The Odessa opera is now open and there is a performance nearly every evening. A member of the American Relief Administration who attended last evening said it was very good, but that the effect was rather spoiled when he stumbled over a corpse lying on the sidewalk just outside.
—Webb Trammell, commanding officer, USS Fox
In July of 1921, while sailors, naval officers, and many other Americans were delighting in the astonishing Russian music suddenly available in Constantinople, and were also becoming more and more enchanted with the beautiful Russian women, Russian author Maxim Gorky made an emergency appeal to the world for his homeland. Back in what was now Bolshevik Russia, millions had begun suffering from a massive famine. Could anyone help?
Admiral Bristol heard of the Russian’s appeals and wrote the State Department of his willingness to cooperate in relief measures, but Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover had already promised food for a million children, some medical supplies—and further investigation.1 Hence, before long, American teams set off on yet additional investigatory journeys, this time to southeastern Russia.
Traveling with a five-man Near East Relief Commission in August of 1921 was the American relief head in the Caucasus, E. A. Yarrow. Yarrow had been doing extensive Armenian relief and orphanage work, but on this journey he would encounter conditions at least as frightful as any he had witnessed in Armenia. In late August, his commission began sending preliminary reports to Hoover and others by a series of long telegrams.
One message pointed out that this was the second year of the famine and that the peasants were now living on bread made of millet and chalk, or grass mixed with earth. Over the winter, many farmers had sold their household goods to maintain life, hoping to pull through till the next harvest. It was not to be: “This summer whole southeast Russia upburned by drought Stop Army grasshoppers ten miles wide swept from Novorossisk through grainbelt destroying what little rye left Stop Population forced eat draught animals when harvest failed now have nothing.”2 A great wave of emigration resulted. Whole towns and farming districts were fleeing by train to neighboring regions. Ironically, peasants were piling into trains traveling in both directions, as nobody knew where food was actually to be had.3 On reaching the cities, the peasants sometimes became struggling mobs. Usually, though, they just lay lifeless about the railway stations.
Members of the commission walked through these camps and came on dying children at every turn. Mothers with shrunken, empty breasts were attempting to nurse their babies on a diet of watermelons. Many of the suffering were emaciated; others featured grotesquely swollen abdomens and limbs. Hence, as the commission reported, these “acres” of helpless humanity were ripe for “death’s sickle” at the moment winter set on.4
An American newspaper writer who visited the train stations toward the end of 1921 found the sickle in full swing: “The people died while they waited—died not by the one, but by the dozen and by the hundred. The children died like flies. They died in the trains, they died around the stations. The women crawled out into the streets and sank dead on the ground. Death became so commonplace that you scarcely noticed it.”5 Having observed trainloads of refugees being forcibly evacuated by a Bolshevik committee, Dr. Henry Beeuwkes would find the situation appalling in the extreme. “I saw one echelon arrive in Moscow from Kazan, where all children in several cars were found frozen to death upon arrival.”6 Hoover’s initial plan to feed a million children (already proposed and agreed to by Bolshevik authorities in July) was obviously insufficient. Somebody had to provide grain for literally millions of starving peasants, along with medical help prodigious enough to stave off mammoth epidemics. Moreover, the grain had to be transported deep into the interior of Russia, all the way to local villages, so the peasants would be on hand to plant corn the next year. Otherwise, not only would millions soon die and more millions in years to come, but aimless refugees (it was thought) would spread social disorder throughout the continent.
Some American politicians wanted the Bolsheviks to fry in their own grease. They argued that by prohibiting trade and private enterprise and by confiscating peasants’ foodstocks—even by confiscating the seed corn for the next crop!—the Bolsheviks had helped to bring about the famine in the first place.7 The Reds should be left to deal with it. Others disagreed. In urging that the relief be approved, many Americans were actuated purely by humanitarian motives. Some (like Herbert Hoover) were largely altruistic but also hoped that ending hunger and starvation would enable the Russian people to gain the physical and moral strength to throw off the Bolsheviks.
