Vladimir Lenin
THE RAINS DIDN’T COME IN THE SPRING OF 1920. It was unusually hot, and by planting season the ground had been baked hard. The dry weather carried on throughout the summer and into the autumn. The harvests proved small. That winter saw scant snow covering the land, followed by a second parched spring. The worst drought in thirty years gripped much of Soviet Russia in its deadly grasp: nearly the entire length of the Volga River Basin, from Nizhny-Novgorod in the north all the way to the Caspian Sea in the south, and from Ukraine in the west to the edge of the Ural Mountains in Asia. Villages were starving. Over a hundred thousand peasants left their homes in search of food. Russia was facing a catastrophe.
Life for the Russian peasant had never been easy, even after the end of serfdom in 1861. The peasants eked out a meager existence not much beyond subsistence levels. Farming methods were primitive, the land was overcrowded, taxes were heavy. In the late 1880s, the Russian state began a massive program of industrialization, to be financed by the sale of grain abroad. Ne doedim, no vyvezem—we may not eat enough, but we’ll export—became the motto of the effort to bring tsarist Russia up to the modern lifestyle of the West. Tax collectors were sent out into the countryside to redouble their efforts; peasant farmers were forced to hand over an ever larger share of their rye, wheat, and barley. Between 1881 and 1890, the average yearly export of major grains almost doubled.
And then, in the late summer of 1891, the crops failed following a horrendous drought. Peasants ran out of food and survived on what they called goly khleb, hunger bread: an odious loaf made from a small dose of flour mixed with some sort of food substitute, usually lebeda—saltbush or orache—that when consumed for any length of time causes serious illness. By December, the Ministry of the Interior estimated more than ten million people would need government relief. Leo Tolstoy, the conscience of the nation, publicized the extent of the famine and organized relief, thus helping to let the world know of the full scale of the disaster. America was among the countries to come to Russia’s aid. A group of Minnesotans sent a ship full of Midwestern grain that was greeted by fireworks and a jubilant crowd when it arrived at the Baltic port of Libau* in March 1892. In the end, the people of Minnesota donated over 5.4 million pounds of flour and $26,000 worth of supplies to combat the famine on the other side of the globe. The generosity of the Americans was commemorated by the artist Ivan Aivazovsky, the great master of Romantic seascapes, in two paintings that he himself delivered to America in 1893 along with other gifts of thanks from Tsar Alexander III. The paintings hung for decades in the Corcoran Gallery until First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy saw them and had them moved to the White House.
The Russian government mounted its own relief effort, which, though bedeviled by setbacks and inefficiencies, at its peak provided more than eleven million people with supplemental food. The state was joined in its efforts by a great many in educated society. Moved by the plight of the hungry masses, Anna Ulyanova, a twenty-seven-year-old nobleman’s daughter from the town of Simbirsk on the Volga River, distributed food and medicine to the needy, like so many others of her background. Her brother Vladimir, however, was an exception. Not only did he refuse to aid the suffering, he welcomed the famine, since he believed it would help destroy the people’s faith in God and the tsar. Revolution, not charity, would save the peasants, he said. “The overthrow of the tsarist monarchy, this bulwark of the landowners, is their only hope for some sort of decent life, for an escape from hunger, from unending poverty.” Vladimir, better known as Lenin, his revolutionary nom de guerre, understood even as a young man the connection between food and power.
Vladimir Lenin
Russia in 1921 was confronting more than a drought. Indeed, the lack of rain played only a secondary role in the famine. Much more important had been seven years of war and revolution. By the end of 1916, after two years of brutal fighting in the First World War, Russia was experiencing grain shortages and bread riots in major cities. In February 1917, factory women protesting the high cost and lack of bread in the capital of Petrograd sparked the revolution that led to the fall of the tsarist regime the next month. The food crisis and the state’s inability to address it had been directly responsible for the death of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty.
After overthrowing the interim Provisional Government in October, the Bolsheviks set about establishing a monopoly of power, arresting and killing their political opponents. Their actions plunged Russia into a civil war of unspeakable barbarism that would last several years. Foreign forces—including the British, French, Americans, and Japanese—landed on Russian territory, first in the hope of keeping Russia in the war against Germany, and then offering nominal support to the White armies fighting against the Bolshevik Red Army. Complicating matters still further, Great Britain’s Royal Navy established a blockade in the Baltic Sea that isolated the new Soviet government from the West for many months.
The Bolsheviks knew from the start that bread was crucial to their survival. If they didn’t solve the food problem, the revolution would fail. Leon Trotsky, the great revolutionary and prominent Soviet official who, among other things, was then head of the Extraordinary Commission for Food and Transport, told the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in April 1918: “I say it quite openly; we are now at war, and it is only with guns that we will get the grain we need. Our only choice now is civil war. Civil war is the struggle for bread [. . .] Long live the civil war!” A key tactic in the effort to seize the grain was to stoke class warfare in the villages. The Bolsheviks created Committees of Poor Peasants (Kombedy) to confiscate the grain of the wealthier peasants, the so-called kulaks, and hand it over to the state. Often composed of outsiders, the Kombedy terrorized the local population, stealing their personal property, making summary arrests, and further destabilizing rural life, an effort Lenin endorsed as part of a larger goal of destroying age-old and, in his eyes, backward peasant culture. A Provisioning Army (Prodovol’stvennaya armiya or Prodarmiya), consisting largely of unemployed Petrograd workers, was also created and sent out into the countryside, both to spread Bolshevik propaganda and to help in the requisitioning of grain. Fyodor Dan, a leader of the Menshevik Party,* called it “a crusade against the peasantry.”
Lenin, however, was only getting started. In August 1918, he ordered that wealthy peasants be taken hostage and executed should the requisition targets not be met. He sent this directive to the Penza Soviet:
The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity [. . .] You must make an example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions [. . .] Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble.
Even fellow Bolsheviks were aghast at what was being done to the peasants. “The measures of extraction are reminiscent of a medieval inquisition,” commented one official after witnessing a requisition brigade at work in southern Russia. “They make the peasants strip and kneel on the ground, whip or beat them, sometimes kill them.” In June 1918, Joseph Stalin traveled to Tsaritsyn* with two armored trains carrying 450 Red Army soldiers to secure food for the capital. His initial success was not enough for Lenin, who felt Stalin had been soft and ordered him to “be merciless” toward their enemies in the hunt for food. “Be assured our hand will not tremble,” Stalin replied. “We won’t show mercy to anyone [. . .] We will bring you bread.”
The grain quota established by the central government grew ever higher. By 1920, it had risen from eighteen to twenty-seven million poods.* The peasants called that year’s requisition campaign “The Iron Broom,” for it swept the villages clean of practically every last kernel of grain, leaving the peasants with almost nothing. Local authorities could not believe what they were seeing and sent back reports to their bosses in Moscow that such actions were “senseless and futile.” Even though the war against the White armies had largely ended with the defeat of General Pyotr Wrangel’s forces in late 1920, still the campaigns against the peasants raged on.
Peasants responded to the brutal policies of the Bolsheviks in a number of ways. One was to hide their grain, be it under the floor, down the well, stuffed in thatched roofs, or behind fake walls and secret compartments in their huts. The men of the Prodarmiya soon caught on to the peasants’ tricks and became relentless in ferreting out their hidden stores, regardless of the damage they caused. A second response was to reduce the land under cultivation and grow only the bare minimum necessary for their own survival, thus denying any surplus for the state. Between 1917 and 1921, as much as a third of the arable land in the main agricultural regions of Russia was removed from production. The harvest of 1920 was just barely over half that of 1913.
And some peasants decided to fight back. Revolts against grain requisitioning first erupted in the summer of 1918 and grew as time went on. The uprisings turned into an actual war in the summer of 1920, when a former factory worker and schoolteacher by the name of Alexander Antonov organized the Partisan Army of the Tambov region. Eventually growing to some fifty thousand men, many of them Red Army deserters, Antonov’s peasant army swept out of Tambov and soon spread into the lower Volga region—Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, and Astrakhan—and even into western Siberia. “Banditry has overwhelmed the whole province,” wrote terrified Bolshevik leaders in Saratov in a telegram to Moscow. “The peasants have seized all the stocks—3 million poods—from the grain stores. They are heavily armed, thanks to all the rifles from the deserters. Whole units of the Red Army have simply vanished.” The fire of revolt seemed unstoppable, and the Soviet government was losing control over ever more territory.
Toward the end of 1920, the Cheka—the Soviet political police, precursor to the KGB—admitted that, except for areas around Moscow, Petrograd, and the Russian north, the entire country was convulsed with unrest. The situation grew worse in early 1921. The chairman of the Samara Province Cheka wrote to his superiors in Moscow in a top-secret memorandum: “The masses now have a hostile attitude to the communists [. . .] Cholera and scurvy are raging [. . .] Desertions from the garrison are growing.” Lenin was beside himself. The peasant war, he warned his colleagues, was “far more dangerous to us than all the Denikins, Kolchaks, and Yudeniches put together.”* The key to the fate of the Soviet government, in other words, lay with the country’s rebellious peasants.
And it wasn’t just the peasants. The Bolsheviks began to lose support in the cities, too, among workers and soldiers, once their most devoted followers. In January 1921, bread rations were cut by as much as 30 percent in a number of cities. Angry and hungry, the workers of Petrograd went on strike. Demonstrations quickly devolved into riots. Cheka detachments had to be dispatched to restore order; martial law was declared in late February 1921. The following month, the sailors at the Kronstadt naval base rebelled against what they called the “Communist autocracy,” characterizing the country’s rulers as “worse than [Tsar] Nicholas” and issuing a call for their own “third revolution.” Lenin saw to it that the mutiny was crushed. Over two thousand men were sentenced to death, more than six thousand sent off to prison.
To save the regime, Lenin announced at the Tenth Party Congress in March a strategic retreat from the extremist policies of the past. “War Communism,” as the initial phase of the revolution came to be known, was to be replaced by the New Economic Policy (NEP), a concession to capitalism and market forces that allowed for private property and ownership of retail trade and small industry. Most important, NEP ended the forced grain requisitions in favor of a tax in kind (i.e., grain or other agricultural products). Henceforth, peasants would know exactly what their obligation to the state was, thus giving them the incentive to grow as much as possible, keeping any surplus for themselves.
Meanwhile, the war against Antonov’s peasant army raged on into the summer of 1921. An army of one hundred thousand led by General Mikhail Tukhachevsky mounted a campaign of ruthless terror that included the use of heavy artillery and airplanes against what the state called “bandits.” Soldiers were given orders to shoot on sight any person who refused to give his name. Families guilty of harboring bandits were to be arrested and deported from the province. Their property was to be seized, and their eldest son executed forthwith. Tukhachevsky’s army took thousands of hostages and interned them in kontsentratsionnye lageria—concentration camps. By August, ten camps in Tambov Province alone held over thirteen thousand prisoners. Lenin ordered his general to suffocate the enemy: “The forests where the bandits are hiding must be cleared with poison gas. Careful calculations must be made to ensure that the cloud of asphyxiating gas spreads throughout the forest and exterminates everything hidden there.”
Eventually, the Red Army gained the upper hand. Although Antonov would not be caught—and killed—until June 1922, the last of the rebels were being mopped up by the autumn of 1921.
The Bolsheviks, however, had vanquished one foe only to face another, much more dangerous one. In terms of sheer numbers, the famine of 1921 was the worst Europe had ever known. The Soviet government estimated that some thirty million people were facing death. The concessions to the peasants made in March at the party congress had come too late to alter the situation. Lenin had said then: “If there is a harvest, then everybody will hunger a little, and the government will be saved. Otherwise, since we cannot take anything from people who do not have the means of satisfying their own hunger, the government will perish.” Two years of drought, and several more of war and senseless cruelty, meant whatever harvest there might be would never come close to feeding a hungry Russia.
THE GOVERNMENT HAD been receiving reports of the growing crisis since the beginning of 1921. One Cheka report from January described the famine sweeping over Tambov Province, which it attributed to the “orgy” of requisitioning in 1920. The waves of refugees fleeing hunger throughout the Volga Basin became too large to ignore.
Yet that is just what the government did. Any official mention of the famine was forbidden until July 2, 1921, when the newspaper Pravda published the following notice on the back page: “This year the grain harvest will be lower than the average for the last decade.” It went on to add that there had been “a feeding problem on the agricultural front.” Orwellian language if ever there was. Ten days later, Pravda printed a fuller and more honest story that characterized the famine as “a catastrophe for all of Russia that is having an influence on every aspect of the country’s economic and political life.” It instructed readers in the famine zone to stay where they were and not to add to the “wave of refugees” or give in to the panic and rumors that represented such a “very large danger” to the country at present. The bourgeois West had been informed of the famine, Pravda went on, but it cautioned readers against placing any hope in the “capitalist predators,” who would not only be overjoyed to see the working people of Russia starve, but would use their suffering as a opportunity to organize a counterrevolution against the Soviet government.
A family of refugees in search of food
The West had indeed been made aware of the catastrophe early that month, in two separate appeals for help. One had been issued by Tikhon, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, addressed to the pope, the archbishop of Canterbury, and other world religious leaders. The other had been made by the writer Maxim Gorky. Apparently, the idea had not belonged to Gorky, who was no great champion of the peasantry. (He even published a book the following year called The Russian Peasant in which he wrote of “the half-savage, stupid, and heavy people of the Russian villages” and expressed the hope that they would die out and be replaced by “a new tribe” of “literate, sensible, hearty people.”) Friends of the writer convinced him to use his considerable moral authority to speak with the Kremlin about issuing an open appeal to the world. Lenin, it seems, did not take much convincing.
In “To All Honest People,” dated July 13, Gorky wrote: “Gloomy days have come for the land of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Mussorgsky, Glinka and other world-prized men [. . .] Russia’s misfortunes offer humanitarians a splendid opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of humanitarianism [. . .] I ask all honest European and American people for prompt aid to the Russian people. Give bread and medicine.” He included mention of the unprecedented drought afflicting his country, but said nothing about capitalist predators or counterrevolutionaries. Gorky sent the appeal initially to Fridtjof Nansen, the famous Norwegian explorer, scientist, and humanitarian, but Nansen replied that the Russians would be better advised to concentrate their efforts on the Americans, for they alone had the resources to help.
On July 22, 1921, a copy of Gorky’s appeal published in the American press landed on the desk of Herbert Hoover, the U.S. secretary of commerce. As soon as he had read it, Hoover knew what had to be done.
THE HUBERS LEFT THEIR NATIVE SWITZERLAND for the American colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century. At some point they anglicized their name to “Hoover” and abandoned the Lutheran Church for the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, drawn to the Friends’ revulsion to slavery. The family moved west with the young nation, eventually settling in a small cottage by Wapsinonoc Creek, in the rolling farm country of eastern Iowa. It was here, in August 1874, that Herbert Hoover was born.
Jesse Hoover was the blacksmith in the village of West Branch; Hulda, his wife, taught Sunday school and served as secretary in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. They were simple, industrious folk. The family motto was “What matter if we descended from the highest unless we are something ourselves. Get busy.” Little Bertie, as he was called, was a sickly boy, often afflicted with the croup. Once, they thought he had died and laid him out on the table, a dime over each eye. Suddenly, Bertie stirred. “God has a great work for that boy to do,” said his amazed grandmother; “that is why he was brought back to life.” In 1880, Jesse died, followed by Hulda four years later. At the age of nine, Bertie became an orphan.
