Samara region, 13 April, 1922
“… in the larder we found two pieces, in the stove there was one piece of boiled human flesh, and in the inner porch there was a pot with jellied minced flesh of the same kind, and near the porch we found a lot of bones. When we asked the woman where she had taken the flesh from, she confessed that back in February her 8-year-old son Nikita died and then her 15-year-old daughter Anna and she took his corpse and cut it into pieces, and as they were starving they ate it together. When there was nothing else left, she decided to kill the daughter for meat and did it in the early April. While the girl was sleeping, she slaughtered her and cut the corpse into pieces, and started to cook it. She gave the jellied flesh and liver to her neighbors Aculina and Evdokia, saying that it was horse meat.
Text and photo from
English Russia, where there are additional photos. For more re Russia in the 1920s, see the
post below this one.
During the Civil War in Soviet Russia(1917-1921), the Bolsheviks adopted War Communism, which entailed the forcible seizure of agricultural surpluses, to feed the urban populations (on which communism relied, read Marx). This lead to a massive famine throughout Russia, and people ended up eating the dead. Some may have killed the livings to feed upon them too, but I'm not sure.
ReplyDeleteAfter this, the Tenth Party Congress decided to institute the New Economic Policy (NEP), in which the state allowed agricultural surpluses to be kept (and sold on markets) by the peasants.