Food Waste and Survival in Times of the Soviet Famines in Ukraine

Abstract

This article focuses on the interconnections and interrelations between food, waste, people and state during a series of survival crises in the famines of 1921–3, 1932–3 and 1946–7 in Soviet Ukraine. Owing to grain and food requisitions, the collectivization of agriculture and rationing, as part of the state's growing control over the flow of economic resources from the 1920s to the 1940s, discarded food acquired particular importance for people's survival during these times of extremes. Focusing on both individual and institutional levels of waste production and regulation, this study explores the role of food waste in the survival practices of the starving and traces the development of their individual resourcefulness and interconnectedness with wider social and natural environments. The article explores different types of food waste, including husks, leftover food, carrion and spoiled and rotten food and the spaces of its collection. By ‘following’ the traces of waste in urban and rural landscapes, including, among others, dumpsters, slaughterhouses, cattle cemeteries and railway stations, the article brings into focus the critical changes in human–food, human–waste and human–nature relationships in times of extremes.

Waste is often imagined as what is left over – the redundant by-products of social life, ¹ ‘out of sight’ and ‘out of mind’, culturally invisible. This is a significant feature of any socio-economic system, ² while being located at the endpoint of the linear process, that is, production, consumption and disposal. ³ Historically, food waste has had an extensive duration of life, usually being incorporated into human and animal consumption and the organic cycle of agricultural production. In times of dearth, the social life of food becomes prolonged, and discarded resources are turned into a widespread food base for the survival of both humans and animals.

The interconnections of the political, social, and natural environments of waste as a resource are played out vividly during famines and other food crises. Though the nature of food waste is individually and culturally defined, the distinction between waste and edible food epitomizes the most characteristic changes in foodways and food behaviour during times of food insecurity, making previously unacceptable discarded or tabooed foods a life-long impact on the memory of the starving. One female survivor of the famine of 1932–3 in Ukraine became emotional when recalling her experience of consuming flat cakes made of rotten potatoes: ‘I will never forget how a neighbouring girl invited me to the house, … and treated me with those pancakes made of rotten potatoes. Never in my life have I eaten such delicious flat pancakes. Fifty-five years have passed since then, and I can [still] feel their taste’. ⁴ Being one of the most extreme periods of survival, the famine caused a re-evaluation of food value, emotions of taste and the relationship between society and wasted resources.

As periods of extreme food insecurity and the major existential crises of the twentieth century for humans, animals and the environment, the Soviet famines of 1921–3, 1932–3 and 1946–7 became pivotal events in the history of the Soviet Union, Ukraine and global communism. When the first famine of 1921–3 occurred, the Soviet republics had just been created. In Ukraine, as the national revolution was defeated, the Soviet government, formally independent of Moscow, was established. As a result of droughts in 1921 and 1922 and the extensive grain requisitions, the Ukrainian gubernias (regions) were already starving in 1921, although until spring 1922, the leadership in Moscow's did not recognize this and allowed foreign aid. ⁵ The political climate of the early 1920s allowed the circulation of information about the famine in the Volga region in Russia and Ukraine, while during the following two Ukraine famines, there was no official acknowledgement at all, and the information about its spread was suppressed and silenced, especially during the famine of 1932–3. The famines of the early 1930s, which mostly hit Ukraine and Kazakhstan, ⁶ were primarily induced by the forced collectivization and excessive requisitions of grain and cattle, respectively. ⁷ Many hungry people fled to the cities in search for employment in industry, primarily in the eastern regions of Ukraine, the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which provided them with basic rationing. ⁸ The third famine of 1946–7 came on the back of the devastation and destruction caused by the Second World War, ⁹ but it was significantly intensified by the state's grain requisitions and exports of grain abroad. It hit the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) and the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine most severely. ¹⁰

Unlike the famines of 1932–3 and 1946–7, when the rural population suffered the most, ¹¹ in addition to rural areas, the famine of 1921–3 had a heavy impact on the cities. ¹² While the first and the third famines had largely spread to south and south-eastern Ukraine, with an excess death rate of almost a million people each, ¹³ the most debatable figures are the mortality estimates for the Great Famine of 1932–3, also known as the Holodomor or ‘death by hunger’. This affected almost every region of the Ukrainian SSR, but had the most dreadful impact on the eastern and central areas. ¹⁴ According to demographic studies, during the Holodomor, 3.9 million died. ¹⁵ Despite the differences in the geographical and demographical impact of these famines, food survival practices were very similar, incorporating the mass consumption of surrogates, plants, domestic and wild animals and carrion.

