US President Herbert Hoover - A capitalist working in Russia
An article published in the English edition of Russia Beyond.
Herbert Clark Hoover, the 31st president of the United States, worked in Russia as an entrepreneur from 1909 to 1913 and helped during the mass famine of 1921-1923.
"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."
"Children are our greatest natural resource."
Hoover, a mining engineer by profession, had been working in Russia since 1909. In Kyshtym in the Urals, he bought the enterprises from the heirs of the South Urals merchant Lev Rastorguev and created the joint-stock company ‘Kyshtym Mining Plants’. He was engaged in both financial reorganization and modernization of production.
This success at Kyshtym brought important repercussions. Russian industry had, hitherto, been often dominated by German and British operators. The Russians were always suspicious of them, fearing political implications. They resented the assumed superiority of the British and the German officials. They had none of that feeling toward Americans. The Russian engineers were most able technical men, but lacked training on the administrative side. There was instinctive camaraderie by which the Russians and Americans got along together,” Hoover wrote in his memoirs.
Hoover, who quickly gained prestige in Kyshtym, was later invited to supervise the development of the mining fields in the Altai Mountains. In his opinion, it was the largest and richest ore deposit known in the world. American engineers worked there until the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
Hoover left Russia in 1913.”"Had it not been for World War I, I would have had the largest engineering fees ever known to man,” he recalled of his work in Russia. He also headed several mining and oil companies.
In 1917, the United States severed diplomatic relations with the newly formed Bolshevik government. Nevertheless, when a mass famine broke out in Soviet Russia in 1921, Hoover, already Secretary of Commerce and head of the American Relief Administration (ARA), sent humanitarian supplies to the country, despite the fact that he was extremely negative about Bolshevism.
ARA donated aid to 20 million people in Soviet Russia. It provided food and shoes, agricultural machinery and seeds and opened hospitals and dispensaries.
Under President Hoover, the U.S. actively developed trade relations with the USSR. In 1932, with American assistance, an automobile plant in Nizhny Novgorod and a metallurgical plant in Novokuznetsk were launched.
photo with human remainings found at their home.
[Contemporary documents are also available from
the same Russian (?) source.]
Mass Famine in Russia - A Historic Event.
Another article published on 15 June 2022
in the German edition of Russia Beyond.
Originally, the U.S. initiative was aimed at curbing the influence of the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia. During the great famine between 1921 and 1922, however, it saved the lives of millions of people.
One of the greatest disasters since the Middle Ages.
The catastrophe that forced the United States to send large-scale humanitarian aid to Russia is sometimes called one of the largest European disasters since the time of the Black Death, that is, the plague.
As a result of the First World War, the Civil War, hunger and the policies of the Bolsheviks, many regions in Russia suffered from an unprecedented famine between 1921 and 1922. Tens of millions of people were affected. The total number of victims who died due to the famine is estimated at at least five million. This state of affairs prompted the Soviet regime to ask for help from the "capitalist world" for the first time.
A struggle with food shortages and the "Bolshevism disease".
Two years before the outbreak of the devastating famine in Russia, the U.S. Congress had passed the "European Famine Relief Bill" in April 1919 with a sum of 85 million euros. The program was intended to help European countries suffering from food shortages after the First World War. The fight against hunger was led by the newly created American Relief Administration (ARA) under the leadership of Herbert Hoover, then U.S. food administrator and future president of the United States.
Bolshevik Russia was not directly represented in the list of countries that received assistance from the United States. This would have been hard to imagine, considering that the US and other Western countries had only recently intervened in the Russian Civil War on the side of the White Army and supported anti-Bolshevik troops in several Russian regions with army units.
Furthermore, the entire program was directed against Soviet Russia, as it was believed that left-wing radicalism might have spread to other European countries along with hunger. The historian Bertrand Patenaude puts it this way: "The economic and political instability of these states, most of which had just been built from the ruins of old empires, made them susceptible to the plague of the East, commonly called "the Bolshevism disease." European and American statesmen generally assumed that this evil was caused by hunger; that Bolshevism was the consequence of good people starving."
Russian intellectuals and Kremlin's plea for help.
However, this situation changed in the middle of 1921. The Bolshevik regime successfully resisted the foreign invasion and defeated its opponents – they had to be taken very seriously at the latest. Moreover, the famine at that time was so terrible that it was impossible to ignore it. Around 100,000 people fell victim to the disaster every week.
Russian writer Maxim Gorky turned to the international public and asked for help. Lenin also turned to the international proletariat for support. Then, in September, the famous Norwegian adventurer Fridtijof Nansen spoke to the public from the League of Nations rostrum and said that it was not right "to sentence millions of people to death just because of enmity with the Soviet regime."
