American Experience (1988–…): Season 23, Episode 9 - The Great Famine - full transcript

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"December 4, 1921."

"Samara District, Soviet Russia."

"Today I came upon a group of
men in a makeshift cemetery"

"digging a mass grave."

"When I asked where the bodies were,"

"one of them explained..."

"We are trying now to make a place"

"to put the future corpses."

"We are afraid we won't have
the strength to do it later."



"As I looked at them,
I wondered if any of those men"

"thought he might be digging
his own grave."

Will Shafroth,
American Relief Administration.

In July 1921,
noted Russian author Maxim Gorky

issued a plea to the West.

"Gloomy days have come
for the country of Tolstoy,"

"Dostoyevsky, Mendeleev," Gorky wrote.

"I ask for prompt aid
to the Russian people."

"Give bread and medicine."

Gorky never mentioned Vladimir Lenin

or his Bolshevik revolution.

Russia had suffered a drought,
which was not unusual.

The famine of 1921 was.

It would become the worst
natural disaster in Europe



since the Black Plague in the Middle Ages.

There was this historical coincidence

of a number of social forces:

the collapse of the tsarist regime,

the outbreak of civil war,

the policies of the Bolsheviks themselves.

The government carried out
mass requisitioning of grain,

which prevented peasants
from feeding themselves

or even having enough seed
to carry on next season

planting a new crop.

Herbert Hoover,
the new secretary of commerce

under President Warren Harding,

spotted Gorky's plea in a newspaper.

Hoover was also the director

of the American Relief Administration,

known as the ARA.

For most Americans,

Herbert Hoover is associated
with the Great Depression.

But back in the 1920s,

his image was one of being
a very efficient...

a hardheaded humanitarian

who knew how to get the food through.

No one in the West had better credentials

to answer Gorky's request
than Herbert Hoover.

Hoover was a Stanford-trained
mining engineer

who had operated in Australia, China,

and Russia's Ural Mountains,

and knew the logistics
of moving men and materiel

around the world.

When World War I broke out, he
was asked to organize the relief

of an entire nation.

There were seven million Belgians

living under German occupation.

So it became Hoover's responsibility

to provide daily food assistance

that would keep all those people alive.

And Hoover showed that he had
the administrative talents

as well as the humanitarian
sympathies to pull this off.

And he became an American hero
and even an international hero.

After the war,

the Paris Peace Conference
asked the United States

to feed tens of millions in 21 countries

throughout war-torn Europe
and the Near East.

The U.S. created the ARA
with Herbert Hoover as its head.

It has been said, and I think correctly,

that Herbert Hoover was responsible

for saving more lives than
any person who has ever lived.

He became known
as the "Master of Emergencies"

and the "Great Humanitarian,"

the embodiment of an America

proud of its newfound sense of
itself as an altruistic nation.

Hoover accepted Russia's plea for help.

Will Shafroth, 29, son of
the governor of Colorado,

joined other famine relief
workers from the United States

and headed for Moscow.

Spurred by a sense of adventure
and altruism, "Hoover's boys,"

as they came to be known,

had done relief work after World War I

and represented an America
that emerged from the war

as a world power.

Now their idealism would be tested

by a railroad system in disarray...

a forbidding climate...

a ruthless government suspicious
of their motives...

and the shear scale
of starvation and death.

They would be among
the first Americans to see

the earth-shaking revolution

that Vladimir Lenin and
his Bolsheviks had wrought

and the first to feel the tensions

that would mark U.S.-Soviet
relations

for much of the century.

On September 1, 1921,

the first ship carrying
American relief supplies

arrived from Hamburg, Germany,

and docked at Petrograd,
the former St. Petersburg.

It began to unload 700 tons of
rations that had been in storage

since the European relief.

The ARA's goal in Russia was
to do what it had done

in postwar Europe:

feed children, mainly in the cities.

Feeding one million seemed
a manageable task.

Within a week, the first ARA
feeding station opened

in Petrograd School number 27.

The menu was white bread,
corn grits, rice, milk, cocoa,

and sugar.

At a time when there
was not a spark of hope anywhere,

unexpectedly, without any reason,

nobody could explain why Americans came,

why they provide food for children.

The "Chicago Tribune" began running a story

that would captivate America.

It also appealed for funds.

Private donations began to flow to the ARA.

Five days after his arrival in Moscow,

Will Shafroth was part of an ARA
scouting party sent east

to evaluate the famine in the Volga valley.

People had fled their villages,
desperate to escape the famine.