In any case, in January of 1922 Congress appropriated $19 million for grain—mainly yellow corn, new to Russia. Additional millions’ worth of medical supplies were to come from the War Department and the American Red Cross. Private contributions and aid from religious charities would greatly swell the total.8 Plans were quickly drawn up. Under the American Relief Administration (ARA), with headquarters in Moscow, some two or three hundred Americans were already locating warehouses and setting up food kitchens for the child-feeding program. Now, in addition, they were to help organize distribution of the huge shipments of corn and assist the American medical teams that were coming.
To what ports should the corn be sent? In September of 1921, Admiral Bristol ordered the destroyer Gilmer with its commander, Mike Robertson, and Bristol’s aide, Lt. Robbie Dunn, to southern Russia to investigate. The Soviet officials there were full of threat and bluff.
When Gilmer docked at the port city of Novorossisk, port authorities announced as they boarded that Russian guards would have to be placed on the American Navy ships, lest the Americans land contraband through offshore portals. Robertson responded that the guards could only stand on the dock. The Bolshevik officials then stipulated that the ship must be quarantined because of “cholera in Constantinople,” at which the Americans just laughed. “But of course you’ll have to shut down your wireless.” Again Robertson refused, and went on to tell the communists that if they insisted on such absurd conditions, they could forget about any food. When the Russian commissar pushed the point, demanding surrender of the radio key, the tough Navy CO gave orders to get his ship under way—whereupon the Russians backed off. Of course the American Navy ship should stay; everyone would cooperate.9
Over the next several months, the Navy’s stiff resolve in the face of Bolshevik blustering was to become typical. Even now, despite their newfound cooperation, some Russians officials boasted, “We live under dictatorship, yet it is one more just and human than the capitalist tyranny.” To this, Robertson argued that the Russian system had created a greater famine than the czar ever had. Actually, only a few officials spouted propaganda, usually the higher-ups. Even on Gilmer’s initial visit, the Russian pilot and the Greek translator whispered to the Americans that nothing would make them Bolsheviks. With good meals on the mess decks, loafs of bread as they left the ship and offers of rare cigarettes, even the surly dock guards soon warmed up. The Greek interpreter privately informed Robertson and Dunn that the 90,000 people in the city had no work, lived three to a room, and from fear mostly stayed off the street. “We starve, but lots of food and plunder are stored away,” he averred. Walking through a bedraggled black market, Dunn witnessed one frail old lady trade her fine ermine stole for a paper spill of salt.10
On returning to Constantinople, the American officers reported that the Bolsheviks were in complete control of the city, and though there were few true believers, the people were utterly demoralized. There would be no chance of a revolt. American food would be welcomed by all, though, and, with some repairs, facilities at Novorossisk would be good enough.11
Over the winter the grain operation got rolling, with ships being loaded in the United States and then sailing direct to Baltic and Black Sea ports. From these ports a vast grid of rail lines would transport the grain an average of a thousand miles inland per trip. Over that winter, most of the Baltic froze up. For several months, transport in the north came virtually to a halt. Moreover, everywhere there was a shortage of locomotives and railcars. (Rail stock had been vandalized and allowed to rust during and since the Revolution.) At Black Sea ports, fewer than 60 of a promised 240 cars per day actually materialized.12 Despite these and other problems, including deteriorated warehouses, warped and spread rails, rotted ties, and so forth, in late January of 1922 supplies of American grain began shipping through Novorossisk and, to a lesser extent, through Theodosia and Odessa.13 In his memoir, Robbie Dunn reported that the grain mainly went through Baltic ports,14 not the only time Dunn got his facts exactly backward: most of the grain actually shipped through the Black Sea. Several Baltic facilities were used, though. Beginning in the spring of 1922, after the freeze, grain also began shipping in the north.
The main contribution of Americans from Constantinople and Turkey was naval liaison, and even this was kept low key lest the naval presence suggest recognition of the Bolsheviks.15 Nevertheless, the relief of the starving in Russia constituted yet another significant part of the American naval service in the region. Admiral Bristol assigned a permanent rotation of destroyers to the northern Black Sea, so at least one destroyer was in Novorossisk at all times, and another at Odessa. The destroyer captains on the Russian stations were kept busy making arrangements with port authorities for the grain ship entry, meeting incoming vessels, relaying communications, and handling unforeseen difficulties.
