14 ms·

The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (2011)

103 points by rutenspitz 9y ago

adventured 9y ago
In line with the same type of intentionally forgotten history, US investors and business persons built and provided a large portion of the Soviet industrial capabilities prior to WW2 [1], which the Soviets later pretended were their own accomplishments. It's a theme that repeats throughout all of Soviet history, where Communist propaganda collides with market economy prosperity, on up to the famous 1959 Kitchen debate between Nixon and Khrushchev [2], or Yeltsin's visit to the Texas supermarket [3]. Communism universally, completely failed at providing superior material prosperity, which was one of its most touted foundational claims. Worse, it failed at providing nearly any consistent materialism at all, as witnessed by the second great Soviet famine under Stalin in 1932-33 [4], in which millions of people perished. [1] http://www.americanheritage.com/content/how-america-helped-build-soviet-machine http://www.americanheritage.com/content/how-america-helped-b... [2] http://adst.org/2015/07/nixon-vs-khrushchev-the-1959-kitchen-debate/ http://adst.org/2015/07/nixon-vs-khrushchev-the-1959-kitchen... [3] https://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-clear-lake/ https://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/red-famine-anne-applebaum-ukraine-soviet-union/542610/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/re...
- ThrowMeDown01 9y ago
  You are taking this way too far as an argument. Russia at the time was miles and miles behind any Western nation in terms of development. They knew it, which is why they thought their revolution would fail unless Western nations, German workers in particular, would start their own revolution. So they already started with a huge handicap - on top of that WWI and the civil war after the revolution, which was a fight tooth and nail, as bad as it gets, put them down even further. So even if the "experiment" would have stopped right then and there and they would have switched to pure capitalism, what kind of development would you have expected? This is not to take anything away from your mention of their propaganda efforts to appear a lot bigger than they are, but your argument leaves out some important "details".
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    > So even if the "experiment" would have stopped right then and there and they would have switched to pure capitalism, what kind of development would you have expected? I would expect something more like 350 million strong Norway, not 140 million strong Honduras that is the result of a century of communist experiment. I am often reminded that Eastern Europe was always poor. Guess what? So were Norway at the time of divergence. Moreover, poverty and corruption is a direct result of communism that can't be ignored.
    - ThrowMeDown01 9y ago
      Russia was not poor and corrupt under the Tsar, it was the Bolshevists that caused it all? Really? Yes, heroic efforts are possible, see Japan or South Korea. Doesn't change what I wrote, especially since the OP comment was about a time shortly after the revolution. Nobody is disputing the horrible and stupid things that happened in Russia at the time. Nothing worse than people on a mission to save the world at any cost.
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      @ThrowMeDown01 Under Tsar Russia had a chance. Now it no longer has any because it is now dead and wasted away, just like your account (UPD: It's unblocked, so now Russia is in worse state than your account). It's an empty broken shell. And that, kids, is the result of communism. You die on that stuff.
      - dang 9y ago
        Your comments are crossing both into ideological flamewar and personal attack. Please stop.
    - tpm 9y ago
      Well, Norway discovered oil and managed to distribute the profits evenly (I think). Not many oil-rich countries did that. And regarding Eastern Europe, it was not always poor, for example the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was more prosperous than Austria both before and immediately after WW2, but that changed during communism and Austria is still much more prosperous nearly 30 years after the fall of communism.
- dang 9y ago
  Let's not have yet another battle about how bad communism was. On HN, generic tangents are always off topic because the discussions they produce are predictable. Ideological battle is the worst subtype of those. I know the theme is adjacent to the article's material, but so are plenty of other things, some of which are specific rather than generic, and those are the ones that can seed good conversation. Who even knew this massive event had taken place? or that Herbert Hoover played a central role? I sure didn't. Relitigating communism, on the other hand...not so much. Nearby generic themes trigger quick reactions because we all have many pre-existing associations to them. But for internet discussion, they are the black holes we need most to steer clear of. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - adventured 9y ago
    Fair enough. I thought it fit well with the parent article. I get your point about how wandering anywhere near Communism as a discussion can quickly lead to low quality argumentation.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
thriftwy 9y ago
Then another famine was created to sell wheat to pay Americans for factories. It is usually shown as Ukrainian genocide, but when you look at absolute numbers, large areas of greater Russia and present-day Kazakhstan were affected to the same extent.
teej 9y ago
This YouTube video seems to be the PBS episode mentioned - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmCsztQz4s0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmCsztQz4s0
johntiger1 9y ago
