Feeding The Enemy
Douglas Smith - The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin
The Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2019
The American troops who landed in Russia to help reverse the Bolshevik coup of 1917 did little to change history, but cast as imperialist villains, they were useful to Soviet propagandists charged with rewriting it. In “The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin,” Douglas Smith tells the remarkable tale of a different, largely forgotten yet infinitely more effective intervention.
Between 1921 and 1923, the United States, acting through Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration, supplied food and other aid to more than 10 million people caught up in the famine—created by war, revolution and the Bolshevik assault on the peasantry—then raging in the former Russian empire. The ARA operated, Mr. Smith tells us, “across a million square miles of territory in what was the largest humanitarian operation in history.”
Suspicious of, and embarrassed by, assistance from such a politically inconvenient source, the Kremlin accepted the ARA’s help only grudgingly and, once the crisis was over, “began to erase the memory of American charity,” Mr. Smith writes. “What it could not erase, it sought to distort into something ugly” by depicting the ARA as a nest of spies and reactionaries. For many of the thousands of Russians who had worked for the ARA, their reward was persecution.
The damage done to Hoover’s reputation in America by the Great Depression may help explain why this episode is so little-known in the U.S. today. But something else may be at play. Mr. Smith argues that the ARA may “quite possibly” have prevented “the collapse of the Soviet state.” Did the decades of communist atrocity that followed cast a shadow over what was a very grand American gesture?
That said, in an earlier history of the ARA’s work in Russia, “The Big Show in Bololand” (“Bololand” being the land of the Bolsheviks)—a study that Mr. Smith rightly acknowledges as definitive—Bertrand Patenaude describes how in 1921 Karl Radek, a leading Bolshevik, “seemed to take a special delight” in telling Western visitors that the regime would survive: “Only famine victims die from famine.” Radek (who would receive his comeuppance in the Gulag in 1939) might not have been wrong. Ensuring that industrial workers in the major population centers were fed was essential to the survival of Lenin’s new order. If that meant taking food from a peasantry the Bolsheviks despised as socially backward, so be it. Indeed, their tragedy was an opportunity. “It is precisely now,” Lenin wrote, “when in the famine regions people are eating human flesh, and the roads are littered with hundreds if not thousands of corpses,” that the Soviet leadership should start the systematic expropriation of yet another dangerous relic of old Russia—the church. And so it did, in the name of famine relief. How much of what was confiscated was “turned into bread,” Mr. Smith points out, “is unknown.”
Lenin’s reference to “hundreds if not thousands of corpses” was an understatement. According to Soviet forecasts, some 30 million faced starvation. The effects of the famine were spilling over into the Bolshevik strongholds and, regardless of Radek’s bravado, could no longer be contained. In response, Lenin permitted elements of the market to slip back into the national economy and cut back on grain requisitions from the peasantry. In July 1921, the writer Maxim Gorky was allowed to send out an appeal for help. Hoover, who had been overseeing food-relief efforts in Europe since shortly after the German invasion of Belgium, might have been a fierce anticommunist, but, as Mr. Smith observes, he “knew what had to be done.”
The impulse to help was genuine and unselfish; the results, orchestrated by Hoover with the organizational aplomb for which he was already legendary, were extraordinary. In Mr. Smith’s not unreasonable view of the number of lives saved, “an estimate of more than ten million does not seem exaggerated,” a feat made all the more impressive by the small number of Americans—never more than 200 at a time, and less than 400 in total—who ended up in Russia, often in towns and cities far from anywhere but never far enough from apocalypse. If the term “good Samaritan” is to mean anything, it’s what many of these men were, risking their lives amid disease and disorder, through scenes so terrible they were almost impossible to bear: “I walk with my eyes on the ground,” wrote one.
But good is not necessarily the same as saintly. Bololand was the new great unknown, and many of the ARA’s Americans were drawn there by a sense of adventure as well as an urge to help—a number of them had originally gone to Europe to take part in the Great War—and had no great desire to return home. “Trying to kill people may sound more exciting than trying to keep them alive,” one ARA man explained, “but don’t you ever believe it’s so.” Amid the horror—well-described by Mr. Smith, who makes excellent use of contemporary sources (one American, upon arriving in Samara, passes “two dogs fighting in the street over a partially eaten corpse”)—there were pretty girls, hard partying and, for some, a chance to scoop up valuables at the bargain prices that upheaval left in its wake.
The ARA departed after the worst was past, but famine returned to the U.S.S.R. less than a decade later, a consequence of collectivization transformed, in Ukraine, to genocide. Millions died, but there were no calls for assistance from the Kremlin—only denials.
While Mr. Patenaude’s volume remains definitive, its length will be a deterrent to some. Mr. Smith, a biographer of Rasputin and the author of “Former People”—on the fate of the aristocrats who stayed on in the new Soviet state—has, in “The Russian Job,” produced a well-written account of a story that should not have passed into obscurity. Less comprehensive than Mr. Patenaude’s tome, Douglas Smith’s book is still much more than an introduction.