Russian famine of 1921–1922

• 1. Introduction

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  The Russian famine of 1921-1922 killed an estimated five million people across the Volga and Ural River regions of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. It began in the spring of 1921 and lasted into 1922, striking a country that had already endured three-and-a-half years of World War I and a brutal civil war that left somewhere between seven and twelve million dead, mostly civilians. Severe drought was the trigger. But drought alone does not produce a famine of this scale. Behind the catastrophe lay a chain of broken systems: a war-ravaged rail network that could not move food, a government grain requisition policy that had driven peasants to stop growing crops, and a new revolutionary state whose very survival was entangled with the hunger of its people. What emerged from those conditions was one of the most desperate episodes of the twentieth century, one that produced documented cannibalism, a massive international rescue operation, and a secret political letter that revealed how the new Soviet leadership planned to use mass death for its own purposes.

• 2. Roots in Ruin

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  Russia entered the famine already hollowed out by a decade of compounding catastrophe. The civil war of 1918-1921 had drawn in the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the Anarchists, and the seceding nationalities, and every single faction had fed itself by seizing grain from the farmers who grew it. Historians have noted that even before the Bolsheviks came to power, both Tsarist government councils and opposition parties had already advocated food requisitioning as a wartime tool. The Bolshevik version of this policy, known as prodrazvyorstka and operating under the broader doctrine of war communism, went furthest. Peasants who gave up their grain received little or nothing in return, and so they responded the only way they could: they planted less. When the drought arrived, it fell on fields that were already shrinking. The rail system, battered by years of war, could not carry what food did exist to the places that needed it most. The spring of 1921 brought the worst of it, concentrating misery along the Volga and the Ural River regions, areas that had long been the breadbasket of Russia.

• 3. When Hunger Becomes Something Worse

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  Orlando Figes, the historian, documented "thousands of cases" of cannibalism during the famine, and noted that unreported cases likely numbered far higher. In the city of Samara, ten butcher shops were closed for selling human flesh. In Pugachyov, children were warned not to go out after dark because gangs were known to capture them to eat or sell. One village resident reported that cafeterias in the area were serving young children as food. Figes estimated that a considerable proportion of the meat processed in Soviet factories in the Volga region was human flesh. Organized gangs had formed specifically to capture children, murder them, and sell the flesh as horse meat or beef. Buyers, desperate for any source of protein in conditions of extreme shortage, were often willing not to ask too many questions. Cholera and typhus spread alongside the starvation, adding disease casualties to famine deaths.

• 4. A Letter to the World

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  In the summer of 1921, Vladimir Lenin and the writer Maxim Gorky sent an open letter addressed to all honest European and American people, asking for bread and medicine. Gorky had already written separately to all nations on the 13th of July 1921, describing the crop failure that had brought his country to the edge of starvation. Herbert Hoover, who would later become U.S. President, responded immediately. Negotiations were conducted in Riga, the capital of Latvia. A parallel European effort was organized by the Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen through the International Committee for Russian Relief. The appeal was a significant moment for a Soviet government that had, only two years earlier, refused ARA assistance because accepting it would have meant handing Hoover's organization full control over the Russian railway network. Lenin had rejected that condition in 1919 as interference in internal affairs. By 1921, the scale of the disaster left little room for such calculations.

• 5. The American Relief Administration

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  Hoover's American Relief Administration had been operating across Europe since 1914. After Germany invaded Belgium that year, Hoover organized the Belgian Relief Committee; the ARA then moved into northern France and assisted both France and Germany from 1914 to 1919. By 1920 and 1921, it was providing one meal a day to 3.2 million children across Finland, Estonia, several Russian regions, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, and Armenia. When it began emergency feeding in Russia, the ARA planned to reach about one million children for a full year. Within a year, it was feeding more than ten times that number daily. Hoover appointed Colonel William N. Haskell to direct the Russian operation, and within a month ships loaded with food were heading for Russian ports. The ARA insisted on the terms it had always required: food distributed without regard to race, creed, or social status, a condition written explicitly into Section 25 of the Riga agreement. Hoover also pressed the Soviet leadership to contribute financially. He secured eighteen million dollars from Russia's own gold reserves, twenty million dollars from the U.S. Congress, eight million dollars from the U.S. military, and additional sums from private charities, arriving at a total of approximately seventy-eight million dollars.

