March 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the Russian Revolution, which led to the eventual rise of communist rule in Russia. But just a few years after the Bolshevik Revolution, an ignoble footnote in history emerged.
A few years after the Soviet Union became the world’s first communist state in the 1920s, a little-known but devastating famine ravaged the Russian countryside. The Povolzhye famine started in 1921 and ran until 1922, leaving millions dead and even more affected.
The famine was so bad that peasants were driven to practice the unthinkable: cannibalism. The Red Cross quoted a 1921 Soviet police report as saying, “Right now [the peasants] are digging up bodies in order to eat them.”
“After the killing fields of the First World War, the political upheavals in Russia and elsewhere, and the rampant spread of disease among exhausted communities, came the threat of food shortages that put an estimated 32 million lives at risk in Russia, Ukraine and Georgia,” said the Red Cross. “In 1921, on top of the political chaos that caused the breakdown of whatever health services existed, the region experienced a devastating drought, leading to a generalized famine.”
At least 5 million people died during the Povolzhye famine, which was triggered by policies initiated by Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin, who had been in charge of the Soviet Union since 1917. At the time, he instructed guards to take food from the poor. His Bolsheviks believed peasants were trying to undermine the war effort by taking their food away from the army.
