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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.86: Starving to Death

As you know, we are now commencing the final eight episodes of the Russian Revolution series, fully three calendar years after we started this thing. Okay. Uh, now that we’ve reached the spring of 1921, the plan for the next five episodes is to continue pulling up and away from the day by day, week by week narrative of the Russian Revolution to give a slightly broader perspective on the next few years. That’ll take us right up to the death of Lenin, at which point I’ll cap the whole series off like I did with the final French Revolution episodes on the Consulate and the Napoleonic Empire. So the final three episodes will give much larger beats to wrap up the story with the great Purge of 1937, at which point the revolution was well and truly over.

Now, I think even right now, you could make the case that the Russian Revolution as such is over. The Commies won. They will remain in power, and thus, we are clearly moving into what could reasonably be classified as early Soviet history, as opposed to the revolutionary and civil war period. But it’s not quite as cut and dry as that, and I’ve always been aiming at the death of Lenin as the final destination.

But though this tenth and final and longest series on the Russian revolution is ending in a few weeks, the Revolutions podcast still has one big epilogue left to go. From the moment I first conceived of the show, the plan has always been to end it with a collection of final thoughts, reflecting on everything we’ve covered, from Cromwell and the Long Parliament through Lenin and the Soviet socialist republics. Is there a structured pattern to how revolutions start, unfold, and resolve? Who and what are the common archetypical figures? Are revolutions necessary? What the heck is a revolutionary, anyway? In the very first introductory episode, I sidestep that question and just say, look, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a revolution. Well, now it’s probably time to come back around and take a stab at classifying all the different species of duck. So when we finish Russia, I’ll take the summer off completely to work on this final project, and then we’ll come back around in the fall. So even though story time is almost over, there’s still lots of good stuff up ahead.

But getting back to story time, the spring of 1921 really is a major hinge point in Russian history. And as I just said, you could plausibly argue the revolution is, at this point, over. Up until now, the fate of the revolution had hung in the balance. The question of who would rule Russia after the fall of Tsar Nicholas and the February Revolution was wide open for four solid years. After the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, no sane person would have bet on them lasting for long. People barely knew who they were. There weren’t that many of them to begin with, and their rank and file were confined to a few large cities in an incredibly rural and agrarian country. The Bolsheviks had no links to the peasantry who formed the mass majority of Russians. So their adventurous storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 seemed destined to go down as reckless folly that led directly to their mass arrest and almost certain execution.

But that didn’t happen.

Then, after defying the odds and holding on through the first tumultuous months, Russia was consumed by three more years of a multi-front civil war, foreign invasions, border conflicts, peasant insurrections, worker strikes, and military mutinies, like most recently the Kronstadt Rebellion in March 1921. Instead of being thrown by any of this — and any one of the things I just rattled off could have spelled the end of Communist rule — the Communists had hung on. As things started warming up in 1921, the most obvious and direct threats to their rule had been overcome, driven back, and beaten down. Their roster of political enemies were almost all dead, exiled, imprisoned, converted, or terminally demoralized, and had just given up the game entirely.

But a big part of the reason we’re not totally wrapping up the story of the Russian Revolution is that it’s not over yet. The Communists hold on power was not yet totally solidified, and in fact, beginning in the spring of 1921, the Soviet government faced exactly the kind of social catastrophe that had destabilized and destroyed regimes far deeper entrenched than they were. Indeed, exactly the sort of social catastrophe that had taken down the tsars, and paved the way for the Bolsheviks to come to power in the first place.

So today we are going to talk about one of the great humanitarian disasters of the 20th century, a disaster which is especially notable for managing to produce, if you can believe it, mass death on a scale that dwarfed all the insurrections, rebellions, and civil wars that we’ve been talking about for the past 9,000 episodes. Today, we’re going to talk about the Russian famine of 1921-1922. By the time the famine was over, it had probably killed upwards of 10 million people in just a little over a single year, dwarfing even the Russian casualty numbers from World War I. For all the deadly machines of violence humans have created since we started sharpening sticks and rocks, there’s nothing quite like the fatal devastation wrought when millions of people have literally nothing to eat.

