Soviet Terror: Sponsored by American Humanitarians

In July 1921, the communist regime in Russia was in dire straits, only four years into its precarious existence. A complete clamp down on the market, years of war capped with a drought, and the central planners’ disastrous policy of confiscating the farmers’ grain, meant that the communists of Lenin now had a full-fledged famine in their hands. A country that was feeding Europe with its grain for decades, under the communists could not feed its own population.

The situation was so desperate that the communist firebrand author Maxim Gorky, with the approval of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party, swallowed his pride and sent an open letter to the Western world asking for help. The “capitalists” and “imperialists” were now asked to bail out the people who came to power swearing to throw them onto the trash pile of history. Gorky’s desperate appeal was sketched in the language he knew would appeal to the dominant moral assumptions of many in the West. The disaster in Russia, he claimed, “offers humanitarians a splendid opportunity to demonstrate the vitality of humanitarianism.”¹ Despite being a long shot, Gorky’s cynical bet paid off.

The humanitarian vanguard of the West — the Red Cross, charitable international organizations, religious groups like the Quakers — replied positively. The heavy lifting of the humanitarian aid to the Soviet state would be provided by the American Relief Administration (ARA), an agency created by the U.S. Congress and at the time run by future U.S. president Herbert Hoover, an acknowledged anti-communist, who was celebrated as “the Great Humanitarian.” In other words, the Soviet Union was bailed out by U.S. taxpayers and the generosity of middle- and upper-class Americans; the same people the communists decried as class exploiters and the face of international capitalism and “imperialism.”

The story becomes more morally outrageous if one considers that the main resistance that Hoover faced in his willingness to aid the starving Soviets came from the Soviet government itself! The beggars could be choosers in that case: the communists imposed conditions on how the relief would be administered, while the Soviet press denounced ARA as a Trojan horse of imperialism. Leon Trotsky, one of the most prominent Soviet leaders at the time, claimed that the U.S. aid proved the bankruptcy of Western capitalism, seeing the assistance as just an opening for American capital to find a way out of its supposed decline.²

Yet, the Americans were not discouraged by the Soviet moral denunciation. After two weeks of negotiations, the ARA managed to persuade (!) the Soviet government to accept the aid. Eventually, the ARA ended up feeding more than ten million people daily, while also engaging in a vast vaccination program and water purification projects. It is difficult to measure how many millions of lives were saved. But since around five million people had died from the famine in 1921–1922, it is reasonable to estimate that American aid stopped the famine from becoming one of the largest humanitarian disasters in history.

How did the Soviets express their “gratitude”? By instituting surveillance by the secret police on foreign aid workers, and demanding that the ARA be charged for the transportation costs of the relief efforts within Soviet territory.³ Also, for years the secret police were arresting and terrorizing the Russian personnel of ARA as imperialist collaborators.

Despite the cynical communist suspicions, the ARA workers lived up to their promise to deliver humanitarian aid (as one scholar writes) “without regard to class, politics, or religion.” To underscore how the humanitarians viewed their aid, in some districts the ARA stamped its food and medicines “ARA Free” and “A Free Gift of the American People” in Russian.⁴

Why did the Americans rush to help a regime hostile to them and to their country’s values? It is important to highlight that Hoover was an anti-communist. Americans knew already that the Bolsheviks were a regime, based on violence and expropriation, which pursued a declared goal of exporting their revolution to the West. And yet, Americans felt compelled to help. Why?

To properly understand the American humanitarian aid to the Bolsheviks, we need to consider a force at play so large and so potent, that it eclipsed any political calculations or doubts. This force was the morality of altruism.

Most people will have a positive response to the concept of altruism. Altruism is often (mis)characterized as benevolence or good will. “This is just about helping the hungry, the desperate . . . just lifting up the suffering women and children,” the Americans probably told themselves. Yet, altruism is something different and insidious. It is a philosophy asserting that the needs of others, any others, supersede one’s own needs. Altruism declares that the good is sacrificing one’s self and one’s values for other people and their values, irrespective of whether they are good or bad. Under altruism, need trumps and supersedes any other moral consideration, such as whether the provision of aid would be beneficial or destructive to the giver, or what are the aims and the moral status of the recipient.

