How Capitalist America Saved The Soviet Union In The 1920s

See ‘The Russian Job’ Review: Feeding the Enemy: Few remember that in the early 1920s America supplied food to a starving Soviet Union, quite possibly preventing its collapse by Andrew Stuttaford. Mr. Stuttaford, who writes frequently for the Journal, works in the international financial markets. Excerpt:

"The American troops who landed in Russia to help reverse the Bolshevik coup of 1917 did little to change history, but cast as imperialist villains, they were useful to Soviet propagandists charged with rewriting it. In “The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin,” Douglas Smith tells the remarkable tale of a different, largely forgotten yet infinitely more effective intervention.

Between 1921 and 1923, the United States, acting through Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration, supplied food and other aid to more than 10 million people caught up in the famine—created by war, revolution and the Bolshevik assault on the peasantry—then raging in the former Russian empire. The ARA operated, Mr. Smith tells us, “across a million square miles of territory in what was the largest humanitarian operation in history.”

Suspicious of, and embarrassed by, assistance from such a politically inconvenient source, the Kremlin accepted the ARA’s help only grudgingly and, once the crisis was over, “began to erase the memory of American charity,” Mr. Smith writes. “What it could not erase, it sought to distort into something ugly” by depicting the ARA as a nest of spies and reactionaries. For many of the thousands of Russians who had worked for the ARA, their reward was persecution."