Russian famine of 1891–2

The Russian famine of 1891–2 began along the Volga River, then spread as far as the Urals and Black Sea. The reawakening of Russian Marxism and populism is often traced to the public's anger at the Tsarist government's poor handling of the disaster.

In 1891 a particularly dry autumn had delayed the planting of the fields. That winter temperatures fell to −31 degrees Celsius (−24 degrees Fahrenheit), but very little snow fell therefore the seedlings were totally unprotected from the frost. When the Volga river flooded the lack of snow caused the water to freeze, killing more seedlings as well as the fodder used to feed the horses. Those seedlings that were not killed by frost were blown away along with the topsoil in an uncommonly windy spring. The summer started as early as April and proved to be a long dry one. The city of Orenburg for example had no rain for over 100 days. Forests, horses, crops and peasants all began to die, and by the end of 1892 about half a million people were dead, mostly from cholera epidemics triggered by the famine.

Weather alone cannot be blamed as there was enough grain in Russia to feed the starving areas. The peasants used medieval technology like wooden ploughs and sickles. They rarely had modern fertilizers or machinery (the Petrovsky academy in Moscow was Russia's only agricultural school). Russia's primitive railways were not up to redistributing grain. The affected area was a stronghold of communal land distribution so that households had no incentive to improve the land or mechanize, but every incentive to produce as many children as possible (Russia had Europe's highest birth rate). The main blame was laid at the government, which was discredited by the famine. It refused to use that word: golod, they called it a poor harvest, neurozhai, and stopped the papers reporting on it. The main reason the blame fell on the government was that grain exports were not banned till mid-August and merchants had a month's warning so they could quickly export their reserves. Minister of Finance Ivan Vyshnegradsky even opposed this late ban. He was seen as the main cause of the disaster as it was his policy to raise consumer taxes to force peasants to sell more grain. Even Russia's capitalists realized the industrialization drive had been too hard on the peasants. The government also contributed to the famine indirectly by conscripting peasant sons, sending taxmen to seize livestock when grain ran out, and implementing a system of redemption payments as compensation to landlords who had lost their serfs.

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