He was sent off to live with his uncle in Oregon. Life there was as serious as in his parents’ home. A fellow Quaker, Bertie’s uncle impressed upon the boy the importance of individual responsibility, hard work, and self-improvement. At school, Bertie was asked by his teacher to consider questions such as whether more men’s lives had been destroyed by liquor or by war. In 1888, Bertie, now just fourteen years old, was sent to Salem to be an office boy for the Oregon Land Company, where he acquired the fundamentals of business and proved an excellent worker. In 1891, he joined the inaugural incoming class at the new Leland Stanford Junior University, dedicated, in the words of its founder, “to promote the public welfare by exercising an influence in behalf of humanity and civilization.” When Hoover graduated four years later, with average grades and a B.A. in geology, none of his classmates held out any great hopes for his future. Yet the fundamental elements of his character that would make him a successful businessman and then a great humanitarian—a keen mind, boundless energy, a nascent sense of his uncommon talents, undeniable ambition, and a commitment to duty and service—were already in place.
Hoover set off to work as a mining engineer in the gold fields of the Australian outback (what he called “hell”) and then moved on to China, where he managed to put together what was perhaps the largest mining transaction in the country’s history, all before the age of thirty. He was in Tianjin in 1900, during the Boxer Rebellion. Refusing to be evacuated to safety, he delivered food and supplies on his bicycle to other members of the foreign settlement, with bullets whizzing past his ears. This marked young Hoover’s first relief mission, which, though modest, was not free of personal danger.
He was made a partner in the British engineering firm Bewick, Moreing and Company two years later and traveled about the world setting up and reorganizing mining operations in sixteen countries. He had a knack for making lackluster operations profitable and discovering new opportunities. In 1905, Hoover invested his own money into an abandoned mine in Burma, and under his management it quickly became one of the world’s richest sources of silver, zinc, and lead. He gained an international reputation for his administrative talent, technological understanding, and way with finances. After a few years, he parted company with the firm and went off on his own, operating simply as “Herbert C. Hoover,” with offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, and St. Petersburg.
Hoover first visited Russia in 1909, and over the next several years he invested considerable time and money in the country. He was involved in oil fields around the Black Sea, copper mines in the Kazakh Steppes, gold and iron mines in the Ural Mountains. At one point, he was even asked to manage the Romanov Imperial Cabinet’s mines. He returned to Russia two years later to check on his investments. Although pleased with the state of his various operations, Hoover was disturbed by what he saw of Tsar Nicholas II’s Russia. He described as “hideous” the social tensions rumbling just beneath the surface. The sight of a chain gang being marched off into Siberian exile made him shudder. The brutality of the tsarist system haunted Hoover: he couldn’t shake the feeling that, in his words, “some day the country would blow up.” Hoover sold off his investments before the country exploded under the joint pressures of war and revolution. Russia, for Hoover, was a land filled with “annoyance and worry.”
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 found Hoover and his wife and children living in luxury in London. Forty years old, Hoover had amassed a fortune and now commanded the highest engineering fees in the world, but the fun had gone out of it. He retired from business. It appears that Hoover had undergone some sort of crisis. Money and worldly success were no longer enough for him; he wanted something different, something more. The old family values of doing good, being of service, aiding one’s fellow man pricked his conscience.
That year, Hoover was approached by the U.S. consul in Britain and asked to help Americans trapped in Europe by the war. Hoover set to work immediately and managed to arrange safe passage home for 120,000 people. Hoover’s career in public life had begun.
He next turned his attention to the crisis in Belgium. Ignoring its neighbor’s neutrality, Germany had invaded Belgium early in the war. In what became known as the Rape of Belgium, the German Army massacred thousands of civilians and burned their homes. The international outcry was enormous. With the country occupied by the Germans and cut off from supplies by a British naval blockade, the people of Belgium were soon running low on food. Mass starvation looked like a horrifying possibility.
Hoover set up the Commission for Relief in Belgium to bring food and supplies to the approximately nine million people living under German occupation in Belgium and northern France. But first he had to convince the warring nations to agree to his plan. The British, led by Minister of War Lord Kitchener, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, and Prime Minister David Lloyd George, objected to the idea, fearful the Germans would take the food for themselves and thus prolong the war. Hoover, however, managed to convince them that the CRB’s agents would control the transport, storage, and distribution of all supplies, thus minimizing the possibility that the food would end up in German hands. At the same time, he also convinced both Britain and Germany that it was in their own best interest to allow the aid to go through, since this would go a long way to improving public opinion in America—still a neutral party—and so, perhaps, help to win the United States to their side in the conflict. Although no one in London or Berlin cared to listen to the arguments of some American businessman, in the end they all agreed.
For the next two and a half years, the CRB distributed over 2.5 million tons of food to the people of Belgium and northern France. There had never been an organization like it before. The CRB was the biggest, most ambitious relief effort in history, run by an outfit that was neither wholly private nor wholly public. One British Foreign Office official called it “a piratical state organized for benevolence.” It had its own fleet of ships, and even its own flag. The men of the CRB had been gathered from among Hoover’s business associates, Rhodes scholars, and U.S. Army officers, all of whom served with unquestioned devotion the man they called “The Chief.” His agents had complete freedom from the various European governments to operate as they saw fit, and their boss entrusted them with enormous leeway in their day-to-day operations.
At the same time, Hoover insisted on complete control over the entire operation. An undertaking of this size and complexity demanded the organizational skills of an exceptional businessman and the absolute power of a dictator. “Famine fighting is a gigantic economic and governmental operation handled by experts,” he insisted, “and not ‘welfare’ work of benevolently handing out food hit or miss to bread lines [. . .] Some individual with great powers must direct and coordinate all this.” “Some individual” meant, naturally, Hoover himself. With every minute of the day devoted to famine relief, Hoover had no time left to manage his personal financial affairs, but he didn’t worry. “Let the fortune go to hell,” he said. He wrung money out of everyone he could to support the CRB. He even managed to talk Britain and France into subsidizing his effort, to the tune of over $300 million. Not everyone was impressed by Hoover’s efforts. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts deemed the CRB a criminal act by an individual citizen who was usurping the authority of official United States diplomacy. He threatened an investigation.
Herbert Hoover
In the end, the CRB proved an enormous success. It disbursed over $880 million in aid, more than the typical annual budget of the United States government before the war, and saved millions of lives. “The Savior of Belgium,” as Hoover became known on both sides of the Atlantic, had won the admiration of people across Europe and America.
After the United States entered the war in April 1917, Hoover gave up his position at the CRB and returned home, where President Woodrow Wilson made him the head of the United States Food Administration established that summer. Dubbed “the food dictator” by the press, he was now in charge of the food chain for the entire nation. With singular focus, he pushed efficiency, standardization, and measurement to minimize waste. Every American learned to “Hooverize” for the sake of the war effort. At war’s end, Wilson invited Hoover to join him at the Paris Peace Conference as an unofficial adviser. To help sustain the hungry, war-torn continent and begin the process of economic reconstruction, Hoover urged the president to create the American Relief Administration, funded by a $100 million appropriation from Congress early in 1919. As its general director, Hoover undertook relief operations in thirty-two countries, not only offering food and clothing but rebuilding devastated infrastructure and acting as a quasi-intelligence and diplomatic organization for the Allied powers. Upon learning that Europe’s telephone and telegraph systems had been largely destroyed, Hoover created an effective wireless network using U.S. Navy vessels and experts from the Army Signal Corps. Nothing would stand in the way of accomplishing the mission. Over the course of nine months, the ARA distributed over $1 billion in aid.
The establishment of the ARA symbolized the arrival of the United States on the international stage. Its creation was an expression of Americans’ growing confidence in their ability to project American power and values around the globe. Hoover shared Wilson’s belief in America’s mission to improve the world. Yet, unlike the president, whose practical knowledge of life abroad was quite limited, Hoover had lived outside the United States for many years and so had a much better understanding of the world and how difficult improving it was going to be.
Wilson, like many presidents after him, mistakenly believed America could redeem humanity; a wiser, more knowledgeable Hoover was content to ease its suffering. “The sole object of relief,” Hoover remarked in December 1918, “should be humanity. It should have no other political objective or aim other than the maintenance of life and order.”
That said, he was convinced that neither life nor order could be secured in nations that fell to the new threat: Bolshevism. He made it clear in a memorandum in November 1918 that the first order of business in the reconstruction of Europe was the need “to stem the tide of Bolshevism,” which could only be achieved through the peace and stability that adequate food made possible. Wilson agreed, writing to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee in early 1919: “Bolshevism is steadily advancing westward, is poisoning Germany. It cannot be stopped by force, but it can be stopped by food.” Food, the two men correctly understood, was a weapon.
Many in the United States, intent on “making the Hun pay” for the war, were not so clear-sighted. The U.S. Senate went out of its way to forbid the use of any of the appropriation for the ARA in the defeated enemy states. Hoover had fought against the restriction, and had also spoken out against the Versailles Treaty’s harsh treatment of Germany. Forcing the Germans to accept the blame for the war and to pay punitive reparations, the treaty, in his opinion, reeked of “hate and revenge” and was bound to lead to resentment and political instability. Not to be stymied by the small minds of the Senate, Hoover outwitted his own government by moving aid through a byzantine network of organizations, thus making it impossible to follow exactly what the ARA was up to. In the end, Hoover managed to direct over 40 percent of the ARA’s relief supplies to Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The economist John Maynard Keynes, representative of the British Treasury to the peace talks, stood in awe of Hoover and the ARA:
Never was a nobler work of disinterested goodwill carried through with more tenacity and sincerity and skill, and with less thanks either asked or given. The ungrateful Governments of Europe owe much more to the statesmanship and insight of Mr. Hoover and his band of American workers than they have yet appreciated or will ever acknowledge [. . .] It was their efforts, their energy, and the American resources placed by the President at their disposal, often acting in the teeth of European obstruction, which not only saved an immense amount of human suffering, but averted a widespread breakdown of the European system.
Keynes and Hoover, who met at the conference, were of the same mind about the treaty. Keynes was convinced that had there been more diplomats in possession of Hoover’s “knowledge, magnanimity, and disinterestedness,” they would have been able to secure “the Good Peace.”
ALTHOUGH HOOVER UNDERSTOOD how Bolshevism spoke to the Russian people after centuries of oppression, he was an unbending foe of communism, and would remain so for his entire life. He was against official recognition of Lenin’s Soviet state, what he called “this murderous tyranny,” not only since he believed this would encourage radicalism in the West, but also given the Soviets’ refusal to assume tsarist debts* and his conviction that the Bolsheviks would never protect American lives or property—views shared by Wilson.
Nevertheless, Hoover did not support military action by the United States. He wrote in a memorandum to Wilson on March 28, 1919: “No greater fortune can come to this world than that these foolish ideas should have an opportunity somewhere of bankrupting themselves.” In the meantime, however, he was not against offering aid to those then waging war against Lenin and the new Soviet Russia. He wrote Secretary of State Robert Lansing from Paris in August 1919 that the ARA should support the White Army forces of General Nikolai Yudenich, convinced that the Whites represented Russia’s best hope for a constitutional government and the defense of personal liberty. When Yudenich marched on Petrograd in the autumn, Hoover supplied him with food, clothing, and gasoline. The grateful general wrote to thank “Mr. Hoover, Food-Dictator of Europe,” and informed him that his army was “now existing practically upon American flour and bacon,” which was no less important for their success than “ rifles and ammunition.”
Hoover later tried to cover up his support of the Whites, but Lenin and the rest of the Soviet leadership knew about it. Understandably, the true motives of America’s great humanitarian remained under a cloud of suspicion.
AFTER READING GORKY’S appeal on July 22, 1921, Hoover, now secretary of commerce under the new president, Warren G. Harding, wrote to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes: “I feel very deeply that we should go to the assistance of the children and also provide some medical relief generally.” He stated that he wished to reply to Gorky’s appeal. “I believe it is a humane obligation upon us to go in if they comply with the requirements set out; if they do not accede we are released from all responsibility.”
Hoover could not have been surprised by Gorky’s appeal. In the first week of June, the ARA received reports on the severity of the Russian crisis. Hoover communicated to his top subordinates in the ARA that operations in other countries were to be halted so that they could begin building up supplies for a possible mission to Russia. He wanted to be ready, should the Soviet government collapse or be overthrown, to show Russia the goodwill of the American people. His motives were twofold: the desire to fight both hunger and Bolshevism.
On July 23, Hoover wired a lengthy telegram to Gorky, explaining that he had been moved by the suffering of the Russian people and laying out what had to happen before any aid might be considered, as well as a necessary general understanding of principles. First, he noted, all American prisoners in Russia had to be released immediately. Next, the following items had to be agreed to: (1) that the Soviet government must officially state that it was requesting the assistance of the American Relief Administration; (2) that Mr. Hoover was acting not as secretary of commerce but in an unofficial capacity, as the head of a relief agency, so that help from the ARA in no way signaled official U.S. government recognition of the Soviet state; (3) that the ARA would operate in Russia as it did in all other countries: namely, its workers would have complete liberty to come and go and travel about, free of interference; that they would have permission to set up local aid committees as they best saw fit; and that the Soviet government would cover all costs associated with the transportation, storage, and handling of ARA supplies. In return, the ARA promised to give food, medical supplies, and clothing to one million children “without regard to race, creed, or social status.” Finally, Hoover affirmed that the representatives of the ARA would refrain from any political activity.
If the Soviet leadership had any doubts, reports from the provinces that month may well have convinced them to put them aside. In the middle of July, the vice-chairman of the Samara Province Executive Committee sent a secret telegram to Lenin, outlining in clear terms just how dire the situation had become: “ There are no more grain reserves in the district capitals. State dining halls are all closing. Children are starving in the orphanages [. . .] The cholera epidemic has taken on terrifying proportions [. . .] Samara is now the breeding ground of a contagion, the consequences of which threaten the entire republic [. . .] The population is fleeing from Samara Province, the train stations and wharfs are over-flowing with refugees. Famine, epidemic.”
From the start, the ARA mission to Russia was subject to political pressure back at home. When word of Hoover’s reply to Gorky became public, the ACLU objected in the pages of The New York Times to linking the offer of aid to any political conditions. The Nation criticized Hoover along similar lines, noting that surely there were Soviet citizens in U.S. jails, and so who were we to expect the Soviets to release Americans if we did not do the same to Russians. Some on the right saw in the famine the opportunity to strike a blow against Bolshevism. John Spargo, an erstwhile socialist turned rabid Republican anti-Red crusader, wrote Secretary of State Hughes, “The present crisis presents an opportunity which, if rightly used, may lead to the liquidation of the Bolshevist regime and the beginning of a restoration.” He recommended they work together with the newly created All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Starving, an organization that included many anti-Bolshevik intellectuals and prerevolutionary political and cultural leaders, which Lenin had reluctantly agreed to sanction, although chiefly for cynical public-relations efforts in the West. Lenin let the other Soviet leaders know that a close watch would be kept on the committee, and that as soon as it had served its function, it would be closed and its members dealt with. As for Spargo, he, like some other opponents of the Soviet regime, thought the committee could become the basis of a representative government in Russia once the Bolsheviks had fallen.
Paul Ryabushinsky, an adviser to the embassy of the Russian Provisional Government in Washington, D.C., met with Hoover’s assistant Christian Herter to tell him in secret that Russian émigrés were prepared to provide money and supplies to the ARA that it could funnel to the All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Starving. Their goal was to use the ARA to help undermine the Soviet government and replace it with the committee once the Soviets had been overthrown. Herter declined to endorse Ryabushinsky’s plan.