While often disparaged these days, the US has long been one of the most charitable countries in the world both in terms of private citizen contributions and public government aid. Glad to see some of the good deeds finally being recognized!
- gumby 9y ago
  I agree but (per my other comment on this topic) don't forget that the US had been invading Russia from the revolution to shortly before this famine.
  - Fins 9y ago
    Had the allies really been invading Russia, the world would have been a much better place. Unfortunately, their role was very limited.
    - BenSahar 9y ago
      It would have depended on which part(s) of the White Movement would have been included in the new government. There were a lot of leaders in the movement that had no problem with autocracy as long as it was their autocracy.
      - Fins 9y ago
        It is quite unlikely that any part of the Whites would have engaged in mass slaughter of its own citizenry at quite the same scale as communists.
        boomboomsubban 9y ago
        That's a pretty tough sell. The White terror was pretty terrible during the war, supposedly killing more people than the counterpart Red terror. And given the antisemitic nature of that killing, there are some incredibly grim possibilities for what the following years would have looked like.
gumby 9y ago
Hmm, this article doesn't mention the allied invasion of russia (of which the US was a major part) that ended in 1920. Sure, the US was a great humanitarian but also contributed to their being a famine!
- adventured 9y ago
  edit: downvoters, feel free to correct what I'm saying if you can. I'm going by the factual history of what actually happened, what role the US actually played in the conflict (barely any), and the trivial scale of that role. It's not mentioned because the US was not a major part of any invasion into Russia and did not contribute to the famine. Factually the US involvement in that conflict was something below trivial. Although feel free to explain how a couple hundred US soldiers contributed to the forced famine of a nation of tens of millions of people. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/the-day-that-the-usa-invaded-russia-and-fought-with-the-red-army-x.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/the-day-that-th...
  - gumby 9y ago
    Though I disagree with you I gave you an upvote -- the right way for people to disagree is to comment, so thank you for adding that edit and alerting me to the downvoting. I agree that in a country the size of russia the counterrevolutionary invasion was, in a sense, trivial (as had been the counterrevolutionary invation of revolutionary France). However it had various long term consequences in terms of policy, resentment, pride etc which, sad to say, do effect politics in international relations today as well. However on the subject of the invasion itself, there were about 150K invaders of various nationalities (about 100K in the north, of which the US personnel was about 10%). However US materiel support was substantial, as they had barely entered WWI and had plenty to supply. in addition the blosheviks -- not particularly well organized or rational) were quite distracted by this force. You can see from the treaty of Brest-Lutovsk that they were quite eager to be shed of foreign obligations, wanting to consolidate domestic control. I don't claim the invasion was the cause of the famine, nor do I believe the bolsheviks would have been competent to deal with it without the invasion, but it has a significant distractor as you can see from their records. But to present the article as the US being the rescuing heros without mentioning their bloody opposition in the years immediately leading up to the famine I do consider rediculous.
ballenarosada 9y ago
This article makes no mention of the role the Wilson administration likely played in creating the famine to begin with. Following 1917, anglo-american support of fascist paramilitary groups in Russia led to the bloodiest civil war in history.
- adventured 9y ago
  The articles makes no mention of it, because the famine was directly caused by Lenin's government forcibly removing farmers from their own land and taking state control of food production and distribution. The famine occured several years after the Russian civil war was already over. The Wilson Administration played no role in making Lenin and the nascent Communist system seize control of farm land, intentionally starve millions of people to death by stealing their food, and seize control of most food production and distribution.
  - Demiurge 9y ago
    It was the Tsar who took control of the Russian farm yields in order to supply the WW1 army, with strong encouragement of the British/Entente.
    - adventured 9y ago
      It was directly caused by Lenin's prodrazvyorstka, and began formally in early 1919 and gradually spread to every form of food and food production over the following years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodrazvyorstka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodrazvyorstka
      - Demiurge 9y ago
        From the article you linked, "The term is commonly associated with war communism during the Russian Civil War when it was introduced by the Bolshevik government. However Bolsheviks borrowed the idea from the grain razvyorstka introduced in the Russian Empire during World War I, in 1916." The point being made that this has something to do with Lenin and communism "directly" is ignoring the context. The context is that this famine, as well as the revolution were caused by the extreme failures of the Tsarist rule, compounded with the pawn role Russian Empire was given in the World War I. Russian Empire was used a supplier of the Entente in both grain, and ground forces. You can perhaps blame Lenin for the famine, but Lenin has steered the country out of the World War, in which Russia would have been the loser, regardless of which side won.
nraynaud 9y ago
Different times, different behaviors. Now Yemen is ravaged by famine and the US is droning it.