Here is how altruism was a dominant factor behind the U.S. aid to the Soviets: millions in the Soviet Union were in need, therefore all good altruists (religious and secular) had to help. Why were all these people in need? Who was to blame? What would be the results of throwing a lifeboat to the oppressors of the people in Soviet Union and to those who swore to destroy the capitalist West? Such questions did not enter the mind of the humanitarians in the West. That this help was requested by the Bolsheviks, and that it would be a lifeboat to their murderous reign, was subordinate to the commands of altruism. Hoover himself shared the moral view of altruism, and this is why in a letter to the Secretary of State in support of the proposed American assistance, he emphasized that “it is a humane obligation upon us to go in” (emphasis mine).⁵

The aid was to be self-effacing: the American Civil Liberties Union and Nation magazine even objected to Hoover requesting some conditions from the Bolsheviks, such as the release of eight American prisoners who were rotting in Soviet dungeons, arrested on made-up charges of “espionage.”⁶

Even in 1948, after World War II, at a time of the USSR’s outright hostility to the West, many Americans still considered aid to the Soviet Union a moral duty. This was after the collectivization of agriculture in Soviet Union led to another famine and reduced tens of millions of farmers to state serfs. This was after the whole world witnessed the Great Purge of the 1930s, when millions in the Soviet Union perished in torture chambers, execution wards, and the gulags. This was after the Soviet Union had occupied half of Europe via the Red Army. And yet, Secretary of State George Marshall still wanted to include the USSR in his aid plan that gave billions of dollars for the reconstruction of Europe. What if the USSR was an enemy committed to the destruction of the United States? “Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos,” was Marshall’s altruistic reply.⁷ Whenever there’s a need, there’s a duty, altruism commands. Stalin, for his own reasons, declined the aid, but not for lack of trying by the Americans.

Today we can recognize that Western aid saved the Soviet Union from a total collapse in 1921–1923. Does this mean that Western aid, and later the heavy Western investments in the USSR, enabled the future slaughter of millions by the communists? Did Western “humanitarians” contribute to the spread of the Gulag Archipelago and the perishing of millions of lives in it? Did U.S. aid eventually make possible the pro-Soviet puppet regimes that dominated Eastern Europe post-1945? This is a harsh reality to fathom, but the answer to all the above is “yes.”

But there’s something even more unfathomable to comprehend: even in light of our current knowledge regarding the evil that U.S. humanitarianism accommodated in the USSR, the dominant morality of altruism in the West commands that we would do it all again! “May the story of ARA inspire that same spirit of generosity today toward all humanity, abroad and at home,” comments an author who studied Western aid to the USSR.⁸No lessons were learned, because the morality whose culprit can be found in these lessons is apparently above any criticism or revision.

It is time we challenge the unchallengeable, though. The story of Western enablement to one of the most murderous regimes of the twentieth century gives us a good opportunity to question the moral premise of altruism. Ayn Rand made the revolutionary claim⁹ that evil is impotent, and the only way for it to survive is by the willingness¹⁰ of the good to assist it. For this to happen, a morality is needed to force the good to feel compelled to assist its enemies. Enter altruism: the morality elevating self-sacrifice to the ultimate good. The impotence of evil and the pull of altruism is exactly what we saw in young Soviet Russia: an evil regime that left to its own devices would have collapsed under the weight of the destruction it brought, but was thrown a lifeboat by its betters in the West, who considered such a help their unquestionable duty.

Altruism thus became a tool in the hand of an evil force to strike against its betters; a tool without which the moral and political bankruptcy of the Bolsheviks would have been fully exposed, without any hope of concealment or mitigation.

The story of the Soviet Union, and of the death and misery it brought for millions, is a perfect example of abstract ideas playing out in real life. It shows both the impotence of evil — a country continuously on the verge of collapse — and the tragic spectacle of such evil being assisted by the good under the auspices of an undisputed morality. We have, rightly, condemned the Soviet Union as a murderous abomination of a regime. When are we going to condemn the morality that paved the way for its murderous reign? When are we going to condemn altruism?

1. Bertrand M. Patenaude, “Give Bread + Medicine: Maxim Gorky’s Appeals,” Hoover Institution, accessed January 24, 2025, https://histories.hoover.org/bread-medicine/maxim-gorky/#:~:text=Gorky%27s%20appeal%2C%20%E2%80%9CTo%20All%20Honest,heritage%20of%20Europeans%20and%20Americans.
2. Douglas Smith, The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Famine (London: Picador, 2019), 33.
3. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin, Vol. 1: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 (Penguin Books, 2014), Kindle edition.
4. Bertrand M. Patenaude, “America to the Starving People of Russia,” Hoover Institution, accessed January 24, 2025, https://www.hoover.org/shorthand-story/18.
5. Smith, The Russian Job, 27.
6. Smith, The Russian Job, 27.
7. Robert Gellately, Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 302.
8. Smith, The Russian Job, 273.
9. “Evil,” Ayn Rand Lexicon, accessed January 24, 2025, https://courses.aynrand.org/lexicon/evil/
10. “Sanction of the Victim,” Ayn Rand Lexicon, accessed January 24, 2025, https://courses.aynrand.org/lexicon/sanction-of-the-victim/.