In December 1946, famine began to appear on a large scale in the state farm apparatus (where the peasant workers lacked access to both the food they themselves produced and the ration cards they would have needed to buy food), although the term "famine" was avoided in official documents in favor of the phrase "provisioning problems". Likewise, the phrasing "starvation" was usually avoided as a cause of death, in favor of terms such as "dystrophy". The Kaluga provincial office sent specific stories to the Central Committee, describing employees of state farms, including widowed mothers and veteran tractor operators, receiving far less than the food they earned by work, and contracting malnutrition-related illnesses as a result. While villages were most affected, urban industrial enterprises in various cities also suffered. By 1 March 1947, 3,789 cases of dystrophy were recorded in the five major factories of the city of Mariupol alone.