Map 5. American Destroyer Stations in the Black Sea, 1922–23
Lt. Cdr. Webb Trammell, commanding officer of Fox, was sent by Admiral Bristol to coordinate the initial grain shipments. On January 19, 1922, Fox reported to Novorossisk after a day’s steaming from Constantinople, and over the next several days, Trammell dealt with the local police and other key Bolsheviks. He also visited with ARA officials, who were already in the city preparing for the grain shipments. Trammell reported some of his conversations by message back to the admiral.16 On January 29, Fox made a day’s visit to Theodosia to offload some ARA passengers, and Trammell visited with many officials there, too. Among other things, he learned that Fox was the first foreign vessel to visit Theodosia since the Russian Revolution. Trammell suggested that Bristol consider offloading some of the grain ships in Theodosia, too, for the positive effect it might have on Russian morale.17
Fox returned to Novorossisk, and while awaiting the first grain ships, Trammell visited a nearby Greek refugee camp. The five or six thousand ethnic Greeks in the camp had sometime earlier fled to Russia from the Black Sea coast of Turkey. They were having to beg for what little food they could get—which wasn’t much, for they only could beg from already destitute Russians! Hence five Greeks were dying daily, and the Greek leaders told Trammell they were all hoping one way or another somehow to get on to Greece.18
On February 6, Fox went to sea to meet SS Winnebago, the first American relief ship to arrive in Russia. Fox transferred a Russian pilot to this grain ship and then led the way back into Novorossisk.
Two days later, Trammell handed the Novorossisk diary he had begun to Capt. Robert Ghormley of Sands and steamed southeast toward Batoum (en route, the destroyer battled heavy winds and seas).19 He spent a few days there, then steamed west to Constantinople for another week, and then traveled back north, this time to coordinate the initial arrival of grain ships at Odessa. Reaching Sebastopol on February 21, Fox’s captain relayed to Bolshevik officials the requests of the SS Effna and SS Deepwater for pilots and for permission to enter port at Odessa. Fox then got under way to meet and accompany the latter two grain ships to berths in that city, which they reached on February 26, and the ship and its officers would also coordinate the arrival of SS Ward at Odessa a few days later. On March 2, Fox transferred two American correspondents and an ARA official to another destroyer steaming back to Constantinople. (The correspondents had apparently been reporting on the grain delivery.) A few days later, SS Duquesne also arrived at Odessa with grain, and on March 14, Trammell arranged for lighters and a tug to aid SS Western Glen, which had gone aground near Sebastapol. Eventually, Duquesne and Ward began offloading grain in Odessa, after which, on March 23, the destroyer Sturtevant arrived to relieve Trammell’s ship.20
A succession of destroyers continued this coordination work for over a year. Two destroyer captains kept complete files of their war diaries for this period in their private papers,21 noting the overall conditions in Russia, the specific difficulties they were encountering, their strategies for dealing with the Bolsheviks, and general impressions. A few other captains’ periodic reports can be found in various archives. Hence one can describe the situation from the American naval point of view in some detail.
