Long before he was elected President in 1928, at the age of fifty-four, Herbert Hoover’s life had been eventful enough to fill two thick volumes of memoirs. The son of an austere Quaker blacksmith, born in a two-room frame house in West Branch, Iowa, he retained from his upbringing the art of friendly (or at times unfriendly) persuasion. Departing from Quaker rules, he smoked and drank and fished on Sunday and swore like a longshoreman. Orphaned at ten, he was raised by an aunt in Oregon. Hoover attended a newly opened college called Stanford, then tuition-free, and graduated in its first class, in 1895, as a mining engineer.
His life resembled a series of vignettes in a boy’s adventure book: Hoover the globe-trotter, caught in China’s Boxer Rebellion or trekking through the Burmese jungle. Hoover the London-based financier who raised money for promising mining ventures in distant lands. Hoover the mogul in czarist Russia, investing in oil fields in the Caucasus, gold mines in Kazakhstan, and the million-and-a-half-acre Kyshtin estate in the Urals, which had its own mines and ironworks. Hoover the wire-puller and market manipulator, whom his rivals called a conniver, buying an interest here, promoting a stock there, and always selling out at a profit.1
In 1911 he went to Kyshtin and found a modern refinery in a semifeudal environment, “a microcosm of all of Russia,” as he recalled. “At the top a Russian noble family and at the bottom 100,000 peasants and workers…. Peasants devastated by famine…a hideous social background…. Always there was the feeling among us that some day the country would blow up.” At a railroad station, he saw a long line of men and women chained together and marched aboard a freight car bound for Siberia. Despair was in their faces. The scene so shook the normally impassive Hoover it gave him nightmares.2 Although the Kyshtin mines became the biggest copper producer in Russia, turning out 25 million pounds a year, Hoover had premonitions and got out in 1916, a year before the Bolsheviks seized foreign-owned mining companies. He lost an estimated $15 million, but not his shirt. World War I found him living the good life in London, as director of eighteen companies with business interests on five continents, from zinc in Australia to silver in Burma. He was a millionaire several times over, though resented as “a pushful American.”3
In 1914, looking for an area of the war where his organizing abilities could be of use, Hoover focused on the plight of the eight million Belgians, occupied by Germans who refused to feed the civilian population, and cut off by the British naval blockade from the ships that could have brought food.
Mass starvation loomed. Hoover stepped in and founded the Commission for Relief in Belgium. He thought it would be a short war; it was just a matter of tiding the Belgians over until the next harvest. He went to Berlin to obtain an agreement for the passage of his ships and the distribution of food. When he discussed the issue of instructions to U-boat commanders with Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, Hoover told him a joke about a man who asked his neighbor to keep his bulldog tied up. “Oh, he won’t bite,” the neighbor said. “You may know he won’t bite,” the man said, “I may know he won’t bite, but does the dog know it?” It was the only time he got a laugh from a German.4
In the next two and a half years, Hoover bought, carried, and distributed 2.5 million tons of food for Belgium and German-occupied northern France. The British and the French paid for about 90 percent, or $226 million, with donations making up the rest. Raised to prominence by his good works, Hoover dealt with chiefs of state and cabinet ministers, negotiating treaties with belligerents on both sides, and enforcing compliance by threatening to cancel the mission. He obtained the right-of-way for his ships to clear the British blockade and the U-boats, and proceed through a mine-free channel to Rotterdam. In the unlimited submarine war of 1917, three of his ships were sunk, even though they carried big signs from stem to stern that heralded: BELGIAN RELIEF COMMISSION. The Belgians sold empty flour sacks to the Germans, who used them as sandbags in the trenches; the British were furious when they took trenches after weeks of battle and found sandbags stamped BELGIAN COMMISSION.5
Famine fighting was like running a corporation: strict accounting, tight administration, one CEO. Hoover got the job done, and when he came home in May 1917 he was famous, the great humanitarian who had single-handedly saved millions from starvation. All over the country, mothers told their kids to eat their spinach and think of the starving Belgian children. One of his admirers, President Wilson, named him to the post of Food Administrator, responsible for regulating prices, assuring supply, and eliminating speculation, but he also continued as chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, or CRB. Now the United States paid the bills, which rose to $75 million over the next six months.6
When the Russian Revolution came in November 1917, Hoover followed events at the Kyshtin estate he had once owned. Upon learning that the technical staff had been driven out as bourgeois idlers, he cursed the Bolsheviks’ “enthroned ignorance.” Here was a copper refinery that he had helped build, with highly complicated chemical and metallurgical operations. Its machinery required expert mechanics to keep it in good order. And what did these Bolsheviks do? They threw out the people who knew how to run the plant. “A thunderclap guided by blind stupidity shattered this tuned intelligence in an instant,” he recalled. “In a week the works were shut down. The very furies of ignorance were in the saddle.”7
In 1917, as Hoover continued his Belgian program, he clashed with his own government, for the priority of the U.S. Army was shipping men to France, not food to Belgium. And yet the appeals kept coming. Malnutrition and tuberculosis were taking their toll. Belgians were fainting in soup lines, children were dying, but Hoover could not obtain the ships to meet his quota. General Peyton C. March, the Army Chief of Staff, a man as willful as Hoover, told him bluntly, “If we do not get the men to France, there will be no Belgian Relief problem.”