At the station at Kazan
on the northern Volga,

Shafroth noted "wretched creatures

huddled together in compact
masses like a seal colony."

Most were children whose mothers
had deserted them or had died.

Shafroth and his fellow scouts
then drove to a home

for orphaned and abandoned children

whose lice-ridden clothes
had to be destroyed.

"I saw emaciated little skeletons,

"whose gaunt faces and toothpick
legs testified to the truth

of the report that they were
dying daily by the dozen."

"The stench was nauseating."

He served with the ARA in Poland
right after the war,

but he had never witnessed
scenes of horror like this.

Shafroth witnessed
the same or worse in Simbirsk,

in Sengiley, in Samara.

Once the richest grain-growing
province in the Volga valley,

Samara was now at the heart of the famine.

My father wrote about one children's home

in Samara where 283 children
were confined to three rooms.

"They were sitting on the floor,

"and when I asked the brave
little lady where they slept,

"she pointed to the floor and said, 'There.

"We have no other place
for them.'

"And then she had those
little, hungry, homeless waifs

sing for me."

My dad said he had to turn away.

It was more than he could stand.

In October
1921, Colonel Walter L. Bell,

a National Guardsman from Syracuse,

was dispatched into the abyss
of the unknown...

Ufa in Bashkiria, 725 miles from Moscow,

at the foot of the Ural Mountains.

His relief district would expand
east across the Urals

to the edge of Siberia.

"It is impossible
to describe the suffering and misery

that presented itself
on every side."

"I found the only food was made from weeds

mixed with ground-up bones,
tree bark, and clay."

The famine was awful.

People were eating almost everything

that could be swallowed.

They ate straw from the roof.

Using this straw and such
substitutes of food,

they became ill and they look

something like fat men,

but it was the beginning of their illness.

We had a camel...
two camels our family had.

Finally, of course, we ate him, our family.

So we ate all cats, dogs,
horses, everything.

Shafroth and Bell wired their reports

to Colonel William Haskell in Moscow,

a retired Army officer who was the director

of the ARA's Russian relief.

Haskell began to grasp the
enormity of the problem.

In October 1921,
he wired Hoover in Washington

that the starvation would peak
in the winter

and affect 16 million people.

Hoover realized the challenge

was not hunger, as in postwar Europe.

Soviet Russia faced the greatest
famine in history.

Feeding one million children
would only scratch the surface.

He needed to feed adults as well.

That would mean funding from Congress.

Yet he worried Americans would be reluctant

to spend their tax dollars on people

whose Communist government
many saw as monstrous

and intent on spreading revolution.

We had had a Red
scare in our own domestic politics

in 1919, 1920, a general strike in Seattle,

a bombing of the home

of the attorney general of the
United States, never solved.

There were many reasons to fear
that left-wing agitation,

even of the Communist variety,
was a serious menace.

Hoover had a
reputation not just as a humanitarian

but also as a staunch anti-Communist.

In postwar Central Europe,

he had helped thwart Lenin's
attempts to expand Communism

by threatening to withhold relief supplies

from countries sympathetic
to the Bolsheviks.

That worried the American left.

Left-of-center
people... legitimately, I think...

suspected that his motivation
here wasn't pure,

because he had this
counterrevolutionary record

with respect to food relief
in Eastern Europe.

To them, a Socialist revolution
or a Socialist regime in Russia

was an experiment that should be
encouraged.

In Hoover's mind,

there was no conflict
between feeding people...

giving sort of straightforward
humanitarian relief

on the one hand...

and using food as a political
weapon to stop Bolshevism.

Bolshevism was wicked.

It was evil.

Stopping it was humanitarian.

Hoover felt the
example of American efficiency

and generosity might do more
than just feed the Russians.

That was part of his pitch
to President Warren Harding.

He wanted and I think implied

that food famine relief could, perhaps,

lead to a regime change

and that it might get rid
of the Bolsheviks.

He thought that by bringing in

Americans with their talents
and administrative expertise...

their efficiency, if you will...

that they could serve as
an example to the Russians.

Lenin was afraid that he would
try to sneak arms in with food

and try to organize a resistance.

No, no, Hoover was not trying
to do that at all.

Hoover's primary
argument for helping the Russians

was an economic one.

Feeding Russians would help
American farmers

who were sitting on huge surpluses.

Hoover asked Congress for
$20 million to buy surplus corn

for an expanded relief program
for children and for adults.

Some in the House feared it would bolster

the Bolshevik government.

