Part of the problem was that western Europe could no longer turn to the granaries of eastern Europe on which it had traditionally depended. For there, too, no-one had enough to eat. In Romania the 1945 harvest failed, through mismanaged land reforms and bad weather. From western Wallachia through Moldavia, into the western Ukraine and the middle Volga region of the USSR, poor harvests and drought led to near-famine conditions in the autumn of 1946, with aid agencies describing one-year old children weighing just three kilograms and sending back reports of cannibalism. Relief workers in Albania
...more
