The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story Of How America Saved The Soviet Union From Ruin, Smith - B

                                  Drought struck the Russian breadbasket along the Volga in 1920 and 1921. On the heels of seven years of war, revolution, civil war, and Kulak withdrawal of land from production,  the granaries of Russia were empty. People turned to cannibalism. Lenin allowed Maxim Gorky to publish an open letter to the West asking for help. US Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover's American Relief Agency had fed millions in Europe after WWI. He offered the help of the ARA and by August, 1921 it was in country to dispose of food parcels where and how it saw fit. However, it was not all hearts and flowers, the American right was opposed. The Cheka believed every American was opposed to the state and shadowed, if not hounded, them around the country. The conditions were so bad in Russia that the ARA staffers in the field were constantly felled by typhus. Within months of starting, the ARA was feeding 570,000 children a day. Massive distributions of corn in 1922 further stemmed the famine. The summer of 1922 was the peak of American success and popularity in Russia. Mission creep led to vast amounts of medicine and clothing arriving overseas. As the famine eased, Russian cooperation waned and the Americans began to plan a mid-23 exit. By that summer, the Americans were gone. It is estimated that the ARA saved ten million lives. The newly established USSR turned on those who had worked for the ARA and most wound up in jail or worse.   

I was unaware of this story and am glad to have learned of it. I must point out an obvious conclusion I came to long ago. The greatest failure of Bolshevism was its inability to feed its own people. Nothing says failed state more than that.