Hunger and War Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II [Paperback]

Drawing on recently released Soviet archival materials, Hunger and War investigates state food supply policy and its impact on Soviet society during World War II. It explores the role of the state in provisioning the urban population, particularly workers, with food; feeding the Red army; the medicalization of hunger; hunger in blockaded Leningrad; and civilian mortality from hunger and malnutrition in other home front industrial regions. New research reported here challenges and complicates many of the narratives and counter-narratives about the war. The authors engage such difficult subjects as starvation mortality, bitterness over privation and inequalities in provisioning, and conflicts among state organizations. At the same time, they recognize the considerable role played by the Soviet state in organizing supplies of food to adequately support the military effort and defense production and in developing policies that promoted social stability amid upheaval. The book makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the Soviet population's experience of World War II as well as to studies of war and famine.

Life and Death in Besieged Leningrad, 1941-44 edited by John Barber and Andrei Dzeniskevich (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). ISBN 9781403901422.

'Hunger and War' analyses several aspects of food shortages, starvation, and food provisioning in the Soviet Union. . . . [This is] . . . a coherent and informative volume that adds substantially to existing knowledge about Soviet food supply, military and civilian rationing, and starvation during the 'Great Patriotic War'.Dec. 2016Hunger and War . . . constitutes an important contribution to the current scholarship on the period of the Great Patriotic War. Focusing on the theme of food provisioning and consumption, the volume effectively bridges the traditional divide between scholarship on the battlefront and the home front. By bringing to light an impressive corpus of previously ignored archival sources, tló*