All of this was taking place in the shadow of the Red Scare that had gripped the United States in 1919–20. After the war, the country had experienced a wave of strikes and worker agitation, and there was the fear that Bolshevik influence might spread outward from Russia to destabilize the West. The U.S. Senate organized a subcommittee to investigate the threat of the “Red Menace” to civilization. In the spring of 1919, anarchists began a bombing campaign against key politicians, state officials, and businessmen, including John D. Rockefeller. One bomb was mailed to the home of U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. An enraged Palmer responded with the so-called Palmer Raids. By December, 249 radicals had been caught and placed on a ship leaving for Finland, whence they would be free to make their way to Bolshevik Russia. Among them was the “Red Queen,” Emma Goldman. One of the young agents hired by Palmer to hunt down the radicals was a nineteen-year-old civil servant by the name of J. Edgar Hoover. In the end, thousands of suspected radical subversives were deported. Palmer announced that the Reds planned to overthrow the U.S. government on May 1, 1920. When the day came and went with no revolution, Palmer’s credibility took a hit. Still, the violence, and the hysteria, continued. On September 16, a bomb exploded on Wall Street, killing thirty-eight people.
Staunch anti-Bolshevik though he was, Hoover appears to have looked upon the hysteria of the Red Scare as misguided and overblown. Even though the Red Scare had calmed down by the summer of 1921, many Americans still saw no difference between the Bolsheviks and the Russians, so that helping one was helping the other. But Hoover always insisted on keeping the two separate: “We must make some distinction between the Russian people and the group who have seized the Government.” Moreover, Hoover’s reputation as an enemy of Bolshevism was just the thing for an American trying to win support for a relief operation to Russia: it immunized him against the charge that his ultimate goal was to help save the young Soviet regime.
On July 26, a mere three days after sending his list of conditions, Hoover received a reply from Gorky stating that the Soviet government looked favorably on his offer. Two days later, Lev Kamenev, an old Bolshevik, a longtime comrade of Lenin, chairman of the Moscow Soviet, and head of the Committee for Aid to the Starving, sent Hoover an official letter of acceptance of relief on behalf of the government. He promised that the American prisoners would be freed and proposed that the two sides immediately sit down to agree on the conditions necessary to begin the enormous task of feeding the hungry.
NEGOTIATIONS BEGAN IN THE BALTIC CITY of Riga, capital of the newly independent state of Latvia, on August 7. Walter Lyman Brown, the London-based director of the ARA for Europe, represented the American delegation, together with his assistants Cyril J. Quinn, head of the ARA in Poland, and Philip Carroll, ARA chief in Germany. The Soviet team was led by Maxim Litvinov, deputy chairman of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. The chain-smoking Litvinov spoke fluent English and was an intelligent and highly skilled negotiator—persuasive, wily, and tough. Once, Litvinov’s revolver fell from his coat pocket and crashed onto the negotiating table. Quinn worried that if all Bolsheviks were like Litvinov, they were in big trouble.
Two days before the negotiators met, Lenin instructed Kamenev to hurry up with the release of the American prisoners, and the Soviet government did manage to accomplish this in time. But no sooner had the two sides sat down than Litvinov pushed back on two of the ARA’s key demands: a voice in determining which regions to serve, and the right to set up local relief committees without Soviet interference. Disagreements also arose over questions concerning the ARA’s freedom of movement about the country and who would have ultimate control over the distribution of food and other relief: the ARA or the Soviet authorities. As for the Americans, Brown wanted to backtrack on Hoover’s reference, in his telegram to Gorky, to helping one million children, proposing instead that they drop any mention of a specific number and promise only to feed as many as possible. He also added the stipulation that, as in other countries served by the ARA, all warehouses, offices, vehicles, trains, and kitchens be prominently marked as belonging to the “American Relief Administration” and that, wherever possible, these identifications include the image of their boss, Herbert Hoover. If the ARA was going to go to the considerable trouble of aiding the people of Russia, it was going to make certain everyone there knew just who it was who was helping them.
A wall of mistrust divided the two sides. The Americans worried about compromising the independence of the operation and simply handing over relief supplies to the Soviets to disperse as they saw fit, without American control. They would offer aid on their own terms, feeding as best they could everyone in need, not just loyal supporters of the regime, and were careful not to let themselves be used by the Soviet government for their own designs. The Soviets worried about a good many things, chiefly that the true goal of the operation was the overthrow of their government.
Lenin, in declining health and suffering from insomnia and horrible headaches, nervously followed the talks from Moscow. He sent Litvinov a radiogram on August 11: “Be careful. Try to gauge their intentions. Do not let them get insolent with you.” He insisted on being kept informed of every detail during the talks. Lenin seethed with anger when he heard the Americans’ demands, especially about noninterference with the ARA men once they were inside Russia. Hoover and Brown were “impudent liars,” he wrote the same day to Vyacheslav Molotov, secretary of the Communist Party throughout the 1920s and then foreign minister under Stalin. Lenin insisted, “Hoover must be punished, he must be publicly slapped in the face so the whole world can see.” He demanded Litvinov set “very strict conditions: for the slightest interference in internal matters—expulsion and arrest.” The Red Newspaper captured the mood with an article titled “The Greek Hoover and His Gifts”: the ARA was a modern-day Trojan horse presented to foment counterrevolution; if the ARA was permitted into Soviet Russia, the newspaper demanded, it would have to be not only watched but placed under tight government control.
The most fanciful comment on the ARA came from Leon Trotsky, the brilliant Marxist theorist and ultimate master of spin, in a speech before the Moscow Soviet. While acknowledging that Russia was facing a serious famine, Trotsky assured his audience that the government could handle it without outside help. No, he proclaimed, it wasn’t Soviet Russia that needed the West, but the other way around: the capitalist world was facing a commercial and industrial crisis of unprecedented scale (the depression of 1920–21 had indeed been bad, but the worst was over by then), and its only chance at survival was in finding a way to draw Russia back into the world economy. “What is at stake is the very basis of bourgeois rule,” Trotsky told his audience. In other words, America would not save Russia, but Russia might well save America. The offer of relief by the ARA had nothing to do with a real concern for human welfare; rather, it amounted to nothing more than an aggressive move by the missionaries of American capital, who were certain to be followed by businessmen, traders, and bankers.
There was one gaping hole, however, in Trotsky’s depiction of the current situation: if the government truly could handle the famine without Western help, why, then, was it willing to make “big concessions,” as he characterized them, to the ARA, especially if the Americans posed such a serious counterrevolutionary threat? To this, the great Marxist dialectician had no answer. In fact, Russia could not get by without outside help, as Kamenev had made quite plain in a speech the month before, admitting, with all seriousness: “We know that our resources aren’t enough to even begin to halt this disaster. We must have help from abroad, especially help from foreign workers and also all kinds of public organizations in Europe and America that are able to recognize the necessity of help regardless of our political differences.”
An article titled “Stemming the Red Tide” that had appeared that spring in the journal The World’s Work seemed to validate Soviet suspicions of the ARA. The author, T.T.C. Gregory, a brash lawyer from San Francisco with an inflated sense of his role in world events, had served in the ARA in Central Europe after the war. Gregory described how he and Hoover had hatched a plan to overthrow the communist government of Béla Kun in Hungary by withholding food relief to Budapest in the summer of 1919. “Way down in my heart,” Gregory wrote, “I knew that we were not only feeding people but also were fighting Bolshevism.” His actions had shown the incredible power of food “as modern weapons.” After his cunning maneuver to stop the spread of the “Red Menace,” as Gregory saw it, no one could deny that “Bread is mightier than the sword!”
Though it’s true that Hoover could not stomach the Kun regime, Gregory’s boast was pure fancy. (The imaginative Gregory also claimed he prevented the Habsburg restoration after the fall of Kun: “My blood was up . . . A member of the Habsburg family? Not while I could have a word to say, at any rate!”) The Hungarian Soviet Republic, which lasted a mere 133 days, collapsed of its own making, largely because of the regime’s military aggression toward its neighbors, and not the derring-do of T.T.C. Gregory, attorney-at-law. Nevertheless, the article, soon reprinted in Soviet Russia, confirmed the Russians’ darkest fears about Hoover and the ARA.
Gregory’s piece gave ammunition to the American left as well. The Nation took up the story and accused Hoover of putting politics ahead of people. Another left-wing magazine commented, “Everything that is known about Mr. Hoover [. . .] conveys ample assurance that he would use his position in Russia for political purposes.” While negotiations were under way in Riga, the American Labor Alliance held a rally in New York City at which the main speaker openly accused Hoover of planning to overthrow the Soviet government by taking control of the country’s food supply.
Attacks also came from the right. Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent maligned the mission and attacked the ARA as poorly administered and venal. There were nasty suggestions that the ARA was controlled by Jews and Bolsheviks. Another Midwestern newspaper asked why America should “interest itself in perpetuating a dynasty of darkness that is dying because of its incompetence.” Criticized by both left and right, Hoover let his men know that the ARA would avoid politics at all costs. He sent a cable to Brown in Riga on August 6, a day after Herter’s meeting with Ryabushinsky:
I wish to impress on each one of them [employees of the ARA] the supreme importance of their keeping entirely aloof not only from action but even from discussion of political and social questions. Our people are not Bolsheviks but our mission is solely to save lives and any participation even in discussions will only lead to suspicion of our objects. In selection of local committees and Russian staff we wish to be absolutely neutral and neutrality implies appointment from every group in Russia and a complete insistence that children of all parentage have equal treatment.
Along with instructions to his agents, Hoover also maintained an ARA public-relations department, led by George Barr Baker in New York, that put out a steady stream of uplifting press releases, maintained good relations with the Western press, and sought to counter any negative publicity. Hoover was not about to let anyone tarnish his reputation or that of the American Relief Administration if he could help it.
IN RIGA, TALKS had reached an impasse. On August 12, the local newspaper published an interview with Litvinov in which he affirmed that the Soviets would “never agree to any conditions that may have the slightest effect of discrediting our government. We will never let any foreign administration use the terrible conditions in the Volga District to force the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government to accept conditions that are against our honor.” The following day, he sent a cable to his boss, Georgy Chicherin, people’s commissar for foreign affairs: “I have the impression that the ARA has come to us without any ulterior motives, but still we’re going to have plenty of trouble with them.” The two sides had had no success in coming to any sort of agreement over the ARA’s autonomy and who would be in charge of handing out the food. Litvinov kept reminding Brown and the other Americans, in his heavily accented English, “Gentlemen, food iz a veppon.” Of course, Litvinov knew this well from recent history. The Soviet government had given extra rations to social groups that supported the regime and denied food to its enemies, both real and imagined. They had used food as a weapon in the struggle to win the revolution and create the first communist state. And they needed food now to prevent the state from collapsing, but the question was: if food was a weapon, whose finger was going to be on the trigger?
Brown wired Hoover on August 15 that the talks were deadlocked and they would have to make some concessions. At first Hoover refused, but he soon realized it would be best to do whatever he could to make a deal. He agreed that the ARA would not hire any non-Americans without the approval of the Soviet authorities, and that the ARA would fire from its staff anyone the Soviet government complained about, if there was the least bit of evidence of any political or counterrevolutionary activity on that person’s part. The Americans also agreed to permit the Soviets to expel any person caught engaging in political or commercial activity and granted them the right to search premises in which they believed a crime had taken place, and reinstated the reference to feeding one million children first made in Hoover’s telegram to Gorky. Nonetheless, the Americans refused to concede the point about the Soviets’ obligation to cover all the costs of transporting, storing, and administering the aid, as well as the ARA’s right to work in those terrorities it deemed needing assistance. Litvinov, after hearing of Hoover’s concessions, had no trouble agreeing to this: “Money, gentlemen, ve vill give you a carload; if necessary, ve can put the printing presses on an extra shift.”
After almost two weeks of negotiations, the two sides agreed to terms on August 20. The following day, at a ceremony presided over by the president of Latvia and attended by various officials and members of the world press, the Riga Agreement was signed. Litvinov told the gathering that this was an occasion of great political significance, expressing the hope that it signaled the rapprochement between the United States and Soviet Russia. Brown chose to ignore Litvinov’s comments in his own remarks. As Hoover had insisted, the ARA mission to Russia was to be above all politics.
LENIN HAD FOLLOWED the talks closely. Having to accept help from capitalist America was a bitter pill. On August 23, he sent a secret letter to Molotov: “In light of the agreement with the American Hoover we are facing the arrival of Americans. We must take care of surveillance and intelligence.” He instructed the Politburo to set up a special commission that could come up with a plan. “The main thing is to identify and mobilize the maximum number of communists who speak English so that they can be inserted into the Hoover commission, as well as coming up with other forms of surveillance and intelligence.” Two weeks later, Lenin, now even more alarmed at the thought of so many Americans entering the country, wrote Chicherin: “As for the ‘Hooverites,’ we must shadow them with all our might [. . .] and we ought to ‘catch’ and entrap the worst of them (a certain Lowrie?*) in such a way as to produce a scandal around them. This calls for war, a brutal, unrelenting war.”
As a way of deflecting attention away from the ARA, Lenin created the International Workers’ Committee for Aid to the Starving in Russia (Mezhrabpom, in Russian) that same month. The appeal to the world proletariat to come to the aid of the first communist state did little to help the starving—its total relief effort amounting to a mere 1 percent of that marshaled by the ARA—but Mezhrabpom did function as a useful propaganda tool, especially in the United States, where it operated as the Friends of Soviet Russia. In the middle of August, a meeting was convened in Geneva by a number of Red Cross societies to discuss the possibility of organizing aid to Russia. They established the International Committee for Russian Relief and elected Fridtjof Nansen, to whom Gorky had first sent his appeal for help, as its high commissioner. The Nansen mission, as it was known, brought together relief organizations from over twenty countries. Among the groups that came to Russia’s aid were the British Society of Friends, the Save the Children Fund, the Red Cross of Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and Belgium, and His Holiness the Pope.
Nansen left Geneva for Moscow, where he was warmly embraced by top Soviet officials, in large part because he was much more cooperative than Hoover and the ARA. Nansen had no serious experience in relief operations, nor did he have a large organization at his disposal, and so he offered to turn over to the Soviet government whatever supplies he managed to gather. The Soviets could not have been happier. The relief provided by the Nansen mission was significant, although modest when compared with what the ARA provided: approximately 90 percent of all aid delivered to Russia came from the Americans. Nevertheless, Nansen was fêted by the Kremlin as a true friend of the Soviet state on both of his two brief visits to Russia. Some in the West viewed the Norwegian as a naïve tool of the Soviet regime, and the exaggerated praise showered on Nansen—and his associate Vidkun Quisling, the notorious president of Norway during the years of Nazi occupation—drove the ARA men mad. Nansen’s being awarded the Noble Peace Prize was but more salt in the wounds.
After the troubles dealing with the Americans in Riga, Lenin was in no mood to bargain with Nansen. He wrote to Stalin, then both commissar for nationalities and commissar for the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate (Rabkrin), on August 26: “Nansen will be given a clear ‘ultimatum.’ We’ll put an end to this game (with fire).” To show Nansen in no uncertain terms that he was not playing around and that the Soviet leadership was in complete command of the situation, Lenin also instructed Stalin to shut down the All-Russian Committee for Aid to the Starving before the Norwegian left Russia. On August 27, Cheka agents moved on the committee, arresting its non-Bolshevik members and charging the group with secretly negotiating with “foreign powers” behind the government’s back and even trying to establish contacts with the remnants of Antonov’s peasant army. Two of the committee’s leaders were sentenced to death ( later commuted), and the rest were exiled from Moscow—to towns without any rail connections—and placed under surveillance. Lenin ordered that the committee be denounced in the harshest terms in the press no less than once a week for the next two months. Foreigners were arriving in Moscow, and Lenin was going to make certain no critics of the government would be there to meet them.
