The postwar famine in the USSR has received scarce attention in both post-Soviet and Western historiography. Based on newly disclosed archival materials from the former civil police and party in Chişinău and Moscow, this article focuses on the food riots in Soviet Moldavia on the eve of the 1946-1947 famine. Out of 30 food riots in the Spring 1946 registered in the Moldavian SSR, 18 were dominated by women (called bab’y bunty by Lynne Viola, 1996). The author tries to understand the agency and contingency in the outbreak of the food riots as well as the public and hidden transcript related to the way the Soviet regime tried to deal with earlier signals of the famine. The larger question to be raised is why people resist to food policies at certain moments of food crises and not at all in some others.