103 points by rutenspitz 9y ago

In line with the same type of intentionally forgotten history, US investors and business persons built and provided a large portion of the Soviet industrial capabilities prior to WW2 [1], which the Soviets later pretended were their own accomplishments. It's a theme that repeats throughout all of Soviet history, where Communist propaganda collides with market economy prosperity, on up to the famous 1959 Kitchen debate between Nixon and Khrushchev [2], or Yeltsin's visit to the Texas supermarket [3]. Communism universally, completely failed at providing superior material prosperity, which was one of its most touted foundational claims. Worse, it failed at providing nearly any consistent materialism at all, as witnessed by the second great Soviet famine under Stalin in 1932-33 [4], in which millions of people perished. [1] http://www.americanheritage.com/content/how-america-helped-build-soviet-machine http://www.americanheritage.com/content/how-america-helped-b... [2] http://adst.org/2015/07/nixon-vs-khrushchev-the-1959-kitchen-debate/ http://adst.org/2015/07/nixon-vs-khrushchev-the-1959-kitchen... [3] https://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-went-grocery-shopping-in-clear-lake/ https://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin... [4] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/red-famine-anne-applebaum-ukraine-soviet-union/542610/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/re...

ThrowMeDown01 9y ago
You are taking this way too far as an argument. Russia at the time was miles and miles behind any Western nation in terms of development. They knew it, which is why they thought their revolution would fail unless Western nations, German workers in particular, would start their own revolution. So they already started with a huge handicap - on top of that WWI and the civil war after the revolution, which was a fight tooth and nail, as bad as it gets, put them down even further. So even if the "experiment" would have stopped right then and there and they would have switched to pure capitalism, what kind of development would you have expected? This is not to take anything away from your mention of their propaganda efforts to appear a lot bigger than they are, but your argument leaves out some important "details".
- thriftwy 9y ago
  > So even if the "experiment" would have stopped right then and there and they would have switched to pure capitalism, what kind of development would you have expected? I would expect something more like 350 million strong Norway, not 140 million strong Honduras that is the result of a century of communist experiment. I am often reminded that Eastern Europe was always poor. Guess what? So were Norway at the time of divergence. Moreover, poverty and corruption is a direct result of communism that can't be ignored.
  - ThrowMeDown01 9y ago
    Russia was not poor and corrupt under the Tsar, it was the Bolshevists that caused it all? Really? Yes, heroic efforts are possible, see Japan or South Korea. Doesn't change what I wrote, especially since the OP comment was about a time shortly after the revolution. Nobody is disputing the horrible and stupid things that happened in Russia at the time. Nothing worse than people on a mission to save the world at any cost.
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    @ThrowMeDown01 Under Tsar Russia had a chance. Now it no longer has any because it is now dead and wasted away, just like your account (UPD: It's unblocked, so now Russia is in worse state than your account). It's an empty broken shell. And that, kids, is the result of communism. You die on that stuff.
    - dang 9y ago
      Your comments are crossing both into ideological flamewar and personal attack. Please stop.
  - tpm 9y ago
    Well, Norway discovered oil and managed to distribute the profits evenly (I think). Not many oil-rich countries did that. And regarding Eastern Europe, it was not always poor, for example the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was more prosperous than Austria both before and immediately after WW2, but that changed during communism and Austria is still much more prosperous nearly 30 years after the fall of communism.
dang 9y ago
Let's not have yet another battle about how bad communism was. On HN, generic tangents are always off topic because the discussions they produce are predictable. Ideological battle is the worst subtype of those. I know the theme is adjacent to the article's material, but so are plenty of other things, some of which are specific rather than generic, and those are the ones that can seed good conversation. Who even knew this massive event had taken place? or that Herbert Hoover played a central role? I sure didn't. Relitigating communism, on the other hand...not so much. Nearby generic themes trigger quick reactions because we all have many pre-existing associations to them. But for internet discussion, they are the black holes we need most to steer clear of. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- adventured 9y ago
  Fair enough. I thought it fit well with the parent article. I get your point about how wandering anywhere near Communism as a discussion can quickly lead to low quality argumentation.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

thriftwy 9y ago

Then another famine was created to sell wheat to pay Americans for factories. It is usually shown as Ukrainian genocide, but when you look at absolute numbers, large areas of greater Russia and present-day Kazakhstan were affected to the same extent.

teej 9y ago

This YouTube video seems to be the PBS episode mentioned - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmCsztQz4s0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmCsztQz4s0

johntiger1 9y ago

While often disparaged these days, the US has long been one of the most charitable countries in the world both in terms of private citizen contributions and public government aid. Glad to see some of the good deeds finally being recognized!