Recent scholarship has made significant strides in studying the history of waste and its role in the context of global history, social change and the legacy of the Anthropocene. ¹⁶ As Brian Spooner notes, ‘the faster the change, the greater the disruption, and the greater the potential for waste’. ¹⁷ Yet, in times of war, as historical studies illustrate, waste had an empowering role for individuals and states and itself became a potential source of mobilization. ¹⁸ Focusing on waste as a ‘reserve’ to be mobilized, scholars have significantly broadened our understanding of how economies and societies utilize waste resources during major military conflicts. ¹⁹ Given the defining role of the state in the distribution of food and waste, the existing scholarship on the history of food and waste has focused on the institutional perspective, in which respect the focus on the overwhelming role of the Soviet state in administering the flow of economic resources makes it a particular case. ²⁰

By approaching the history of Soviet famines in Ukraine from the perspective of waste and discard studies, this article examines the role of waste and discarded food resources at times of extremes. The Ukrainian famines of 1921–3, 1932–3 and 1946–7 have been used as historical examples of extreme survival crises in European twentieth century history. By ‘following’ traces of waste in urban and rural landscapes, including, among others, dumpsters, slaughterhouses, cattle cemeteries and railway stations, this article highlights the impact of famine conditions on human food practices. Looking at various types of food waste that the hungry relied on, such as husks, leftovers, carrion and spoiled and rotten food, the study reveals the transformation of human–waste relationships under extreme circumstances. Examining industrial, public and economic infrastructure of the Soviet economy, the article highlights how the starving people adapted its discarded resources to survival needs by challenging the inequalities within the system of food distribution and the state faminogenic policies.

The article therefore analyses a wide range of primary sources that highlight human–waste relationships during the Soviet famines and practices of food waste consumption. Aiming to understand the personal experiences and emotions of the starving, it incorporates the testimonies and memoirs of famine survivors. ²¹ The state's perspective on the mass consumption of food waste is analysed by examining documentation and reports produced by the Ministry of Agriculture, the State Political Directorate (DPU) and the Institute of Nutrition, as well as health, epidemiological and sanitary commissions. Being able to see how waste was approached by different actors, consumers and the state, the study broadens our understanding of human–waste relationships by adding the institutional level.

Since this article is situated within the framework of famine studies, ethical considerations regarding the experiences of the survivors deserve special acknowledgement. This study does not aim to belittle the experiences of the hungry nor to simplify them, but instead seeks to illuminate the changes in their relationships with food and the environment. Those who survived retained lucid memories of how they ate food waste through time and space, being able to recall the details about its appearance, taste and smell. ²² Years later, one of the survivors of the famine of 1932–3 remembers, ‘Still when I cannot sleep at night, these rotten potatoes appear in front of my eyes, and I still sense that stinky smell’. ²³

In 1932, an emigrée from the Ukrainian gubernias of the Russian Empire, Mendel Osherowitch, at that time an American journalist, visited the USSR. In Tulchin, a small city in southwest Soviet Ukraine, he was amazed by a large mural with its central message claiming that ‘people should not throw away their old and torn shoes’. In fact, as Osherowitch noted, it would not be possible to do so, as ‘on the street very few people actually had shoes that were whole’. ²⁴ His impressions correspond to the general tone of the historiography of Soviet trade and consumption, when the periods of 1917–2, 1928–33 and 1939–47 are considered years of crisis, being differentiated from the mode of normalization due to the extensive state control over supply, distribution and consumer behaviour. ²⁵ Yet, given the total number of the years of crisis in the span of the three subsequent decades, living in the so-called ‘crisis mode’ was the norm rather than an exception, meaning that people had to adjust their relationships to the surrounding resources and discarded waste on an everyday basis. The adaptations of consumer practices to a crisis mode regime were particularly common for the population of the Soviet Ukraine that experienced three periods of famine, excluding the hunger conditions during the Second World War.