Two years of infighting in London had turned Hoover into a shrewd negotiator. He devised an argument that turned food into a weapon scarcely less important than military victories. The Belgian population was divided between French-speaking Walloons and Germanic Flemish. The risk of jeopardizing relief, Hoover told President Wilson, was that the Flemish half might secede and form a pro-German state. The French would suffer a terrible blow to their morale if the Flemish were to defect. Thus, curtailing relief could damage the war effort. Out of necessity, recognizing that only military imperatives would sway the men in charge of the war, Hoover invented the politics of famine.8
Scrambling for ships, he diverted freighters from the Cuban sugar trade and rationed American candy makers. He urged King Albert of Belgium, in exile in France, to intervene with the King of Sweden. America’s envoy to the Belgian King, Brand Whitlock, found Hoover brusque and peremptory. “What a bully!” Whitlock exclaimed. “He would even bully a poor exiled king!” Hoover got his Swedish ships, as well as a handful of British ships after a direct appeal to the Prime Minister, Lloyd George.
On November 11, 1918, the fighting was over, but not the help to destroyed nations. In Hoover’s words, the Horsemen of War and Death had passed by, only to be replaced by the Horsemen of Famine and Pestilence. He was now internationally famous, the subject of poems and songs, such as:
Who kept the Belgians’ black bread buttered?
Who fed the world when millions muttered?
…Hoover—that’s all!9
Hoover lobbied the President and his cabinet with his plans to use food as an instrument of postwar policy. In the starving inhabitants of defeated nations, he saw the specter of revolution. Among his converts was Secretary of State Lansing, who agreed that hunger bred social upheaval. “Empty stomachs mean Bolsheviks,” he wrote on October 28, 1918. “Full stomachs mean no Bolsheviks.”10 The President too was won over, and said in his remarks to the state food administrators on November 12, the day after the Armistice, that “the world has to be revictualed.” Hoover would continue to lead “the fight against famine,” for “famine is the mother of anarchy.” Wilson asked Hoover to transform his Food Administration into an agency for the reconstruction of Europe, the American Relief Administration. In January 1919, Wilson asked Congress for $100 million. There was considerable opposition from isolationist Republicans like Representative Henry F. Ashurst of Arizona, who exclaimed on January 20: “I do not propose feeding anything but hot lead to murderous Bolshevists.” But Democrats who backed the plan sold it on the grounds that food shipments would “stem the wave of Bolshevism,” so that “our boys” would not have to “fight another war.” The funds were approved at the end of January.11
By that time, Hoover was in Paris. He had left New York on November 16 aboard the SS Olympia, to invade the Old World with his armada of food, which he would command and navigate. Frank Polk, the State Department counselor, cabled Colonel House in Paris: “Confidentially, I think you will have to calm Hoover down a little as his plans may be resented by the allies.”12
The press now dubbed Hoover “Food Administrator to the World.” He remained in Paris while the peace negotiations dragged on from January to July 1919. His secret purpose, approved by Lansing, was to feed the anti-Bolshevik elements in Russia, as well as in other countries where the Bolsheviks were active. As such, he became the key figure in America’s policy of containment, under the cover of food.
Hoover loathed “the plague” of Bolshevism and believed that “no greater relief of human misery could be undertaken than” the suppression of the Soviet regime. His feelings were founded on his experience in the Russian copper mine, which he had made efficient and productive, only to see it ruined by the Bolsheviks.13
Hoover’s policy was aimed at preventing the Bolsheviks from spreading beyond their borders to the Baltic states and Finland, or to Germany and Hungary, where they were already agitating. Under the guise of his American Relief Administration, he became deeply involved in foreign policy and military affairs. Ostensibly, he was in the business of sending food. But covertly, he was supporting anti-Bolshevik regimes and sending both food and military equipment to anti-Bolshevik armies. Once again, Hoover was conducting a war within a war.14
Vanquished Germany was a case in point. In the months after the Armistice, Germany was a wasteland mired in revolution and civil war. Famine and lawlessness gripped the nation and pitched battles were being fought in the streets of Berlin. The Kaiser had fled, and the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert had formed an interim government, but if it was to succeed, he would have to put down the uprising of the Bolshevik-inspired Spartacist League, who intended to bring about a Socialist revolution.
Ebert was elected the first German President in January 1919, but the civil war dragged on. By March, the Bolsheviks were in control of Munich and Hamburg. Hoover thought food was the answer. The German people were starving, penalized by defeat, not even allowed to fish in their own waters. Hoover organized a conference in Brussels with the British and the Germans on March 13, 1919. Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, who had handled transport operations in the Dardanelles, went up to Hoover and said: “Young man, I don’t see why you Americans want to feed these Germans.” Hoover replied: “Old man, I don’t understand why you want to starve women and children after they are licked.” Hoover started moving food to Germany in April and propped up the Ebert government, which adopted the motto, “without order, no bread.” The uprisings subsided and Germany was saved from a Bolshevik government. Hoover was confirmed in the belief that “whoever controlled the food controlled the state…. It was nip and tuck keeping ahead of the Communist movement.”15
More deadly than the medieval plague, the dismemberment of the Hapsburg empire removed every semblance of orderly rule. In those ruined lands, the broad belt of submerged races, tossed between hunger and reawakened dreams of nationhood, were cast adrift. A lordless and exhausted people drained of hope and energy were easily manipulated. The scourge swept away the stores of food and seed, most of the domestic animals, and the accumulated capital of housing and tools that represented the labor of many generations. And here were these newly formed nations, naked as Adam, which had to start over, with nothing to implement their needs, while diplomats in Paris discussed the terms of peace. Here was Hungary, which had once taken pride in the pompous name of empire, now rejoicing in its separation from Austria.
