ARA and the SU

[D_Bokk]

I'm currently reading Reds: McCarthyism in Twentieth-Century America by Ted Morgan and I came across something that I found rather interesting.

During the time after the civil war in the USSR, there was a famine in which the Bolsheviks couldn't subside. The ARA (American Relief Administration) stepped in to help feed the people of Russia. Not to say they intent was only to help, they also hopped to cause a counter-revolution while they were there.

When it came to the transportation of the food donated from the US, Lenin and Trotsky both agreed that the Bolsheviks should provide free transportation because the US is doing what the SU could not, feeding the Russian people. On the other hand, Stalin wanted to make them pay for the transportation and called the ARA a front for espionage. The ARA was a front, but that doesn't mean the Russian people should starve.

Of the three main leaders of the time, only one of them was willing to allow millions of people starve due to chances espionage. Oddly enough, he was the one who gained control after the death of Lenin. This whole situation seemed as though Stalin feared the loss of power more than the loss of life.

[Smirnov]

Maybe, in the US this fact is not so well-known, but during the Civil war in Russia the American Government had appointed the suggestion to the Antanta countries "The Future Map of the Bolshevik's Russia", according to which Syberia, Ural and Russin Far East were divided between the US and Japan, Kolsky peninsula and Pribaltika were to become Finnish, British and Polish etc. After all, Russia, according to Yankee plans, was to be a not-so-big state on the Russian-European plane, without any mineral resources, access to sea etc. Of course, leaders of the Soviet State knew about these plans. And why should they have any deals to their enemy? I think Stalin was right. More than that, with normal organization of Government working famine could be stopped by Russian resources.