Food shortages during the Great Patriotic War forced local authorities to find additional ways to provide food for the population. One of the ways to solve this problem was decentralized harvesting, which primarily assumed an increase in the value of gathering (mushrooms and wild plants), as well as catching fish. On the basis of party and economic sources from the funds of the state archives of the Vladimir and Ivanovo regions, the author seeks to identify the significance, scope and results of this practice in two rear regions that belonged to the Central Industrial Region of the USSR. A feature of these regions was their predominantly consuming nature, which was due to both a relatively high proportion of the urban population in comparison with the all-Union values, and difficult agro-climatic
conditions. The paper highlights the main difficulties faced by local authorities and the population in the implementation of procurement. These included unstable harvests during the war years, lack of manpower, slow and/or poor construction of storage facilities for harvested products. A significant role was played by the attention of local economic bodies to the organization of procurement, which most often behaved passively. According to the available data, although fragmentary, one can state an increase in the share of decentralized procurement in the total amount of food available. The historical and geopolitical approach used in the work shows that decentralized procurement during the war years was a matter of national security, and therefore
its profitability was secondary, the main thing was to at least slightly improve the food situation
For citation:
Tryakhov I.S. Decentralized procurement during the Great Patriotic War and their importance in the life of the population of the Vladimir and Ivanovo regions,
Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2022, iss. 3, pp. 138—152.