Now, the story of any famine is obviously going to begin with some kind of natural or environmental catastrophe, and so it was for Russia in 1921. This catastrophe was centered on the region around the Volga River and the steppes by the Ural Mountains, but it was not confined there entirely. There was a crop failure in 1920, followed by a particularly heavy frost over the winter that killed off a ton of seed. Into these inauspicious conditions would follow an extreme summer drought that turned fertile acres into a dustbowl. Dry thin topsoil was just blown away by the wind. So, 1921 delivered a second consecutive crop failure, and two failures in a row is where famine comes from. One crop failure is terrible, but endurable with sacrifice. Two in a row and you’re dealing with a humanitarian crisis.

But it’s not as if the peasants weren’t familiar with the phenomenon of crop failures. They were a recurring feature of Russian life, and the peasants knew how to insure themselves against the random vicissitudes of God and nature. As a matter of course, they kept reserves of grain, seed banks, food, and fodder stored in case of emergency. They had done this for centuries. And this is when we turn from the natural causes of the famine to the human causes. Years of civil war over these contested areas like the Volga meant constant forced requisitions from both the Red and the White armies. When the Reds gained the decisive upper hand, areas under their control were subject to the policies of war communism. As we’ve discussed, the practice of seizing food, grain, and fodder by force without compensation led the peasants to simply stop producing surpluses. Anything they produce was just going to be seized, so why bother producing it? The result was that the amount of land under cultivation dropped dramatically, and the amount that peasantry saved and stored also dropped dramatically. After years of this, the peasants were out on the thin ice of bare subsistence. And in 1921, they fell through the ice.

When the second crop failure hit, there was nothing to eat. There’s just nothing to eat. In huge chunks of the former Russian Empire — not just around the Volga, which was the area hardest hit, but also western Siberia, the steppelands around the Ural Mountains, the area around the Don River, Southern Ukraine — all of them places, I might point out, that were on the front lines of the civil wars. In the spring of 1921, roughly 25% of Russian peasants were already starving from a long winter after the failures from 1920. This would only get worse as the months went on. The spreading curse of malnourishment brought with it a secondary wave of disease and sickness, as typhus and cholera started taking over entire communities severely weakened by hunger. The ultimate death toll of the famine includes those who died from the sicknesses, which were so directly caused by it.

Now, in the big picture, the Soviet leadership knew how bad things were out there. It’s a huge reason Lenin had initiated the New Economic Policy at the 10th party Congress in March, 1921. He recognized how counterproductive war communism had ultimately been, and he was very motivated to reverse course, increase the amount of land under cultivation, revive heavy industry, and fix the railroads. This would put rush on a more productive course that would hopefully allow them to make gains in leaps and bounds once things started clicking. The Bolshevik vision for Russian agriculture was ultimately about large nationalized estates using advanced mechanization and the most advanced tools and theories to create the kind of abundance that would make famine a relic of the old world. They were trying to do all these things, but it was a big turn that would take a long time, and people were starving right now.

General circumstances limited the Soviet government’s initial response. We’ve talked a bunch about how the broad collapse of the Russian economy and its infrastructure was hindering everything. In particular, the roads and rail lines were an absolute shambles. It was dang near impossible to get anything anywhere else. And even if and when the Russian government was able to ship food into a famine zone, they were often taking it not from a zone of abundance and plenty, but a zone that was itself on the knife’s edge of famine. In particular, grain was shipped into the Volga from Ukraine, an area ravaged by five years of chaos that was itself suffering mass food shortages. So you get one of those terrible images of people with empty bellies, watching food get loaded onto trains and shipped away.

Now for a little while the Soviet government did what the tsars had typically done, which was not acknowledge the problem and just clamped down on the press. In particular, using the word famine in a news article was a really good way to have the Cheka come calling on you in the middle of the night. Lenin had been around the revolutionary block a time or two, and he knew famines are radicalizing events that can and will destabilize a regime. I mean, after all, lenin and his generation of revolutionaries had come of age right when the famines of the early 1890s had done so much to smash the first cracks in the foundations of the Romanov dynasty.

But the stories that were coming in over the summer of 1921 could not be repressed on a mass scale, nor could the government continue to deny what was going on. Millions of their citizens were reduced to eating literally anything they could find that might fill their stomachs. People were eating grass, weeds, leaves, tree bark, sawdust, clay, and even manure. They slaughtered every living thing they could find — livestock, horses, rodents, cats, and dogs. Many tried to flee their homes for literally greener pastures, but the government stopped allowing outbound trains to leave these areas to stop the spread of diseases taking over the famished communities, and to stop those empty stomachs from overwhelming other parts of a clearly shaky system. By the summer in 1921, things were so bad, and there were so little they could do about it, that Lenin’s government had to do something drastic. Something, almost unthinkably drastic: appeal to the west. With no other options, they would have to go hat in hand to the people they had spent their lives trying to overthrow with great proclamations about how much better life would be under communism, and now say to those people, we’re starving. Please feed us.