The widespread consumption of waste as a resource for survival gained in importance during the years of the revolutions and the post-revolutionary famine. As the economic and social situation deteriorated, the organized collection of food waste became a pervasive everyday practice for underprivileged and marginalized social groups, who were forced to explore the surrounding environment in search of discarded food. During the ‘military communism’ of 1918–20 and the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s, these practices of the efficient use of commodities and resources were in line with the Bolshevik ideology of consumption, which were critical of veschism advocated ascetic views on materiality. ²⁶ Adapting communist ideas of consumption towards the everyday reality, the Soviet state launched a ‘battle’ against excessive consumption and elite goods. ²⁷

Aiming to bring up new Soviet consumers, the state initiated a campaign to ‘engineer’ the masses’ consumer tastes. ²⁸ To battle against constant shortages of raw materials and goods, with the lowest-grade and least expensive ones in short supply, ²⁹ the authorities focused on educating consumers on how to re-use goods and extend the life span of things. ³⁰ In this ideological framework, the idea of constructivist tselesoobraznost’ (feasibility) arose, namely that the socialist ‘thing’ was used for a larger purpose and served utilitarian and rational functions for the ‘new everyday life’, byt. Unlike bourgeois commodities, therefore, it could be redeemed for socialist consumption. ³¹ To utilize the practical value of used commodities, the Soviet economy adapted the notion of utilizatsiia (utilization), which referred to a socialist order of things and the efficient management of discarded resources. ³²

In Soviet Ukraine, the administrative implementation of these ideas could be seen in the establishment of a state agency, which was in charge of the collection of waste and other discarded resources. ‘Ukrutylzbir’, an abbreviation for the Ukrainian waste recovery organization, was officially founded on 5 December 1923. ³³ It was this All-Ukrainian organization that was in charge of all activities related to waste management, including its collection, trade and disposal of paper, rags, bones and glass, both from individual households and enterprises. ³⁴ The development of the activity of Ukrutylzbir resulted in the establishment in the Ukrainian SSR of several regional branches in Kharkiv, Kyiv, Odesa, Artemivs’k (Bakhmut) and Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro) ³⁵ and connections with All-Union, Russian and Ukrainian organizations of trade and supply.

However, in addition to these economic goals, the main reason for the very existence of this enterprise and the initial stimulus of Ukrutylzbir's founder, Eduard Simson, as a Ukrainian environmental historian Tetiana Perga emphasizes, was to achieve humanitarian goals and overcome children's homelessness and unemployment among the sick and wounded Red Army soldiers in cooperation with the Ukrainian Red Cross. ³⁶ As at the time of its creation this organization did not place the environmental agenda at the centre of its activity, it was the scarcity of raw materials and resources that were the main drivers of the recycling of waste resources and their transformation into valuable commodities. ³⁷ Interestingly enough, the idea of this agency had not been developed in the context of communist consumer ideology, but inadvertently became one of the leading instruments of the implementation of its ideas into reality.

The First Five-Year Plan did not solve the existing disparity in the consumer market, as the development of light industry was not the main state priority. In April 1929, Vlas Chubar, the head of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic's government, confirmed that society was encountering issues in meeting its consumer needs for food and material goods. ³⁸ With the onset of the massive famines of 1932–3 in several regions of the Soviet Union, which were caused by deliberate state politics, in particular in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the actual experiences of ordinary consumers became even worse, as they were forced to extend the cultural and ethical boundaries of their food practices.

Though the concepts of usefulness were not uniquely a ‘Soviet invention,’ the relationships with waste in the communist state differed from those in other economic regimes. While in capitalist economies this kind of consumer behaviour was an everyday practice among impoverished households, in the Soviet Union, the efficient use of resources constituted a central part of both ideological politics and individual consumer practices.

As Spring et al. argue, ‘… food deserves – and demands – to be elevated to a point where it is not merely a thing to be “managed” but is emphatically deserving of greater respect and is not to be wasted’. ³⁹ Under famine conditions, the value of food grew exponentially, making its social life more prolonged. The extreme survival circumstances blurred the distinctions between everyday food, food waste, and famine food. During the famines of the Soviet period, the life of food extended its life span significantly, as waste was eaten raw, dried or cooked. Husks, previously used as cattle fodder, were cooked en masse. Food waste and discarded resources, such as food leftovers, spoiled food and carrion, became essentials for the survivals of both people and their household animals.

