Chapter 02: American Inaction—Allowing Soviet Massacres and the Great Famine of the 1920s (Part I)

In October 1917, Lenin and the Russian Communist Party seized power through a violent coup and launched a frenzy of Red Terror. Tens of thousands were slaughtered in Petrograd. In 1918, acting on Lenin’s orders, the Bolsheviks brutally murdered Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, their four daughters, their 13-year-old son, as well as the imperial physician and attendants—eleven people in total. Their bodies were dismembered, doused with sulfuric acid to disfigure and destroy them, and dumped into an abandoned mine shaft, where they were not discovered until 1978.

After the collapse of the Soviet state, Russian President Boris Yeltsin presided over a solemn cathedral requiem in 1998 and formally reinterred the entire imperial family. No matter how lofty the ideals of communism may claim to be, or how noble its followers may portray themselves, they cannot evade the original sin of communist practice. That original sin began with the annihilation of Tsar Nicholas II’s entire family in Soviet Russia. The Chinese Communist Party’s extermination of Gu Shunzhang’s family was merely the manifestation of that same original sin in China.

On December 6, 1917, following the “October Revolution,” the Bolshevik Party seized power from the tsarist regime. On September 5, 1918, Lenin issued the decree on “Red Terror,” implementing the dictatorship of the proletariat and making the indiscriminate killing of innocents a state policy. In September alone, Lenin ordered the execution of more than 500 social elites in Petrograd. Not only were former government officials, military officers, entrepreneurs, merchants, and Orthodox clergy slaughtered, but workers and peasants who dared to defend their own rights were also killed.

The Bolshevik government refused to honor the debts owed by the tsarist government to the United States and ignored existing treaties and agreements with other countries. After the October Revolution, it confiscated American property in Russia. In March 1918, Soviet Russia also signed a separate peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, ending Russia’s participation in World War I. Diplomatic relations between the United States and tsarist Russia were thereby severed. President Wilson decided not to grant diplomatic recognition to the newly established Soviet state.

Although extensive commercial contacts existed between the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the 1920s, Wilson and his successors—Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—consistently refused to recognize the Soviet communist regime. The Soviet Union persistently sought diplomatic recognition from the United States, but was repeatedly rebuffed. When Hoover became president, recognition became even less likely.

Herbert Clark Hoover was born in 1874 in a small village in Iowa. He was the son of a Quaker blacksmith and grew up in Oregon. In 1891 he enrolled at Stanford University, later becoming a mining engineer after graduation. At Stanford he met Lou Henry, fell in love, and married her. Lou Henry was the only woman in her class to earn a degree in geology, a woman of both talent and beauty. After marriage, the couple went to China to work for a private company, where Hoover served as chief engineer. During their time in China, they even studied the Chinese language and were said to communicate fluently in Chinese. After Hoover entered the White House, whenever they wished to discuss matters they did not want others to understand, the couple would converse in Chinese, leaving aides utterly perplexed.

After the United States entered World War I, President Wilson appointed Hoover as head of the Food Administration. Hoover successfully coordinated food supplies overseas, ensuring that the Allied forces were adequately fed. After the armistice, as a member of the Supreme Economic Council and director of the American Relief Administration, Hoover organized food shipments to Central Europe, rescuing millions from starvation.

In 1917, the October Revolution overthrew Russia’s socialist government amid the turmoil of World War I. Peasants opposing the Bolsheviks responded to Lenin’s Soviet regime with war. From the latter half of 1918 to the spring of 1921, the Soviet government implemented the policy of “War Communism,” banning the trade of grain and enforcing compulsory requisition of surplus food. As the Red Army fought the White Army, years of warfare severely damaged the Soviet economy. The Communist Party forcibly requisitioned grain from peasants, plundering without restraint and demanding that peasants surrender all surplus and even subsistence grain, sparing not even seed grain. The coercive enforcement of grain monopoly led to peasant hunger and uprisings. More than 100,000 peasant rebels and their families were imprisoned or exiled, and 15,000 were executed.

In 1921, tens of thousands of sailors at the Kronstadt naval base near Petrograd rose in rebellion, demanding the restoration of free elections. The Communist Party mobilized more than 100,000 troops and used poison gas against the sailors. After eleven days and nights of fierce fighting, nearly 10,000 sailors were killed; 8,000 fled to Finland; of those captured, 2,103 officers and men were sentenced to death, and 6,459 were imprisoned or exiled. The Soviet Communist Party carried out large-scale repression and massacres nationwide, killing 1.5 million people over several years.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian government rehabilitated the victims of these massacres and issued apologies. But communists who have seized power will never reflect on their errors, much less relinquish power. Lenin said: “Russia is already a man beaten half to death; if there were free elections, we would all be driven from office.” He also declared: “If necessary, I would not hesitate to exterminate 50 million peasants, turning the survivors into new slaves.”

Under the policy of War Communism, peasants refused to cooperate with the government and deliberately reduced cultivated acreage. Agriculture shrank precipitously: by 1920, total grain output had fallen to half of prewar levels, and cotton production dropped to just 6 percent of its prewar level. War Communism ultimately triggered the nationwide famine of 1921. The famine affected 17 provinces across the Soviet Union and caused massive loss of life. Official Russian figures put the death toll at 5 million, while some scholars estimate it reached 10 million. Cannibalism even occurred. By 1921, Petrograd’s population had fallen to just one-third of its former size. A direct result of the famine was the Soviet government’s adoption, beginning in March 1921, of the transitional “New Economic Policy,” which allowed peasants to retain surplus grain and engage in trade.

Lenin initially rejected Western food aid, claiming it constituted interference in Russia’s internal affairs. As deaths continued to mount, however, he was forced to accept assistance. The writer Maxim Gorky appealed to the international community, calling for help. Western aid was led primarily by the American Relief Administration under Hoover’s leadership. The United States provided $20 million to purchase food, medicine, and transport relief supplies, saving 11 million lives. Shamelessly, the Soviet Communist government accepted the aid on the one hand while exporting relief grain on the other to earn foreign currency.