• 6. Scale of the Operation

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  At its peak, the ARA was feeding more than ten million people daily, with over four million of them children and more than six million adults. In total, more than 1.75 billion meals were served. The food came via 237 ships and was distributed through more than 21,000 newly built kitchens, run by 200 Americans and supported by 125,000 Russian workers handling unloading, warehousing, cooking, and serving. The ARA provided more than 912,000 tons of food, including flour, grain, rice, beans, pork, milk, and sugar, valued at over 98 million dollars. After the food arrived, Colonel Haskell reported a second crisis: fuel for heating and cooking was unavailable, and millions of peasants had clothing consisting mostly of rags. Children in orphanages often wore a single garment made from flour sacks, with no shoes, stockings, or underclothing. Haskell informed Hoover that at least one million children were in extreme need of clothing. Hoover organized a donation drive reaching individuals, businesses, and banks, and eventually clothed 333,125 people. The medical dimension was equally severe. Dr. Henry Beeuwkes, chief of the ARA's Medical Division in Russia, reported that American relief was supplying over 16,000 hospitals treating more than a million patients daily. Dr. Louis L. Shapiro, one of the ARA's medical directors, recalled roads in southern Russia as little more than mud ruts across limitless prairies. On one trip, he drove 150 miles on tires stuffed with straw. The ARA sent 125,000 medical packages weighing 15 million pounds on 69 ships, covering more than 2,000 separate medical items. When the ARA left Russia in 1923, Shapiro stated that the Russians had been pulled out of the slough of famine and death.

• 7. Lenin's Secret Letter

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  In a letter dated the 19th of March 1922, Lenin wrote in secret to the Politburo laying out a plan to seize church property under cover of famine relief. That year, the Bolsheviks launched a campaign targeting Orthodox Church assets, confiscating over 4.5 million golden roubles worth of property, of which one million gold roubles were directed to famine relief. The historian Richard Pipes argued that Lenin deliberately used the humanitarian emergency as justification to attack the Church, which held deep influence over the peasantry. The famine also served anti-Bolshevik purposes abroad. Russian white emigres in London, Paris, and elsewhere used it as a media instrument, trying to show the failures of Soviet governance to Western governments and discourage trade with or formal recognition of the Bolshevik state. Meanwhile, even as the ARA was still distributing food throughout 1922 and 1923, the Soviet government was simultaneously exporting grain abroad to raise funds for industrial recovery. Western supporters of the relief effort found this deeply troubling. The Soviets at one point demanded that if the ARA suspended its relief operations, it should arrange a foreign loan of about ten million 1923 dollars on their behalf. The ARA could not do so, and kept shipping food regardless.

• 8. Counting the Dead

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  An official Soviet publication from the early 1920s placed deaths from famine and related disease at approximately five million, and that figure became the standard citation in textbooks. More conservative estimates counted no more than one million. An assessment drawn from the ARA's medical division suggested two million. Some sources put the total as high as ten million. The historian Bertrand M. Patenaude observed that even ten million hardly seems extravagant when set against the many tens of millions of victims of war, famine, and terror across the twentieth century. By the summer of 1923, U.S. relief to Russia amounted to more than twice the total given by all other foreign organizations combined. European agencies coordinated through the ICRR fed two million people a day at their peak; the International Save the Children Union fed up to 375,000. Several relief workers died of cholera during the operation. In May 1922, Lev Kamenev, president of the Moscow Soviet and deputy chairman of all Russian famine relief committees, wrote to Colonel Haskell to say the Soviet government would never forget the help given during the calamity. A century later, on the 24th of September 2022, a Russian documentary film titled Hunger or Famine premiered at the Oktyabr cinema in Moscow, depicting the mass famine across more than 35 oblasts and a total affected population of approximately 90 million people. The Russian Ministry of Culture banned the film's distribution in Russia just two months after its premiere.