Although the different Soviet famines had different impacts on the rural and urban populations, the starving adopted similar survival practices and relied upon existing intergenerational knowledge about the previous crises of survival. With the beginning of the famines, most of the population were forced to adapt their consumer practices to a survival mode. By exploring a wide range of environmental and industrial areas and spaces for the storage of waste, the hungry developed their agency and adopted resourceful forms of behaviour that went beyond the existing supply structures.

Experiencing the lack of food, contemporaries were forced to reorganize the foodways in their households and revert to a more rational use of food and commodities. The underprivileged in society were forced to rely on the collection of food leftovers, which played a crucial role in their everyday practices. Those without access to the system of state supply and distribution, such as the unemployed and homeless, were in the most desperate situations of all. When the system of goods rationing was introduced at the beginning of the Bolsheviks’ takeover of power in Ukraine (1918–21) and during the first years of the First Five-Year Plans (1928–35), those who were employed at state institutions and industry had access to the rationing system. ⁴⁰ Basically, the key principle in distributing resources was manifested in the common Soviet-era saying, ‘He who does not work does not eat’, meaning that belonging to a state system of employment gave one access to a food supply. According to this ‘logic’, peasants were not included in this equation, so during the years of famine, they had to rely on their own resources, unless their property and food were requisitioned or confiscated by the state. ⁴¹ The most excessive and coercive food requisitions took place in the early 1930s, which left collective farmers and the families of repressed well-to-do villagers, the kulaks, without sources for survival.

This desperate situation forced the starving to seek new ways to sustain their families during the famine. The incorporation of food waste into foodways and consumption practices became one of the most common ways to stay alive. Being in a desperate situation, the starving started to eat waste en masse. The range of food waste was diverse. Based on the number of mentions in interviews, husks and leftover potatoes were a significant part of the everyday famine diet. In almost one in four personal famine histories about the Holodomor, using various leftovers as everyday famine foods is mentioned. Husks of corn and other cereals, previously treated as cattle fodder, were consumed by the starving in large amounts. Potato peel was another survival food during the famine of 1946–7. ⁴² Carrion was another common source of famine foods. During the famine of 1932–3, the official reports lamented that ‘the use of carrion as food has become a mass occurrence’. ⁴³ Though all these types of food waste came from different sources and places, in different forms, shapes and varieties, they played a paramount role in human survival strategies during the years of Soviet famines.

Traditionally, from previous periods when the population experienced hunger, among the most common practices of survival was re-using food waste. A typical example was recalled by a survivor of the famine of 1932–3, Tania Gudz from the Mykolaiv region. As a 9-year-old child, she developed a strong sense of agency, as she was forced to work in a communal kitchen, since her family was starving. ⁴⁴ Once, she recalled, she asked her female colleague to put aside food waste: ‘When you cook food, collect all the leftovers and add them together … and on Saturday when I go to my mother and father I will take them home’. ⁴⁵ In their post-famine recollections, the interviewees told stories of how, as children during the years of hunger, they treated dried potato clippings as candies. ⁴⁶ This example is very telling as it provides voices to children and illustrates how their agency and survival practices depended on waste consumption. ⁴⁷

Though, as discussed above, the consumption of food waste of vegetable origin was ‘a usual’ practice among the starving, the extreme conditions of survival compelled them to consume waste of animal origin, namely carrion. One of the preconditions of doing so was the widespread death of livestock from malnutrition, which created stocks of dead animal corpses lying around the collective farms or kolkhospy, as grain confiscations and requisitions were so massive that cattle were left without sufficient food. Moreover, being malnourished, people also consumed grain and corn, which was supposed to feed the cattle, as happened in 1932, when the corn used to feed cows was commonly consumed by the local peasants. ⁴⁸ Hence, while travelling through the villages, correspondents documented the cases when people were not the only ones who had become swollen from malnutrition: their cattle were also dying because of the lack of fodder. ⁴⁹ This picture of the starving village was an appalling illustration of how the lack of food and fodder for people and household animals made them hostages to political and economic decisions.