In Hungary, where Hoover saw “a sort of unending procession of tragedies,” Count Michael Karolyi had been named President of the liberal government. Two thirds of the newly minted republic were occupied by Romanian and Czech troops. Hoover sent trainloads of food for starving Hungarians, but his supplies could not keep Karolyi in power. On March 22, 1919, Bela Kun, a Hungarian soldier captured by the Russians and converted to Communism, set up a Soviet republic and launched a Red Terror. Hoover had a train of twenty-five carloads of food en route to Budapest even as Bela Kun arrested and executed some of his Hungarian relief council members. On Hoover’s initiative, the Allies declared on June 26 that food would only be sent to a government that represented the Hungarian people. Just one month later, Kun was overthrown by trade union leaders and the army, and fled to Russia. Food shipments rapidly resumed. Hoover was strengthened in his conviction that food was the best way to topple Bolshevik regimes. Food was restorative and altruistic and did not require mayhem or sordid compromises. It was an inspired way of meddling in the affairs of other countries.16
In ill-fated Austria, the cat’s-paw of German expansion, the Hapsburg bubble burst. Entire divisions of subject troops refused to advance to the front. Soldiers shot their officers. Sailors drowned their captains. Mobs roamed the countryside, stealing and plundering. Austria was reduced to a small republic, and the people of Vienna, now the capital of a diminished and bankrupt state, appealed to the world for food.
When Hoover learned that the Bolsheviks would try to take power on May Day 1919, he had posters put up all over Vienna that said: “Any disturbances of the public order will render the food shipments impossible and bring Vienna face to face with absolute famine.” There was no May Day takeover and Hoover wrote in his memoirs that “fear of starvation held the Austrian people from revolution.”17
Vanquished Germany and Austro-Hungary were not the only countries that risked sliding into Bolshevism. Those countries that had been part of the Russian empire before the war, such as Finland and the Baltic states, did not escape the postwar turmoil.
Finland, the pawn of Scandinavia, was a land of nomadic hunters and fishermen conquered by Sweden in the thirteenth century, then lost after the war with Russia in 1809. As subjects of the Czar’s empire, spending Russian coin, licking Russian stamps, obeying Russian laws, and serving in Russian regiments, the Finns developed a fierce desire for self-rule as an armor against “Russianization.”
Finally, in December 1917, they took advantage of the Bolshevik Revolution to declare their independence, but the country soon lapsed into civil war. A strong man arose, the former Russian general Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, whose White army defeated the Soviet-backed Red Guards in a bloody four-month campaign. Mannerheim named himself Regent and at the start of 1919 he expressed a desire to carry on the anti-Bolshevik struggle to nearby Petrograd. In February he told a U.S. naval attaché that his army was “capable of defeating the Bolsheviki in northern Russia” and that he was ready “to commence hostilities immediately” if “assured that the United States would hasten sending food supplies to Finland.”18
In exchange for taking Petrograd, Mannerheim demanded the Kola Peninsula, an area the size of England bordering on Finland. Robert Imbrie, the U.S. vice consul in the Finnish border town of Vyborg, reported to the State Department on March 2, 1919, that the Finns had “perfected a military organization numbering, they state, 10,000 men.” Their objective was “the capture of Petrograd and afterward Moscow and the overthrow of the Bolsheviks.” Having already committed American troops in Archangel and Vladivostok, the State Department took a cautious approach. Counselor Frank Polk replied on March 8 that as Washington did not have “adequate information regarding Russian Whites,” it was “not in a position to offer any support or assistance.”19
Hoover, however, was eager to help. He told President Wilson in April that he was impressed by the Finns and their “sturdy fight” for democracy. He arranged to ship them food on credit, and persuaded the President to grant Finland diplomatic recognition so that the Finns could open accounts with New York–based banks to pay for the food.20
On June 19, 1919, Mannerheim signed an agreement with Nikolai Iudenich, a czarist general who had fled to Finland after the Bolsheviks took power, for a joint attack on Petrograd. With his army of six thousand, top-heavy with fifteen hundred ex-czarist officers, Iudenich was keen to enter the fray. His was one of the half-dozen White armies then engaging the Bolsheviks on as many fronts. In Paris, Secretary of State Lansing and other heads of delegations gave Mannerheim the green light on July 7, telling him they had “no objections” to his attack on Petrograd. Hoover said that “no greater relief of human misery could be undertaken than the occupation of Petrograd” and the suppression of the Bolshevik regime. But by then it was too late: in July Mannerheim lost the election for President, which brought to power in Finland a center-left coalition opposed to intervention.21
Hoover redirected his energies toward Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. During the war, these three small Baltic states had been occupied by the Germans, but after the Armistice, nationalists and Bolsheviks fought for control. As Hoover put it, the Soviets were “spreading Communism by infection.”22
In Lithuania, the Bolsheviks swept into the power vacuum created by the departed Germans and formed a Soviet Socialist Republic in the capital of Vilnius in January 1919, backed by Red Army units. This unpopular regime lasted only three months and was deposed by Lithuanian nationalists in April. Hoover’s American Relief Administration quickly moved in with food for the fledgling regime. On June 22, Captain Russell of the Red Cross reported on the struggle of “the little army of Lithuania…to free the country from Bolshevism.” He noted that “Mr. Hoover’s men…are following every military advance here as quickly as the railroad bridges can be repaired.”23
