ABSTRACT
By any measure the early post-war years were ones of unremitting hardship for the Soviet population. Analysis of this hardship, however, has to be set within the long-term context of demographic shocks and deprivation which punctuated all of Soviet, and indeed immediate pre-Soviet, history up until the late 1940s: the famine of 1891–1892; the First World War; the Civil War and the famines of 1918–1922; the famine of 1932–1933; the Stalinist Terror of 1936–1938; the Second World War; and the famine of 1946–1947. Barely had the population begun to recover from the trauma of one catastrophic event than it was beset by another.
