to recognise Crimea a starving region.
The chaos reigned everywhere: theft, murder, an outbreak of typhus, cannibalism, etc. In desperation, people ate carrion, sheep and ox skins, and even domesticated cats and dogs. As a result, hospitals were overcrowded, and there were several dozen deaths a day.
A telegram to the Azerbaijani Council of People’s Commissars signed by Y. Gaven and O. Deren-Ayerly in May 1922 contained the following information: “In Crimea, more than 400 thousand people are starving, which is more than 60% of the total Crimean population. More than 75 thousand people have already died of starvation, including more than 50 thousand Tatars. More than one-fifth of the total Tatar population has died of starvation.”
At that time, the authorities finally began to help improve the situation, although most of the aid was provided by the American Relief Administration, Red Cross, Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the missions of Fridtjof Nansen and the Pope, and the Ukrainian, Georgian and Azerbaijani SSRs. Thanks to that, large-scale famine problems were resolved by the mid-1920s.
Sources:
1. «“Голод-павук”: трагедія Криму 1921-1923 років»
3. “The Famine of 1921–22 in the Crimea and the Volga Basin and the Relief from Turkey”
Article by Sultaniie Zeinidinova, Daria Piskun, Olena Sudak