The Russian Job
The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Famine
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- 59,00 kr
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- 59,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
The gripping human story of how American volunteers fought famine in Bolshevik Russia, saving Lenin’s revolutionary government from chaos and millions of people from starvation.
'Brilliant, disturbing . . . an important story that needed to be told. A fast-moving and most compelling read.' - Helen Rappaport, author of The Race to Save the Romanovs
In 1921, after six years of unrelenting war and revolution, Russia was in ruins. The economy had collapsed, the country was ravaged by disease and starvation claimed the lives of millions. People were so desperate for food that there were reports of cannibalism, reports that were revealed to be horribly accurate.
Remarkably, it was a young American aid worker who uncovered the truth and, even more remarkably, it was the US-backed charity that had sent him to Russia that would save Lenin’s fledgling government by feeding his people.
In The Russian Job, acclaimed historian Douglas Smith tells the gripping story of how an American charity fought the Russian famine. Backed by $20 million from the US government, and founded by Herbert Hoover, US Secretary of Commerce, the American Relief Administration recruited more than three hundred young Americans, many of them war veterans. They would oversee the distribution of food, clothing and medical supplies to people throughout Russia’s vast landmass, saving millions of lives.
Vividly written, with a rich cast of characters and a deep understanding of the period, The Russian Job shines a bright light on this strange and shadowy moment in history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith (Rasputin) delivers a narrowly focused history of one program of the American Relief Administration, a "quasi-intelligence and diplomatic organization" that, during the 1921 1923 famine in the Soviet Union, operated soup kitchens and fed over 10 million people. As starvation, sickness, and political terror gripped the fledgling Soviet Union and prompted the writer Maxim Gorky to appeal to "all honest European and American people" to send food and medicine, workers' strikes and anarchists' bombs in the United States had the American government believing Bolshevism was invading the West. Some in Congress believed a relief effort would weaken the Bolshevik government, while others were motivated by humanitarian concerns; ultimately, the program was mobilized. Nearly 400 Americans worked in Russia during the two years, and Smith tells the story from their point of view, drawing on their diaries, letters, reports, and photographs. (Numerous gruesome stories and photos of cannibalism and starvation are included.) His prose moves at a fast clip and takes a matter-of-fact tone about the horrors of the famine. Not all readers may buy the claim that the Soviet Union would have collapsed without this intervention, but this is an intriguing window onto the humanitarian work of the past. Photos.
