The Russian famine

On 13 July 1921 Maxim Gorky, the best-known Russian writer in the world, issued an appeal “To all honest people”. He wrote that drought had destroyed the harvest on the fertile steppes of the Volga and that millions faced death by starvation, and he begged the peoples of Europe and America for bread and medicine. The appeal was written with the knowledge of Vladimir Lenin. A government that had spent four years predicting the collapse of the capitalist world was now asking it for help. For the outside world it was the first clear sign that one of the greatest famines in European history was beginning in Soviet Russia. It struck the Volga region, the Urals, southern Ukraine, the Crimea and Kazakhstan. According to the most frequently cited estimates, some five million people died of hunger and disease. Millions more were saved by the largest humanitarian relief operation of its time, led by an American who ten years later was President of the United States.

Spring or July?

Some chronologies date the start of the famine to “spring 1921”. That is true in the sense that by spring it was already clear that disaster was coming: the winter crops had frozen or withered, the spring sowings had failed to come up, and in some districts famine had already set in during the winter of 1920–1921. At the end of April the Council of Labour and Defence adopted measures “to combat the drought”, and in May and June Lenin ordered grain to be bought abroad. But spring has no single date. For a long time the authorities did not speak openly about the disaster, and Pravda admitted its scale only on 26 June. A clear turning point can therefore be found on 13 July 1921, the day of Gorky’s appeal, which set the international relief effort in motion. The worst months, in any case, came later: in the autumn of 1921 and the spring of 1922.

Drought and requisitions

Russia had starved before. In 1891–1892 famine in the Volga region killed several hundred thousand people. The drought of 1921 was severe, but it does not on its own explain the scale of the catastrophe. The countryside had been ravaged by seven years of war: first the World War, then the Civil War, in which the front lines swept back and forth across the Volga region and the Urals several times. All sides – Reds, Whites and Greens – fed their armies on grain taken from the peasants. But the Bolsheviks went furthest. Under War Communism the state banned free trade in grain and introduced compulsory deliveries, the so-called prodrazvyorstka. Food detachments took everything they judged to be surplus, often including the seed grain. Peasants who could not sell their crops began to sow only as much as they needed for themselves. When the drought came, there were no reserves either in the peasants’ granaries or in the state’s warehouses.

According to Soviet data, the 1921 harvest was less than half that of 1913. The famine affected 35 provinces with a population of about 90 million. Official figures spoke of 28 million people starving; some estimates put the number at 40 million. The worst-hit areas were the provinces of Samara, Saratov, Tsaritsyn, Kazan and Ufa, Bashkiria and Tatarstan, as well as the settlements of the Volga Germans. The transport system, wrecked by war, could not move food to where it was needed.

Hunger

Accounts from the Volga region in the autumn and winter of 1921 read like descriptions of medieval calamities. People ate dogs, cats, rats, carrion, bark, grass, moss, and flour made from acorns and goosefoot; they boiled hides and leather straps. In some villages people ate clay. Hundreds of thousands of peasants took to the roads in search of bread in Ukraine, Siberia or Turkestan. Many died in railway stations and wagons. The famine was accompanied by epidemics of typhus, cholera and dysentery. Children died in the greatest numbers. Hundreds of thousands of homeless orphans, the so-called besprizorniki, appeared on the streets of the cities.

Local authorities and foreign observers reported thousands of cases of cannibalism. In Samara and Pugachev traders were sometimes found selling human flesh as horsemeat. At first Pravda wrote about it openly, but in January 1922 the people’s commissar for health proposed that the press stop publishing reports of cannibalism.

In Ukraine the disaster was less well known, though severe. The drought struck its southern provinces, but for many months the authorities went on shipping grain out of Ukraine to the Volga and central Russia, and foreign aid was allowed into Ukraine itself only at the beginning of 1922.

A committee dissolved

At the end of June 1921 a group of economists, agronomists and public figures – among them Sergei Prokopovich, food minister in the Provisional Government, and his wife Yekaterina Kuskova – proposed setting up a public committee for famine relief. Gorky acted as intermediary. The Bolsheviks agreed, reckoning that well-known names would make it easier to obtain help from the West. On 21 July the All-Russian Central Executive Committee approved the All-Russian Famine Relief Committee, known by its acronym as Pomgol. It was chaired by Lev Kamenev, with the writer Vladimir Korolenko as honorary chairman. Alongside representatives of the government sat professors, doctors, economists and people from the theatre and literature. In parallel a government famine relief commission attached to the Central Executive Committee operated under Mikhail Kalinin.

The public committee lasted a few weeks. Once the agreement with the Americans had been signed and Western aid was under way, Lenin judged it unnecessary and dangerous. On 26 August he wrote to Joseph Stalin that the committee must be dissolved, its activists arrested or exiled, and the press set to ridicule them. On 27 August the committee was dissolved, and most of its non-party members ended up in a Cheka prison. They were reportedly threatened with death sentences. They were released after protests from abroad, but many, including Prokopovich and Kuskova, were expelled from the country in 1922.