Indeed, around 6:00 p.m. that same evening of the 27th, the first group of ARA men arrived by train in the Soviet capital. The mission had begun. As the Americans were approaching Moscow, Walter Lyman Brown wrote to Hoover: “It is going to be by far the biggest and most difficult job we have yet tackled and the potentialities of it are enormous, but I think we can pull it through.” Neither Brown nor anyone else in the ARA had any idea just how big or difficult the Russian job was going to be.
LATE ONE AFTERNOON IN JULY during the sweltering summer of 1921, two young American men sat whiling away the day at the Café du Commerce in the small French town of Château-Thierry. Charles Veil—fighter pilot for the Lafayette Flying Corps in the war, turned playboy-adventurer in peacetime—was reading the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune when he looked up at his friend and casually remarked: “ There’s a famine in Russia and an appeal has been made to America for aid. It seems the American Relief Administration may go in.” J. Rives Childs took the paper and read Gorky’s appeal. In an instant, Childs was seized with the idea of signing up and heading off to Russia. “If the deal goes through, there will be big news,” a grinning Childs told Veil. “Right now Russia is a closed book.”
Childs was a son of the South, born in Lynchburg in 1893 to an old Virginia family. His father had served as a messenger for General Lee in the Civil War and then went on to a career in business that ended badly, in a bank failure. His mother was the stronger, more influential of his parents. A college graduate, she was the first white woman in Lynchburg to teach in a school for black children, much to the displeasure of the local white superintendent. She made sure her son got an education, sending him to the Virginia Military Institute, then Randolph-Macon College, and finally on to Harvard College for a master’s degree in English. Young Childs had dreams of becoming a writer. One day, the radical journalist John Reed came and spoke to the class about his dangerous experiences on the Eastern Front. Childs’s head was filled with the allure of foreign adventures.
Soon after, in the summer of 1915, he and a friend volunteered for the American Ambulance Corps and sailed for Europe. For several months, he ferried wounded French soldiers under the distant rumble of heavy guns from Compiègne to the College of Juilly, not far outside Paris. After the United States joined the war, Childs was commissioned as a second lieutenant and sent to intelligence school, then served with the American Expeditionary Force in the Bureau of Enemy Ciphers in Chaumont, France. In December 1918, he was assigned to the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference as a radio intelligence officer. There he watched his hero, President Wilson, parade down the Champs-Élysées amid wildly cheering crowds. Wilson’s idealism, his progressive political agenda, and his vision of a new world order based on democracy and national self-determination inspired Childs and would become signposts in his life. As Wilson rode past, Childs was so overcome with emotion he had to walk away from the crowd and try to collect himself in private.
Childs fell in love with Europe, and when his job in Paris ended, he began looking about for anything that would keep him from having to return to the States. He heard about the newly established American Relief Administration and was hired on to help feed hungry children in Yugoslavia. It was just the posting he had been looking for. “The Balkans were remote and romantic,” he later recalled. The job ran until the autumn of 1919, when he reluctantly returned home. His disappointment was somewhat lessened after he won a job as the White House correspondent for the Associated Press. He met his idol on a few occasions, but then was nearly crushed with despair at the 1920 election of the Republican Warren G. Harding, whom he characterized as “a ponderous piece of flesh” and “a great tragedy for the American people.” Childs’s choice for president had been Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party of America. He was now more eager than ever to get back to Europe. In the spring of 1921, Childs managed to land a writing assignment that would take him to France for several months. He jumped at the opportunity.
ON AUGUST 1, Childs made his way to the American Express Office at 11 rue Scribe in Paris. In the Visitors’ Writing Room, he wrote a letter to Walter Lyman Brown in London, reminding Brown how the two had met back in 1919, before Childs shipped off for Yugoslavia, and offering his services for the job the ARA was preparing to undertake in Russia. He told Brown that serving with the ARA had been a great honor and no other work in his life had given him such satisfaction. He was prepared to come to London at a moment’s notice to discuss with him in person the chance of going to Russia. He closed his letter by remarking that he already possessed a fair conversational knowledge of the Russian language. This was a lie, but, then, Childs was willing to do just about anything to return to the ARA.
Two days later, Brown cabled Childs, inviting him to come to London. Childs was overjoyed. He immediately wrote his mother: “ There seems to be the prospect of a spirited adventure in Russia and you may be sure that if it is possible I shall be heading that way before returning home.” He made no mention of the famine, or of communism, or of potential business opportunities, only that a job with the ARA would provide him with “some interesting material for stories.” Childs’s motivation for heading off to Russia—the prospect of adventure, the lure of the exotic and the unknown, a motivation shared by many, if not most, of the young Americans who signed up for the ARA mission—never once crossed the minds of Soviet officials. After three revolutions and three wars in two decades, the Russians had had plenty of “adventures,” more than most nations experience in the course of a century or two. They could not even conceive of a country where life was so steady that its young men sought out the world’s troubled spots merely in the hopes of quickening their pulse. A cloud of misunderstanding obscured the Americans from the Russians, and it never lifted, not even after years of close work together in the fight against the famine. Childs was in Vienna on the 20th when he received a wire informing him an agreement had been made with the Soviet government and instructing him to head to Riga by the shortest possible route. He nearly burst with excitement. “It will be a tremendously big job and one which any man should be proud to have a hand in. To be among the first expedition I consider a boon sent directly from Heaven,” he wrote his mother. He had a sense based on his previous work for Hoover that they’d be engaged in more than just famine relief. Hoover’s true aim, he seemed certain, was “the ultimate economic reconstruction of the country.” Childs hadn’t felt so alive since his days in Yugoslavia. “The old fever to be among stirring scenes and a part of great events is once more about to be satisfied.”
J. Rives Childs
Armed with a Russian dictionary, Childs set off for Riga by way of Berlin. He asked his mother to send him his wool socks, three suits of heavy underwear, and a carton of Camel cigarettes. On the 27th, he reached Riga. There he met Emmett Kilpatrick, a friend from his Paris days. Kilpatrick had been taken prisoner by the Red Army while serving with the Red Cross in southern Russia and spent nearly a year in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, much of it in solitary confinement. Childs seemed shocked that his old pal was no longer the fun-loving prankster of former days. Over lunch, Kilpatrick told him of the horrors he had gone through in prison—the filth, the lice, the cold, hunger, and brutality. He had stayed sane by repeating the famous lines of Richard Lovelace’s “To Althea, from Prison”—“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” Childs noticed how his “eyes roved restlessly about him like those of a hunted animal.” Late on the night of the 29th, Childs left for the station and boarded his train for Moscow. At last, he was on his way into what he called “that strange, mysterious world” of Soviet Russia.
Among the small party of Americans with Childs was a middle-aged professor of Russian history from Stanford. Frank Golder had been born in Odessa and immigrated to America as a boy with his family, most likely soon after the bloody pogroms of the early 1880s. As Jews, the Golders hoped for a better life across the ocean, but getting by in New Jersey proved a struggle. Frank’s father, a Talmudic scholar, made little money, and Frank was forced to sell household wares on the street to support the family. One day, he met a Baptist minister who was so impressed by the boy’s work ethic that he persuaded the Golder family to let him give them money to allow Frank to go to school.
As a teenager, Golder studied philosophy at Bucknell University and then went on to Harvard, from which he graduated in 1903, before enrolling in graduate studies in Russian history. After earning his doctorate in history in 1909, he took a position at Washington State College, in the town of Pullman, amid the rolling hills of the Palouse. Golder dreamed of working in Russia’s archives, and he managed to travel to St. Petersburg in the summer of 1914, just as war was breaking out across Europe. He was back again in March 1917, and witnessed the collapse of the Romanov dynasty with his own eyes. Like many, he greeted the February Revolution as a necessary step toward a freer, more just Russia, only to be disillusioned at the chaos and violence that soon followed. He could not believe how quickly a country could go to pieces.
In 1920, Golder was hired by the new Hoover War Collection ( later the Hoover War Library and now the Hoover Institution Library and Archives) at Leland Stanford Junior University to help build a collection of documents on the history of the Great War. Stanford would become his home for the rest of Golder’s life, both as a professor and as director of the Hoover Library. Golder traveled all over Europe, buying up manuscripts, libraries, and ephemera for Hoover. Everywhere he went, he was met with open arms. Modest, soft-spoken, a good listener who never tried to impose his views on others, Golder developed an enormous network of contacts among the continent’s intellectual elite, including in Russia. Few if any Americans in 1921 could boast of a more thorough knowledge of Russia—its history, culture, and politics—than Frank Golder, and it was for this reason that his employer, Herbert Hoover, sent him back to Russia that summer, to continue his collecting and to assess the famine as a special investigator for the ARA. “Doc” Golder, as he was affectionately called by the ARA men—all a good deal younger, and almost all a good deal less educated than he—would cover more ground over the next two years than any other American in his search to discover the full extent of the famine.
Frank Golder
The electricity on the train had gone out, so the men rode through the night by candlelight. When they crossed the frontier, Childs was shocked to see that everyone was dressed in rags. The faces of the Russians seemed to betray a dull-wittedness the likes of which he had never seen before in Europe. Trains loaded with refugees from Moscow passed them along the way. Their locomotive was so underpowered that it failed to summit a few small hills along the route. Twice the engineer had to back up the train a good ways and give it all she had to get over the gentle inclines. After a forty-hour trip, the train finally pulled into Moscow on the afternoon of August 31; here they were met by Philip Carroll.
The first group of ARA men had “gone in,” as one called it then, several days earlier. Russia had been almost completely cut off from the rest of the world for over three years. A palpable sense of excitement, mixed with foreboding, had filled their car as they crossed the border. They were entering a strange new land and had little idea what lay ahead. A man from Universal News came along to film their progress behind the Red Curtain. There were seven of them, led by Carroll, acting chief of the Russian mission, a longtime ARA man from Hood River, Oregon. He’d been sent in with no specific instructions from either the New York office or Hoover. As would be the case in much of the mission to come, the men on the ground had to make it up as they went along. The Soviet officials meeting them at the station were shocked: they’d been told to expect only three men and had no idea where they were going to put up an extra four. It seemed a bad omen. With a bit of work, Carroll managed to secure a large gray stone mansion at 30 Spiridonovka, just blocks from Patriarch’s Ponds, later made famous by Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Once the luxurious, state-of-the-art residence of a wealthy Armenian sugar baron, its thirty rooms had been reduced, in Carroll’s words, to “an absolute state of filthiness.” The central heating was kaput, the electricity dead, and the plumbing, one ARA man put it, “only a memory.” No one bothered to remove their heavy coats or gloves after moving in. Fifty portable oil-burner heaters were immediately ordered from London.
At the station, Carroll picked up Childs, Golder, and four others on the team in one of the ARA’s freshly painted Cadillacs. Childs noticed how the Muscovites stared as they drove through the city. When they pulled up at their new home, Childs thought Spiridonovka had the look of a dark and massive prison. Carroll seems to have read Childs’s mind, commenting as they went in, “It should be able to withstand a long siege.”
The next day, Childs went out to explore. “I wish that I might give a faithful picture of my impressions of this strange unreal city of Moscow,” he wrote his mother, “but for the difficult portrayal the extraordinary emotions which it awakens there is demanded the morbidly-minded genius of a Poe or E. T. Hoffmann. It is like some great city upon which a pestilence has settled and in which the population moves in hourly expectation of death.” Everywhere were signs of artillery and machine-gun fire, craters where once had been buildings, formerly exquisite shops all now boarded up and cobwebbed. Several years’ worth of trash lay in the streets, and the ground floors of the abandoned structures served as public toilets. Yet more striking than the physical image of the city was the sight of its inhabitants. Childs could not get over “the apparent absence of a heart and soul with which one is struck so forcibly and pathetically. I think that perhaps the briefest and most just characterization of Moscow would be to say that it is a city without love.” Nowhere did he encounter a laugh, or even a smile, as he walked along. There was “rust and corrosion upon the heart and a pall of fear upon the soul.”
ARA headquarters in Moscow, on Spiridonovka Street, with its fleet of Cadillacs and their drivers. The automobile assigned to Colonel William Haskell, who arrived in Moscow in late September to replace Philip Carroll as head of the Russian operation, distinguished by the license plate “A.R.A. 1,” is on the far right.
The Americans got to work straightaway. On September 1, the SS Phoenix arrived in Petrograd from Hamburg, bearing seven hundred tons of ARA rations. Five days later, the first ARA food kitchen opened, in School No. 27, on Moika Street. The first kitchen in Moscow opened on the 10th, in the former Hermitage Restaurant, a beloved establishment for the city’s wealthy in the days before the revolution. Given the great distance food had to be shipped, the meals consisted of products that could be easily packaged and stored and offered lots of calories, usually corn grits, rice, white bread, lard, sugar, condensed milk, and cocoa.
Golder had spent the first two days running around to meetings with Soviet officials in order to make arrangements for a trip to the heart of the famine on the Volga River. No one on the Soviet side seemed to be in charge, and he was having a devil of a time getting any concrete answers about exactly when preparations would be ready for him to depart. Finally, late on September 1, he was told to go to the station for a train leaving at midnight. With Golder were his fellow ARA men John Gregg and William Shafroth, as well as a Soviet liaison officer, two Russian porters, and a driver for the Ford camionette they’d be taking along with them on the train.
They awoke to heavy rain the next morning. Golder noted that the landscape reminded him of northern Idaho, although the desperate, hungry faces at the stations they passed through left him no doubt he was in Russia. Late on the morning of the 3rd, they pulled into the city of Kazan, the old Tatar capital on the Volga, some 450 hundred miles east of Moscow. The men were now inside the famine zone. Hungry refugees from the outlying villages thronged the station, all “huddled together in compact masses like a seal colony, mothers and young close together,” in Golder’s words. The children were surviving on a bit of soup and one small piece of bread from the public kitchens. The city itself was a ruin. In the streets they encountered “pitiful-looking figures dressed in rags and begging for a piece of bread in the name of Christ.”
A wing of the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, home of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, was converted into an ARA kitchen that fed more than two thousand children a day. The kitchen was run by one of the tsar’s former cooks and several servants of the last Romanovs.
They went to the offices of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to introduce themselves to the local authorities. The Tatars received them with an air of suspicion, as if they’d been warned to be on guard. When they learned, however, that Golder was a teacher, as the Tatar officials themselves had been before the revolution, and spoke perfect Russian, their caution melted away. Together the men went off to tour the local hospital. The conditions were abysmal: filthy and lacking the most basic of medicines, the rooms overcrowded with persons afflicted with tuberculosis, scurvy, typhus, and dysentery. Upon returning to their railcar, they found it was besieged by begging children and their wailing parents—a pitiful sight that made it impossible for the men to eat or rest. On the 5th, Gregg sent a wire to headquarters in Moscow: “The need for relief in this country is beyond anything I have ever seen. Speed is of utmost repeat utmost importance as without exaggeration children dying [of] actual starvation every day.” The situation was much worse than anyone had imagined.