In Latvia, a republic was proclaimed after the German collapse, in November 1918, under the nationalist leader Karlis Ulmanis, who had spent eight years in exile teaching at the University of Nebraska. In January, the Red Army captured the Latvian capital of Riga and ousted Ulmanis, who moved his government to the port city of Libau, where it was protected by a British naval squadron. The Allies had asked the Germans to remain in Latvia as a buffer against the Red Army. It was an odd arrangement to be using the enemy as a border police against former allies. “Paradoxical as it might seem,” Lansing noted, “the Allied governments were, by the Armistice, allies of Germany in the Baltic provinces.”24
In May 1919, Hoover wrote a memo to the Council of Four at the Paris conference outlining the situation in the Baltic states. He warned that the Bolshevik government in Riga, “being unable to provide foodstuffs, was mobbed by the populace and has withdrawn its army from the city, which was given over to complete anarchy of wholesale massacre and murder.” The news from Riga horrified him. The Communists had set up a Latvian Soviet Republic, opened the prisons and let loose the convicts, who were plundering and looting the city. Hundreds were killed in summary executions, their bodies dumped into trenches. Hoover asked for military protection to safeguard food deliveries to Riga. In a letter to Wilson on May 9, he urged “definite action” in the Baltic, where “the population in none of these states is Bolshevik…. In many places they are putting up a good fight to try and establish their independence from the Moscow tyranny.” Hoover wanted to send “military supplies to the established governments.”25
When Wilson stalled, Hoover decided to take action. Waiting was “slower than I could bear,” he recalled in his memoir. “In desperation, I sent a telegram to General von der Goltz [the German commander in Latvia] asking him to occupy Riga.” Here was an American official, without any authorization, ordering a German general to occupy the capital of a Baltic country. Von der Goltz moved on Riga on May 22. Fortunately for Hoover, on May 23, the Council of Foreign Ministers approved his proposal to send arms and munitions, as well as food and clothing to the Baltic states. Hoover dispatched a forty-wagon train of food to Riga with a few soldiers under an army lieutenant named Harrington. When they reached the outskirts of the city, men were still fighting in the corpse-littered streets. The railroad tracks were damaged, so Harrington took the food in by handcart. By May 24, he was providing one meal a day to 200,000 Latvians.26
The Red Terror in Riga lasted from January to May 1919. According to Hoover, the Bolshevik revolutionaries killed as many as one thousand a day, mowing them down with machine guns, and singling out clergymen, teachers, and doctors. A White Terror of vengeance followed once von der Goltz occupied the city, and another round of executions. When Hoover protested, he was told the executions would be limited to proven criminals.27
Directly to the north of Latvia was Estonia, whose border with Russia was a scant eighty miles from Petrograd. After the Armistice, the Estonians proclaimed their independence. The Red Seventh Army invaded and established a puppet government in the border town of Narva. With the help of Allied war matériel, a British naval squadron, and three thousand Finnish volunteers, the Estonians fought back, and by February 1919, Estonia was free.28
By this time, the British and the French were calling for an aggressive campaign for the defeat of Bolshevism. “We shall not be far behind the mine sweepers that the British Navy are sending into the Gulf of Finland to clear the channel,” Hoover promised, “if Petrograd is captured by the Russian army now operating against the Bolsheviks southwest of the city.”29
Following Mannerheim’s defection, General Iudenich had found a haven in Estonia and formed an army of fifteen thousand men, which he called, rather grandly, the Northwest Army. Iudenich himself was slack and uninspiring, but he had an able aide in General A. P. Rodzianko.30 On June 11, the American Relief Administration agreed to deliver directly to the Northwest Army their entire ration. “It looked,” Hoover said, “as if this was a military adventure offering genuine assurance of definitely re-establishing order and freeing the territory…from Bolshevik control.” Some food had arrived by July 7, when Hoover wired, “Glad our food is winning in the cause of law and order.”31
Soon afterward, the USS Democracy and six other American ships steamed into the Gulf of Finland with eighteen thousand tons of flour, 1,500 tons of bacon, and other rations. On July 26, General Rodzianko conveyed his thanks to Hoover that “the Northwest Russian army, which is fighting against Bolshevism in the direction of Petrograd for the restoration of the lawful order of things in Russia, is now existing practically upon American flour and bacon.” Hoover wired Lansing on August 30, 1919, that “Iudenich could at an early date take Petrograd.”32
Poised that September with his army in the Estonian border town of Narva, Iudenich felt that he had to act. His restive troops had begun to desert. His plan was to march on Petrograd in a swift and decisive thrust and capture the city. The British, though they had little faith in this enterprise, gave him six tanks manned by English-speaking “volunteers,”33 three thousand rifles, and plenty of ammunition. He knew he could count on the Americans for the four thousand tons of food a week to feed the population of Petrograd. His strategy was to reach a point on the Petrograd–Moscow railway, which he would seize, isolating the old capital before taking it.34
The offensive opened on September 28, 1919, as Iudenich’s army started off from Narva and headed southeast toward the town of Luga, which was on the railway, about sixty miles south of Petrograd. The British tanks demoralized the enemy, and from Luga the Northwest Army advanced due north toward the old capital in the delta of the Neva River.