Hoover and Nansen

The quickest response to Gorky’s appeal came from Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce in President Harding’s administration and head of the American Relief Administration (ARA), which since 1919 had been feeding children in Central Europe, Poland included. Hoover was a determined enemy of Bolshevism. As early as 1919 he had proposed aid for Russia, but Lenin had rejected his conditions as interference in internal affairs. Now Hoover set his terms: the release of Americans held in Russia, complete freedom of action for American staff, and the distribution of food regardless of political views or origin. Negotiations opened in Riga, where a few months earlier Poland and Soviet Russia had signed the peace that ended their war. Lenin warned his negotiator about Hoover’s “spies”, but gave way. On 20 August 1921 Walter Lyman Brown, director of the ARA’s European operations, and the deputy people’s commissar for foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov, signed the Riga Agreement. At the beginning of September the first food ships arrived in Petrograd, and the ARA opened its first children’s kitchen in the city. Its staff soon set out for the Volga.

The operation exceeded all plans. The ARA had intended to feed a million children. By the summer of 1922 it was feeding some 10.5 million people a day at more than ten thousand – by other accounts more than twenty thousand – feeding stations, employing about three hundred Americans and over a hundred thousand Russians. The US Congress voted 20 million dollars for Russian relief, the army handed over surplus stocks, and the Soviet government contributed more than ten million dollars in gold. The ARA’s medical division supplied hospitals and helped fight typhus. Operations in Russia were directed by Colonel William Haskell. Alongside the Americans worked the Quakers, the British Save the Children Fund, the Red Cross and church organisations, while European relief was coordinated by the Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At their peak his organisations fed about two million people. In 1922 Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Church valuables

The regime also used the famine in its struggle against the Orthodox Church. In the summer of 1921 Patriarch Tikhon called on the faithful and on the churches of the world to help the starving, and parishes began collecting money. But the Church was given permission for lawful charitable work only in December, and the rules for conducting it only in February 1922. On 23 February 1922 the Central Executive Committee ordered the removal from churches of all objects of gold, silver and precious stones, including liturgical vessels, supposedly to buy food. The Patriarch agreed to hand over unconsecrated objects, but not liturgical ones. In many places the faithful defended their churches. After a clash at Shuya, Lenin wrote a secret letter to the members of the Politburo on 19 March 1922 saying that the famine offered a unique opportunity to deal with the clergy, and that the more of its representatives could be shot, the better. Show trials followed; among those executed was Metropolitan Veniamin of Petrograd, and the Patriarch was arrested. According to Soviet tallies, valuables worth some 4.6 million gold roubles were seized. About a million of that was spent on food for the starving.

The end of the famine

The great famine coincided with the biggest shift in Bolshevik policy since the revolution. Even before the drought, in March 1921, under the impact of the peasant uprisings and the Kronstadt rebellion, the party had replaced requisitions with a tax in kind and launched the New Economic Policy. Its first fruits, however, came only with the better harvest of 1922. The famine eased from the summer of 1922, although in some regions it lasted into 1923. Meanwhile the Soviet government resumed grain exports to raise money for rebuilding industry, which caused indignation in the West. The ARA ended its work in Russia in June 1923. On behalf of the government Kamenev thanked the Americans in a letter to Colonel Haskell, assuring him that the Russian people would never forget this help. Soviet textbooks, however, soon forgot it, and the ARA’s workers came to be portrayed as spies.

The death toll is disputed. An official Soviet publication of the early 1920s spoke of some five million deaths from hunger and disease in 1921, and that is the figure most often given in textbooks. More cautious estimates speak of one to two million; others of several million more. To the dead must be added the victims of the epidemics, the fall in births and a generation of orphans whom the state shut away in children’s homes and labour colonies.

The long shadow of the famine

The great famine of 1921–1922 closed the period of the Civil War and revealed its true cost: the war killed more people through hunger, typhus and requisitions than on the battlefield. For the young Soviet state the disaster was also a lesson from which Stalin drew terrifying conclusions. In 1921 Lenin accepted help from the capitalists, acknowledged, at least in part, the role of the requisitions, and made concessions to the peasants. Ten years later Stalin, collectivising agriculture, again took the peasants’ grain down to the last kernel, but this time the state did not admit to the famine, refused outside help and went on exporting grain. In 1932–1933 several million people died of hunger, most of them in Ukraine – where the catastrophe went down in history as the Holodomor – and in Kazakhstan.

People whose lives became entwined with the famine later played their parts on the road to war. As President of the United States in 1929–1933, Hoover struggled with the Great Depression. For hundreds of thousands of stateless Russian émigrés Nansen created the Nansen passport, which in the 1930s and 1940s also saved refugees from Hitler. As commissar for foreign affairs in the 1930s, Litvinov tried to build a system of collective security against Germany. The Volga Germans, who in 1921 had starved alongside their neighbours, were deported by Stalin in 1941, after Hitler’s attack on the USSR, village by village to Siberia and Kazakhstan. And hunger as a weapon returned in the Second World War on a scale Europe had never known: in besieged Leningrad and in the German camps for Soviet prisoners of war, where some three million people died, most of them of starvation.