Herbert Clark Hoover was an American politician who served as the 31st president of the United States from 1929 to 1933. He was a member of the Republican Party, holding office during the onset of the Great Depression in the United States. A self-made man who became rich as a mining engineer, Hoover led the Commission for Relief in Belgium, served as the director of the U.S. Food Administration, and served as the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.
The Green armies, also known as the Green Army or Greens (Зелёные), were armed peasant groups which fought against all governments in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922. The Green armies were semi-organized local militias that opposed the Bolsheviks, Whites, and foreign interventionists, and fought to protect their communities from requisitions or reprisals carried out by third parties. The Green armies were politically and ideologically neutral, but at times associated with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The Green armies had at least tacit support throughout much of Russia. However, their primary base, the peasantry, were largely reluctant to wage an active campaign during the Russian Civil War and eventually dissolved following Bolshevik victory in 1922.
Robert John Service is a British historian, academic, and author who has written extensively on the history of the Soviet Union, particularly the era from the October Revolution to Stalin's death. He was until 2013 a professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He is best known for his biographies of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. He has been a fellow of the British Academy since 1998.
After the Russian Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks took over parts of the collapsing Russian Empire in 1918, they faced enormous odds against the German Empire and eventually negotiated terms to pull out of World War I. They then went to war against the White movement, pro-independence movements, rebellious peasants, former supporters, anarchists and foreign interventionists in the bitter civil war. They set up the Soviet Union in 1922 with Vladimir Lenin in charge. At first, it was treated as an unrecognized pariah state because of its repudiating of tsarist debts and threats to destroy capitalism at home and around the world. By 1922, Moscow had repudiated the goal of world revolution, and sought diplomatic recognition and friendly trade relations with the capitalist world, starting with Britain and Germany. Finally in 1933, the United States gave recognition. Trade and technical help from Germany and the United States arrived in the late 1920s. After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin, became leader. He transformed the country in the 1930s into an industrial and military power. It strongly opposed Nazi Germany until August 1939, when it suddenly came to friendly terms with Berlin in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Moscow and Berlin by agreement invaded and partitioned Poland and the Baltic states. Stalin ignored repeated warnings that Hitler planned to invade. He was caught by surprise in June 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The Soviet forces nearly collapsed as the Germans reached the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. However, the Soviet Union proved strong enough to defeat Nazi Germany, with help from its key World War II allies, Britain and the United States. The Soviet army occupied most of Eastern Europe and increasingly controlled the governments.
Throughout Russian history famines, droughts and crop failures occurred on the territory of Russia, the Russian Empire and the USSR on more or less regular basis. From the beginning of the 11th to the end of the 16th century, on the territory of Russia for every century there were 8 crop failures, which were repeated every 13 years, sometimes causing prolonged famine in a significant territory. The causes of the famine were different, from natural and economic and political crises; for example, the Great Famine of 1931–1933, colloquially called the Holodomor, the cause of which was the collectivization policy in the USSR, which affected the territory of the Volga region in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
The Russian famine of 1921–1922, also known as the Povolzhye famine, was a severe famine in the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic that began early in the spring of 1921 and lasted until 1922. The famine resulted from the combined effects of economic disturbance from the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and the government policy of war communism. It was exacerbated by rail systems that could not distribute food efficiently.
American Relief Administration (ARA) was an American relief mission to Europe and later post-revolutionary Russia after World War I. Herbert Hoover, future president of the United States, was the program director.
The Workers International Relief (WIR) — also known as Internationale Arbeiter-Hilfe (IAH) in German and as Международная рабочая помощь in Russian — was an adjunct of the Communist International initially formed to channel relief from international working class organizations and communist parties to famine-stricken Soviet Russia. The organization, based in Berlin, later produced films and coordinated propaganda efforts on behalf of the USSR.
Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, which alleges that the Jews were the originators of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and that they held primary power among the Bolsheviks who led the revolution. Similarly, the conspiracy theory of Jewish Communism alleges that Jews have dominated the Communist movements in the world, and is related to the Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory (ZOG), which alleges that Jews control world politics.
Soviet Union–United States relations were fully established in 1933 as the succeeding bilateral ties to those between the Russian Empire and the United States, which lasted from 1776 until 1917; they were also the predecessor to the current bilateral ties between the Russian Federation and the United States that began in 1992 after the end of the Cold War. The relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States was largely defined by mistrust and tense hostility. The invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany as well as the attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan marked the Soviet and American entries into World War II on the side of the Allies in June and December 1941, respectively. As the Soviet–American alliance against the Axis came to an end following the Allied victory in 1945, the first signs of post-war mistrust and hostility began to immediately appear between the two countries, as the Soviet Union militarily occupied Eastern European countries and turned them into satellite states, forming the Soviet Bloc. These bilateral tensions escalated into the Cold War, a decades-long period of tense hostile relations with short phases of détente that ended after the collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of the present-day Russian Federation at the end of 1991.
The 1921–1922 famine in Tatarstan was a period of mass starvation and drought that took place in the Tatar ASSR as a result of the Russian Civil War, in which 500,000 to 2,000,000 peasants died. The event was part of the greater Russian famine of 1921–22 that affected other parts of what became the Soviet Union, in which up 5,000,000 people died in total. According to Roman Serbyn, a professor of Russian and East European history, the Tatarstan famine was the first man-made famine in the Soviet Union and systematically targeted ethnic minorities such as Volga Tatars and Volga Germans.
The Soviet famine of 1946–1947 was a major famine in the Soviet Union that lasted from mid-1946 to the winter of 1947 to 1948.
The Hoover Institution Library and Archives is a research center and archival repository located at Stanford University, near Palo Alto, California in the United States. Built around a collection amassed by Stanford graduate Herbert Hoover prior to his becoming President of the United States, the Hoover Library and Archives is largely dedicated to the world history of the 20th and 21st centuries. It includes one of the largest collections of political posters in the world.
The Kazakh famine of 1919–1922, also referred to as the Turkestan famine of 1919–1922, was a period of mass starvation and drought that took place in the Kirghiz ASSR and Turkestan ASSR as a result of the Russian Civil War, in which 400,000 to 750,000 peasants died. The event was part of the greater Russian famine of 1921–22 that affected other parts of what became the Soviet Union, in which up to 5,000,000 people died in total.
The American Volga Relief Society was a German American non-governmental organization that provided relief and supplies to ethnically German settlements in the area around the Volga River. The group was active following World War I, during the period between 1921 and 1924. The organization officially disbanded in 1926, though private donations continued until the 1930s.
Bread and Authority in Russia, 1914—1921, is a history book by Lars T. Lih about the food crisis in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.
The following is a list of important scholarly resources related to Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States. For recent work see Ellis W. Hawley (2018). For older studies see Patrick G. O’Brien and Philip T. Rosen, (1981), 25–42, 83–99 and Patrick G. O’Brien, (1988).
This is a select bibliography of post World War II English language books and journal articles about the Revolutionary and Civil War era of Russian (Soviet) history. The sections "General Surveys" and "Biographies" contain books; other sections contain both books and journal articles. Book entries may have references to reviews published in English language academic journals or major newspapers when these could be considered helpful. Additional bibliographies can be found in many of the book-length works listed below; see Further Reading for several book and chapter length bibliographies. The External Links section contains entries for publicly available select bibliographies from universities.
Foreign policy of Herbert Hoover covers the international activities and policies of Herbert Hoover for his entire career, with emphasis to his roles from 1914 to 1933.
The 1921–1923 famine in Ukraine was a disaster that mostly occurred in the southern steppe region of Ukraine. The number of fatalities is estimated between 200,000 and 1,000,000, but no systematic records were then made.