At the same time, the ARA and the Soviet government concluded an agreement. However, it would be a mistake to think that Hoover dropped his political agenda during the time he was helping the Soviet Union. "Hoover believed that if only he could rid the Russians of starvation, they would regain their sanity and regain their physical strength in order to free themselves from the oppression of the Bolsheviks," Patenaude argues.
Food for ten million people every day.
Hoover did not succeed in achieving his political goals. On the contrary, with his help, he contributed to the stabilization of the situation in Russia. Nevertheless, his support saved millions of lives.
The situation was indeed dramatic. As journalist and scientist Cynthia Heaven writes, people in the famine-stricken areas had to eat everything they could find: "grains of ground bones, tree bark and clover, but also horses, dogs, cats, rats and straw from the rooftops. The government sought to put an end to the sale of human flesh and set up guards in cemeteries to protect them from looting." Heaven also cites the terrifying memories of an ARA employee in Russia: "I've seen stacks of half-naked and frostbitten corpses in the most bizarre positions, with signs that they may have been eaten by stray dogs. I saw all these bodies – and it was a sight I'll never forget." During this time, the authorities opened more than 7,000 kitchens to feed people in need – far from enough.
[The steamer "Phoenix" with a cargo of food
arrived in Petrograd on 1st September 1921.]
In August of the following year, for this reason, the ARA set up another 19,000 kitchens and supplied ten million people every day to support the Soviets. Usually, a meal included corn semolina, canned milk, cocoa, white bread and sugar – goods imported into the Soviet Union from abroad. In addition to the soup kitchens, ARA opened emergency shelters for the homeless and wise men and helped fight the typhus epidemic.
"Your help will go down in history as a unique, huge achievement, which deserves the greatest honor, which will long be remembered in the memory of millions of Russians whom you saved from death," Maxim Gorky wrote to Herbert Hoover in gratitude for his support.
Here is another reliable source on the same subject:
ICRC International Committee of the Red Cross
Famine in Russia: The hidden horrors of 1921
Editor's Comment:
It should be added that the former Soviet Union during all the time of its existence never succeeded in feeding its population properly. Purchase of grain from Canada and even from the US became a regular item during its last years, not to mention the grave mistakes committed in the concept of agricultural production by Stalin and his followers. While the Great Famine of 1921-22 was mainly a result of an unusual drought, exaggerated by the consequences of a civil war that emerged after the Bolshevist revolution, Russia's new leaders, namely Lenin, managed to keep in the background instead of actively inviting foreign help into their country. Everything that was done to fight mass starvation remained the initiative of Hoover's ARA and other international aid organizations. Instead, the Cheka as an instrument of supervision and suppression was activated under the guidance of the Politburo to 'prove' any anti-Bolshevist attitude among members of such aid organizations, especially those from America.
Even years later, more money was spent to finance industrial espionage operations instead of modernizing Russia's inadequate economical structures. I remember a Professor at my West-Berlin university who unexpectedly became the target of a little snoop, obviously sent by some 'informal member' (IM) for East-German state security (Stasi), and who kept a facade for science espionage at East-Berlin's Humboldt University. That IM operated in close connection with Russia's KGB when it came to detect anything new discovered by Western scientists. As to the above-mentioned West-Berlin Professor, it was his professional interest in a certain group of chemicals occurring in nature which lead him to the development of chemically stable fungicides for plant protection, a project turning into a big-selling hit for Germany's agricultural chemicals branch much later.
After the crumbling of the East-German state in 1989, their state security IM in the background, and who held the post of a regular Humboldt Professor, was immediately licensed (*) while his 'errand boy' vanished to the Munich region, embedded in a group of similar guys. He is still naming himself 'Herr Onur' in allegation to his documents describing him as the Turkish citizen Onur K., and who should have undergone academic formation. In fact, he usually behaves like some crook who jumps on the back of his victim from behind. Despite his feigned interest in a local 'Institute of Turkish Culture', he avoided to speak Turkish, his alleged native language, at the time when he had to face two of my Turkish colleagues on our West-Berlin campus. He was therefore regarded as rather coming from one of the Caucasian Soviet Republics (Georgia / Chechnya) with a very limited knowledge of his alleged 'scientific profession'. I came to think that he had already entered 'the radar screen' of West-German security authorities many years ago, so I didn't mention him earlier.
(*) = Verstrickungen der Humboldt-Universität mit dem MfS
Entanglements of Humboldt University with the Ministry of State Security (MfS)