With unemployment reaching
five million during a recession,

some senators favored projects
that would create jobs

for Americans or help veterans in distress.

Hoover supporters and the Farm
Belt lobby carried the day.

On December 22, 1921,
with Harding's backing,

Congress approved the purchase
of surplus corn.

Hoover also insisted
the Soviets buy wheat seed

to plant in the spring to secure
the harvest of 1922.

The ARA campaign in Russia

would be the largest relief
operation to date...

and the first to provide relief
to an adversary.

The challenge was to get the food

almost halfway around the world,

where up to 100,000 Russians
were dying every week.

America's surplus corn and wheat
seed began to move quickly

from the heartland to the holds
of oceangoing freighters.

The first relief ships left
New York in mid-January 1922,

carrying 300,000 tons of grain.

The task before the ARA workers
in Russia was Herculean.

During the child feeding,

the ARA had divided Russia
into ten districts.

Each had an American supervisor
and a small staff of Americans.

Once again, these relief workers set off

into the far corners of their districts,

estimating the new needs,
arranging for more warehouses

to store 20 million bushels of corn

and thousands of tons of seed...

and directing the village committees

to identify starving adults
for the expanded relief.

They traveled over the flat
expanses of the Russian steppes

for silent days in crude sleighs,

by train if they could find a private car.

Their greatest physical threat
was typhus, spread by lice.

They're afraid
to travel with ordinary Russians

in third-class cars because of lice.

They're traveling along in a sled,

and they get out and they go
into a peasant hut

for the night and they see
the walls crawling with lice.

So they go back in the sled,
they bundle up, and they know

"Mr. Louse," as they called him,
couldn't survive in that cold.

The ARA had to expand its staff.

With no more than 200 American
supervisors in Russia

at any one time, it hired
120,000 Russians to do the work.

They invited those who could speak

at least a little bit English
or other foreign languages.

For ARA, it was practical reasons.

They had an education.

Because most Communists were
without any education,

no languages, but the Russian authorities,

they interpreted this
as an opportunity for the ARA

to find people who would be able to support

counterrevolutions, all these things.

So, different perceptions.

Will Shafroth's Samara
district was divided into eight regions,

each with at least one warehouse.

Every village had a committee
of local citizens

who decided who got fed.

Shafroth would supervise 16,000
Russians in 900 kitchens.

In his sprawling Ufa Urals district,

Walter Bell faced even greater challenges.

The population
of that district was almost nine million

and the territory is bigger than France.

And there were only five or six Americans

supervising the operations.

They didn't know Russian at all.

They knew nothing about
Bashkir and Bashkiria.

They kept asking each other,

"Have you ever heard
about those Bashkirs?"

They, they didn't know that
such people exist.

The Bashkirs had been a nomadic people

who settled in what would become
Russia's lawless wild east.

In addition to the Muslim Bashkirs

who were hostile to the Russians

and had a reputation for plunder,

Bell's district contained Kazakhs,

who for centuries had attacked the Bashkirs

and hated the Russians.

"The diplomatic entanglements
involved," Bell would write,

"make the Paris Peace Conference seem

like a well-conducted
private school."

Walter Bell faced a formidable task.

Unlike Shafroth,
he had no previous experience

with relief work.

Vladimir Lenin kept
a watchful eye on the ARA.

In February, the Cheka...
his secret police...

ordered its agents "to purge the
ARA of undesirable elements."

These agents began
to infiltrate ARA offices,

hired as Russian assistants.

They reported to Alexander Eiduk,

a Cheka agent who was
the Soviet government's liaison

with the ARA.

Was there any
political activity made by the ARA?

Did they meet any suspicious persons here?

Did they agitate against anything?

Did you notice any anti-Communist slogans

in their declarations?

Eiduk also tried
to undermine the ARA's American staff.

One target was David Kinne, the
29-year-old district supervisor

of Saratov Province on the Volga.

Cheka agents
had secret instructions from their chiefs

to use every American weakness

to get control over American supply.

And David Kinne was
a perfect match for them

because he was an alcoholic.

The Cheka exploited Kinne's weakness.

The Soviet notion
is if they can get control of the food,

they can funnel it to the people
they want to get the food,

and they can keep the food away from people

they don't want receiving the food.

Poretskii, that guy from Cheka

who was supervising American
operations in Saratov,

he knew exactly what he was doing.

The Cheka
agents took over Kinne's operation

and diverted food from children
to their political allies.

It took several months before
the ARA could reclaim

American control in Saratov province.

