The Russian Famine of 1921 and U.S. Foreign Aid.

American Experience recently aired a broadcast on the Russian famine of 1921-22. It killed an estimated five million people, and would have killed millions more had the United States not sent large amounts of food aid. At the peak of the U.S. relief effort, 16 million people were receiving food aid. The broadcast showed horrible pictures of children, naked in overcrowded orphanages as starved as the inmates of Nazi concentration camps a generation later; it showed piles of bodies piled frozen on the ground; it recounted massive amounts of cannibalism, mothers killing a child so that their other children could eat the bodies of their siblings.

The U.S. aid included seed grain that allowed the people of the USSR to plant again in 1922; the harvest ended the famine and allowed the food aid to end.

The film also showed the state of the Russian railroads in 1921 after the damage inflicted by World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Civil War that followed. The United States, which had huge stocks of grain, was able to move the grain to its ports and ship it across the Atlantic Ocean more easily than the Russians were able to move the grain from the Russian ports to the starving people.

I recently posted on life in the USSR in the 1930s, One of the things members of my history book club had difficulty understanding is how Russians then could believe the propaganda from their government that things were getting better. This film made that acceptance much more credible.

The History of American Disaster Relief

The United States provided two billion pounds or food aid to Belgium and northern France early in World War I, and then provided food aid to the millions of hungry Europeans in the aftermath of that war. The food aid to the USSR in 1921 was even greater in magnitude. This was perhaps the beginning of the American continuing effort to provide emergency aid following disasters abroad. The aid to the USSR was especially notable in that it was given to a Communist country at a time that there was considerable fear of the international spread of Communism, including spread to the United States, among political leaders and the economic elites in the United States. I suppose that this was also a precedent for the broader development assistance programs of the United States that have persisted since World War II.