That month, Golder traveled throughout the famine region. Everywhere he went, he encountered the same scenes of hunger and despair. At one small station on the way to Simbirsk, two militiamen told him they had not been paid in months and received nothing from the government but one bowl of watery soup a day. They had taken to making a bread substitute out of grass and acorns, which Golder mistook for horse manure.
When they were a few days out of Kazan, their train stopped because of a wreck up the line. Golder went out to have a look and found the flatbed conveying the ARA Ford crowded with peasant women who had climbed on. They told him they had left home in search of potatoes, and shared their stories. Desperate mothers had abandoned children they could no longer feed in the Simbirsk marketplace, in the hope that the state would take the children in. Others had even killed their offspring and then taken their own lives. Everyone they met seemed resigned to their fate. Only the subject of the Soviet government agitated the women: they blamed it for their misfortunes. Golder noted that life had been hard under the tsars as well, but they rejected the comparison. Yes, the tsar’s officials had stolen and robbed, they admitted, but back then they all had so much they didn’t really notice. Now it was different. All the Soviets knew how to do was take—an attitude Golder encountered often during his trip. He gave them each a bit of chocolate cake, which they carefully wrapped up and put in their pockets, saving it for their children back home. Finally, the line was cleared, and the train started up again. As they rode along, Golder looked out and saw sparks pouring out of the stack; they landed on the peasants and set their raggedy clothes ablaze.
Golder and his party stopped at the wharf near the village of Khrashchevka. The villagers, who had come down to the river to beg for food from passing boats, told them how the Communist Party had sent workers from the cities to crush a peasant revolt there in 1918. Golder had heard similar tales as they passed through villages along the way. All about them were pitiful scenes. Golder was especially moved by the sight of an old woman crawling in the mud on all fours, fighting with several pigs over bits of pumpkin rind. They happened upon a local dentist, and she told them there was not a single toothbrush in the entire village. The peasants, having eaten up all the remaining dandelions, wild mustard, and onions, had come down with scurvy, and she could do nothing but watch their teeth fall out.
Refugees crowd the top of a train, fleeing the famine.
On the 14th, they reached the city of Samara. “Dirt and ruins are everywhere,” Golder wrote in his diary. “Windows are smashed; streets torn up and littered with rubbish and dead animals. Hotels, which at one time compared well with the best of Europe, are today empty shells; church steeples are turned into wireless stations and palatial homes into barracks. In brief, the city is a wreck, a shadow of its former self.” The people were surviving on rinds, potato peelings, and bones. The rail station was crowded with people trying to flee to Siberia, where they’d heard there was plenty of food. Others crowded the beach, hoping to escape by boat to Ukraine. The authorities, however, were doing everything in their power to keep people from leaving and spreading panic and disease as they went. Weakened by hunger, the people lay about and slept and waited; their little remaining strength they devoted to searching the bodies of their loved ones for lice. “I shall never forget the sights I saw in September, in Samara,” Shafroth later wrote.
A common scene from a children’s home inside the famine zone
The scenes in the hospitals and orphanages were particularly disturbing. Typical was one children’s home built for 30 that now held 450. The men mistook the stinking rags on the floor for discarded clothing, only to realize that they concealed, in Golder’s words, the “cadaverous bodies of young children with such old, shriveled faces that they look like mummies.”
It was by now obvious that although the ARA had not provided medical relief in its other operations, it would need to do so in Russia. The most basic supplies were lacking: aspirin, chloroform, ether. Old newspaper had replaced bandages for wrapping wounds and surgical incisions. Before the month was out, the ARA made an agreement with the American Red Cross for $3.6 million worth of medicines and supplies. The scope of the medical relief would grow during the mission and become a large part of the ARA’s work in Russia.
On the last day of the month, Golder headed back to Moscow. The train was covered with refugees who were trying to flee the area. They rode on the roofs of the cars, on the steps, the bumpers; many even clung to the undercarriages, their bodies just inches above the rails. Golder remarked that it looked as if the train were covered with insects. When one sickly-looking man got too close to their compartment, the Soviet liaison officer pulled his gun and threatened to shoot. “Shoot!” the poor man screamed. “Do you think it makes any difference to me whether I am shot or die of hunger?” The train stopped at the bridge over the Volga, and the militia pulled all the refugees off. But no sooner had the train crossed to the other side when another mass of refugees, “waiting, shouting, swearing, and pushing,” lunged at the train and climbed on before it could get back up to speed.
From Moscow, Golder wrote to a colleague back in the history department at Stanford:
The famine is bad beyond all imagination, it is the most heart breaking situation that I have ever seen. Millions of people are doomed to die and they are looking it calmly in the face. Next year millions more will die [. . .] To see Russia makes one wish that he were dead. One asks in vain where are the healthy men, the beautiful women, the cultural life. It is all gone and in place of it we have starving, ragged, undersized men and women who are thinking of only one thing, where the next piece of bread is coming from [. . .] In all these wanderings and through all the discomforts there is one blessed thought: that I have another land to go to.
When news of the horrors on the Volga reached Moscow, Carroll decided to send a team to begin operations in Kazan as soon as possible. The plan was to prepare a train with fourteen cars loaded with enough food to feed thirty thousand children for a month. In addition, there would be a large flatcar to carry two ARA trucks and a Cadillac touring car, a railcar with kitchen, and two saloon cars for the ARA men, their interpreters, chauffeurs, and cook, and a group of American newspaper reporters. The train was scheduled to leave Moscow on Wednesday, September 14.
As would soon become clear to the Americans, setting a schedule and sticking to it were two very different things in Soviet Russia. First, there was a series of unexplained delays in finding the required railroad cars. Finally, when several did appear at the station, they were too filthy and broken-down to be of any use. It was at this point that the Americans learned a crucial lesson about working in Russia: the Cheka could be a friend as well as an enemy. The Cheka agent Bublikov, according to Childs a sinewy figure with “superabundant nervous energy” and “the cold penetrating eye of one devoid of the instinct of mercy,” picked up the phone and demanded that the necessary cars be delivered to the station within two hours or those responsible for the delay would be arrested. Sure enough, the cars arrived on time; late on the afternoon of the 15th, the train set out for Kazan.
Besides Childs, the ARA men included Vernon Kellogg, Ivar Wahren, and Elmer Burland. The press was represented by Walter Duranty of The New York Times, Ralph Pulitzer of New York’s The World, Floyd Gibbons of the Chicago Tribune, and Bessie Beatty, the noted journalist who had witnessed and reported on the Russian Revolution firsthand. Also on the train was the Australian-born adventurer and onetime British member of Parliament Arthur Alfred Lynch. By the next day, their train was already passing through small railroad stations crowded with refugees. Childs noticed how the people outside his window, so weakened and hopeless-looking, showed “scarcely any vestige of human expression.” The little boys and girls with grotesquely bloated stomachs made him think of hideous freaks of the kind one might see displayed in a museum.
Once, without thinking, Childs carelessly tossed some apple peelings out his window; a pack of children set upon them as if they represented a great treasure. Lynch, however, seemed strangely untouched by the misery. Childs noticed how he would leap from the train at each stop and shout, “Long live the Soviets!” One wonders what the poor, starved Russians made of this spectacle.
Young famine victims photographed in a refugee camp in Samara Province
They arrived in Kazan in a cold drizzle the night of the 17th. Looking about, Childs could see nothing but mud and misery. He was reminded of a line from Thomas Moore’s “Oft, in the Stilly Night”—“I feel like one / Who treads alone / Some banquet-hall deserted.” In the gloom of the station, he caught sight of a young boy struggling to pull a cart bearing a coffin. The next day, Childs and Wahren went to meet Rauf Sabirov, chairman of the Tatar Central Executive Committee, and Kashaf Mukhtarov, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Tatar Republic.
The meetings went well, and the men immediately established an easy rapport. That very day, less than twenty-four hours after arriving in Kazan, the ARA began feeding children in a makeshift location. A few days later, they set up a full feeding operation capable of handling a thousand young people.
One of Kazan’s muddy main streets on a day in early May
On the 20th, Wahren left Kazan with a boatload of relief supplies for villages out in the countryside, followed by Burland and Kellogg the next day. Childs stayed behind to set up their offices and housing. The days were long, but Childs was excited to finally be at it. He wrote his mother that it filled him with pride to be involved in a large effort aimed at saving lives—not taking them, as had been his mission during the war. One of his first days at his desk, with paperhangers scurrying about and office furniture and supplies being delivered, the Cheka showed up and arrested Childs’s interpreter. No explanation was given, and he never saw the man again. That afternoon, a smart-looking young man in a Red Army uniform marched into the office, saluted, clicked his heals, and introduced himself as William Simson, Childs’s new interpreter. Born in Estonia, Simson had been educated in England and worked as a valet in London’s Savoy Hotel, where he perhaps anglicized his name, before returning to Russia to join the Red Army. He had been arrested and sentenced to death as a counter-revolutionary spy more than once before being exiled to Kazan. His English was flawless. Childs naturally, and certainly correctly, assumed that the Cheka had sent Simson both to interpret for and to spy on Childs, but this didn’t bother him in the least: in his estimation, he and the ARA had nothing to hide. What’s more, with the others gone, Childs was terribly lonely. He hugged Simson and begged him to join him for dinner. The two men soon formed a close bond and were rarely apart. Later, Childs would even save Simson’s life.
Most of Childs’s time in the first days was spent trying to put together the personnel vital to the ARA mission. The total number of Americans in Russia never surpassed more than two hundred at a time, and so the great bulk of the work had to be done by the local population. The ARA office in Kazan was inundated with applications, but only a few of the applicants possessed the requisite skills. Among those to beat a path to their door was the granddaughter of Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov, famed field marshal under Catherine the Great and one of Russia’s greatest military commanders, along with her son and daughter. They were dressed in rags, and their gaunt faces bore all the signs of prolonged hunger. He hired the daughter, since she spoke English and French and could type, but had no use for the other two. The poor mother, who at one time had been received at the tsarist court, pleaded through her tears with Childs to hire her. She refused to leave, and for the rest of the day haunted the office with her presence. Childs didn’t know what to do, never having encountered before persons whose nerves were so “hopelessly disordered.”
Accompanying the Russians’ desperate wish to be hired by the ARA was an almost equally strong fear that working for the Americans would lead to future trouble with the Cheka. There was talk in the city that the ARA would be around for only a few months, and that once it pulled out the secret police would arrest individuals who had had anything to do with the Americans. Everyone was convinced the Cheka had planted agents throughout the organization and was keeping close tabs on its operations and personnel. Childs, dangerously naïve in such matters, called these fears unfounded. When he brought the matter up with local officials, they assured him that such concerns about retribution were baseless. (Some of these same officials would themselves later be arrested and shot as counterrevolutionaries under Stalin.) The Latvia-born John de Jacobs, hired on in Kazan as another interpreter, later commented that the Russian staff was riddled with Cheka informers. They even proposed to Childs the idea of putting some of their desks in his private office, which the unwitting Childs happily accepted.
Working eighteen-hour days, Childs had built up a staff of fifty by the end of September. Even though he was solely responsible for their training, he still managed to find time to expand the feeding operation to fifteen thousand children. The strain was enormous, and at times he thought he was about to break under the pressure. He felt horrible having to turn away so many seeking jobs, for he knew that, without the money and rations provided to ARA workers, many would perish in the coming winter. Moreover, reports from the provinces made it clear that the operation would have to expand to include the feeding of adults. The famine was much worse than they had ever imagined, a fact that he feared the ARA bosses back in London and New York did not understand. Childs did his best to raise the alarm. “I cannot permit part of the responsibility for the death of thousands to rest on my head,” he recorded in his diary. A bit of relief came with the arrival of two Americans: John H. Boyd, a tall and lanky Southerner with considerable experience in aid relief in the Near East, and, a bit older and more sedate than Boyd, Van Arsdale Turner, a preacher’s son who had come to Russia in search of adventure. Childs noted that Turner “had the language of romance on his tongue,” and was an “impractical, idealistic type for whom America has no corner to which to turn.” Boyd took charge of transport and supply for the Kazan district; Turner and Childs divided the children’s feeding operations between them.
IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE LENIN began to see the good the Americans were doing. He wrote to People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin in mid-October: “Hoover is a real asset [. . .] Agreements and concessions with the Americans are extremely important to us: with Hoover we have something (and it’s not a little).” When Lenin learned that Cheka agents from Novorossiisk had boarded and then searched an American destroyer with “Hooverites” aboard and treated the Americans “most rudely,” he was outraged. He sent an angry letter to Chicherin, reminding him that they were anticipating necessary American food and supplies via the Black Sea, and that measures had to be taken to rein in the Cheka, or else there would be “the most serious trouble” with the Americans. Chicherin, Lenin let him know, had been too soft and slow in addressing the matter. It was imperative that they “arrest these rotten Chekists, bring the guilty ones to Moscow, and shoot them.”
On September 2, Izvestiia had published an order from Mikhail Kalinin, the titular head of the Soviet government, addressed to all people’s commissars and directors of the provincial executive committees, instructing them to carry out every request of the ARA within forty-eight hours, since the work of the Americans was “extraordinarily urgent and demanded the commitment of a military operation.” Any attempts to slow up, much less block, the ARA’s work would be punished “according to all the severity of revolutionary justice.” Later that month, the Central Executive Committee set up a liaison organization to assist the ARA in its operations. When the original representative plenipotentiary proved ineffective, he was replaced by Alexander Eiduk.
Alexander Eiduk
A fearsome Latvian, Eiduk had been a revolutionary practically his entire life. Exiled from tsarist Russia after the Revolution of 1905, he apparently returned after the Bolsheviks seized power and joined the Cheka, quickly rising in the ranks to become one of its leaders, a figure notorious for his cruelty and bloodthirstiness. A killer with an artistic side, he supposedly penned the following verse for a collection titled “The Smile of the Cheka”—“There’s no greater joy, no better music, / Than the crush of broken lives and bones.” All manner of gruesome stories were told about Eiduk. He was dubbed “the executioner” for the many White officers he was reported to have executed with his own gun. A member of the ARA claimed he had “one of the cruelest faces I have ever seen.”
Eiduk was immediately impressed with the ARA’s efficiency, administrative talent, and organizational know-how, all of which only highlighted the shortcomings of the Soviet government, especially at the local level. In the early months of his work with the ARA, Eiduk tried to tackle the bureaucracy, inefficiencies, and fears lurking inside most Russians (of taking initiative, of acting without written orders from above, of foreigners, of unfamiliar ideas and new ways of doing things) that hindered the ARA’s efforts. He saw to it that Russian ARA personnel were given government food rations, and permitted Americans to keep guns for their personal safety. Yet at the same time, he ordered strict surveillance over the ARA men and their Russian staff. Eiduk was going to help the ARA get its work done, but he was going to make certain it didn’t get up to anything beyond its stated mission.
Colonel William Haskell and Cyril J. Quinn
Meanwhile, Carroll, the temporary acting head of the ARA mission in Russia, had been replaced by Colonel William Haskell, the new permanent director. The stiff and taciturn Haskell was a military man through and through. A West Point graduate, he had served in the Philippines and then with the Second Army Corps in France in the First World War. Given the forty-three-year-old Haskell’s proven leadership experience and his lack of any involvement in politics, yet his unequivocal anti-Soviet attitude, Hoover deemed him “the ideal man” for the job, although many longtime ARA men thought he was too quick to impose military order and hierarchy on the loose, informal, and historically flat structure of the organization. Haskell arrived with a staff of seventeen. Captain Thomas C. Lonergan was appointed executive officer, and he was soon joined by Cyril J. Quinn as the second executive officer.
