The Aftereffects of the American Relief Mission to Soviet Russia

Abstract

A great famine in Russia in the spring of 1921 stimulated the first, and to date, the most intimate and extensive, engagement between the United States and the Soviet Union. For twenty-two months, an American relief force under the direction of Herbert Hoover (then Secretary of Commerce) fed millions of Soviet citizens throughout twenty-five provinces in Russia and the Ukraine, and in Moscow and Petrograd.1 This paper is a study of the effect of this experience on subsequent Soviet and American attitudes. In accordance with the terms of the treaty'> concluded between the American Relief Administration (A.R.A.) and the Soviet government on August 20, 1921, a group of some 180 Americans operated as a virtually autonomous authority within Russia under the protection of immunity from arrest or prosecution.2 Soviet suspicion that Hoover might use the privileged position of his relief missionaries for counterrevolutionary purposes was more or less reasonably based on his openly anti-communist activities as Food Administrator in Europe during the Armistice period.3 That Hoover did intend to conduct a new intervention in the form of famine relief can be seen in his secret instructions to all A.R.A. representatives in Russia to abstain entirely not only from action but even from discussion of po-