During their visits to the regions that were starving, the authorities and medical specialists acknowledged that ‘the use of carrion as food has become a mass occurrence’. ⁵⁰ Its prevalence in famine food practices was revealed when the officials’ house inspections revealed ‘stocks of carrion’. ⁵¹ Going from house to house, they witnessed the same picture of starving peasants eating carrion, mostly horse meat, but also the flesh of cattle, including calves, and pigs, including animal skin and bones. The incorporation of carrion into famine diets constitutes one of the highest levels of transgression during famines, short of cannibalism. One of the most common food transgressions among the different peoples of Soviet Ukraine, including Ukrainians, Russians, Germans and Jews, was the consumption of horse meat and carrion. In a letter to relatives from North Dakota (USA), a German family from South Ukraine had to stress that to survive the hunger, they had to ‘eat sausage made of dead horse’. ⁵² This became one of the signs of the transgression of normal food rules, as manifested in the rejection of cultural and food taboos prohibiting the consumption of carrion and spoiled meat, but it also led to the extension of traditional cultural and ethical boundaries during times of such extremes.

The food industry played a significant role in human survival practices, both directly and indirectly, especially for the urban population. Industrially produced food was traded, distributed, and rationed through consumption networks, provided one had access to them. ⁵³ Even when canned produce was spoiled, it was still a high-value source of consumption and significantly contributed to the famine diet of the malnourished population. In Poltava in 1931–2, at the beginning of the famine, sausage broths were offered as part of the public food system. ⁵⁴ Following the Second World War, the state's scientific institutions actively worked on exploring ways in which food wastes could be incorporated into the food-processing industry and consumption practices.

Trying to expand theoretical knowledge about the uses of food discards and rationalizing scarce resources after the Second World War, Ukraine's Institute of the Hygiene of Nutrition launched a project on the uses of food wastes in the networks of public dining and the hygienic analysis of meals containing discarded ingredients. ⁵⁵ These initiatives coincided with the famine of 1946–7, when the need to augment food resources was demanded by both the state and the significant part of the population that had been already impoverished during the course of the war. Hence, responding to the existing food crisis during the post-war famine, Ukraine's Institute of Nutrition recommended that the administrations of children's homes introduce the waste products of the food-processing industry into their dietary norms, alongside wild greens, mushrooms, berries, and fruits. ⁵⁶ In expanding the range of ‘allowed’ food ingredients, the Institute of Nutrition acknowledged the changes in the food diet that had already been incorporated on the individual and institutional levels. For instance, animal blood, which would be usually discarded from the cycle of industrial food production, was recommended as an ingredient of bread, which would also increase its nutritional value. It was also suggested that blood might be added to sausages, pâté and kashas. ⁵⁷ In fact, animal intestines and blood had already been incorporated into traditional Ukrainian food culture, where blood sausages are a known delicacy despite religious taboos. ⁵⁸ The widening of the post-war Soviet state's food base allows us to see how local knowledge and traditional food culture became adapted to the regime of a food crisis, with the state playing a central role in food production.

Another source in increasing the food base was the consumption of low-quality grain, which would be usually discarded during the consumption cycle. During the famine of 1932–3, death records show that one of the most widespread causes of food poisonings was ergot fungus. ⁵⁹ Known as Cornua Secalіs cornuti, this plant disease usually affects rye. ⁶⁰ In the Russian Empire, ergotism had already been known for centuries, resulting in extensive scientific research on the problem ⁶¹ at the turn of the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Soviet-era medical scholars were quite optimistic with their predictions, hoping that the disease would be eliminated with the development of socialism. ⁶² During the famines in Ukraine, the lack of good-quality grain and insufficient control over flour and the baking of bread resulted in mass consumption of the infected grain in either the local state-owned bread plants or private households. If in normal times such ingredients would usually be discarded, in times of hunger, due to the general shortage of all food resources, all available grain was used in the production cycle. In the early 1930s, the growing number of food poisonings forced medical scientists to acknowledge its epidemic scale. Based on their clinical observations, they concluded that ergotism, the scientific name for this disease, could develop three forms, namely the convulsive form, which was the most frequent, the gangrenous form and mixed. ⁶³ They also revealed that the disease could develop even when bread contained just a couple of hundredths of one per cent of ergot. ⁶⁴ As a key measure to eliminate ergotism as disease, the authors suggested taking preventative measures against the infestation of grain and to clean it if it had been infected. ⁶⁵ However, the general poverty of the population and the shortage of food did not provide positive contributory factors in fighting against the disease.