But Lenin, as ever, was a practical guy, and as he had said, during the days of crisis surrounding the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in early 1918, “Please add my vote in favor of taking potatoes and weapons from the bandits of Anglo-French imperialism.” Though some pride would obviously have to be swallowed, it was all for the greater glory and survival of the revolution.

The initial call to the west did not come from the government itself, but rather from the internationally renowned writer Maxim Gorky. Gorky and Lenin had been friends for years, though events since 1917 had left Gorky depressed and disillusioned. And it was only thanks to lingering personal sentimental attachment that Lenin allowed Gorky freedom of movement and expression that would have been denied to others. Gorky appealed to Lenin to let him appeal to the world, and Lenin agreed. So in July 1921, Gorky penned a short letter, that soon spread throughout the international press. It’s short, so I can just read from it in full:

The corn-growing steppes are smitten by crop failure caused by the drought. The calamity threatens starvation to millions of Russian people. Think of the Russian people’s exhaustion by the war and revolution, which considerably reduced its resistance to disease and its physical endurance. Gloomy days have come for the country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Mendeleev, Pavlov, Mussorgskii, Glinka, and other world-prized men and I venture to trust that the cultured European and American people, understanding the tragedy of the Russian people, will immediately succor with bread and medicines.

If humanitarian ideals and feelings faith in whose social import was so shaken by the damnable war and its victors’ vengeance towards the vanquished — if faith in the creative force of these ideas and feelings, I say, must and can be restored, Russia’s misfortune offers humanitarians a splendid opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of humanitarianism. I think particularly warm sympathy and succoring the Russian people must be shown by those who, during the ignominious war, so passionately preached fratricidal hatred, thereby withering the educational efficacy of ideas of all by mankind in the most arduous labors and so lightly killed by stupidity and cupidity. People who understand the words of agonizing pain will forgive the involuntary bitterness of my words.

I ask all honest European and American people for prompt aid to the Russian people. Give bread and medicine.

Maxim Gorky

After this letter was written, Lenin even allowed Gorky to organize a voluntary relief effort among private Russian citizens, a rarity in a time when any public facing institution had to be connected to the Communist Party. On July 21st, they formed the All-Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry. It was a collection of many prominent Russians, including old liberal politicians, popular former SRs like Vera Figner, prominent writers, artists, and intellectuals, and people drawn from the same social ranks that had once populated the zemstvo — doctors, engineers, teachers, lawyers, and agronomists. It was, in a certain sense, a revival of the days both of the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, when Russian society begged the tsar to be allowed to organize supplies, aid, and relief when the Russian state couldn’t do it. It was in fact so much of a callback to those days that even old Prince Lvov got involved, Lvov had himself come to prominence as a leader of the zemstvo relief efforts during both the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, and it’s why he had wound up head of the first provisional government after the abdication of the tsar in 1917. Now long since in exile in Paris, he did his best to organize a campaign of relief for the starving Russians from whoever would take his call. He was no fan of the Communist government. He did not sympathize with them. But he did sympathize with the Russian people.

Now out there in the wider world, the first person to jump to respond to Gorky’s letter was not yet US President Herbert Hoover. If you know anything at all about Herbert Hoover, you know that his path to the presidency ran through the international fame he earned organizing relief efforts in Europe both during, and especially after, World War I had blown the whole continent to hell. Hoover had led several different agencies distributing food throughout war-torn Europe since 1914, and in February 1919, the U S Congress created a thing called the American Relief Administration, giving it a budget of over a hundred million dollars in the hopes of moving food from plentiful north America to impoverished Europe. Hoover raise further funds from private donations that doubled his budget, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, the ARA delivered more than 4 million tons of relief supplies to 23 European countries.