On October 16, Iudenich’s advance guard entered the deserted town of Gatchina, twenty-five miles south of Petrograd, where Catherine the Great had built her six-hundred-room summer palace. Here was the imperial Russia the Northwest Army hoped to restore, and the statue of Czar Paul in front of the palace seemed to be welcoming them with outstretched arm. They bivouacked in the deer park, the deer having long since been butchered to feed the two million citizens of Petrograd. Down a long avenue strewn with yellow leaves, a pair of half-starved dogs tore at the carcass of a horse, and a dead soldier lay face down in the decaying foliage.35
By October 20, Iudenich had captured Pulkovo Heights, overlooking the old capital; his troops could see Petrograd spread out before them—the golden dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the gilt spire of the Admiralty, and the Nevski Prospect. Officers through their field glasses could see the trains pulling out of the Nikolai Station and heading toward Moscow. Their puffs of steam trailing across the autumn sky spelled defeat for Iudenich, for he did not have enough troops to hold the railway line, and the trains would be bringing back reinforcements.36
There was considerable excitement in Washington when the first reports came in claiming that the Northwest Army had occupied Petrograd. In reality, Trotsky, the Commissar for War, had taken command. Petrograd was the cradle of the revolution; its workers had stormed the Winter Palace and placed Lenin in power. Trotsky mobilized and armed these workers, until his Seventh Army outnumbered the Northwest Army three to one. Riding his horse from sector to sector, he made sure that roadblocks and barricades went up at key intersections. He improvised some armored cars to face the tanks. He manned an out-of-commission battleship, the Sevastopol, berthed in the Neva River, whose guns served as his artillery.37
On October 21, when Iudenich attacked with his cavalry exposed in the floodplain, Trotsky’s naval guns sent them galloping in all directions. Outgunned, and outmanned by workers’ battalions charging with fixed bayonets, the Whites fell back toward Gatchina. The attack, which depended for its success on a speedy capture of the city, was broken. With the Red Fifteenth Army coming at him from the east, the exhausted czarist general was caught in a pincers movement.
Iudenich was pushed back to his starting point, the town of Narva in Estonia. An epidemic of typhoid spread through his ranks, killing many of those who had survived the battle. The Estonians, fearing Soviet retaliation, disarmed and interned what was left of the Northwest Army. Iudenich fled to France, where he died in exile in 1933.38
American efforts to topple the Bolsheviks failed on all fronts: in Siberia and Archangel, and in the Baltic provinces. Later, it was argued that American meddling had helped keep the Bolshevik regime afloat. Commander John Gade, the naval attaché with the U.S. Baltic mission, observed near the end of 1919 that “allied intervention and the blockade have been important weapons in the hands of the Soviet leaders…for purposes of propaganda. The result has been that a patriotic wave has swept through Soviet Russia, resulting in the present strong Soviet army…. The Petrograd population supported the Soviet government wholeheartedly when Iudenich advanced.”39 These were the first secret rollback operations—halfhearted, intermittent, piecemeal ventures that ended disastrously. They would not be the last.
By the end of 1920, the civil war was over. Exhausted by the convulsions of revolution and isolated from the rest of the world, Russia was about to sink into famine. The economy lay in ruins and the peasants were up in arms over a new government policy of requisitions. They had been given the land in 1917 with the slogans “pillage that which has been got by pillage” and “peace to the cottages, war to the palaces.” What this meant, they believed, was no more taxes, rents, or debts. But now they were being made to turn over their entire harvest, setting aside a meager portion for their own needs, at a fixed price, in exchange for which they were promised basic supplies such as oil, salt, and cloth. When these supplies failed to arrive, most peasants refused to hand over their harvest surplus. In comments collected by the party investigator J. Yakovlev in 1920, one peasant said: “You receive an order on Feb. 20 stating that if you don’t pay a tax by February 15 you will be fined. Whether you want to or not you begin to pay not only the tax but the fine…. The peasant is like a sheep. Whoever needs wool, fleeces it. He was fleeced by the Czar and the landlords and now the Comrades.”40
As will so often be the case in a system run by bureaucrats trying to impress their bosses, the provincial committees of the People’s Commissariat for Food routinely inflated their estimates for the harvest. Armed detachments known as the Food Army came in to seize the hoarded surplus by force and fought pitched battles, destroying entire villages. In some areas, the Food Army took even the seeds for the new harvest, and a decline in the cultivated acreage ensued.
In entire regions, fertile but overtaxed, such as the lower Volga and western Siberia, famine now threatened and peasant revolts broke out. The commander of the military district in Samara Province reported on February 12, 1921, that “crowds of thousands of starving peasants are besieging the barns where…the grain has been requisitioned for urban areas and the army…. The army has been forced to open fire repeatedly on the enraged crowd.”41
Lenin had to appease the peasants, on whom the regime depended for survival in a country that was 85 percent rural. At the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, he admitted that the policy of forced requisition had been a mistake.42 The requisitions were abolished as part of the New Economic Policy, a strategic retreat from the extremism of wartime Communism. The peasants, after paying a tax in kind, would be allowed to dispose of their surplus. A modified market economy would be sanctioned in small industries, with profit-and-loss accounting. The currency was stabilized, and wages were now scaled according to responsibility.43
The New Economic Policy introduced a temporary loosening up of state control, but there were some things the state could not control, and one of these was the weather. In the spring of 1921, when the fertile Volga plain should have been soaked with rain, hot dry winds blew out of the steppes of western Siberia and the fields remained cracked and parched. The grain burned as it came up from the ground. No one in the government dared to utter the dreaded words “drought” and “famine.”
On June 28, 1921, Pravda reported that people were “in mass flight” in the provinces of Samara and Saratov, and that peasants were eating grass and bark. On July 12, Mikhail Kalinin, the president of the Central Executive Committee of Soviets, admitted at last in Pravda that “in numerous districts, the drought this year has destroyed the harvest.”44
Maxim Gorky, world-famous author of The Lower Depths and the founder of socialist realism in literature, issued an appeal to the press: “I ask all honest European and American people for prompt aid to the Russian people. Give Bread and Medicine.”