The distinctive difference between the consumption of famine foods, including food surrogates, and food waste lies in the emotions that the latter elicited. During times of extreme survival, scarce food resources caused a diverse range of emotions, both positive and negative. If the consumption of a rare bread crust was the source of a memorable positive experience, eating food waste caused a strong sense of disgust. Decades later, an eyewitness of the famine of 1932–3 still remembers the horrible smells of rotten food: ‘There was an oilcake, goosefoot, there were rotten, terribly stinking potatoes. We pressed it, and my mother apparently managed to find crumbs of starch there, or God knows what. The potatoes [were] laid near the house and smelled so bad that it was impossible to enter the yard’. ⁶⁶ The survivors can vividly recall the distinctive ‘fetid smell’ of the food they ate. ⁶⁷ When faced with the prospect of eating dead horse meat, respondents recalled their mothers stating that they would rather ‘die than feed the children with the meat of a dead animal’ ⁶⁸ or would turn instead to consuming chaff. ⁶⁹ As the eyewitness testimonies illustrate, disgust at eating carrion and other famine foods that elicited strong negative emotions helped contemporaries define the imaginary borders of their humanity. ⁷⁰

Examination of the varieties of food waste could be traced through the topography of discarded food. When analysing the geography of food waste in the context of famines, wars, catastrophes and other existential crises, it is important to unpack the peculiarities of human–waste relationships and interconnections under extreme circumstances. Sophie Woodward argues that, to understand spaces, practices and objects, one has to follow them within one place. ⁷¹ David Evans suggests extending the commodity chain and following its items in domestic space. ⁷² This study proposes to go further by looking at the sites of food waste both within and outside the household, given that each period of Soviet famine had different dynamics, intensities and impacts on both rural and urban areas. ⁷³ As the hungry did not have enough to eat in their households, the conditions of hunger forced them to go beyond the existing food supply structures and collect food resources from previously excluded and distant places. The fewer the edible resources that were available, the stronger was the need for the hungry to expand their geographies of consumption.

Dumpsters are the best-known waste collection containers that have survival potential. Being already incorporated into the survival strategies of impoverished social strata, such as the poor and abandoned children, they became life-saving spaces for a significant number of the starving in both urban and rural areas. Though in the pre-famine years urban dumpsters were a familiar space for the poor and homeless, during the mass famines of the early 1920s, early 1930s and late 1940s, they became known to a large proportion of the population. For this reason, one could argue that famine caused the ‘popularization’ of waste sites as spaces for food consumption. As an eyewitness of the famine of 1932–3 recalled, the starving looked for potato clippings in the dumpsters and then consumed them as such or cooked them, adding other ingredients and food surrogates, such as corn heads. ⁷⁴ Given that the geographical distribution of Soviet famines in Ukraine varied, though generally affecting the vast rural and urban landscapes of the southern, eastern and central regions, ⁷⁵ dumpsters located in the village and on the city outskirts became a magnet for the malnourished, such as peasants whose property and food were requisitioned, collective farmers who barely survived, urban workers living on meagre rationing, or the starving unemployed. During the famine of 1946–7, respondents acknowledged the important role of markets, where they were able to get food wastes. ⁷⁶

Abandoned and homeless children were in a particularly dire situation. ‘I searched for food in the dumpsters. I wandered over the fields all day long, searching for frozen potatoes’, ⁷⁷ one female survivor recalled. Being left by her mother when she was a 7-year-old child, she had to find ways to stay alive like many other children whose survival became dependent either on materiality or the environment. ⁷⁸ During the famines, homeless children found themselves in dire conditions, being able to rely only on their own skills and knowledge about food provision and shelter, unlike those who had better survival chances when taken into the orphanages and provided with a meagre food supply, such as rye bread and barley porridge. ⁷⁹

Rural and urban dumpsters were therefore relatively well known to marginalized groups in society, while in the Soviet famines in Ukraine, many starving peasants were forced to learn about dumpsters at collective farms and cattle cemeteries. The excessive grain requisitions, especially during the famine of 1932–3, left livestock owners, both peasants and collective farmers, without a sufficient amount of fodder. As one local correspondent wrote about the situation in the Zaporizhzhia region, the state collective farms did not have any food for either people or horses and pigs. ⁸⁰ Given this situation, mass mortality associated with malnutrition and epidemic diseases was widespread among cattle and horses, ⁸¹ and the number of dumpsters at collective farms rapidly grew. For this reason, carrion became one of the most common objects of food waste and famine food.