Among Haskell’s first tasks was finding more space for the expanding operation. Spiridonovka was fine for the ARA’s offices, but it wasn’t going to be big enough to house all the men, whose numbers were growing rapidly. The ARA offices in London and New York were inundated with applications, and Quinn was busy scouring for worthy hires among the U.S. Army forces stationed at Koblenz and the Rhodes scholars at Oxford. Over the two-year mission, some 380 American men would eventually work in Russia. And men they were: American women were not even considered, on the assumption that the work was too dangerous for them. Nor were Jews, again supposedly for their own good, the argument being that, should disorder break out, they would likely become targets of anti-Semitic pogroms. Given America’s stringently enforced system of white privilege, it is not surprising that no other racial and ethnic minorities were welcome among the ranks of the ARA, either. But the mission was not an entirely all-white, all-male affair: among the ARA’s archives are two photographs of an African American woman identified simply as “Emma.”
Emma. Following the racial prejudice of the day,
the ARA photographer did not bother to record her surname.
She was from Washington, D.C., and had somehow ended up in Moscow, where she was hired on as the ARA’s laundress. According to the caption on one of the photographs, Emma was “excellent” at her work, and she had “a white husband”— which must have seemed an objectionable arrangement to most of her American compatriots in Russia.
Haskell located two large mansions that he wished to use for housing the ARA men. Once homes of Russia’s wealthy elite, they had been nationalized and turned into state museums under the control of Natalya Sedova, Trotsky’s wife, as head of the so-called Museum Division of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment. Madame Trotsky wouldn’t hear of renting the museums to the Americans, given their valuable art and furnishings. One of these, at 8 Bolshoi Znamensky Lane, had been the home of the famous collector Sergei Shchukin, and fabulous works by Monet, Picasso, and Matisse still covered the walls. Haskell refused to back down, and promised in writing that no damage would be done to any of the properties; in the end, Madame Trotsky acquiesced. Eventually, the ARA occupied five buildings along with their headquarters on Spiridonovka, all in the Arbat neighborhood; the men gave each one a nickname based on the color of its façade: Shchukin’s former home was the Pink House, and there were also the Brown, Blue, Green, and White Houses.
AFTER GETTING MATTERS squared away in Moscow, Haskell, along with a few other men, set out for a two-week tour of the famine zone. They returned from their travels with the same opinion as Golder and Childs—namely, that the famine was much worse than they had realized and would likely require more aid and manpower than planned. Vernon Kellogg, an old friend of Hoover’s and one of his special representatives in Russia, noted on October 7 that the program would have to be expanded way beyond the original number of one million children, and wrote to Hoover to encourage him to double the size of the operation. The need, he noted, was overwhelming, and a huge tragedy was unfolding before their eyes. The geographic expanse of the famine was vast, stretching 800 miles north to south, from Vyatka to Astrakhan, and 350 miles west to east, from Penza to Ufa. After hearing from Kellogg and Haskell, Hoover agreed that more had to be done and was coming around to the idea of feeding adults as well.
Haskell arrived on his inspection tour in Kazan on October 27. Among the men traveling with him were James P. Goodrich, the former governor of Indiana, sent to Russia by Hoover to investigate the famine, and Philip Gibbs, an English journalist and writer. Two days later, the party departed Kazan for Moscow—except for Gibbs and a fellow British reporter, who wanted to get out into the countryside and see the famine for themselves. Gibbs, whom Childs called “a prince of a man,” told the men in Kazan he was not convinced that the famine was as bad as characterized and that the West was being fed a good deal of anti-Russian propaganda. So Childs found an interpreter and arranged a short trip for Gibbs down the Volga to the district of Spassk to see for himself.
Gibbs returned a day later a changed man. The trauma had been so great that Childs had trouble getting him to talk about what he had seen. It was only by the second day that he had gained enough composure to describe the horrors he had witnessed in Spassk. Although Gibbs had reported on the carnage he had seen on the Western Front during the war, nothing could have prepared him for this. The condition came to be known as “famine shock,” a reworking of the past war’s “shell shock,” and Gibbs was one of the earliest cases. Another case involved an ARA man who came upon a barn stacked with corpses in the Volga region late that summer. He began to count the bodies, but when he reached forty-eight, something inside him snapped. He couldn’t go on, even though there were a good many more bodies to count. He went about the rest of the day repeating over and over “forty-eight . . . forty-eight . . . forty-eight.” It was all he could say. Not until the following day was he able to go back and finish the job.
The personal letters of the ARA men are full of references to the emotional strain of their work. Nerves were frayed, strained, and at times shattered. Edgar Rickard, the ARA general director based in New York, was so concerned about the men’s mental state that he recommended they be given longer vacations in Europe and shorter shifts. “This Russian job to judge from unofficial personal narratives,” he wired Brown on April 7, 1922, “has developed among workers ‘famine shock’ such as we have not experienced in any other operations and which apparently renders otherwise superior individuals insufficient.”
After he recovered and returned home to England, Gibbs published a fulsome tribute to the work of the American Relief Administration, whose efforts he called “the most astounding thing that has ever been done in the history of mankind.” He acknowledged the work of his fellow Englishmen, but commented how “our homage is due to the magnitude and splendour of the American effort.” Nothing could compare with the “untiring devotion” of the young American men risking their health and lives in the service of humanity.
Bodies piled in a morgue awaiting burial after the spring thaw
ON OCTOBER 6, 1921, Childs embarked from Kazan on the large, if rather dirty, river steamer SS Varlen with seventy-five thousand rations for hungry villages down along the Volga. Traveling with him was the interpreter Jacobs, Rauf Sabirov, and Mikhail Skvortsov, another local Communist Party official filled with inexhaustible energy and genuine commitment to the loftiest ideals of the revolution, with whom Childs would become fast friends. They arrived the following day at Bogorodsk. It was a grim sight. “A dreary, mud-besmattered Russian village,” Childs noted. Refugees lined the riverbanks. Many were dead and dying; those with any strength left were digging shallow graves in the slime.
A child dying of hunger in the streets. She no longer has the strength to eat the scraps of food on the ground in front of her.
He was shocked to see a large pile of American food next to them on the banks, waiting to be trucked into the interior. It sat there guarded by only one soldier, wielding a rifle that appeared too antiquated to shoot. The refugees stared at the food with longing, but no one made any move for it. To Childs, the picture proved the truth about what he had heard of Russians’ passivity and fatalism, “inbred through long centuries in the Slavic nature.”
Of course, what he didn’t realize was that after years of war, revolution, disease, and famine, these poor folk were too weak and defeated to fight back any longer, whatever their Slavic nature. They had struggled mightily for years and were now beyond resistance. Adding to the strange nature of the scene was the fact that just a short way down the riverside was a bazaar where peasants were selling eggs, butter, milk, and meat. The refugees, however, had no money, and so they starved and died. Childs could hardly believe his eyes, yet this was an inescapable fact of the famine that all ARA men soon realized: as millions perished, others around them ate. Food was to be had, but for a price, and the vendors in the markets, even if they felt sympathy for the walking skeletons in their midst, were not about to give their goods away for nothing. Golder noticed the same thing in his travels. There was food, but it was in small pockets, quite local, and the poor distribution and the villagers’ lack of money meant they were starving. Urban dwellers with some sort of salary had a good chance of survival; those without did not.
The next day, they met with villagers from Laishev to organize the local feeding committee. The ARA divided the country into a number of large districts and established a headquarters run by several Americans to oversee the work in each district. The Kazan district, set up to serve the Tatar Republic, included 2,456,074 people and covered nearly forty thousand square miles. It would be enlarged in December and then again in May 1922, eventually embracing 4.5 million people and over ninety thousand square miles, roughly the size of the states of New York, New Jersey, and all of New England minus Maine, all run by only a handful of Americans out of Kazan. The enormity of the district was compounded by the horrific state of the transportation network, which made travel slow, difficult, and exhausting. At the height of the operation, thirty thousand Russian employees of the ARA were feeding two million people a day in the Kazan district alone.
Every ARA district was divided into smaller subdistricts, each over-seen by an inspector, a native civilian, responsible for establishing a local ARA office and organizing relief efforts at the village level. Inspectors hired ten or so assistants, referred to as instructors, usually young Russian men with a few years of schooling and basic literacy. Instructors managed about twenty villages apiece, roughly fifteen hundred people, and typically lived in the local county seat. They were responsible for putting together an ARA committee of between six to twelve persons in each village, making certain to include the head of the village government and the local priest. It was required that at least one of the committee members be literate, and he would then serve as secretary. These committees were given two weeks to set up kitchens—most often in the schoolhouse or an abandoned peasant hut—and compile feeding lists of the neediest children. Outside every feeding station hung a large sign announcing the presence of the American Relief Administration along with the identification number for that particular kitchen. It was also the committee’s job to make sure the food was going to the right people and in the right amount. The risk of theft, or at the least pilfering (think watered-down cocoa, thin grits), was a real concern, although actual recorded cases were surprisingly few.
Childs, in a dark suit, at an ARA kitchen in the Kazan district. His interpreter, Simson, is visible behind Childs’s right shoulder.
The instructors had one of the most difficult jobs of anyone working for the ARA. It was their responsibility to travel from one remote village to the next, even in winter, often on foot, and with little to eat or to keep them warm, and make sure the food was being distributed as prescribed and to the neediest. Once the ARA woke up to the full extent of their hardships and decided to give them an American ration as well, most of the instructors didn’t take the rations for themselves but gave these to their families back home. The Americans did get out into the hinterlands to inspect feeding operations, but they were never able to visit more than a small percentage of the kitchens, and so relied on the hard work and honesty of their Soviet colleagues to be certain the job was being carried out as intended.
From Laishev, the men sailed on to the village of Elabuga. Childs was struck by the beauty of the fall foliage in the area, which masked the suffering around them. The night before, he kept seeing the pitiful faces of emaciated young children in his sleep. They arrived on a Sunday and set straight to work. Childs wondered what the good people back home in Lynchburg would think of his missing church for a “secular meeting” on the Sabbath, assuming “many bigots [. . .] would condemn my action.” At one time he might have agreed with them, but now he was coming to realize that such notions were nothing more than blind prejudice. Although he had been in Russia only a short time, his values had begun to shift, and he sensed he was undergoing “a radical transformation.” He wrote: “It would seem to me that I am throwing off a great deal of baggage and that in the stripping of life of its inessentials [. . .] I am gaining warrant, not for the salvation of my soul, for I dislike and reject that phrase, but for the right to live.”
Childs returned to Kazan on the 13th. He wrote his mother, “I never believed there could be so much misery on such a scale in the world.” The surreal nature of his experience in Russia was highlighted by the fact that, despite this misery, daily life went on, somehow, as always. Just days after his return, he attended a performance of Carmen at the Palace of the Red Army Soldiers. “Thousands are dying of starvation, but the Soviet government must realize man does not live by bread alone.” Childs had to admit that, even if the company was mediocre and the staging shabby, he enjoyed the performance more than anything he had ever seen at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, since “ there before us was a little make-believe tragedy which was being produced in the midst of a great living tragedy [. . .] Principals of the greater tragedy were pressing as spectators into the lesser one to forget, in the tragedy of the other, their own.” He was mesmerized by the star, the Persian-born mezzo-soprano Fatma Mukhtarova, whose effect on him surpassed that of even the great Caruso. Childs invited Mukhtarova and some of the other women from the company to join him for a light meal back at the ARA house. His enchantment vanished the moment the women threw themselves ravenously at the food.
A week later, Childs was back on the steamer, carrying food to villages along the Kama River. He fell ill with ptomaine poisoning after eating some contaminated food and had to be confined to bed for days, using the time to record his observations in a letter to an old friend. Russia, he commented, was not the chaotic mess depicted in the West, but a well-regulated country whose government enjoyed popular support. The officials he had gotten to know in Kazan were, in his opinion, all honest men, and though they may have lacked education, they made up for this with a fearless will that made all things possible. The Russians he had met exhibited a simple dignity. “We traveled some thousands of miles among the starving population, but not once were we molested or solicited to share in the food we had with us, nor was any of it stolen. In other countries, under similar conditions, we would have risked death.”
Death, however, was ever present in Kazan. Around this time, Childs’s Russian tutor took sick with typhus, after having just lost her brother to the disease; her sister was on the verge of death as well. Next, the maids at the ARA house came down with it, and their housekeeper, too. “Literally, people die here like flies,” Childs remarked. On top of this, the Cheka was becoming more brazen. In the morning, when he arrived at work, it was obvious to him that agents had gone through all the papers in the desks. Spies planted among the personnel were reporting “our every gesture” to their superiors, infecting the work atmosphere with an air of suspicion. The agents even surveilled Childs on his trips to the bazaar. He complained to local officials, but was told it was all in his head.
Childs’s concerns were in fact well founded. On October 25, the Cheka issued a special order giving all agents extraordinary powers of surveillance in the struggle against the ARA. “Based on our intelligence, the Americans are drawing anti-Soviet elements into the ARA organization, engaging in espionage to gather information on Russia, and buying up valuables.” This last bit would come to spell Childs’s own fate in Russia.
BY THE BEGINNING OF NOVEMBER, the ARA had established kitchens throughout the entire Volga region. Still, the famine worsened. On the 19th, a Soviet official overseeing feeding operations in Sorochinsk, on the road from Samara to Orenburg, sent his superiors a report on conditions in the area. Much of the adult population, he warned, was “doomed to die from starvation unless more help appears immediately.” Bands of people were roaming the riverbanks in search of weeds and grasses, desperate to find anything to fill their stomachs. Entire families were showing up at the local soviet headquarters for some sort of help, their bellies bloated, their faces disfigured, their eyes fevered. For many, the struggle was over:
They’ve lost their last bit of strength, fallen, and died. Some are unable to bear the torments of the Tsar-Famine and lose all sense of reason and go mad. In our region one often sees little children refusing their ration and asking for permission to give it to their mothers. Yet there are also instances when just before the mothers die, they suffocate their young ones in order to put an end to their suffering. Open your eyes, once and for all, to the great enormity of this catastrophe, which is a hundred times worse than you realize, and know that the help you are now providing is nothing but a drop in the ocean.
Childs found himself torn with contradictory emotions. On November 6, he could write his mother of how fortunate he felt to be doing good: “It is only by being of service that one can be happy.” And then, four days later, he was immersed in gloom, certain that the misery was so immense that whatever help they could provide was “pitifully inadequate.” He increasingly came to believe more had to be done, especially by Americans back home. Convinced that they were ignorant of just how bad things were in Russia, what he called “this greatest of twentieth century tragedies,” he sent a letter to the editor of the Lynchburg News in which he chastised Americans for “dickering over debts and political opinions” while twenty million people were dying of hunger. He countered the lies that aid to Russia was being misused and stolen and took on the popular notion that America had enough of its own problems and so was in no position to help. “ There was never a tragedy in America to compare with this,” he wrote. “To America is given a great opportunity and as an American I am deeply concerned that she will take advantage of it.”