One of those who responded to Gorky’s plea was none other than President Warren Harding’s Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. The famine-fighter and anti-Bolshevik (who insisted that he did not mix relief and politics) could now fulfill his frustrated dream of sending a relief mission to the Soviet heartland. Since Harding had maintained Wilson’s policy of nonrecognition, there were no contacts between the two countries. Here was a chance to observe what was going on inside Russia and to make direct contact with Soviet officials. Hoover might be able to show the Russian people, by his example of efficient aid, that Bolshevism did not work. It was even within the realm of possibility that the relief mission could hasten the end of the Bolshevik regime.45
Hoover wired Gorky on July 23, 1921, that the American Relief Administration would distribute food in the famine areas under the following conditions:
The release of Americans held prisoner in Russia.
An official request from Soviet authorities.
The ARA must move freely in Russia, without government interference.46
On July 28, 1921, Lev Kamenev, the chairman of Pomgol, the government commission hastily set up to try to help the famine-stricken population, accepted Hoover’s offer. Hoover’s envoy, Walter Lyman Brown, left for Riga to hammer out the details with Maxim Litvinov, the deputy chairman of the Commission for Foreign Affairs. As negotiations proceeded in neutral Latvia, the principal stumbling block was Hoover’s desire to organize local relief committees. This sent Lenin into a fury—he denounced it as interference in Soviet internal matters and called Hoover “an insolent liar.” On the American side, Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes asked Hoover to talk to Litvinov about taking back seventy-five Russians arrested in the Palmer raids, even though they had no passports. Hoover declined to present a demand that might jeopardize the overall negotiations. Already the Soviet press was suggesting that he was planning political activities.47
Hoover finally had to consent to some measure of Soviet control and an agreement was signed on August 21. “They were afraid we were trying to set up a state within a state,” Walter Lyman Brown wrote to Hoover from Riga, “to influence the Russian people toward counter-revolution by use of ‘food as a weapon.’ ”48 The Russians kept their promises on at least one item in the agreement: seven Americans were let out of Soviet jails.49
The way was now open for Hoover’s team to do its work. It would remain in Russia for nearly two years, feeding up to 10 million Russians a day in a population of 120 million. Aside from the soldiers who had fought in Siberia and Archangel in 1919, and the diplomats who had long since left, Hoover’s people were the only Americans to get a close look at the Soviet system. The Hoover mission was a formative event in the gestation of American anti-Communism: the first time Americans and Russians had worked together for a common goal.
Hoover himself, busy in Washington with his duties as Secretary of Commerce, didn’t set foot in Russia. The leader of the ARA team was Colonel William N. Haskell, a West Pointer who had commanded the “Fighting 69th” in World War I, and who had run the American Relief Administration program in Armenia and Romania. Hoover figured a military man would carry more weight with the Russians than a civilian. On August 27, 1921, the first seven ARA men rolled into Moscow’s Windau station.50
Five days later, the SS Phoenix steamed into Petrograd with two hundred tons of rations. When it was unloaded, the ARA supervisor, D. L. Noyes, noticed that the stevedores were using their hooks to rip open bags of rice and sugar and fill their pockets. Another ARA man, Donald Lowrie, asked a Soviet guard to arrest a stevedore with bulging pockets. A Soviet official explained that it was a long-standing custom to take one day’s pay in pilferage. When the incident was brought to Lenin’s attention he saw the ARA protest as an affront to the Soviet state and swore to curb the overzealous Hooverites.51
Not all Russians were quite as combative. Lev Kamenev, the chairman of the Soviet famine agency Pomgol, a stocky man with a trim beard and a pince-nez, was courteous and friendly, and would become the ARA’s friend at court. It was typical of the Soviet way of doing things that the liaison man with the ARA, Alexander Eiduk, was a member of the Secret Police. Two years earlier he had been assigned to the organization of gulags. The Americans knew him as a heavy-handed and interfering flatfoot.52
On September 7, the first ARA kitchen opened in Petrograd. On that first night, it fed fifteen thousand children. In Moscow, the kitchen that opened on September 11 was housed in a former luxury restaurant called the Hermitage. The Americans—there were by now two hundred of them—wanted to move into the famine areas as quickly as possible, but difficulties arose over small things such as locks for storerooms, scales, and paper and pens for keeping accounts. They had not realized they would have to bring everything with them. The Americans were appalled by Russian apathy. The general attitude was “Why hurry? There will be hungry people for a long time.”
At first only children were fed: the rule at the feeding stations was that the meal must be eaten on the premises, which angered parents. Moving eastward to the Urals, the ARA men reached a town near Samara where the streets were covered with a layer of garbage six inches thick.53
Despite the obstacles, the Americans and their thousands of Russian employees had by December 1 set up feeding stations in 191 towns and villages and were feeding 568,000 children a day. Hoover needed more money, and President Harding backed him in a request to Congress for $20 million. His argument was that the program would ultimately benefit American farmers and shippers. The relief bill passed the House, but protests arose in the Senate. One senator said it was time for “Uncle Sam to stop being Santa Claus to the whole world.” But the bill eventually passed the Senate and Harding signed it into law on December 24, 1921. Now that Hoover’s funding increased, a new agreement was signed on December 30 to feed adults as well.54
The Russians also agreed, after more deliberation, to provide transportation from the border to the food warehouses. In a document recently released by the Soviet archives, we have the reactions of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin on October 18, 1921, to Kamenev’s proposal for this free transportation:
Lenin: “We should do this, for they are giving us pure profit for the hungry and monitoring rights…. Therefore, we ought not to take payment for shipment to the warehouses…on condition that all be monitored.”