Cattle cemeteries and sheep pens were especially notorious places in the rural landscape. Famine survivors recalled how the hungry used to come to the cattle cemeteries in search of rotten meat before the local authorities chlorinated the dead animals to prevent the spread of epidemic diseases. ⁸² One eyewitness recalled that his family ‘did not shrink from eating carrion’ and complained about the lack of salt as a seasoning for the spoiled meat, ⁸³ while others would point to the violent behaviour of some of the starving. ⁸⁴ As one can imagine, these places were extremely controversial: they simultaneously played the role of a survival space, an epicentre of violence, and a notorious area with a disgusting smell, constituting a vivid representation of the apocalyptic landscape.

The construction of the food-processing industry was intensified during the years of rapid collectivization at the end of the 1920s, having an indirect impact on human survival practices during the famine of 1932–3. Scholars argue that the process of creating new fields for the food industry could literally be considered a revolution in its own right. ⁸⁵ New industrial spaces, such as dairies, bakeries, and canning factories, not only produced edible goods but also accumulated a significant amount of food waste. Dairies were known to the hungry for the by-products of their production such as whey, a liquid which remains after milk has been curdled. ⁸⁶ Similarly, as the famine survivors recalled, the Belorussian starch plants were important places in the topography of survival for the starving who had travelled there from Ukraine. Aiming to obtain starch waste used for baking flat cakes, people from the famished regions travelled across the Dnipro River on a boat or by a railway station. ⁸⁷

The waste from distilleries and breweries also became a resource for people's survival. Reporting on the level of starvation in the Dnipropetrovs’k region in March 1933, the head of the regional department of the DPU ⁸⁸ pointed out that the consumption of various food surrogates, including brewery waste, was causing food poisoning and deaths among the local population. ⁸⁹ In the villages of the Kyiv region, which had had distilleries since the middle of the nineteenth century, peasants received pruno and strained it, the dried grain seeds being used to cook soups and porridge. ⁹⁰ Additionally, the hungry also repurposed and learned how to consume other types of waste from distilleries and sugar plants. Pruno and bagasse pits in the fields of the collective farms were of particular value. ⁹¹ Those living in close proximity to a creamery and had connections with its employers would be able to get the wastes of its production, such as maslianka ⁹² and surovatka (milk serum). ⁹³

As the examples above illustrate, the hungry adapted food industry waste in different ways. Less common examples of re-use could be found in the enterprises of the light industry, such as tanning yards. As the workers received an insufficient supply of everyday goods on their rationing cards, they learned how to adapt the leather waste for purposes of survival. During the famine of 1932–3, starving workers in the Sixth Tanning Yard in Kyiv stole leatherwork and subcutaneous tissue. ⁹⁴ As meat and bones were an exceptional rarity, the starving would eat leather as such after extensively boiling it or used it to make a broth.

The canteens of industrial enterprises also provided food leftovers, though they were not distributed officially. One female worker in the tanning yard, as mentioned above, used to come to its canteen with four of her children every day and beg the diners to give her any leftovers. Being strongly motivated to save her family from starvation, she recalls saying to people in the canteen while asking for their leftovers: ‘Do not be surprised, I am a mother, and I must save my children from hunger’. ⁹⁵

In addition to the food and light industry, other urban places had life-saving potential. Though railway stations were symbolically related to modernity, danger and violence, during the years of famine, along with existing features, they became known as places where food waste could be found. A 9-year-old girl collecting scraps of cheese and oranges, mentioned at the very beginning of the article, represents a collective portrait of starving and homeless children who managed to survive on food leftovers collected at railway stations. Indeed, the DPU cautioned that train stations were being flooded with the poor, vagrants and homeless, including children. In May 1933, it was reported that, in the south of Soviet Ukraine alone, more than 31,000 people and 8500 children had been detained at the Ekaterinyns’ka and south-west railroads. ⁹⁶ Kharkiv was one of the largest transport hubs in Soviet Ukraine and an important railway junction in the south of the Soviet Union. Since the number of trains coming and departing from Kharkiv was significant, its station became a well-known place of survival. Coming to Kharkiv from Rostov in 1932, Mendel Osherowitch was greatly saddened by what he saw at the train terminal: ‘There was not a single spot where people were not lying about, even though the place was damp, wet, dirty, crowded and chaotic. Over there, you saw people camping out on top of sacks and bundles, everything twisted together in one lump, the whole of it crawling as hundreds of heavy feet moved yet seemed to go nowhere’. ⁹⁷

