The Politics of Relief: American Quakers and Russian Bolsheviks, 1917-1921

The Politics of Relief: American Quakers and Russian Bolsheviks, 1917-1921 David W. McFadden* Contraryto popularbelief, and the overwhelming majority ofhistorians, Bolshevik seizure ofpower in Russia in October 1917 did not result in the immediate termination ofcontactbetween Westerners, particularly Americans , and the new Soviet government. Even the Civil War and Red Terror, as they developed in the summer and fall of 191 8, did not totally extinguish Americans from Bolshevik Russia, although all official American representatives left by October, 1918.1 Remaining in Russian territory held by the Bolsheviks were small groups ofAmerican and British Quakers, who had come as part ofa war reliefeffort as early as 1916. Although the major Quaker project at Buzuluk, in Samara, was terminated by the late fall of 1918,along with most other allied missions, two Quakers, one American and one New Zealander, Esther White and Theodore Rigg, returned to Moscow and Petrograd, determined to assist the Peregovtsy Society for Russian children to maintain their work for children's victims of the war and to find a way, ifpossible, to expand and revitalize Quaker reliefefforts in Russia even in the darkest days ofisolation and blockade, the winter of 1919.Although Rigg and White did leave in the early spring of 1919, they were succeeded within the year by two others: Anna J. Haines and Arthur Watts who, in painstaking negotiations with Soviet authorities, paved the way for fullscale western relief made famous by Herbert Hoover as the American Relief Administration famine relief in Russia from 192 1-23.2 The story ofthe ARA is well known. That ofthe Quaker reliefeffort less so, yet the outlines, particularly ofthe Buzuluk project and the later famine relief (both under, and independent of, the ARA) have been told in a number of ways before.3 What has remained largely unknown, however, is the extent of the unofficial contacts and negotiations which these solitary Quakers undertook with Bolshevik authorities—Commissars of Foreign Trade, Food production and distribution, Central Association of Cooperatives, Social Service, Children's Homes, representatives in Riga, Berlin, New York— in order to break down skepticism and hostility toward western representatives , expand the scope ofQuaker operations, and enable reliefefforts to *David W. McFadden, Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University (Connecticut), is currently working on a book about Quakers in Soviet Russia, 1917 to 1931. QuakerHistory get underway. These negotiations and the Quaker relief which accompanied them were not only the essential good faith testing grounds for Americanreliefas awhole (leading directlyto theARA),buttheyrepresent something else as well. Together with the much better known efforts of Raymond Robins ofthe American Red Cross, the YMCA and a few others, they also stand as the first stage of what might be called the origins of Citizen Diplomacy, the people-to-people efforts to break down hostility between the United States and Soviet Russia by direct means.4 What remains extraordinary in even a cursory perusal ofthis story is the range ofpolitical enemies with whom the Quakers were able not only to carry on negotiations, but with whom they gained confidence and agreements . Not only didRigg and White have authorization fromthe Peregovtsy and the Tolstoyans of Moscow (both inherently anti-Bolshevik), but they successfully negotiated an agreement with the People's Commissariat to take over and run the Children's Homes. Haines and Watts were able to persuade Narkomprod to give them permission to distribute food and relief supplies, not only their own, but also those of Save the Children and the American Red Cross, both perceived as enemies of the Bolshevik regime. Moreover, they were even able to procure the use of a warehouse from Tsentrosoyuz, and an official office address and cable permission courtesy of Narkomprod. And back in Philadelphia and Washington, the astute Chairman of the American Friends Service Committee, noted Haverford College religion professor Rufus Jones, and his Executive Secretary Wilbur Thomas successfully maneuvered through the shoals ofbitter American politics in the very heart ofthe Red Scare period, earning the simultaneous confidence of Herbert Hoover, the American Red Cross, the American Famine Relief Fund (Allen Wardwell and many establishment liberals) and the proBolshevik Russian Famine Fund runbySovietRussia magazine and, before its forced departure, the office ofLudwig Martens...