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The famine resulted from the combined effect of the disruption of the agricultural production, which already started during World War I and continued through the disturbances of the Russian Revolution Of 1917 and Russian Civil War with its policy of War Communism . One Of Russia's Intermittent Droughts that happened in 1921 aggravated the situation to the level of the national catastrophe. In many cases recklessness of local administration, which recognized the problems only too late, contributed to the tragedy. HISTORY OF THE FAMINE Russia had suffered six and a half years of war before the famine began. The last years of the First World War in the East were fought inside Imperial Russia . Modern war strains any economy; but for much of the period, Russia had been cut off, not only from trade with the Central Powers , but, with the closing of the Dardanelles , from the rest of the world. The end of grain export would at least have meant full granaries, if it were not for the peculation and corruption of Imperial Russia. Before the famine, all sides in the argued with Lenin that this was failing as early as the spring of 1920; Lenin eventually admitted mistakes. In June 1921, Mikhail Tukhachevsky , later Marshal, was sent to suppress the Tambov Rebellion , with armored cars and cannon. He ordered the general taking of hostages, especially eldest sons, who were to be shot if their families were found to have guns or have given refuge to rebels. These orders were opposed in higher quarters, and revoked after a month. The American Relief Administration , which Herbert Hoover had formed to help the starvation of WWI , had offered assistance to Lenin in 1919 , on condition that they have full say over the Russia n railway network and hand out food impartially to all; Lenin refused this as interference in Russian internal affairs. This famine, the , relieving the Polish famine which had begun in the winter of 1919-20. THE INTERNATIONAL RELIEF EFFORT Although no official request for aid was issued, a committee of well-known people without obvious party affiliations was allowed to set up an appeal for assistance. In July 1921 the writer Maxim Gorky published an appeal to the outside world, claiming that millions of lives were menaced by crop failure. At a conference in Geneva on 15 August organised by the International Committee Of The Red Cross and the League Of Red Cross Societies , the International Committee for Russian Relief (ICCR) was set up with Dr Fridtjof Nansen as its High Commissioner. The main participants were Hoover's American Relief Association, along with other bodies such as the American Friends Service Committee and the International Save The Children Union , which had the British Save The Children Fund as the major contributor. Nansen headed to Moscow, where he signed an agreement with Soviet Foreign Ministry Georgy Chicherin that left the ICCR in full control of its operations. At the same time, fundraising for the famine relief operation began in earnest in Britain, with all the elements of a modern emergency relief operation - full-page newspaper advertisements, local collections, and a fundraising film shot in the famine area. By September, a ship had been despatched from London carrying 600 tons of supplies. The first feeding centre was opened in October in Saratov. The ICCR managed to feed around ten million people, with the overwhelming bulk coming from the ARA, funded by the US Congress ; the International Save the Children Union, by comparison, managed to feed 375,000 at the height of the operation. The operation was hazardous - several workers died of cholera - and was not without its critics, including the London Daily Express , which first denied the severity of the famine, and then argued that the money would better be spent on poverty in the United Kingdom. THE POST-RELIEF PERIOD The Bolsheviks permitted the relief agencies to continue distributing free food in 1923, while they sold grain abroad. The net effect, since grain is Fungible , was that they received money for nothing from the western Philanthropists . When this was discovered, foreign relief organizations suspended the aid. Lenin's first heart attack was in the spring of 1922, and he had Aphasia in 1923; the extent of his responsibility for the grain sales is therefore unclear. However, taking advantage of gullible capitalists would have accorded with his expressed policies. François Furet estimated there were five million deaths in the famine; for comparison, the worst crop failure of late Tsarist Russia, in 1892 , caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths. That failure followed years of normal and bumper harvests, with the resulting buildup of reserves; the harvest of 1888 had been "excellent beyond even the more optimistic hopes". Also, that was in a time of peace, international commerce, and good order; there had not been war throughout Russia before 1917. POLITICAL USES As noted above, the Russian famine of 1921 came at the end of six and a half years of unrest and violence (first World War I, then the two Russian revolutions of 1917, then the Russian Civil War). Many different political and military factions were involved in those events, and most of them have been accused by their enemies of having contributed to, or even bearing sole responsibility for, the famine. SEE ALSO REFERENCES |
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