When the ARA got going in 1919, Hoover offered aid to Soviet Russia, but this offer was flatly rejected. Even though Russia was in bad shape in 1919, and could have used all the relief it could get, this was the hottest period of the civil war, and as the American Hoover is offering this aid, American expeditionary troops, as well as forces from several other allied countries, were occupying Russian soil. They were actively funding and supplying the White armies trying to topple the Soviet government. So it did not take much to see the ARA as a Trojan horse. Especially as Hoover stipulated the organization must be allowed to deliver food and supplies equally to all who needed it, that the Russian government must not interfere with their activities, and that they be given priority access to the Russian railroads. In 1919, it would have been nearly impossible for Lenin’s government to see this as anything but an attempt to insert a supply chain for the White armies, so Lenin aggressively passed on Hoover’s offer.

But two years later, in the summer of 1921, circumstances had changed. The need for relief was far greater, the threat of being overthrown by western powers much reduced. After all, the British had just signed a trade deal with Russia. So in August 1921, negotiators from the Russian government and the ARA met in Riga to hammer out a deal. The ARA reiterated its demand to work freely and independently inside Russia without interference, and that they must be able to hand out food and supplies on the basis of simple need, without distinction of ethnicity, class, or political affiliation. Further, while the ARA was a venture whose costs were covered by the US government and private donations, the ARA demanded the Russians kick in some of their gold reserves. So it became a joint venture. After a deal was reached, the U S Congress appropriated $20 million under the Russian Famine Relief Act of 1921. The Russian government pledged $18 million of its own, with various other public and private organizations making their own contributions, taking the grand total of the budget up to about $80 million — roughly $1 billion in today’s money.

Now practically the day this agreement was signed, Lenin double crossed all those people who had joined the Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry. And in retrospect, it seems pretty obvious that him allowing this committee to be formed was a PR gesture meant to soften western public opinion. Lenin was very aware an organization composed of people hostile to the Communist Party to drive their relief work in politically seditious ways and he wasn’t going to have it. On August 27th, the Cheka arrested most of the members of the Committee on vague charges of counter-revolutionary activity. Some were exiled abroad, some exiled internally, and some administratively confined to a certain area. Lenin told Gorky that now was probably the right time for him to leave Russia for good if he knew what was good for him. Gorky took the hint, and in September 1921 departed for 10 years of exile, spent mostly in Italy.

None of that upended the deal with the ARA though, and they commenced operations immediately. Within a month, ships loaded with food headed for Russia. The ARA came into Petrograd first, since it’s, y’know, a huge port city close at hand, and that’s where they set up their first kitchen, the place where the food would actually be doled out to the starving people. As is usually the case with these things, the group at the forefront of everyone’s mind was children. Not only children of poor families, but the almost unfathomable number of orphans that had been created since 1914. With their parents either dead or having abandoned them, nearly 7 million orphans now roamed the streets of Russia, completely fending for themselves. The ARA set its initial goal on feeding 1 million children every day for a year.

Although the ARA was the largest foreign relief operation in Russia during the famine, they were not the only ones. A pan-European effort was led by famous Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen through an organization called the International Committee for Russian Relief. As the combined efforts of these groups spread out, and the scope of the disaster became apparent, everything started ballooning in size. At the height of its operations, the ARA would be feeding 10 million Russians — men, women, and children — at least one meal every day. Their European counterparts fed two million people every day, while another outfit called The International Save the Children Union fed up to 375,000. They all used a steady stream of freighters to bring in literally millions of tons of flour, grain, rice, beans, pork, milk, and sugar. The ARA brought in hundreds of onsite relief managers to oversee a small army of 125,000 Russians tasked with unloading, warehousing, hauling, weighing, cooking, and serving food at the more than 21,000 kitchens that would be established throughout the country over the next two years.

But unfortunately, the winter of 1921 came all too quickly, and the relief efforts could not move fast enough to stave off the horrors of another long hungry winter. Once the ice set in, and anything edible disappeared, people were forced to resort to cannibalism. With people dying left and right, it seemed like an absolute stupid waste of perfectly good flesh to let bodies just be buried in the ground. Especially around the Volga and Ural areas, a thriving underground culture of cannibalism got many people through the winter. When relief workers came around and attempted to properly dispose of corpses, people quietly begged them not to take the meat away. As time went on, grave robbery became a thing, and of course, eventually, there are stories that it wasn’t exactly safe to go out at night. The weak might get jumped, murdered and eaten. Nobody really talked about it openly, nor wanted to talk about it openly, but cannibalism was widespread in many areas, and at least a few more people lived than would have otherwise perished.