For example, consider Webb Trammell’s war diary description of the terrible conditions he or his men encountered at the formerly beautiful city of Odessa. A Russian priest complained in an American’s hearing that the government refused to bury the 600 bodies that had just been piled in front of his cemetery, and that dogs and vultures were devouring the dead. Trammell’s war diary mentions that Americans themselves regularly came across bodies left in the streets, including one right in front of the ARA building.22
Further, a doctor from a local hospital told Trammell that there were 6.000 cases of typhus in Odessa, 150 of whom were dying daily, this in addition to deaths caused by starvation. A couple of months later in this same city, the commanding officer of Williamson would find 800 corpses in the basement of a hospital; outside, carts stood idle in the street, piled with dead bodies. “Were I to try for hours I could not paint a picture as gruesome as I saw conditions this morning,” he would write. Cdr. Harry Pence of McFarland heard that forty doctors had died in Odessa over the winter, mainly from typhus.23
The great desperation of the Russian people was visibly manifest when Effna and Deepwater started discharging their grain. Trammell described the scene when wheat was spilled inadvertently: “Thousands of people gather on and near the piers to collect the scattered grains of corn. They crawl on hands and knees and pick up the grains one at a time, women leaving their babies lying on the ground nearby [in order to do so]. In the meantime, the soldiers endeavor to keep them off the piers. The rifles are used as clubs as well as being continually discharged to frighten them. The fusillade continues day and night, women and children driven back at the point of the bayonet, crying. This is not an occasional happening, but a continuous performance.” Daily theft by workmen, who carried the grain in pockets or in bags under their shirts, was so bad that each man had to be searched on leaving the piers, a procedure “similar to the diamond mines,” Trammell thought. When a sympathetic sailor from Fox carried a pan full of scraps out onto the dock, it created such a riot that a special guard had to be called out.24
Throughout their coordination work, the American naval officers reported that the Bolshevik military exercised a very harsh discipline—some of it no doubt necessary, but much of it not. In April an American relief administrator named Clement told Commander Pence that when a man had attempted to steal a mere handful of grain, a nearby sentry immediately had mashed his face to the bone with the butt of his rifle, and then hit him again and again. Clement had also seen a man and boy shot dead for stealing a little grain, the sentry who fired those shots afterward not giving the bodies a second glance. In May nearly all hands on Pence’s ship saw a small boy shot and killed nearby for stealing food.25
All the destroyermen felt sympathy with the suffering, and many tried to help in one way or another—by saving scraps from their meals to send to the local hospital, for instance, or again by feeding those on the pier. Sooner or later almost every destroyer tried the latter tactic. Seeing “a motley crowd of waifs and others” one day waiting expectantly with buckets from early morning to late evening, McFarland fed soup to 250. After all had been served, the chief Russian Cheka informed the officer of the deck that they could not continue the feeding; it would attract too many starving people.26 The sailors of another ship learned to slip by the guard gate with loaves of bread under their jackets, having found that the Russians ashore would swap almost anything for a few slices of bread, or for cigarettes. Moreover, before the practice was stopped, several destroyers even gave some Russians menial jobs aboard ship, a measure for which there was ready precedent: in America’s China Fleet of that day it was common practice to employ coolies aboard ship, even when under way.27 Ens. Dolly Fitzgerald recalled in an informal oral history that McCormick’s sailors made mess cooks of some of the local Russians while his ship was at Odessa. One of these mess cooks had been an officer in the Russian navy; in the ship’s laundry they had a prince.28
And at one point, small boys began to swim out to McCormick to collect food left for them on the deck. After wrapping it for their families, they would swim back ashore. But if a Russian guard spotted a swimmer, the American sailors could only grimace and hope that the guard’s shots would go wide.29 Word of American generosity traveled quickly. The commander of a Soviet destroyer told Trammell that when his ship stopped in Yalta, a number of children had rowed out in small boats and asked for loaves of bread, certain that the ship was American. It was all he could do to persuade them otherwise.30
Russian officials sometimes had political reasons for objecting to the Americans’ charity. Cdr. Robert Ghormley, then commanding Sands, found that his sailors’ feeding of the Russians outraged the local Bolsheviks, for it gave the lie to all their propaganda about the hated “Capitalists.”31 Indeed, the very presence of the Americans was hard for the communist officials to accept. “Without saying a word, the men [go] among the populace, smiling, well-fed, clean and warmly clothed, generously spending their money. They are a walking advertisement for America and an undisputable argument against Bolshevism.”32 At first, the Bolsheviks tried to convert the Americans. Sometimes they wined and dined the naval officers. The officers, however, noted that the officials themselves always had plenty to eat and drink despite the famine. Also, the Americans learned that for furnishings, the communist officials could easily draw on great quantities of furniture, rugs, and other articles that had been recently “nationalized” and placed in warehouses.33
The communists addressed the naval proletariat more often than officers, though. For instance, the “International Seaman’s Club” in Odessa regularly gave a concert or a dinner for American sailors. With the “results of Communism so plainly written on everything in these cities,”34 Commander Trammell thought he had little to fear of his men being contaminated, and so he sent twenty of them to a concert. The political propaganda began at a supper afterward. “The general trend of the speeches was to the effect that Russia is the working man’s paradise, that when American sailors can call the Captain down off the bridge and take charge of the ship they can call themselves a free people.” Unaffected by such barely veiled suggestions, the men reported the whole episode to their CO.35
Back home in the States, the Bolsheviks’ message would have gone over even worse. A letter found in the Bristol files was written by a Russian who somehow had gotten to America at about the same time the destroyers were visiting Odessa. This dressmaker was urging a fellow Russian dressmaker in Constantinople to follow him to the States.
