the famine began, Russia had suffered six and a half years of the
First World War and the Civil Wars of 1918–20, many of the conflicts fought inside Russia.
[4]
Before the famine, all sides in the
Russian Civil Wars of 1918–21 — the Bolsheviks, the Whites, the
Anarchists, the seceding nationalities — had provisioned themselves by the ancient method of "living off the land": they seized food from those who grew it, gave it to their armies and supporters, and denied it to their enemies. The Bolshevik government had requisitioned supplies from the peasantry for little or nothing in exchange. This led peasants to drastically reduce their crop production. According to the official Bolshevik position, which is still maintained by some modern Marxists, the rich peasants (
kulaks) withheld their surplus grain in order to preserve their lives;
[5] statistics indicate that most of the grain and the other food supplies passed through the
black market.
[6][7][8] The Bolsheviks believed peasants were actively trying to undermine the war effort.
The Black Book of Communism claims that Lenin ordered the seizure of the food peasants had grown for their own subsistence and their seed grain in retaliation for this "sabotage," leading to widespread peasant revolts
[9]. In 1920, Lenin had ordered increased emphasis on food requisitioning from the peasantry.
Aid from outside Russia was initially rejected. The
American Relief Administration (ARA), which
Herbert Hoover had formed to help the starvation of
World War I, had offered assistance to Lenin in 1919, on condition that they have full say over the
Russian railway network and hand out food impartially to all. Lenin refused this as interference in Russian internal affairs.
[4]
Lenin was eventually convinced — by this famine, the
Kronstadt rebellion, large scale peasant uprisings such as the
Tambov rebellion, and the failure of a German
general strike — to reverse his policy at home and abroad. He decreed the
New Economic Policy on March 15, 1921. The famine also helped produce an opening to the West: Lenin allowed relief organizations to bring aid, this time. War relief was no longer required in Western Europe, and the ARA had an organization set up in
Poland, relieving the Polish famine which had begun in the winter of 1919–20.
The Russian famine of 1921 came at the end of six and a half years of unrest and violence (first World War I, then the two Russian revolutions of 1917, then the Russian Civil War). Many different political and military factions were involved in those events, and most of them have been accused by their enemies of having contributed to, or even bearing sole responsibility for, the famine