The industrial and urban spaces discussed above, where waste could be collected, created a particular famine landscape. Built in the late imperial and early Soviet era, they were considered objects of industrialization and modernization in light industry and food processing. Some of these waste spaces were situated close to the Ukrainian giants of industrialization, that is, the Kharkiv Tractor Plant and Dniprohes (the hydro-electro station in Dnipropetrovsk/Dnipro), although they were never shown to foreigners, whose trips were carefully guided by Soviet officials. Railway stations were also symbols of technical and infrastructural modernization, but the famine made them places of hope, facilitating the migration of the starving and their meagre material possessions, despite the state-enforced restrictions. ⁹⁸ The larger railway stations also became places where children and adults could find food leftovers thrown away by travellers who had better access to the food supply. The slaughterhouses in rural areas had almost completely removed household animals and livestock from peasant families, an outcome of collectivization. As a result, they relied heavily on the collective farms’ infrastructure and their sites of waste disposal, which became life-saving sites in one's topography of survival.

In examining the topography of waste during the famine, one can see the growing role of these sites in the life-saving strategies of the starving population. Being initially created for specific industrial and economic functions, they were regulated by the authorities in a specific way. During the years of hunger, their social functionality was significantly expanded, enabling them to fill the gap in the state distribution system and provide the starving, whether rural or urban dwellers, whether young or old, with alternative sources of food supply. During massive food crises such as famines, the spaces of food waste played multifaceted roles by becoming the instruments of human agency and historical agents in their own right.

The challenges of survival brought about by the years of famine in the early 1920s, early 1930s and late 1940s in Soviet Ukraine caused radical changes to the value of food and a re-evaluation of consumption practices. Though the history of human–food experiences during these famines was not radically unique compared with other periods of hunger in the region, elsewhere in eastern Europe or globally, it provides not only valuable knowledge for understanding the local socio-economic contexts and specific features but also allows knowledge about the challenges of human experiences during the famines and events linked to food crises worldwide to be improved.

Being resourceful, the starving expanded the boundaries of their everyday landscapes and foodway networks into less emotionally but often psychologically uncomfortable areas that challenged the very notion of their humanity, cultural taboos and social and food norms. The crucial changes in human–waste relationships during the famines manifest the growing power of waste resources in extreme conditions. During a food crisis, the relationships between humans and food reached an even higher level, as food waste itself became a highly praised and respected survival resource. Examination of the afterlives of food and of the landscapes of waste during the Soviet famines in Ukraine illuminates a range of individual and societal responses testifying to the growing role of the agency of the starving and of places of waste in their own right. Being initially used as resources for survival, some food waste was also the cause of poisoning and death, exposing its twofold power, both life-saving and lethal. Understanding these multifaceted entanglements of human–food, human–waste and human–environment interconnections provides crucial knowledge about the cost of human survival during famines.

As Brigitte Pristed argues, ‘waste practices are deeply embedded in the culture and norms of any society and its economic framework’. ⁹⁹ When considering the role of waste during the Soviet famines, the Bolshevik ideology and state policies of the 1920s–40s played the central, ambiguous, role in the development of individual practices with discarded resources and the organization of waste regimes in the planned economy. ¹⁰⁰ Though Soviet ideology initially aimed at ‘bringing up’ a new Soviet consumer, during the years of famines in Ukraine, when people were starving, their behaviour was not a conscious or ideologically motivated consumer choice, but rather a testimony to their need to survive. The efficient reassignment of everyday objects, including food and surrounding discarded resources, imposed as an ideology of consumption ascetism by Communist propaganda in the 1920s, became the non-inherent practice of everyday life during the years of Soviet famines. What distinguishes Ukraine's famines from other historical examples are the specific political, economic, agricultural and ideological settings established by the Soviet authorities, which forced its ordinary consumers to establish close and engaged relationships with waste and its topography. As a major cause of the genocidal famines themselves, the Communist ideology of consumption eventually found its ‘practical’ application by forcing millions of people to turn to discarded food and resources when faced with physical starvation and death.