gumby 9y ago
I agree but (per my other comment on this topic) don't forget that the US had been invading Russia from the revolution to shortly before this famine.
- Fins 9y ago
  Had the allies really been invading Russia, the world would have been a much better place. Unfortunately, their role was very limited.
  - BenSahar 9y ago
    It would have depended on which part(s) of the White Movement would have been included in the new government. There were a lot of leaders in the movement that had no problem with autocracy as long as it was their autocracy.
    - Fins 9y ago
      It is quite unlikely that any part of the Whites would have engaged in mass slaughter of its own citizenry at quite the same scale as communists.
      - boomboomsubban 9y ago
        That's a pretty tough sell. The White terror was pretty terrible during the war, supposedly killing more people than the counterpart Red terror. And given the antisemitic nature of that killing, there are some incredibly grim possibilities for what the following years would have looked like.

gumby 9y ago

Hmm, this article doesn't mention the allied invasion of russia (of which the US was a major part) that ended in 1920. Sure, the US was a great humanitarian but also contributed to their being a famine!

adventured 9y ago
edit: downvoters, feel free to correct what I'm saying if you can. I'm going by the factual history of what actually happened, what role the US actually played in the conflict (barely any), and the trivial scale of that role. It's not mentioned because the US was not a major part of any invasion into Russia and did not contribute to the famine. Factually the US involvement in that conflict was something below trivial. Although feel free to explain how a couple hundred US soldiers contributed to the forced famine of a nation of tens of millions of people. https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/the-day-that-the-usa-invaded-russia-and-fought-with-the-red-army-x.html https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/the-day-that-th...
- gumby 9y ago
  Though I disagree with you I gave you an upvote -- the right way for people to disagree is to comment, so thank you for adding that edit and alerting me to the downvoting. I agree that in a country the size of russia the counterrevolutionary invasion was, in a sense, trivial (as had been the counterrevolutionary invation of revolutionary France). However it had various long term consequences in terms of policy, resentment, pride etc which, sad to say, do effect politics in international relations today as well. However on the subject of the invasion itself, there were about 150K invaders of various nationalities (about 100K in the north, of which the US personnel was about 10%). However US materiel support was substantial, as they had barely entered WWI and had plenty to supply. in addition the blosheviks -- not particularly well organized or rational) were quite distracted by this force. You can see from the treaty of Brest-Lutovsk that they were quite eager to be shed of foreign obligations, wanting to consolidate domestic control. I don't claim the invasion was the cause of the famine, nor do I believe the bolsheviks would have been competent to deal with it without the invasion, but it has a significant distractor as you can see from their records. But to present the article as the US being the rescuing heros without mentioning their bloody opposition in the years immediately leading up to the famine I do consider rediculous.

ballenarosada 9y ago

This article makes no mention of the role the Wilson administration likely played in creating the famine to begin with. Following 1917, anglo-american support of fascist paramilitary groups in Russia led to the bloodiest civil war in history.

adventured 9y ago
The articles makes no mention of it, because the famine was directly caused by Lenin's government forcibly removing farmers from their own land and taking state control of food production and distribution. The famine occured several years after the Russian civil war was already over. The Wilson Administration played no role in making Lenin and the nascent Communist system seize control of farm land, intentionally starve millions of people to death by stealing their food, and seize control of most food production and distribution.
- Demiurge 9y ago
  It was the Tsar who took control of the Russian farm yields in order to supply the WW1 army, with strong encouragement of the British/Entente.
  - adventured 9y ago
    It was directly caused by Lenin's prodrazvyorstka, and began formally in early 1919 and gradually spread to every form of food and food production over the following years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodrazvyorstka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodrazvyorstka
    - Demiurge 9y ago
      From the article you linked, "The term is commonly associated with war communism during the Russian Civil War when it was introduced by the Bolshevik government. However Bolsheviks borrowed the idea from the grain razvyorstka introduced in the Russian Empire during World War I, in 1916." The point being made that this has something to do with Lenin and communism "directly" is ignoring the context. The context is that this famine, as well as the revolution were caused by the extreme failures of the Tsarist rule, compounded with the pawn role Russian Empire was given in the World War I. Russian Empire was used a supplier of the Entente in both grain, and ground forces. You can perhaps blame Lenin for the famine, but Lenin has steered the country out of the World War, in which Russia would have been the loser, regardless of which side won.

nraynaud 9y ago

Different times, different behaviors. Now Yemen is ravaged by famine and the US is droning it.