Books in Brief: Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia 1921-23

Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia 1921-23, by Benjamin M. Weissman (Hoover Institution Press, 247 pp., $7.95).

Scarcely had Lenin and the Bolsheviks weathered the civil war following World War I when Soviet rule faced another grave threat—famine. Starvation and disease across much of Russia had already taken up to three million lives and threatened thirty million more. The one man on earth best equipped to rescue the Soviets, but ideologically the most unlikely of saviors, was U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Hoover, his head perhaps turned by spectacular wartime triumphs as “Food Regulator of Europe” (Pershing’s phrase), could not resist. He mobilized his quasi-private American Relief Administration for its crowning achievement: a massive relief operation which fed 10.5 million Russians per day at its peak and finally broke the famine. Professor Weissman, a specialist in Slavic politics at Rutgers, provides a meticulously detailed and perceptive account of the whole strange episode. His narrative is in more an academic than a popular style; some maps and graphics and a bit more sketching of the broader historical background would have been helpful. But nothing can make this story dry: there is too much irony in the spectacle of giant adversaries embracing in spite of themselves, and above all there is the fascinating question of the road not taken. How many lives might have been saved over the longer term—indeed how might the whole history of the past half-century been different—had President Harding and Secretary of State Hughes reined Hoover in and let events inside Russia run their course? Weissman ends the book one chapter too soon, offering no direct answer on this point, but he hints that U.S. food aid was the critical factor in averting the social and economic chaos that could have swept the Bolsheviks from power. George Kennan thought so too, as did Lenin himself. Some capitalists, it seems, would not sell you the rope for their own hanging after all; they’d give it to you.

JA

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John K. Andrews Jr.

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Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia 1921-23, by Benjamin M. Weissman (Hoover Institution Press, 247 pp., $7.95).

Scarcely had Lenin and the Bolsheviks weathered the civil war following World War I when Soviet rule faced another grave threat—famine. Starvation and disease across much of Russia had already taken up to three million lives and threatened thirty million more. The one man on earth best equipped to rescue the Soviets, but ideologically the most unlikely of saviors, was U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Hoover, his head perhaps turned by spectacular wartime triumphs as “Food Regulator of Europe” (Pershing’s phrase), could not resist. He mobilized his quasi-private American Relief Administration for its crowning achievement: a massive relief operation which fed 10.5 million Russians per day at its peak and finally broke the famine. Professor Weissman, a specialist in Slavic politics at Rutgers, provides a meticulously detailed and perceptive account of the whole strange episode. His narrative is in more an academic than a popular style; some maps and graphics and a bit more sketching of the broader historical background would have been helpful. But nothing can make this story dry: there is too much irony in the spectacle of giant adversaries embracing in spite of themselves, and above all there is the fascinating question of the road not taken. How many lives might have been saved over the longer term—indeed how might the whole history of the past half-century been different—had President Harding and Secretary of State Hughes reined Hoover in and let events inside Russia run their course? Weissman ends the book one chapter too soon, offering no direct answer on this point, but he hints that U.S. food aid was the critical factor in averting the social and economic chaos that could have swept the Bolsheviks from power. George Kennan thought so too, as did Lenin himself. Some capitalists, it seems, would not sell you the rope for their own hanging after all; they’d give it to you.