American Experience

The other night, we caught the end of the American Experience episode regarding Herbert Hoover and the famine of U.S.S.R. during the early 1920s.

The little-known story of the American effort to relieve starvation in the new Soviet Russia in 1921, The Great Famine is a documentary about the worst natural disaster in Europe since the Black Plague in the Middle Ages. Five million Russians died. Half a world away, Americans responded with a massive two-year relief campaign, championed by Herbert Hoover, director of the American Relief Administration known as the ARA.

As the above states, no history book I ever read mentioned the destruction that V.I. Lenin had inflicted by redistributing harvests without leaving enough to be planted for successive seasons.  Lenin thought humanitarian aid was nothing more than a cover to spy and promote a counterrevolution movement.  The deplorable conditions that orphans endured makes one think of the concentration camps in Hitler's Germany.


Tonight, J and I watched American Experience: The Abolitionists. I never knew much about the movement. Putting people and places into a context makes the bloodshed from the Civil War almost make sense.