Trotsky simply said, “Agreed.”
Stalin opposed free transportation: “The issue,” he wrote, “is obviously trade and not charity.” He wanted to exempt the food from customs and taxes, and charge the donors for transportation and warehouse facilities.55
In the early months of 1922, the difficulties multiplied. When the food was moved from ship to rail, they found the switching yards useless, the railroad ties broken, the locomotives in need of repair. The confiscation of food by the Soviets to feed the Red Army, and the arrest of Russian ARA workers were more serious obstacles.
Pressed for time, the ARA had hired local volunteers regardless of their class background. Complaints began to come in from Eiduk, their friendly policeman. What about Madame Depould, who had appeared in an ARA kitchen “in diamond rings and bracelets and décolleté and by her external appearance alone evoked the protest and indignation of the hungry crowd of children and their mothers.” Eiduk had her arrested and found that her husband was a baron who had fought with Kolchak.56
A flurry of other arrests followed. On November 4, the ARA’s top Russian agent in Samara was jailed; on November 11, two in Kazan; and so on. The ARA suspended the feeding in places where their employees were being detained. The Soviets backed off, but only for a while. The arrests soon resumed, on such vague charges as “offenses against the proletariat.” The ARA saw the arrests as part of a pattern of obstruction, a way for the Soviets to control food distribution through the intimidation of its Russian employees. American protests intensified, and then the Russians removed an overzealous official who was responsible for some of the arrests. The Bolsheviks were baffling in their randomness: You never knew which way the cat would jump.
When Lenin suffered a stroke in May 1922, Stalin solidified his hold on the party. The most suspicious of the Soviet leaders, he was convinced that the ARA was a front for espionage. “Trading and other missions are at the same time the most efficient spy agencies of the world bourgeoisie,” Stalin said, “which now knows Soviet Russia, knows her weak and strong sides.” This need for secrecy, this poisonous suspicion, was to be the hallmark of a regime that had much to hide. Trotsky told the American Communist journalist Anna Louise Strong that the ARA was “a highly-qualified feeler, sent forth by the American government into the very heart of Russia.”57
There was, of course, a kernel of truth to this, for the ARA went beyond its mission and sent reports on economic and political conditions to the State Department and the Department of Commerce. “My work after we remove the camouflage is certainly to a considerable measure semi-official,” Walter Lyman Brown wrote to the State Department. Colonel Haskell reported to Hoover on October 20, 1921: “The Soviet government has a stranglehold on Russia but lacks the support and confidence of the people.” Haskell also contributed data on Soviet leaders, with whom he was in daily contact, and spiced it with Moscow rumors. Thus did a private relief agency assume the information-gathering functions of a consulate or embassy.
As part of the distribution program, officers serving on U.S. destroyers were allowed to go ashore at Black Sea ports on ARA business. Occasionally they indulged in a bit of snooping. In September 1921, Lieutenant Dunn of the USS Gilmer visited Novorossik and reported to his fleet commander, Admiral Bristol, the number and locations of the gun emplacements and minefields he had seen.58
Now that the ARA was feeding adults as well as children, the amount of food being distributed doubled. The trouble was, the Russian transport system could not cope with the increase. Thousands of tons were stranded in freight cars at railroad stations and sidings. The railroad workers, also on short rations, refused to work unless they were fed. Colonel Haskell turned over to them 4,500 tons of corn. Even then, the ARA could not move its food to the feeding stations. The relief program was in a state of crisis. On April 10, 1922, Colonel Haskell sent Hoover an uncoded message: “Attitude of Soviets has grown steadily more indifferent and disagreeable,” he cabled. “Seizure of American relief supplies, especially corn in transit, has begun…. Abuses continue and promises are made only to be broken.”59
Suddenly Kamenev, who had been too busy, agreed to see the ARA director. Haskell accused him of seizing ARA supplies to feed the Red Army. “There is no use in bringing supplies to Russia,” he said, “if they don’t reach the starving.” The confiscations ended. On April 12, Kamenev arranged a meeting with Felix Dzerzhinsky, the much-feared head of the Cheka (secret police), who was also Commissioner for Transport. Dzerzhinsky gave orders that ARA seals must never be broken and that the trains must stick to schedule. Hoover’s food trains now had a high priority. From then on, Colonel Haskell dealt directly with Dzerzhinsky, and they established what the Russians called poriadok—an orderly way.60
When the ice broke that spring, river transport became available to places where trains did not go. In the villages, the arrival of food slowed down the movement of refugees. Seeds were planted and the death count was reduced, although five million of the estimated 29 million in the famine zones died in 1921 and 1922.61 By August, 1922, 10.5 million Russians were getting daily meals in 18,073 ARA feeding stations in twenty-five provinces. The famine operation was now running smoothly.