Sell everything and come. There are lots of Russians here and as much work as one likes to have. Life is cheap, and the bolsheviks will not have the pleasure of seeing revolution started here in [the] near future: the workman is able to eat and to drink and to dress same as a millionaire. I am not exaggerating. . . .
Why are you afraid of coming? We should have so nice a time. Dressmakers are greatly asked for, we should rent a flat, open a shop. No evacuations, no scandals, neither Turks, nor Soviets.
. . . I give everyone the [same] advice: Sell anything you’ve got, throw away what cannot be sold, and come to America.36
Lieutenant Holmes of McFarland attended another Odessa propaganda session. An excellent musical program, including selections from Kreisler and from the opera Rigoletto (performed by hungry singers), was followed by a long and fiery speech from an Italian Bolshevik. The American sailors were invited to return. However, even though Holmes counted twenty-six bottles of wine on the sailors’ table (the party had reportedly cost over a billion rubles, or, allowing for the great inflation, about $350), when he stopped by the next day, he found that none of McFarland’s crew had come back. Holmes did find a black seaman from SS Gaffney being lectured by two English-speaking communists. The American seaman offered his hand to the American naval officer, but Holmes refused to shake it, thereby no doubt giving the communists a talking point.37
On at least one occasion, two merchant sailors did jump ship because of the Bolshevik propaganda. A day or two later they showed up at the duty destroyer, looking for something to eat and a place to lay their heads. However, Webb Trammell turned them away, saying he did not recognize them. He accused them of being Bolsheviks. Each day they would come back “more hungry and more disgusted” than before. Finally, when they were reduced to the state of begging to be recognized, asserting they had had enough of Bolshevism and were now completely cured, Trammell put the desperate seamen aboard another merchant vessel so they could finally get out of the wretched place.38
Otherwise, there wasn’t much doing ashore to interest the Navy men. Though the merchant seamen were drawn to the vice of the city, the Navy sailors do not seem to have been much attracted. After all, their home port was the inimitable Constantinople, and they hardly needed to slum it for vice in Odessa. Well, several of McFarland’s sailors did jump ship one night. Captain Harry Pence was much surprised and chagrined, and immediately awarded several summary court-martials and bad conduct discharges.39
A specific form of local entertainment did attract widely. Sailors and officers from virtually every ship attended the Odessa opera at least once.
