Everything about The Russian Famine Of 1921 totally explained
The
Russian famine of 1921, better known as
Povolzhye famine, which began in the early spring of that year, and lasted through
1922, was a true
famine: hunger so severe that it was doubtful that seed-grain would be sown rather than eaten. At one point, relief agencies had to give
grain to the railroad staff to get their supplies moved. Famine, which killed an estimated 5 million,
affected mostly the
Volga-Ural region and
Ukraine.
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, especially
prodrazvyorstka.
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 the
First World War and the Civil Wars of 1918-20 before the famine began; much of them fought inside Russia.
Before the famine, all sides in the
Russian Civil Wars of 1918-20 - the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Anarchists, the seceding nationalities - had provisioned themselves by the ancient method of "living off the land": they seized food from those who grew it, gave it to their armies and supporters, and denied it to their enemies. The Bolshevik government had requisitioned supplies from the peasantry for little or nothing in exchange. This led peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. According to the official Bolshevik position, which is still maintained by some modern Marxists, the rich peasants (
kulaks) withheld their surplus grain in order to preserve their profits - statistics indicate that most of the grain and the other food supplies passed through the
black market . The Bolsheviks believed that peasants were actively trying to undermine the war effort.
The Black Book of Communism states that Lenin ordered the seizure of the food peasants had grown for their own subsistence and their seed grain in retaliation for this "sabotage", leading to widespread peasant revolts. In 1920, Lenin had ordered increased emphasis on the food requisitioning from the peasantry.
The
American Relief Administration, which
Herbert Hoover had formed to help the starvation of
World War I, had offered assistance to Lenin in
1919, on condition that they've full say over the
Russian railway network and hand out food impartially to all; Lenin refused this as interference in Russian internal affairs.
This famine, the
Kronstadt rebellion, large scale peasant uprisings such as the
Tambov rebellion, and the failure of a German
general strike convinced Lenin to reverse his policy at home and abroad. He decreed the
New Economic Policy on
March 15,
1921. The famine also helped produce an opening to the West: Lenin allowed relief organizations to bring aid, this time; fortunately, war relief was no longer required in Western Europe, and the A.R.A. had an organization set up in
Poland, 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 Minister
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 wasn't 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'd
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 5 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 hadn't been war throughout Russia as there was from 1914 to 1920.
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.
The Communist government also mounted an attack against a resistant
Russian Orthodox Church: churches were stripped to provide for the relief of the famine victims, after a refusal by
Patriarch Tikhon to sell off church valuables to raise needed funds to feed famine victims. Many senior members of the church were executed, and even more deported. Said
Lenin on this issue:
"The greater the number of the representatives of the reactionary bourgeoisie and the reactionary clergy that we'll manage to execute in this affair, the better."
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