He informed readers back in Virginia of a new ARA program and encouraged them to get involved. In October, the ARA had agreed with the Soviet government to launch a program of food-relief packages to help supplement the existing feeding operations. Through the ARA offices in New York, London, and other European cities, a person could pay for the delivery of a large box of food supplies to an individual in Russia. The typical package, almost 120 pounds in weight, included 49 pounds of flour, 25 pounds of rice, 3 pounds of lard or other fats, 10 pounds of sugar, and twenty 1-pound cans of evaporated milk. Each box cost $10, over $2 more than the cost of the food, a profit that the ARA then used to help grow the original mission of feeding hungry children. The ARA had first proposed the food package program at the Riga talks, but the suspicious Soviets had rejected the idea. By the beginning of October, however, Lenin, his earlier fears about the ARA put to rest, sought to increase cooperation with the Americans and began to lobby for the program with the rest of the Soviet leadership. At a meeting of the Politburo that month, Stalin argued against the program, insisting this was not charity but in fact a form of capitalist trade, which had not been part of the original agreement. For Lenin, that was fine: “If indeed that is the goal—trade, then we ought to gain experience, for they are giving us real assistance for the starving.” Lenin won the argument, but the hard-liners, men like Stalin, were not about to surrender to the Americans. This was made clear to Childs and the rest of his team in Kazan in the middle of November.
On the 11th, Childs and Wahren attended an exhibition at the Kazan Institute of Art. As they wandered the halls, their teeth chattering in the icy cold of the unheated building, Childs stopped before a canvas devoted to the famine, with images of ragged refugees shuffling across a bleak plain in a last effort to escape death. He bought the painting for 6 million rubles, less than $100. The artist was Nikolai Fechin, a native of Kazan who had studied under the great master Ilya Repin at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and was now barely surviving with his family back in his hometown. Childs got word to Fechin that he would like to request a portrait and would pay him in ARA food packages. The artist was overjoyed at the commission, and soon the two were meeting daily for sittings.
While Childs was viewing art, Cheka agents were striking a blow against the ARA. That same day, they arrested three of the Russian personnel: their office manager, a man named Salomine; a Mrs. Depould, one of the ARA kitchen inspectors; and Wahren’s assistant, a woman by the name of Krasilnikova. The arrests were a clear and provocative infringement of the Riga Agreement, and the Americans were outraged. Turner argued that they should shut down the mission and leave the next morning for Moscow; he was concerned they’d be next and was not about to end up in a Cheka prison. Wahren, however, managed to talk him down. He proposed they first stop all shipments of foodstuffs, clothing, and medical supplies throughout the district and send a letter of complaint to the leaders of the Tatar Republic, insisting that the ARA employees be released and permitted to return to work immediately, unless valid charges could be presented against them. Wahren had the suspicion that the attack on the ARA had not been the work of local officials, with whom they had good relations, but was coming from Moscow. And he was right. There had been similar arrests at the ARA operations in Tsaritsyn and Samara.
Fechin’s portrait of Childs
Wahren’s tactic worked, and on the afternoon of the 14th, a pale, haggard Salomine appeared at the offices, having come straight from prison. Childs thought he looked like a frightened rat terrier. Clearly shaken by his experience, he told the Americans that the Cheka had forced him to sign a statement admitting to harboring anti-Soviet sympathies. The women were soon released as well. The next day, Wahren wrote to the ARA office in Moscow to inform them that the matter had been successfully resolved once it became clear that “we mean what we say and shall expect them to do likewise.”
Back in Moscow, Eiduk was not ready to put the matter to rest. He wrote Haskell on the 20th, complaining that the only Russians the ARA was hiring were from the former bourgeoisie and insisting that these people were enemies of the state. He remarked that Salomine had “an undoubtedly counterrevolutionary past” and described Depould as an “ex-baroness” with “the most emphatically anti-Soviet spirit.” Among her supposed crimes was appearing at the ARA kitchens covered in diamond rings and bracelets and in décolleté, an affront to Soviet morals that elicited indignation from the hungry children and their mothers. The Cheka had been left no alternative but to arrest her. Indeed, after questioning, the Cheka learned that her husband had fought for Kolchak’s army; as the wife of a former White Guard officer, she should be confined to a workhouse.
The ARA pushed back. Haskell reminded Eiduk that, according to the Riga Agreement, they were free to hire anyone without regard to “race, creed, or political opinion,” and they were not about to give up this right. Eiduk backed down and promised to do whatever he could to minimize arrests in the future, although he continued to maintain that among the Russian personnel were a good many criminals and political enemies. In the end, the two sides agreed that the ARA would present the Soviet government with lists of all future candidates for employment, complete with their personal histories, and if the Soviets found good cause for rejecting a candidate, the ARA would respect their wishes.
Nevertheless, suspicion remained. After observing the actions of the ARA in the Samara Province, a Soviet official wrote: “We have the impression that the ARA, upon putting together its local staff, is in fact preparing an organization capable of replacing us should the opportunity arise.
There is no other way to account for the anti-Soviet elements being drawn to it. We shall remain on guard.”
GOLDER ,MEANWHILE, was feeling the heat as well. In early December, after returning to Moscow from yet another of his expeditions, he wrote to a colleague at Stanford that “the secret service, the so-called Che-Ka, is on my trail and after my scalp.” His perfect Russian, deep knowledge of the country and its history, and extensive relationships with writers, scholars, and other intellectuals made Golder stand out from the rest of the ARA men, who were generally ignorant about Russia. All of this made the Cheka suspicious, and the agency became convinced that Golder was not who he claimed. The idea took hold that he had fought with Kolchak and had returned to Russia to carry out propaganda against the government. “I walk around as if a sword hung over me,” he moaned. It was all too much, and he informed the ARA he wanted to leave Russia by the end of January 1922.
For an entire month, beginning in the early-morning hours of October 9, Golder had traveled from Moscow to Ufa, over seven hundred miles to the east as the crow flies, on the edge of the Ural Mountains, before returning west to Samara, on the Volga, then on to Penza and Saratov and from there south to Astrakhan—this last leg an especially exasperating five-day trip on a train traveling at a top speed of ten miles per hour. Everywhere he stopped, he was shadowed by Cheka agents, as welcome, in his words, “as scarlet fever,” which made it difficult for Golder to speak candidly with people about the extent of the famine in the various regions and the efforts being made by the local governments.
He set off back to Moscow on a steamer at the end of October. The blackflies hovering over the Volga were so bad he had to go belowdecks, only to find there was nowhere to sit, much less to lie down for the night, since all the furniture cushions were crawling with bedbugs. He managed to locate a folding table to serve as a bed. In Saratov, the ARA sent one of its automobiles to pick him up at the wharf. Golder allowed himself the pleasure of assuming things would now go more smoothly, but it was not to be. “We rode ten minutes and then got a flat,” he recorded in his diary. “The American Relief Administration is becoming Russianized quickly.”
Golder was nearly as annoyed with his fellow Americans. Life at the Pink House felt at times like living in a richly decorated fraternity house. A visiting American reporter called it a “Gilded Barracks”; one of the men slept on his U.S. Army cot set up beneath a Rembrandt. The heavy-smoking Americans stubbed out their cigarettes on whatever was convenient and then tossed the butts on the floor. Golder couldn’t stand to see how Sergei Shchukin’s magnificent home was being trashed by this bunch of young rowdies. In the early hours of Thanksgiving Day, Golder found himself lying awake in bed, unable to sleep because of the wild partying downstairs. The Americans had invited over some ballet dancers, “and other females of that kind,” Golder wrote in a letter after giving up on the prospect of sleep, and they were now all “more than half full of booze.” This was no ordinary party. “The prize guest is Isadora Duncan and the woman is either drunk or crazy, perhaps both. She is half dressed and calls to the boys to pull down her chimies, I think that this is the way they are called [. . .] What may happen before morning I do not know.”
Heavy drinking was endemic to the ARA operation. Lonergan, Haskell’s assistant, was among the worst, drinking himself practically into a coma on a few occasions; he eventually lost his job over his problems with the bottle. Carroll, too, fell into the clutches of dipsomania, and was also sent home when things got out of hand. For some, drinking offered a release from the pressures of the job; for others, drinking, especially when meeting with Soviet officials, was a requirement of the job.
Golder had been particularly upset about the wild partying that night since he was scheduled to leave the following day on another tour, this time to Ukraine. Preparations for the trip had not been easy. Eiduk and the Soviet government had refused Golder’s request for travel papers to Soviet Ukraine, insisting that there was no famine there and that all of the Americans’ efforts ought to be concentrated along the Volga. What went unsaid was that parts of western Ukraine had yet to be fully subjugated following the recent peasant rebellions; there was considerable fear that an American presence might well inspire the remaining partisans to continue their resistance. The ARA reminded Eiduk that the Riga Agreement gave them the right to determine the areas served by the mission, and in the end he had no option but to relent. “ There is a cry for help from the Ukraine,” Golder wrote. “The granary of Russia is empty and the inhabitants are suffering from hunger and the terrors of bandit raids.” He felt a sincere obligation to see for himself what the Americans could do.
The first stop was Kiev, to make arrangements for the food-relief package program, and from there to Kharkov, for meetings with top Ukrainian officials. Kharkov was then the capital of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, independent of Russia until the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union) in late 1922. There was a good deal of confusion about whether the Ukrainians would let the ARA in without a separate agreement, since the Riga accord, they insisted, did not extend to Ukraine. The Ukrainians wanted American aid, but wished to have the conditions for it spelled out in their own terms if possible. Golder returned to Moscow in early December, frustrated at the lack of a clear understanding with the Ukrainian government, although he had managed to assess in a general way the condition of the famine there. It was beyond any doubt that parts of the country were suffering as badly as the Volga, and perhaps as many as nine million people, out of a total Ukrainian population of twenty-six million, were trapped inside the famine zone. Upon reading Golder’s report on Ukraine, Haskell knew the ARA had to expand operations beyond Russia. He had, however, not a single penny to help feed Ukraine.
On December 6, while riding on the train back to Moscow, a down-hearted Golder recorded in his diary: “All of Russia is on the move and in search of bread, it thinks of nothing else, it talks of nothing else [. . .] If conditions do not change for the better, the future, at least the immediate future, is really dark [. . .] Every one is asking the question, ‘Where is the end?’ but no one can give the answer. Many Russians insist that only America can save the country, rumors are even about that America will, but when I ask what can America do, there is nothing definite to propose.” Golder kept meeting Russians who were convinced that America and Russia needed each other for their mutual survival. Many insisted that America could not get along economically without trade with Russia, and so America and Russia were bound to work together. Such notions of America’s dependence on Soviet Russia infected even the high ranks of the Communist Party.
Karl Radek, a Polish Jew, member of the Russian Communist Party’s Executive Committee, and prominent figure in the Communist International (Comintern), an organization dedicated to fomenting world revolution, invited Golder to the Kremlin on the 17th to talk Russo-American relations. In a mix of grammatically shaky Russian and German, Radek explained to Golder that he had sought the meeting to try to convince him that America’s future lay with Russia and that it was in the United States’ interest to cultivate relations with the new Soviet government. He pointed out that since the United States had had official relations with tsarist Russia, which had not been democratic, there was no good reason for America not to recognize the new government. Relations, he insisted, would be to both countries’ benefit. Before Golder left, Radek offered to introduce him to other Bolsheviks who shared his views.
Golder had to admit that Radek was well informed about American politics; nonetheless, he found absurd the notion that America needed Russia, much less that it could save Russia. Russia, he kept telling people, had no money with which to buy American goods; what was more, the Russians didn’t produce anything Americans wanted to buy. Still, Russians repeatedly tried to convince him the United States would be wise to make sacrifices to Soviet Russia now for the sake of trade in the future. “Russia,” Golder noted, “is full of dreamers.”
BUT IT WASN’T just the Russians: there were dreamers among the Americans as well. Childs wrote his mother a letter from Kazan on December 8 extolling the virtues of the Soviet government and blaming the world’s problems on capitalism. He was certain that Wilson had wanted to build a socialist society in America, similar to what Lenin was creating in Russia, but the late president had been thwarted by the crafty maneuvering of American capitalists and the stupidity of the masses, who’d been unable to grasp the fact that Wilson had been working for their benefit. In Soviet Russia, he wrote, “I believe there is a sincerer desire to serve the people on the part of the ruling class of Russia today than there is in America. In a way, I have a greater faith that the true principles of democracy will be obtained in Russia than I have that they will be preserved in America.” He knew that if the folks back home could hear him talk they’d take him for one of those “Bolshevists.”
The following day, Childs set off on a two-week tour of the Tatar Republic, joined by Skvortsov, Simson, and two American journalists—Edwin Hullinger of the United Press and Ambrose Lambert of the Chicago Tribune. They took an overnight train to Sviazhsk and then climbed into several sleighs to take them to the village of Umatovo, their first stop. The trip was harrowing from the start. The men of Umatovo, “honest appearing peasants with dark brown skins and beards which seem to have taken on the color of the soil they tilled,” told them that, unless they received food relief, no more than 3 percent of the village would survive the winter.
Childs spent two weeks traveling over the snow from village to village, weighed down in layers of heavy clothing, hat, and mittens, and clutching a bottle of cognac to help warm his insides and numb the bite of the icy wind. In the Tatar village of Big Bulatovo, the local ARA committee informed their party that the population had fallen from 580 to 300 in just a few months. Many had died; others had fled in search of food. Now, however, there was no more talk of leaving. It was too cold to travel, and the people were too weak from malnourishment. The draft animals that might have taken them away had long ago been killed and eaten. Many of the villagers who had left reportedly died out in the steppe. The remaining villagers had resigned themselves to fate. The secretary of the local soviet told the men that he felt it was his duty to stay on until the bitter end and help as best he could. They had food for another six weeks at the most. Once that was gone, death would come for them. They encountered a similar scene in the village of Tetiushi. Most of the people were living off the few remaining cats and dogs in the area, and Childs noticed that a good many of the villagers were beginning to show signs of bloating from hunger and poor food substitutes.
At times they traveled at night, guided by the bright light of the moon reflected off the sea of powdery white snow. On December 15, they raced along the banks of the Kama River and watched as the moon set and the sun slowly rose in the southeast. Childs found himself mesmerized by the beautiful silhouette of a Russian church against the frozen horizon. Later that day, Hullinger left them for Moscow to attend the upcoming Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and the group stopped for the night in Alexeevskaya. Their lodgings were filthy and infested with vermin. That night, Simson was bitten by a louse.
The 18th found them in the village of Mamadysh, on the Vyatka River, founded over half a millennium before by the ancient Bulgars. Throughout their trip, they had made a point of visiting the children’s homes, all of which were overcrowded, dirty, grim places. The home in Mamadysh was no exception. There were no beds or blankets, and the children lay in their rags upon the floor, nestled up one against another for a bit of warmth. “They resembled,” Childs wrote, “in their dirty garments and in their staring lusterless eyes, the figures of animals rather than human beings.” Childs gave the director of the home 2 million rubles to buy some clothing, and they drove on to the next village.
Dining Hall No. 1 in the village of Tetiushi.
A portrait of Herbert Hoover watches over the children.
Before they departed Mamadysh, they were warned to be on the lookout for wolves, and for bandits who had recently carried out a raid on an ARA warehouse. Childs and his party had left Kazan armed with revolvers in case of such dangers. One of Childs’s sleigh drivers had told him how he had once been set upon by a pack of fifteen wolves in a deserted woods on a dark morning. He had been forced to light a ring of fires around himself and his horse to hold them off until he could make his escape. He had also heard of a schoolmistress who was being driven through a lonely stretch of forest when her sleigh was attacked by wolves. The driver tried to outrun them, but, no matter how hard he whipped his horse, they kept coming. Just as the wolves were about to attack, he turned, shoved the woman out into the snow, and bolted off to the sound of her screams as the beasts tore into her flesh. At one point, the men in Childs’s party noticed that Simson wasn’t with them. Worried, they doubled back, to find him straggling along, nearly frozen from the cold. Now safely reunited, the group pressed on through the snow.