Sometimes they used the box that the American Relief Association had rented for the season, at the cost of a few cents. Pence found the performance unworthy of the good artists, who deserved a better fate. The orchestra was weak, the house was poorly lighted, and the odor from the audience was nauseating. He stayed for less than an act.40 Ens. Dolly Fitzgerald liked the opera better (he also saw a ballet), but he was bemused to note that the people who attended were very raucous. Someone had taken fiendish delight in putting the most obnoxious fellows in the czar’s box, he thought.41 Commander Trammell wrote in his war diary that the members of the opera troupe were paid one hundred thousand rubles per month, the current price of a loaf of bread.42 As members of the former bourgeois, they apparently had the alternative of singing for this ration, or being imprisoned, or shot. Not surprisingly, a couple of months after Trammell’s visit, Cdr. Harry Pence recorded that five of this same company had died of starvation.43
No doubt manifesting their own bourgeois taste, the American officers were especially interested in the visual arts. At Sebastopol, Trammell visited the famous Panorama, which depicted the siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean War. He regarded this cylindrical work of art as the most interesting painting he had ever seen.44 Harry Pence met the widow of the famous Russian sea painter Ivan Ivasovsky at the Ivasovsky Art Museum at Theodosia. She invited him to take what he liked, for otherwise the communists would just shred the paintings. Pence bought some, which remain in the family to this day.45 Cdr. Carlos Bailey of Sturtevant also met the painter’s widow, who he found living in the museum’s basement with her granddaughter: “That evening two or three of the ship’s officers and I took them some food—bread and other delicacies. They brought out some wine and ate ravenously, after which we danced half the night to the music of the ship’s Gramophone.” The Russian women were excellent dancers, though their dancing was so vigorous that they almost swept the men off their feet.46
As various episodes show, tragedy lay at every turn. Indeed, in many parts of Russia, cannibalism was taking place. In May of 1922, Commander Pence was told by relief worker E. P. Murphy in Theodosia that two girls of eighteen had been boiled and eaten there just the other day; several other children had also been stolen and killed for food.47 Writer F. A. Mackenzie saw photographs that haunted his memory, and from American relief workers he heard many terrible accounts. Although some of their stories were said to be “unspeakably gruesome”—and they were—in his 1923 book Russia before Dawn, the author described them in detail anyway.48 Americans doing publicity for the Russians back in Constantinople found their fund-raising adversely affected. The starvation that afflicted the White Russians in the city (about which they were writing home) was simply “too colorless, compared to cannibalism in Russia itself.”49
Few if any Navy people actually saw evidence of cannibalism, but they were much disturbed by seeing the dying on the streets and the dead “stacked like cordwood” in Novorossisk and Odessa,50 and seldom quickly interred.
Lt. Matt Gardner and another officer of the destroyer Biddle were assigned to locate the bodies and arrange the burial of two American merchant sailors who had died at Odessa during a flu epidemic. Gardner and his friend were worried about this assignment, because there was no vaccination available to protect them. After talking it over, the officers improvised with a few drinks of cognac. Then they proceeded to the city morgue.
This proved to be a vast charnel house with bodies stacked upon bodies, all still wearing the clothes in which they had died. The attendant led the Americans through row upon row, turning over the stiff, frozen bodies to check identification tags by lantern light. After examining seemingly every single corpse in the place, they finally found the seamen’s bodies in a small adjacent building, a place set apart strictly for victims of the flu. The Americans arranged the burial details and quickly beat a quick retreat for more cognac.51
Webb Trammell had no such fortification when he visited a Princess Soumbatoff on a brief stop at Sebastopol, an experience quite disturbing in its own way. Despite her advanced age, this former aristocrat was continually persecuted by the Bolsheviks. Nevertheless, she willingly risked even further maltreatment by requesting a meeting with Trammell, the representative (as she put it) of “a sympathetic and fearless nation.” Soumbatoff desperately wanted Trammell to see the true conditions in the city, normally kept hidden. When Trammell replied that he could not investigate further because his ship was leaving within two hours, the princess broke down and wept bitterly.