In March, David Kinne was
dismissed from the ARA

and sent out of Russia a broken man.

American relief ships got
as far as the Baltic Sea,

only to become icebound in
February and for much of March.

It was the coldest winter in 15 years.

"The Lord seems to have a particular animus

toward the Russian people,"
an ARA staffer mused.

"He cuts off the rain in the summer

and freezes up the Baltic
in winter."

While touring his district
in the fall of 1921,

47-year-old Walter Bell contracted typhus.

His Russian assistants drove him
for three days

back to Ufa, delirious.

He was unconscious for
three weeks and almost died.

Harold Blandy, Bell's assistant in Ufa,

also came down with typhus.

Harold Blandy had a big heart.

Harold Blandy was the type who could not

simply go into a children's home
and inspect it.

He had to go into a children's home

and interact with the children,
put his hand on the kid's head.

It wasn't a surprise to the Ufa Americans

that Blandy caught typhus.

Blandy died a week later.

To the Russians,
his death warranted a tribute...

an elaborate funeral procession in Moscow.

To the ARA, anyone who caught
typhus, much less died from it,

was an embarrassment.

To be outwitted by lice was to fall short

of being a cautious and
efficient relief worker.

When Walter Bell recovered,

he resumed his tour of some
of the remotest parts

of his district.

He found a home in what he
called "the wilds of Russia."

He would stop at a village
and spend days at a time

with the local Bashkirs
and Soviet officials,

including Eiduk's Cheka agents.

"He out thinks these people,"
a colleague noted,

"and wins them by his courtesy."

The other directors of the ARA regions,

they were not polite
with Russian authorities.

And I have read some letters.

They were full of sarcasm, irony,

and sometimes they used rather rude words.

Mr. Bell, he was polite,

and sometimes, when there were his mistake,

he accepted that he was not right.

"One big reason for the friendly contact

"that existed between us
and the authorities

"was whenever we had an
important question to decide,

we had a conference
with the ones concerned."

Bell was
older than most of the ARA workers.

And it was easier for local population

to perceive him as a boss.

He's Colonel Bell.

He's, as the Russians would say,
"Polkovnik Bell."

And we're dealing with a country here

that has just seen a civil war,

Whites and Reds going back and forth.

Military authority counts for something.

With the Baltic
frozen and supplies running low,

Polkovnik Bell told his colleagues

he was forced to put
the children's kitchens

on half rations.

Yet he continued to feed the children

of both Russians and Bashkirs
with their cooperation,

not interference.

On February 6, 1922,

the first American ship carrying
corn to feed Russian adults

docked at Novorossiysk on the Black Sea.

Six weeks had passed since
Congress had voted.

The next link in the chain
to feed the starving Russians

would be a crucial one, and the weakest.

Years of war had wrecked
80% of Russia's railroads.

An American journalist wrote

of locomotives resting in graveyards

"silently like sleeping monsters"...

of "miles of sick box cars on sidings

like rows of skeletons."

The corn had traveled by ship
almost 5,500 miles in 16 days.

The trip from Novorossiysk to
Samara was only 1,300 miles,

yet it would take 21 days.

"The dilapidated railroads were
urged to do the impossible,"

Will Shafroth wrote,
"and they did it."

Shafroth received a small
first installment of corn

in mid-March.

And actually the Bolsheviks paid

to railroad workers with American corn

to make the trains run.

And it was a big help

because Russian government
didn't have money

and didn't have food to pay them.

With relief workers
desperately waiting for more supplies,

entire trains began to disappear.

Shafroth wired Moscow that
local officials in Samara

had commandeered 95 corn cars
for railroad employees.

The authorities in Moscow had no
control over their railroads.

By mid-March, almost 7,000
freight cars had left the ports.

At the end of the month, 60,000
tons of supplies were waiting

for the empty cars to return.

Forty-six trains from Odessa
in Ukraine were stalled

in one yard west of the Volga.

Supplies from the Baltic
via Moscow were stalled

at another train yard.

The result was like logjams on rivers.

Trains were hemmed in.

For three weeks, nothing could move.

Relief supplies from both
the Black Sea and the Baltic

to much of the Volga valley

and all of Walter Bell's
Ufa-Urals district were stalled.

An estimated 25,000 Russians

died in these regions each week...

75,000 more deaths by the end of March.

People had been dying at this
rate all over Russia all winter.

Will Shafroth described
a scene he witnessed in Samara.

"I have seen piles of corpses,

"half naked and frozen into
the most grotesque positions

"with signs of having been
preyed upon by wandering dogs.