Simson awoke the morning of the 20th suffering from excruciating pains and a high fever. It was typhus, transmitted by the louse bite several days earlier. His condition was severe, and the men knew they had to get him back to a doctor in Kazan as quickly as possible. The closest rail station was at Agryz, nearly eighty miles away, and so they piled into their sleighs and took off as fast as they could ride. They rode all day and night, stopping for fresh horses at each village. Once, when the chairman of the local soviet refused, Skvortsov threatened him with arrest if the best horses in the village were not provided within half an hour. They were on their way again in a few minutes. At one point, they halted at a peasant hut in the middle of the night to warm up and try to get some rest, only to find the walls and floors crawling with bugs. Fearful to sit, much less lie down, they stood just long enough to warm themselves and then returned to their sleighs. An exhausted Childs slept as they whisked over the snowy landscape, until he was violently tossed from the sleigh when they hit a bump; he crash-landed, headfirst, into the side of a wooden building, his heavy fur hat saving him from serious injury. They managed to reach Agryz early on the 22nd, hoping to find a train waiting to take Simson back to Kazan, only to discover it had yet to arrive. Eventually, a train appeared; later that evening, the ailing interpreter was put on board, joined by Childs and Skvortsov. Their furious race of almost forty-eight hours to Agryz had saved Simson’s life, and he went on to make a full recovery.
In two weeks, Childs had traveled 470 miles by sleigh, 180 by rail; he had visited twelve of the Tatar Republic’s thirteen districts, held twelve meetings with district ARA committees, fourteen meetings with county committees, eighteen with village committees, and inspected ten hospitals, thirty-three public kitchens, and thirty-six children’s homes. The experience left him shattered.
On Christmas Day he wrote his mother from Kazan:
This day of “peace on earth, goodwill toward men” broke upon me with terrible irony as I sat and surveyed in contemplation those Russian villages through which I had passed a few days previous and where all was death and desolation. I don’t think I have ever suffered so profoundly as I have these past days [. . .] Has the soul of the world been destroyed since 1914? [. . .] I feel like cursing the entire world outside of Russia for its terrible heartlessness in permitting this awful tragedy to pass by without an attempt at aid on the scale which is needed.
He expected that no more than 20 percent of the population would survive the winter, so much greater was the need than what could be fulfilled by the ARA, the Soviet government, and other aid groups.
There were, nevertheless, a few sparks of human kindness left in the world. As the Americans ate their Christmas Eve dinner in Kazan, so far from home and their loved ones, the Russian women from the office sneaked into their living quarters, put up a tree complete with lights and ornaments, and left the men a few gifts and a cake, baked with the flour from their own ARA rations. The men were deeply touched by their gesture. Childs was certain none of the Americans would ever forget this Christmas or this special tree, a clear, unmistakable sign of the goodwill of the people of Kazan toward the men of the American Relief Administration.
AFTER THREE MONTHS IN RUSSIA, the ARA was feeding nearly 570,000 children a day in three thousand kitchens in 191 towns and villages. Its theater of operations had spread way beyond the central Volga region, extending east to the city of Ufa, on the edge of the Ural Mountains, and south to Astrakhan by the Caspian Sea. The main office in Moscow grew accordingly. There was a liaison division to manage relations with the Soviet government, an accounting division to keep track of every penny spent, a traffic division to oversee the transport of food and matériel by rail, a historical division to record its operations, and a motor division to maintain the ARA’s fleet of 149 vehicles, mostly Cadillac touring cars and Ford camionettes along with two types of trucks: the Pierce-Arrow R-5 and the Standard B “Liberty,” built for the U.S. Army in World War I. Top speed: fifteen miles per hour. By the time the mission was over, these vehicles had covered 1.4 million miles on some of the worst roads imaginable.
Despite the initial success of the operation, it was clear to many in the ARA, as well as to many in the Soviet government, that more help was needed. Haskell wrote to Walter Lyman Brown at the ARA’s London office on December 1 that millions in Russia faced certain death before the harvest of 1922 unless additional aid from outside was forthcoming. A week later, he cabled to Hoover that as many as seven million children in Russia would die unless America did more to help. “As a Christian nation we must make greater effort to prevent this tragedy. Can you not ask those who have already assisted this organization to carry over eight million children through famine in other parts of Europe to again respond to the utmost of their ability?” he asked of The Chief. Haskell’s cable had apparently been arranged ahead of time; it was not meant to convince Hoover of the need for more relief (he was already behind the idea), but was to be used by Hoover to convince the United States Congress. Hoover had for quite some time wanted to increase the size of the Russian operation. He had no interest in some large nationwide public appeal, which, given the still-weak state of the economy, might not be successful and would require him to work with all manner of groups, much to his displeasure. Instead, he set his sights on the federal government, specifically the roughly $20 million in the U.S. Grain Corporation, a successor body to the United States Food Administration created during World War I. Haskell’s cable would help Hoover make his case.
Meanwhile, on December 6, President Harding recommended that Congress appropriate funds to purchase ten million bushels of corn and one million of seed grains for the ARA. In his message to Congress, Harding noted that, although the United States didn’t recognize the Soviet government or tolerate its propaganda, “we don’t forget the traditions of Russian friendship” and must do whatever it could to help the millions starving. Politics must be put aside and we ought to be generous, he said, in keeping with the spirit of the “Christmastide” season. “The big thing is the call of the suffering and the dying.” Harding’s appeal had been orchestrated by none other than Hoover. With agricultural prices in the United States severely depressed because of overproduction, Hoover envisioned a way not only to feed the hungry but also to aid American farmers: the government would purchase their unmarketable grain, thus putting money in their pockets that they would spend on manufactured goods, giving a boost to the industrial sector, and so further help the country out of the depression of 1920–21.
The Chief had other political ideas in mind as well. The very day Harding sent his proposal to Congress, Hoover wrote to Secretary of State Hughes that, even though the United States, unlike some other countries, had not officially recognized Soviet Russia, “Americans are infinitely more popular in Russia and our Government more deeply respected by even the Bolsheviks than any other.” One of the main reasons for this was the work of the ARA, which was helping to increase respect for the United States. Hoover let Hughes know he had no doubt that the Bolsheviks would fall, given the inherent fallacies of their ideology, and when they did, a new, democratic Russia would be built, led by the tens of thousands of Russians who had fled abroad with the revolution. It was his hope that, in light of the good feeling created by the ARA, America might be able “to undertake the leadership in the reconstruction of Russia when the moment arrives.” Hoover made sure, however, not to broadcast this view of the potential fruits of the ARA’s mission.
Hoover, together with former Indiana governor Goodrich, who had recently returned from a fact-finding tour of Russia, appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on December 12 to lobby for the appropriation. They surprised the representatives on the committee by doubling Harding’s initial request. “You would not want, and I should regret to see,” Goodrich told the committee, “this country start in and not do the job right because of the lack of two or three million dollars.” Hoover addressed head-on the question of whether the country could afford so much in foreign aid: “Well, the American public spends a billion dollars annually on tobacco, cosmetics, and the like, and I do not think $20,000,000 too much.” Moreover, we were now feeding milk to hogs and burning corn under boilers. Harm the economy? Too much? In fact, he remarked, this appropriation would be of great help to America’s farmers. Ultimately, however, Hoover told the committee, “no other argument is needed beyond sheer humanity.”
News of the bill was met largely with approval. The New York Tribune ran an editorial on December 8, titled “ Really Helping Russia,” endorsing the plan: “America is still America; her ears are not deaf to cries of human want.” Yet charity didn’t imply dangerous ignorance of the facts. “Give to Russia? Yes; but when giving remember that every word spoken in defense of Bolshevism tends to encoffin Russia—and increase the probability of recurrent famines.” Various groups offered Hoover their support. The president of the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce, William C. Redfield, informed Hoover he would do whatever he could to pressure Congress to pass the bill, and he wrote Wyoming congressman Frank W. Mondell, the House majority leader, of the great future trade benefits of the appropriation once Russia recovered and was open to the world for business: “Nothing could be more certain to react largely and favorably upon American business than unselfishness at this moment.” A lobbyist from the American Farm Bureau Federation made a similar point to the committee: “In addition to saving the lives of starving people in Russia, there will be a comeback—bread cast upon the waters has always had a tendency to come back to the giver.” Support came from across the political spectrum. The liberal New Republic, usually a thorn in Hoover’s side, called the famine appropriations “precedents of a new international order based on humanity and good will,” and The Nation noted, “America seems to be awakening at last to the reality of the Russian famine.” (This from the same publication that in September had called reports of the famine “exaggerated.”)
Riding this wave of support, Hoover tried to rush the bill through the House to prevent attempts by its opponents to organize. It came up for a vote on the floor after only a week, and passed by a vote of 181 to 71, although almost 180 members registered as “not voting” rather than having to cast a vote either way, such was the politically fraught atmosphere created by the Red Scare and depression. The large number of representatives on the sidelines gave an opening to the bill’s opponents in the Senate. Tom Watson of Georgia got up on December 20 to assert that there wasn’t even a food crisis in Russia, that in fact the Russians had plenty of wheat. The bill, Watson insisted, was a gift not to Russia but to Hoover and the ARA. “Charity is a business, a profession,” he insisted. What Russia really needed and deserved, he informed his colleagues, was official recognition, not American intransigence over the type of government they had chosen for themselves. Senators raised a variety of objections. Some wanted government relief for the four million army veterans in dire need before doing anything for Russia. Some argued that the U.S. Constitution forbade using tax dollars for the aid of anyone other than American citizens. Some tried to make the point that American aid would only strengthen the Red Army and thus weaken America’s own defenses.
The voices in favor of the bill in the Senate echoed those in the House, and the opponents were soon defeated. Having passed both chambers of Congress, the bill was signed into law by President Harding on December 22. A few weeks later, Congress approved legislation permitting the War Department and other government agencies to transfer as much as $4 million in surplus material, chiefly medical supplies, to the ARA for Russian relief.
The Ninth All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened in Moscow on December 23. Lenin informed the delegates that the Americans had committed $20 million, which he described as a great success, especially in comparison with what he characterized as the paltry help from Western Europe. He admitted that the American aid would not be enough to cover the entire disaster, but stressed that it was significant help that would go a long way toward easing the suffering of the hungry.
Lenin faced opposition from his colleagues. Just days before the congress opened, Stalin wrote in Pravda that the foreign aid workers operated “at the same time as the most efficient spies of the world bourgeoisie, and that, therefore, the world bourgeoisie now knows Soviet Russia, knows her strengths and weaknesses, better than at any time before, a circumstance fraught with grave danger in the event of new interventionist attacks.” Grigory Zinoviev, another party leader, shared Stalin’s view, as did Nikolai Bukharin, editor of Pravda, who published numerous scathing denunciations of the ARA. “The Americans, like the other European capitalists, are not here to rescue the starving, to improve the conditions of the workers,” asserted one piece. “Oh, no. They are preparing chains and a noose for them. Therefore, workers, be on guard [. . .] At the first attempt to slip handcuffs and a noose on us, we must do the same in return.” Eiduk responded to Stalin on the pages of Izvestiia, defending the ARA and its work alongside the Soviet government. Yes, he admitted, the Americans now had firsthand knowledge of Soviet Russia, but this was nothing to fear: as unbiased, fair observers, they were doing much to counteract the many falsehoods prevalent in the West. Haskell had proved particularly useful in this regard, providing reliable information to the many foreign correspondents now in Moscow.
If such was Eiduk’s public stance, in private he expressed a much different view of the ARA. In a “Top Secret” letter of December 21 to People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin, Eiduk wrote that, since his appointment as plenipotentiary to the ARA, “I have tried to get to the heart of the work of Hoover’s representatives,” and he could now say for certain that “this organization cannot be viewed as apolitical and its work within the borders of the RSFSR* is not honest.” Although the Americans followed the letter of the Riga Agreement, they looked for every opportunity “to expose the defects of the Soviet government, and I can assure you that the entire work of the ARA proves that it is not in their interests to provide serious help to us or the starving, rather the ARA is chiefly concerned with self-promotion.”
The fact was, however, the Soviets needed America’s help, regardless of their fears. On the 24th, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko, “the Bayonet,” a battle-hardened Bolshevik who had helped crush peasant unrest in the Tambov region together with General Tukhachevsky and then been placed in charge of famine fighting in Samara Province, sent a report outlining the horrors unfolding in the area. There were instances in which mothers had led their children out into the steppe and left them there to die, and others, mad from hunger, had stabbed their children to death rather than have to watch them starve. And this was not all. There were reports from the district of Ramyshkovskaya that people had been eating corpses. Burials had to be carried out in secret, or else starving villagers would dig up the bodies and eat them. A guard was posted at the graveyard. The Executive Committee of Usminsky County had submitted details concerning a woman who had chopped up the body of a dead eleven-year-old boy and boiled his flesh in a large kettle.
Antonov-Ovseenko’s report was corroborated three days later by an official from the Samara Cheka. The famine was driving many to suicide; parents were bringing their children into the towns and abandoning them there to fate. Examples of cannibalism, including parents killing and eating their own children, were on the rise. Instances of theft, robbery, and general lawlessness were becoming ever more prevalent, creating a sense of panic in the population. The mood among the working population was ugly and angry. “The feeling of the masses for the communists is hostile.” They needed “immediate emergency help” to cope with the disaster.
Hoover had decided to use the congressional appropriation to force the Soviets to contribute more to the famine-relief effort. Back in late August, he had communicated to Brown that he wanted to convince the Soviets to use some of their gold reserves to help defray the expense. The Soviets had agreed to provide the ARA with $4.5 million in gold to be used to purchase American grain, at cost. Now, however, Hoover upped the figure. He informed Leonid Krasin, the people’s commissar for foreign trade, that the ARA expected $10 million in Soviet gold to be used to purchase seed and grain for feeding operations in the Volga Basin. Krasin wired Moscow of Hoover’s demand, and Lenin replied immediately that he should accept the new terms, so great was his desire to secure further American aid.
America had given Russia renewed cause for hope in combating the famine, but Russia showed little gratitude. When the Congress of Soviets wrapped up on the 28th, it expressed in flowery terms its thanks to Nansen and the “workers of all countries” for their aid, and condemned the world’s bourgeois governments, arguing that they were still bent on using the catastrophe to orchestrate the overthrow of the Soviet government. Lenin assured the delegates that he labored under no false pretenses about the nefarious goals of the various foreign missions, and that the Cheka stood at the ready to defeat any attempts at counterrevolution. The work of the ARA over the past four months received only brief and begrudging acknowledgment.
Golder was disgusted. “In a thousand and one ways they worry us, they arrest the Russians who work for us, they block us here and side track us there,” he complained in a letter to a friend back in California on the last day of the year. “I dare say that nowhere in Europe have our people suffered so many humiliations and have been appreciated so little as here. Were it not for the fact that all realize that the honor of the ARA and of Hoover are mixed up with this work many of our men would not remain here. As it is, we all say we have got to see this thing through somehow.”
Despite the challenges, the men of the ARA carried on. By the end of 1921, the famine had gotten worse—perhaps as many as thirty-six million men, women, and children now faced starvation. The question on everyone’s mind as the horrific year came to an end was whether the American relief would arrive in time to save them.