She lamented not for herself, she said (old servants, friends, and people she had once assisted now helped her out, and a single bowl of gruel daily was all she needed) but instead for the Russian people. Before the Revolution she had been criticized for giving the simple folk so much attention. Now it hurt her terribly to see these beloved people “not only dying, but becoming such brutes; that these once gentle and loving people are actually turning into animals.” She took one of Trammell’s hands in hers and begged that he would do everything in his power at least to save the orphan children. And Trammell found himself promising, though he thought he could do very little about it all. Afterward the commander was startled to realize that despite the woman’s weakened condition, the interview had lasted for over an hour. It was “one of the worst hours I’ve ever spent, but one that I would not have missed and shall never forget.”52
Rather than aristocrats, the Americans were more commonly accosted by people caught in the country unexpectedly and now wanting out of it—a Russian merchant marine officer, for instance, who had worked many years in the United States. This man had been educated as an electrical engineer at the University of California. Afterward, while taking out citizenship papers, he had taken a job as a commercial representative for the International Harvester Company. Then he got caught up in the Great War and ended up serving as a Russian naval officer. Later, as a captain of a merchant ship in the Mediterranean, he had left his ship at Constantinople to fetch his wife and child from Odessa, only to be stranded by the Wrangel collapse. Now he had a job as a port pilot with the American Relief Administration—for a few months.53
In that same city a bit later on, the bachelor Trammell had a somewhat more welcome experience: “Today a woman asked me to marry her. I didn’t have enough presence of mind to make the customary remarks about ‘This is so sudden,’ etc. I told her that I was already married—that being the best excuse I could think of. She said that made no difference, that she was too.” The woman’s husband was in France and she wanted to join him. The marriage would be fictitious, and she realized the procedure would be irregular—but not nearly as irregular as present-day life in Russia. She knew of a German who would marry her, but she wouldn’t marry a German even fictitiously. Trammell told the woman that if he found somebody suitable he would certainly let her know. “She seemed to be very nice, was quite good looking, and I think has good taste.”54 Harry Pence later recollected that girls in Russia would marry any American at all in order to get out of the country.55 Several American relief workers, including the district supervisor in Odessa, did marry Russian women (some of whom worked for the ARA) and took them back home with them. In fact, one ARA official wrote at the time that there was “an epidemic of marriages” among the relief workers; he was skeptical that these marriages would work.56
Not everybody wanted out of Russia. Some wanted in—if they could profit by it. American trade commissioner Gillespie forwarded a message from the destroyer Overton to E. St. J. Greble of Baldwin Locomotives, then in Bucharest trying to sell locomotives to the Romanians. The message stated that a Russian general named “Ships” was enthusiastic over the idea of an influential American commercial representative coming to Novorossisk. On receiving this message, Greble and two associates traveled to Constantinople, where Bristol put them on Sturtevant, which immediately steamed off to the Russian port.57 Trammell, there in his destroyer, expressed amusement upon hearing of Greble’s hopes, for the commander knew General Shtip, and could accurately estimate the general’s likely knowledge of Russian railway transportation. Greble was irritated by Trammell’s attitude, but, as Trammell recorded in his war diary, it took about thirty minutes to get telephone connection to the general’s office, ten minutes to explain the purpose of Greble’s visit, two minutes for the general to say he knew nothing of Russian rail transportation in general or of buying locomotives in particular, and another two minutes for Greble to decide to return to Bucharest via Constantinople.58
However, in Greble’s opinion the journey was not a waste. He insisted to Trammell he was “sowing the seeds of great commercial concessions in Russia.”59 Greble was the archtypical salesman, always on the lookout. En route to Novorossisk, Sturtevant had visited the czar’s palaces and wine cellars near Yalta. The five glasses of wine Greble tasted there had not only given him warm feelings about Yalta, but had also aroused his commercial enthusiasm. Greble was struck by the fact that the wine cellars’ seven tunnels contained a collection of over ten thousand casks plus two and a half million bottles of aged wine from throughout the world. It had cost the czar a fortune. Greble conceived the idea of trading for the wine, that is, “to take the wine we saw in exchange for coal, locomotives, and cars and some wheat maybe for the inhabitants.” Yes, some wheat for the starving . . . what a happy last thought. The Greek interpreter thought Greble’s idea excellent, but whether anybody in Moscow also did is not recorded.60
After the abortive trip to Novorossisk, Greble rode Fox back to Constantinople, stopping first at the Turkish port of Trebizond. There Greble tried to sell the Turkish governor some locomotives, only to discover there was no railroad in or near Trebizond (there once had been). Undeterred, Greble tried to interest the Turks in building one. Well, maybe after the war, the Turkish governor replied, and of course he hoped the Americans would build it.61 Back in Constantinople, Greble wrote a ten-page letter to the admiral justifying his recent efforts.