"I have seen these bodies

and it is a sight that
I can never forget."

Shafroth cabled Haskell in Moscow

that the body of a Russian
assistant who recently died

from typhus had been dug up and eaten.

Ten butcher shops, he said,

had been closed for selling human flesh.

Americans read that Shafroth
himself had been eaten.

The government
tried to stop people eating corpses.

And they led propaganda against this,

and they tried to put guards
in the cemeteries

in order to prevent people
from eating dead bodies.

Grandma told me about it.

When the dark was coming,

they put a huge lock to save children,

because children were the
main target of cannibals.

There were cases of killing
children by their own mothers,

by their own parents, and eating them.

Some mothers did that for mercy.

But some mothers killed them
to feed other children,

especially very small babies.

And now, at the end of March 1922,

dozens of trains with relief
supplies were stalled.

It was unclear why the first
trains were detained.

What was clear is that only
the Russians could undo

the train jam.

Alexander Eiduk, the Russian in charge,

told Haskell everything was under control.

For two weeks, he did nothing.

Another 50,000 Russians starved to death.

If the American wheat seed were
not planted that spring,

there would be no harvest in the fall.

The famine would continue another year.

Haskell decided it was time for a showdown.

He decides to send a cable

in the clear...
not coded, in the clear...

to Herbert Hoover,

meaning that the Kremlin
would be able to see

the message he was sending.

And the message was the Soviets
are not only not helping,

they're being obstructionist,

and that until he got better cooperation,

all relief supplies from the United States

ought to be held up at port.

The engineer
in Herbert Hoover had foreseen the limits

of Russia's railroads.

He had testified before Congress
that $20 million worth of corn

would test these limits.

When Haskell's telegram arrived,

Hoover was being blamed
by his critics on the left

for exaggerating Russia's
transportation problem.

He was attempting "to kill the
Soviet government," they argued,

by limiting relief supplies.

Hoover could have silenced these critics

by releasing Haskell's telegram.

But he felt stirring up
anti-Soviet feelings

would be inappropriate for an agency

"engaged in the business
of saving human lives."

Lenin's government got the message.

It humiliated, then fired, Eiduk.

It brought in Felix Dzerzhinski,

People's Commissar of Transportation,

better known as the founder of the Cheka

and mastermind of the Red Terror
during the civil war.

He was the most feared man
in Soviet Russia.

It was very important symbolically.

The dreadful Iron Felix was appointed

as a railroad commissar.

And every railroad worker understood.

It's a sign.

"We should do something,
otherwise we will be shot."

And the trains started to run.

The corn was finally on its way.

Its distribution would be planned

in hundreds of ARA offices across Russia.

Here the Americans still faced
major hurdles.

The culture clash was profound.

A lot of the people the Americans hired

had never really worked
in an office before.

If they had worked in an office,

it wasn't like an American office.

The Americans wanted you
to get to work on time.

You start work at 8:00.

What the Americans found was the
Russians would wander in late.

"Well, there was a goat
for sale up the street,

and I had to go check that out."

It would drive them nuts.

There were even
problems with the elite they hired.

"With the best will in the world,

it is rather difficult for an
ex-princess to do cross-filing,"

wrote a relief worker from Montana.

Especially baffling to the Americans

was the sense of passivity and resignation

on the part of peasants who came for help.

Many Russians
saw in that famine a sign of...

a sort of God will, a sort of retribution

for their bad behavior
during the revolution.

They seized church land.

They killed priests.

"So we can only suffer,
because we deserved it."

These Americans
got pretty impatient with this.

Their attitude was, "Look,
it's time to get to work."

This is their Protestant ethic speaking.

"Your fate is in your hands.

"Get up off your knees, start to help out,

and let's get moving."

Despite the
culture clash, romance flourished.

The Americans had comfortable
quarters, food, and cars.

Their Russian staff was mostly women.

Of the 300 American supervisors,
26... nearly ten percent...

came home with Russian brides.

Weather had helped cause the famine.

Now it once again delayed the relief.

A spring thaw made it almost
impossible to get the corn

from the rail-heads to the villages.

The return of winter helped.

Horses were important...

those which had not died or been eaten.

Many were too weak to draw heavy
loads over long distances.

Where horsepower was lacking,
some relied on camels.

"The camel can live where the horse dies,"

the "Chicago Daily News" noted.

"It grubs up herbage from under the snow.

It will exist on anything."

