To Lenin the struggle for the existence of some was inseparable from the extermination of others. The best way to obtain bread was to "cut the throats of all the kulaks." But in 1921 throat cutting could accomplish nothing. The peasantry had no grain stocks left. Even seed grain had been confiscated. All the leaders of the Soviet government blamed the famine on the drought. In 1891 Lenin had had a different kind of explanation: 'The government bore sole responsibility for the famine and 'the general ruin.'"19 But in 1921 the famine was the result of drought and civil war. At the Tenth Party Congress Trotsky briefly summarized the results of the war: "We have destroyed the country in order to defeat the Whites." The main cause of the famine, however, was the requisitioning policy, the policy of an immediate leap into communism.
The absence of food reserves, the spread of the famine to the cities (unlike in 1891), the ruined transport system, the peasant revolts, and the unrest among the workers—all these created a critical situation. Only the capitalist countries were in a position to provide immediate assistance, more exactly, only the United States, because Western Europe was exhausted by the war and was barely able to feed itself. The Soviet government, however, would not ask the capitalists for help, assuming that they would automatically reject such a request. To Lenin it seemed only natural that the capitalist countries would refuse to help a government whose openly proclaimed goal was world revolution. Nevertheless, the impossible situation finally forced Lenin, after long hesitation, to agree to the formation of a nongovernmental organization, the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee. On July 21, 1921, Mikhail Kalinin signed the decree of the Central Executive Committee authorizing formation of the committee, which included some of the most prominent Russian scientists, literary and cultural figures, and political personalities of the prerevolutionary era. Many of them hesitated a long time before agreeing to collaborate with the Soviet government.
Lenin set precise limits on this never to be repeated experiment in cooperation on an equal basis between the Soviet government and the Russian intelligentsia:
Today's directive to the Politburo: Kuskova must be rendered strictly harmless. You are in the "Communist cell" [of the Famine Relief Committee] and will have to be on your toes, keeping a strict watch over everything. We shall get Kuskova to give us her name, her signature, and a couple of carloads [of food] from those who sympathize with her (and others of her stripe). Not a thing more. (Lenin's emphasis—M. H.)20
Ekaterina Kuskova, a journalist who had been prominent in the early Russian Social Democratic movement, later a liberal, was one of the initiators of the committee. She explained to Kamenev: "Help can come only from abroad. It will not come by itself. They will think their aid will go to you and the Red Army rather than to those who are starving. "21 A guarantee was necessary. The All-Russia Famine Relief Committee served as that guarantee. Gorky, a member of the committee, appealed to world public opinion to send aid, as did the committee as a whole.
During this period Lenin's prime concern was to assure food supplies to the industrial centers, above all to Moscow and Petrograd. Every day he sent telegrams to the southern and eastern parts of the country calling for bread. "In view of the extremely grave food supply situation at the center," he said in a telegram to Rakovsky, chairman of the Ukrainian Council of People's Commissars, "I propose: three quarters to be brought here, one quarter to be left for the cities and workers of the Ukraine. ... But bear in mind that the food crisis here is desperate and downright dangerous."22 In a telegram of May 4 he ordered the Siberian Revolutionary Committee to send 3 million poods (1 million centners) of wheat to the center during the month of May. His telegram of July 12, 1921, to Turkestan said: "With the same speed required in urgent military matters, it is of major political importance that you immediately load and send freight cars, express, to Moscow with 250,000 poods [82,000 centners] of wheat."23 The lessons of the February crisis that produced Kronstadt were still fresh. Grain was confiscated from any possible source to prevent food riots in the working- class centers. A "shameful peace" was made with the intelligentsia, and Lenin bided his time, waiting for the New Economic Policy to produce results. But before these results materialized, who should come to the rescue but the imperialists.
On August 21, 1921, Maxim Litvinov, representing the Soviet Union, signed an agreement in Riga with a representative of the American Relief Administration (ARA), headed by Herbert Hoover. When N. Kutler, a member of the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee, heard about this agreement, he said: "Well, it's time for us to go home. ... Our job is done. Now only 35 percent of the population in the areas of the famine will die, instead of 50 or 70 percent."24 Kutler was only partly right. The help from abroad did save millions, but it was not time for the committee members "to go home." Most of them were arrested right after the agreement with the ARA was signed, that is, as soon as they were no longer needed.
