The Russian Mission: The Forgotten Story of How America Rescued the Soviet Union from Ruin

The famine that struck the Volga region in 1921 became not just a calamity, but a humanitarian catastrophe talked about all over the world. In the end, the Bolsheviks were forced to seek help from their most formidable ideological enemy—capitalist America. Managed by the future U.S. President Herbert Hoover, the “American Relief Administration” (ARA) led the largest humanitarian mission at that time in the history of humanity. The book tells how, in just two years, the ARA managed to save more than ten million people from starvation and prevent not only an even greater tragedy, but quite possibly the collapse of the entire Soviet system—because for it the question of food was a question of survival for power itself.