An ARA Russian inspector
remembers seeing 2,500 wagons,

drawn mostly by camels,

leave Tsaritsyn and head for Leninsk.

"In spite of the immensity
of the steppes," he wrote,

"it was impossible to see the beginning

or the end of this train."

"Even the oldest and most
experienced teamsters admitted

they had never seen
such a sight."

"Contrary to the popular imagination,

the corn was not heralded with
the ringing of church bells,"

an ARA physician wrote.

"These people have borne so much

that their emotions have
long since exhausted."

He observed the only surviving
member of a family of five

clutch her 21-day ration.

My father said
that there were a half a million people

in his district who faced starvation

when he began to distribute the corn.

Every household got a month's
supply... two pounds per day.

That's the job he came
to do, and he was doing it,

and he was very pleased.

People used to call that food "America."

So, we were handed out
"America."

At home, people cooked soup out
of it, fed their children.

This, of course, was great help to us.

My father used to say, "See, the
Americans did the right thing,

sent us help."

Every day in his
Ufa Ural Mountains district,

Walter Bell fed 1.6 million
Russians, Bashkirs,

Tatars, and Kazakhs in 2,750 kitchens.

One was a three-year-old boy.

I still remember they gave us corn

and sweetened condensed milk.

I was little then, but
I still remember the taste

of that American canned condensed milk.

Our father brought it to us.

Thanks to this help I survived,

and then studied and
became a famous dancer.

Before the corn and wheat seed arrived,

up to five million Russians
had starved to death.

By August 1922,

five months after the corn
reached the villages,

the ARA was feeding up to
11 million Soviet citizens

every day in 19,000 kitchens.

Jesus Christ brought 13 people bread.

Herbert Hoover gave millions
of people bread.

You cannot find other example of
such behavior in world history.

Herbert Hoover had
insisted the Russians buy wheat seed,

which the peasants planted
in the spring of 1922.

The wheat harvested that fall

ensured the famine would not return.

The starvation in the Volga
valley was finally over.

"Whether the Russians
or anyone else realizes it,"

the ARA's historian wrote,

"we have saved a nation."

The ARA's relief operation
in Russia began to wind down.

Will Shafroth soon wrote of his experience.

"The thing which
gives me the most satisfaction

"is the gratitude with which
our help was received,

"from the simplest peasant
who would have died

"if he had not been fed by America,

"from the mother whose children
ate at an ARA kitchen.

These are the people for whom
we brought in the food."

Nowhere was that gratitude greater

than among Russia's 14 million Muslims,

who paid Colonel Walter Bell
a special tribute.

This was an extraordinary moment

when the local Muslim officials
decide to show Bell...

this infidel...
a copy of the Koran.

It was incredible.

They had never shown it
to anyone before, to any...

to anyone who is not Muslim.

And they had never shown it
even to Russians,

with whom they lived
side by side for many years.

Before he left Russia in July 1923,

Bell, who served longer than
any other ARA supervisor,

was named honorary mayor of Ufa.

He became known as the
"idol of the Bashkirs."

"I feel as though I were a part of them.

"I have lived with them through
the worst period of suffering

"they have ever endured.

"I have traveled into every
corner of their republic,

"slept under their roofs,

"broken their bread

and listened to their tales
of woe and happiness."

"They nursed me through typhus."

"I feel as if I am part
of their new existence."

Herbert Hoover
had hoped the ARA's efficiency

would inspire the Russians
to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

Instead, it may have saved
the Soviet regime.

He himself in the late '20s

said to a reporter named Henry Wolfe

that he thought "he had set
the Soviets up in business."

Now, that was a kind
of revelatory statement

for him to make,

because he had sold the program
of emergency relief to Russia

as something that would perhaps
effect regime change.

Hoover was president
when the Great Depression began

a decade after he rescued the Russians.

As Americans went hungry,

his image as the "Great
Humanitarian" began to fade.

The story of his Russian relief
was soon forgotten.

Yet the humanitarian spirit he planted

in the American character lived on.

Hoover was really,
in some ways, the vanguard

of that whole approach that has
become associated

with America in the last hundred years,

namely that when there
is a humanitarian tragedy

in the world, whether from war
or from famine or revolution

or a typhoon or an earthquake,

that Americans will be there
to organize the relief.

The memory of
the American Relief Administration

lives on in Russia by word of mouth

among the families who were saved.

My grandma told me many times,

"Dear Anatoly, do not forget American help

at the time of our
national disaster."

Among those people who were
saved were my family,

family of my father, of my grandmother.

My family will never forget.