Gorky, who had turned against Lenin and gone into exile in Italy, sent a letter to Hoover on July 30, 1922, from Sorrento: “In all the history of human suffering,” he wrote, “I know of no accomplishment which in magnitude and generosity can be compared to the relief that you actually accomplished.”62
Even Trotsky had a change of heart. In a speech on March 12, 1922, at the Bolshoi Theater to a plenary session of the Moscow soviets, he praised the selflessness of the American effort while deploring past policies to help Whites:
We have been getting help from that American quasi-government agency known as the ARA. This help is growing day by day and it is obviously playing a gigantic role in our lives…. Of the 117 [American] employees of the ARA, 15 have caught typhus…. When you think of these sacrifices, you want to remind yourself that there are still people…who are motivated exclusively by feelings of humanity and inner nobility regardless of their class affiliation…. I read the obituary of Violet Kilara, the Anglo-Saxon woman. She was a young, weak, fragile creature, and came to Buzaluk in very harsh, backward, and barbaric conditions. She died doing her duty and was buried there. Here tonight we have counted six such graves—there most likely will be more…. The Great Republic across the ocean has shown ten times more generosity than all of Europe…. But for the sake of honesty we should admit that we have mixed emotions…. We often hear the names of the leaders of the ARA associated with statements that are hostile to us…. The day when the men in Washington firmly and clearly state that they have had enough of Wilson’s experience with Kolchak…that the United States will not provide any support for new candidates for the role of executioner of the Russian workers and peasants…. We will see the role of the ARA in its true light…. The ambiguity that exists in our attitude towards the ARA arises from an entire situation that is telling us to be careful.63
Such was the reaction of the fierce Commissar of War, a mixture of genuine admiration and lingering suspicion, America as savior, and America as enemy, conspiring to overthrow the Bolshevik regime.
In the summer of 1922, the Soviets announced that the famine was over and Russia was on its feet. The harvest looked promising and Hoover thought it was time to get out: the ARA was a rescue team, not a welfare agency. By mid-September, adults were no longer fed and meals for children were down to a million a day. Hoover realized that the Russians wanted to use the ARA as a springboard for recognition. But he agreed with the Secretary of State that recognition would be a mistake. As Hughes put it: “The fundamental doctrine of the men who govern Russia is…to overthrow and destroy the government of the United States, of England, of France, of all the civilized nations of the Western world.”64
With a bountiful harvest, sufficient to meet Russia’s food requirements, the Soviet leadership in the fall of 1922 hit upon a scheme that would give a boost to the New Economic Policy. They could export grain and buy machinery if the ARA remained in Russia and took up the slack. Kamenev told Colonel Haskell on November 6 that Russia would be able to ship $50 million worth of grain if the ARA stayed on. But Hoover was not prepared to provide charity so that the Russians could sell their surplus. He wrote to Colonel Haskell on November 18: “The ARA…must protest against the inhumanity of…exporting food from starving peoples in order to secure machinery and raw materials for the economic improvement of the country.” Nonetheless, Hoover authorized on December 19 the feeding of three million children, who he did not think should suffer from the cynical policies of their leaders.
When Hoover reduced the aid, the Soviets retaliated with various pinpricks and restrictions. The ARA staff had to pay cash for telegrams. The number of railroad cars at their disposal was reduced. They were asked to move to more modest offices in Moscow. The Soviets seemed to have countless ways of making life unpleasant. The kitchens and food stations fell under their control, the mail was held up, and in December the privilege of sealed pouches was suspended. Five ARA staff were deported when they tried to take articles of value such as icons and furs out in the pouch to avoid the export tax. An exposé in Izvestia under the headline “How They Are Helping” said the articles were valued at several trillion rubles. It took time to close the stations, so that despite the harassment, the ARA stayed on until July 1923.65
Hoover had hoped that the ARA mission would introduce a sliver of democracy into the Bolshevik system, and that it might take hold like a grafted shoot on a growing plant. The result was just the opposite. The ARA contributed to Russia’s economic recovery and helped shore up the regime. It gave Lenin breathing space to implement the New Economic Policy and averted local rebellions. Instead of stemming the tide of Bolshevism, as Hoover had hoped, the ARA secured the regime more firmly in power.
At best, by its efficient handling of the task at hand, the ARA was a living contradiction to the dogma of class warfare. Here were the emissaries of the richest country in the world rescuing the workers and peasants of a Bolshevik state. Yet if Hoover had stayed out of Russia in 1921, the Bolshevik regime, like any regime that cannot feed its own people, would have been in serious trouble.
Over the years, as Soviet history was rewritten according to the policy needs of the moment, the Hoover mission became a convenient target. The thread of hostility could be traced back to the ARA’s arrival in August 1921, when Pravda wrote: “Hoover’s messengers carry themselves with a splendid disdain, like a duke visiting the hut of a charcoal burner.”66
The bad aftertaste lingered, rather than the memory of good deeds. On April 2, 1924, a Moscow paper reported that Soviet citizens had been arrested in Kiev and charged with accepting ARA food in exchange for conducting espionage. On May 18, two men were tried for this post facto crime. One was sentenced to ten years, the other to five. Hoover, from Washington, said the convictions were “an impossible barrier against the renewal of official relations.”67
The campaign of disparagement spread to official tomes. In 1928, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia said that “under the guise of charity,” the ARA had relieved a crisis of agricultural overproduction in America. In 1949, the historian A. N. Kogan wrote an article entitled “Anti-Soviet Acts of the ARA in Soviet Russia,” on the theme of intervention by other than military means. In 1950, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia promoted the ARA to “an apparatus for spying and wrecking activities.” In 1960, a Soviet history textbook said that the ARA was “expected…to secretly organize an insurrectionary force.”
For millions of ordinary Russians, however, their only firsthand knowledge of the United States came from Hoover’s people, who had arrived in towns and villages where the wheat cellars were empty and the livestock was bleached bones, and who had fed them when their own government could not and asked nothing in return. One of these Russians was the writer Viktor Nekrasov, who wrote in Novy Mir in December 1962 that as a boy he had known of America from postage stamps and Fenimore Cooper and “through ARA condensed milk…. We collected the labels from the cans, with their pictures of Indians and bisons…. I remember the milk and snow-white bread, soft as cotton.”68