The August 31 Pravda reported on a special meeting of the Moscow Soviet at which its president, Lev Kamenev, "noted with satisfaction that an agreement had been reached between the Soviet government and Herbert Hoover's organization, an agreement that has already brought tangible results." Kamenev reported that the first ship "loaded with food for the children" had arrived in Petrograd that day and that regular shipments would be coming from then on.
A man named Eiduk, a veteran agent of the Cheka who was attached to the ARA as the Soviet government's representative, writing in Pravda, May 25, 1922, gave the following summary of the work of the ARA and other relief organizations. As of May 1922, the ARA had fed 7,099,574 persons;
the American Friends Service Committee, 265,000; the International Child Relief Association, 250,751; the Nansen Committee, 138,000; the Swedish Red Cross, 87,000; the German Red Cross, 7,000; the British trade unions, 92,000; and the International Red Aid organization, 78,011. The article on the ARA in the 1926 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia provides further information: The ARA was active in Russia from October 1, 1921, to June 1, 1923; at the height of its activity it fed approximately 10 million people; it spent nearly 137 million gold rubles during its operations, while the Soviet government spent approximately 15 million gold rubles in connection with the ARA. By 1930 the official Soviet reference works had changed their tone in regard to the ARA. The Small Soviet Encyclopedia of 1930 stated that "under the pretext of charity" the ARA had "helped to reduce the severity of the economic crisis in America by finding outlets for American goods." In 1950 the second edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia asserted that the ARA "took advantage of the fact that it was allowed to organize its own apparatus on Soviet territory to engage in espionage and subversion and support counterrevolutionary elements. The counterrevolutionary actions of the ARA were energetically protested by the broad masses of the working people." The encyclopedia did not bother to explain why the ARA was allowed to operate on Soviet soil or what work it did other than "espionage and subversion." The first volume of the most recent edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia now admits that the ARA was "of some help in fighting the famine," but it still contends that "the ruling circles of the United States tried to use it to support counterrevolutionary elements, espionage, and subversion, to fight the revolutionary movement, and to strengthen the position of American imperialism in Europe."25 According to the figures of the Central Statistical Bureau of the USSR, 5,053,000 lives were lost because of the famine of 1921-1922.26 These losses should be added to the 10,180,000 killed in the civil war of 1918-1920. Altogether, from 1918 to 1922, the country lost more than 14 million people, approximately 10 percent of the population. The Soviet demographer B. Ts. Urlanis gave the following estimates for the percentages of populations lost in other major civil wars: Spain, 1936—1939, 1.8 percent; the United States, 1861—1865, 1.6 percent. These figures help to illustrate the monstrous dimensions of the bloodletting in the Russian civil war. If we add to this the nearly 2 million lives Russia lost in World War I and the nearly 1 million persons lost to emigration after the revolution, we can understand how much the population diminished from 1914 to 1922.27 The famine was a major test for the young Soviet government. All the unique features of the system were displayed: cruelty, vengefulness, and obstinacy. Lenin was willing to sacrifice a substantial section of the peasantry as long as the industrial centers were kept in food. Gorky, who was pressured by Lenin into leaving the Soviet Republic late in 1921, expressed his attitude toward the peasantry in a Berlin interview with Western journalists, an attitude that undoubtedly reflected the views of Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. "I assume that most of the 35 million affected by the famine will die."28 The great humanist was optimistic about the future: 'The half-savage, stupid, difficult people of the Russian villages will die out... and their place will be taken by a new tribe of the literate, the intelligent, the vigorous."29 This dream, or at least its first part, was realized ten years later. Those who hindered its immediate realization, especially those active in the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee, paid the price. Many of them, including Kuskova, were expelled from the Soviet Republic in 1922; others were arrested and sent into internal exile. The history of the committee and of relations with the ARA set the pattern for the Soviet government's dealing with those who tried to help it while maintaining their own independence: (1) make concessions, if there is no alternative; (2) renounce all concessions when the need for them is past; and (3) take revenge.