American Experience (1988) s23e09 Episode Script

1
ANNOUNCER:
This program contains content
which may not be suitable
for all audiences.
Viewer discretion is advised.
(wind howling)
(shovel digging)
♪
(grunting)
♪
MALE READER:
"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
(speaking Russian)
"'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.
NARRATOR:
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.
RONALD SUNY:
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.
♪
NARRATOR:
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.
BERTRAND PATENAUDE:
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.
NARRATOR:
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.
GEORGE NASH:
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.
♪
NARRATOR:
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.
NASH:
It has been said,
and I think correctly,
that Herbert Hoover
was responsible
for saving more lives than
any person who has ever lived.
(crowd applauds)
NARRATOR:
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
(train clatters)
a forbidding climate
(wind whipping)
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.
(crowd cheering)
♪
On September 1, 1921,
the first ship carrying
American relief supplies
arrived from Hamburg, Germany,
and docked at Petrograd,
the former St. Petersburg.
(machinery clattering)
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.
ANATOLY UTKIN:
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.
♪
NARRATOR:
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.
READER:
"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.
NARRATOR:
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.
(door opens)
READER:
"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."
(children singing in Russian)
SHAFROTH:
My dad said he had to turn away.
It was more than he could stand.
(door closes)
NARRATOR:
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.
♪
READER:
"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."
YULIA KHMELEVSKAYA:
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.
(camel grunting, wind whipping)
UTKIN:
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.
NARRATOR:
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.
NASH:
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.
(indistinct crowd chattering)
NARRATOR:
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.
♪
JOAN HOFF:
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.
PATENAUDE:
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.
NARRATOR:
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.
HOFF:
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.
NASH:
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.
♪
NARRATOR:
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.
(bird cawing)
♪
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.
(train wheel clacking)
PATENAUDE:
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.
♪
NARRATOR:
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.
NARRATOR:
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.
KHMELEVSKAYA:
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.
♪
NARRATOR:
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.
KHMELEVSKAYA:
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?
(typewriters clacking)
NARRATOR:
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.
KHMELEVSKAYA:
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.
♪
(glasses clink)
NARRATOR:
The Cheka exploited
Kinne's weakness.
PATENAUDE:
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.
KHMELEVSKAYA:
Poretskii, that guy from Cheka
who was supervising American
operations in Saratov,
he knew exactly
what he was doing.
NARRATOR:
The Cheka agents took over
Kinne's operation
and diverted food from children
to their political allies.
(woman laughs, glass thuds)
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."
(bird cawing)
While touring his district
in the fall of 1921,
47-year-old Walter Bell
contracted typhus.
(man coughing)
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.
PATENAUDE:
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.
NARRATOR:
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.
(man speaking indistinctly)
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."
(bird cawing)
He would stop at a village
and spend days at a time
with the local Bashkirs
and Soviet officials,
including Eiduk's Cheka agents.
♪
(gunshot)
"He outthinks these people,"
a colleague noted,
"and wins them by his courtesy."
USMANOV:
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.
(man speaking indistinctly,
horse grunts)
READER:
"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."
(speaking indistinctly)
KHMELEVSKAYA:
Bell was older than most
of the ARA workers.
And it was easier
for local population
to perceive him as a boss.
PATENAUDE:
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.
(playing flute-like instrument)
NARRATOR:
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.
(seagulls cawing)
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.
KHMELEVSKAYA:
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.
NARRATOR:
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.
♪
(brakes squeaking)
(steam hissing)
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.
(train whistle blaring)
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.
READER:
"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."
NARRATOR:
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.
LATYPOV:
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.
(wind blowing)
UTKIN:
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.
♪
(steam hissing)
NARRATOR:
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.
PATENAUDE:
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.
♪
NARRATOR:
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.
(whistle blowing)
(steam hissing)
♪
(train horn blares)
(steam hissing)
NARRATOR:
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.
PATENAUDE:
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.
♪
NARRATOR:
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.
♪
KHMELEVSKAYA:
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."
PATENAUDE:
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."
(crowd chattering)
♪
NARRATOR:
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 railheads
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."
♪
(horse snorts)
"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."
(indistinct chatter)
♪
He observed the only surviving
member of a family of five
clutch her 21-day ration.
STEPHEN SHAFROTH:
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.
♪
(woman speaking Russian)
ZUKHRA IBRAGIMOVA (translated):
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."
♪
NARRATOR:
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.
(man speaking Russian)
KHASHIM MUSTAEV (translated):
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.
♪
NARRATOR:
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.
♪
UTKIN:
Jesus Christ brought
13 people bread.
Herbert Hoover gave millions
of people bread.
You cannot find other example of
such behavior in world history.
NARRATOR:
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.
READER:
"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."
NARRATOR:
Nowhere was that
gratitude greater
than among Russia's
14 million Muslims,
who paid Colonel Walter Bell
a special tribute.
PATENAUDE:
This was an extraordinary moment
when the local Muslim officials
decide to show Bell
This infidel
A copy of the Koran.
KHMELEVSKAYA:
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.
(traditional music playing)
NARRATOR:
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."
READER:
"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."
(music continues)
"They nursed me through typhus."
"I feel as if I am part
of their new existence."
(music ends)
♪
NARRATOR:
Herbert Hoover had hoped
the ARA's efficiency
would inspire the Russians
to overthrow the Bolsheviks.
Instead, it may have saved
the Soviet regime.
HOFF:
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.
NARRATOR:
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.
♪
NASH:
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.
NARRATOR:
The memory of the American
Relief Administration
lives on in Russia
by word of mouth
among the families
who were saved.
UTKIN:
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.
♪
♪
♪
♪
♪