Beyond the deaths caused immediately by starvation, relief workers also reported back the appalling material conditions they found in Russia. Even if food was available, there might not be sufficient fuel to cook it, nor sufficient fuel for anyone to stay warm during the long winter. Russian peasants out in the villages and Russian workers in the cities often lived in a single pair of tattered rags. Children in orphanages often had only one garment, and that was often little more than a converted flower sack. Kids out in the rural areas who might’ve been fed at a kitchen had to stay home as they lacked sufficient clothes to safely leave the house. Taking in these distressing reports, the ARA expanded its operations and initiated a plan to collect and send clothing packages to Russia, all of which would be funded by private donations.

In addition to all of this, as I said, beyond the immediate problem of starvation, there was also a huge ongoing medical crisis. Diseases of all kinds ran rampant through the weakened population. Hospitals and clinics were overrun and under supplied. Everything was in shorts supply; beds, blankets, sheets, and most medical tools and medicines. Operations had to be performed in operating rooms without heat and without anesthetic. Wounds would be dressed with rags or just any random bits of paper. The water supply was often polluted and unusable. By the end of 1921 relief efforts expanded beyond just food, and ultimately, they were supplying over 16,000 hospitals and clinics with medicine, blankets, surgical equipments, and clean garments. They also doled out 6 million inoculations and over 1 million vaccinations.

While all these western relief workers ran around Russia, the Soviet government did not exactly stick to their promise not to interfere with them. The Cheka followed workers, searched them, interrogated them. Some were arrested and accused of being spies, saboteurs, and people looking to discredit and overthrow the Soviet regime. The government search convoys and sea supplies and constantly meddled with the relief operations. Now to a certain degree, this is all understandable. Many in the west had made no secret of their hopes of overthrowing the Communists, and many absolutely saw the Russian famine is a great piece of anti-Communist propaganda. And given how much we know about how spy services operate, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of these people did turn out to be spies with ulterior motives, although I haven’t actually read that anywhere.

But also, just as a Red Scare mentality spread throughout the various corridors of western power during this period, a complimentary White Scare mentality had spread through the corridors of the Kremlin. The slightest little spark of suspicion about someone was enough to drive a wild blaze of paranoia. Now perhaps it was justifiable paranoia, but it was paranoia nonetheless.

Officially the Soviets expressed their gratitude, and in May 1922, Kamenev, in his role as president of the Moscow Soviet and deputy chairman of all Russian famine relief committees, wrote a letter to the ARA administrators that said:

The government of the Russian nation will never forget the generous help that was afforded them in the terrible calamity and dangers visited upon them. I wish to express on behalf of the Soviet government my satisfaction and thanks to the American Relief Administration for the substantial support which they are offering to the calamity stricken population of the Volga area.

The famine itself finally started to taper off thanks to much better harvests in 1922, and then again in 1923; harvests that were helped along by the mass importation of seeds from the west. The ARA continued to do work in Russia until 1923, but it all ended when it was reported publicly that the Soviet government was now exporting grain from Ukraine for sale abroad. They did this because they needed money to buy more industrial machinery, both for factories and farming to get their economy back up and running, but it was a death blow to any kind of sympathetic generosity from would-be supporters in the west. People were not interested in paying to feed a country that was now exporting grain it could use to feed itself. So in June 1923, the ARA suspended its operations in Russia and left.

There’s no way to calculate an exact final death toll of the Russian famine of 1921-1922, nor calculate how many lives were saved by the efforts of the foreign relief organizations. But the numbers that I’ve seen comfortably reported put the number of dead around 10 million, and we know that at least as many as that were being fed every day by the ARA and other organizations. Absent their presence, many millions more would have died. Now it all gets dead and buried under years of cold war propaganda and counter-propaganda, but when it comes to the Revolution, the Americans proved to be at least as generous and helpful towards early Soviet Russia as they had been antagonistic and hostile. And on balance, given the paltry numbers of Americans in the expeditionary forces involved in the incursions in the Russian Civil War in 1918 and 1919, perhaps we might be able to say that the scales are tipped quite a bit in the direction of generous and helpful.

I mean, it’s entirely possible that Herbert Hoover, arch capitalist, was the reason Lenin and the Communists held on to power.