What did the Americans achieve with their Russian relief work? To the naval officers success sometimes seemed hollow. Dolly Fitzgerald had looked on with futility while professors from the university at Odessa who were dressed in rags loaded bricks into wheelbarrows under the close watch of Red guards. Unaccustomed to labor, many intellectuals in Russia died of such treatment.62 In addition, the communists were sometimes obstructive, and they frequently allowed widespread graft. The army and outlaw bands often took grain for themselves, while at one location a local despot prevented the American feeding for two or three weeks by putting guards around the warehouses, inhibiting the relief distribution, and calling a general strike.63 At Black Sea ports, when dock and railway workers saw relief supplies pile up without themselves getting much, they tried capitalist tactics and struck for higher wages. Some workers began to seize the food by carload lot.64
American reliefers occasionally got depressed. On a day in September of 1922, Anna Mitchell and a relief official named Ringland and his wife drove from Constantinople up to the summer resort of Therapia, where they found two relief men just down from Russia. A third man, expected the next day by boat, was said to have very “ill nerves” and tuberculosis, and Mitchell was told that breakdowns among the relief workers were not uncommon, especially on remote sites. Mitchell gathered that the work was terribly trying. The reliefers were always fighting impossible obstacles, not only from incompetence, but too often from deliberate obstruction. The Americans might be able to make soup for the starving if they had fuel and a pot, for instance, but they often couldn’t get them—and people would die as a result, sometimes right in front of the Americans. One of the relief men at Therapia, reportedly a mild and unemotional person, said that during the war he had specialized in machine guns. Now “he sometimes had a pleasant dream of putting all the Bolshiviki authorities up in front of one of them.”65
Both at the time and for decades to come, the Soviet government would greatly depreciate America’s help, making Herbert Hoover (who had spearheaded the relief work) a kind of villain guilty of the murder of many Russian people, in one of the most extreme examples.66 In fact, this was the opposite of the truth. Overall, the American effort, including the required naval coordination, was magnificent. While it could take many weeks for the food to get to the interior even after it reached the Russian ports, it eventually did get there.67 Estimates of the number kept alive are difficult, but at the peak of its effort the American Relief Administration was feeding maybe 10.5 million hungry Russian people, at an overall cost of tens of millions of dollars.68 Also, millions of people were inoculated against cholera, typhoid, and paratyphoid fevers or vaccinated against smallpox, while thousands of hospitals, dispensaries, and children’s homes had been given medical help.69 Perhaps most important, the Americans provided the peasants ample seed for planting. As a result, good harvests in 1922 and 1923 would quickly end the need for American help.
The gratitude of those helped by the Americans was sometimes profoundly expressed. At a small village along a railroad line, peasants from the surrounding region received their share of corn even as the Easter bells were ringing. Before beginning their long march home, one group of these men and women sought out the American supervisor. They told him that they and their neighbors would always associate the ringing of Easter bells with the yellow American corn, which had come at that season to rescue them from death.70 Some Soviet officials at the time also expressed a deep gratitude, and Maxim Gorky (in a letter to Hoover) gave tribute to the American generosity as “unique in human history.”71
As for the American Navy people, while they objected to much that was going on in southern Russia (this included the execution of many returning Deniken and Wrangel soldiers, despite Bolshevik promises of immunity72), from their firsthand point of view of the grain being offloaded and entrained and of desperate thousands being fed, they often could see in context the specific importance of their own country’s generosity.
Like most American commanders (including Admiral Bristol himself at one point, with his staff and their wives73), Commander Pence had visited the czar’s wine cellars at Yalta, being made welcome there by a Mrs. Vedel, an Englishwoman who was the wife of one of the managers. Her husband had been imprisoned for eight months and sentenced to be shot, but had finally been liberated. A son, an officer in the Imperial Army, was not so lucky: he had been killed by the Bolsheviks at Yalta.
When Pence spoke with Mrs. Vedel, she was doing her best to make a happy home for her family and hoped to send her remaining children to the American schools in Constantinople. But things had gotten very tense before Pence met her. Hearing of the American relief, this woman had once taken some wine on her back and walked the fifteen miles of mountainous territory to Novorossisk to exchange it for forty pounds of American flour—and then walked back. The flour had helped her keep her remaining children alive.74
Thanks to American generosity and the efficiency of the American relief workers, the doctors, the merchant seaman and the officers and men of the American destroyers sent from Constantinople, and because of the arrangements of Admiral Bristol and his staff as well, from January 1922 into 1923 episodes of this kind had occurred all over the famine-stricken heartland of Bolshevik Russia.
