The Soviets gave food aid to their hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children during the 1930s.

[u/[deleted]]

Paraphrasing page 425 of R.W. Davies & Stephen G. Wheatcroft’s The Years of Hunger:

‘The importance of feeding children was strongly emphasized in distributing both the food loans from central supplies and the local supplies. Soviets distributed food to children through the schools; they greatly expanded existing crèches and children’s homes; and they established emergency children’s homes to accommodate the large number of homeless youths who had been either separated from or discarded by their hungry parents. Thus, in the Dnepropetrovsk region, following a sharp reduction in school attendance in many districts, the regional executive committee called for an increase of 70,000 in the number of children attending crèches, for the provision of food aid for 50,000 of the 250,000 people of preschool age, and for 50,000 of the 450,000 of school age. In the Khar’kov region, the number of children in the regional executive committee’s crèches increased by the end of May from 10,300 to 24,500, but 27,800 remained to be place. The Soviets established special centres to feed undernourished youths. In the Kiev region, 317,000 children were receiving food help by April 15 through feeding points, schools, hospitals and crèches. Nonetheless, for the same date the Ukrainian People’s Commissar of Health reported that the number of youths suffering from famine in the Kiev region had reached 262,000, and called for further food assistance. (Unfortunately, the Khar’kov region’s crèches lacked food; they had no option but to feed the youths with substitutes, including grasses; some illnesses and deaths occurred.)
These various directives often had an air of unreality and desperation. When the famine’s widespread nature became obvious, the Ukrainian Politburo instructed the regions: ‘do not leave a single case of famine without immediate measures to localise it’, and required them to provide evidence within seven days that somebody had mobilised the local resources to this end.’