Mercy Outlasts Missiles

The forgotten American act of kindness that saved millions Russians

By Ana Emdin and Bennett Iorio

The memory of mercy can temper aggression, and peace can sometimes be sown in acts of care. A century ago, as Russia grappled with a devastating famine, the American Relief Administration (ARA), led by Herbert Hoover, mounted an unparalleled humanitarian mission that transcended political ideologies and saved millions of lives. Today, as the United States mediates peace in the Ukraine War, this forgotten history underscores the enduring power of humanitarian diplomacy and the profound impact of choosing compassion over division.

In 1921, Lenin’s fledgling Soviet state teetered on collapse. Years of war, revolution, and drought had culminated in a catastrophic famine, threatening the survival of millions. Crops failed, infrastructure crumbled, and epidemics of typhus and cholera swept through a population already weakened by starvation. When Russian author Maxim Gorky issued a desperate international appeal for aid, the U.S. responded with what would become the largest humanitarian operation in its history: Feeding its ideological enemy.

Under Herbert Hoover’s leadership, the American Relief Administration launched a monumental effort fueled by congressional funding and private donations. At its zenith, the ARA fed 10.5 million people daily, delivered medical supplies, and distributed seeds to revive agriculture. Hundreds of American workers and over 120,000 Russian volunteers operated thousands of kitchens and dispensaries, prioritising children and the sick “without regard to race, religion, or social status.” Later, Soviet officials, suspicious of Western motives, would accuse the ARA of espionage. Yet at the time, this practical, life-saving assistance constituted a powerful form of diplomacy, communicating care and compassion directly to the Russian population. A Russian 1921 poster that would look quite surreal today proclaimed, it was "The Gift of the American People".

Hoover, though privately disdainful of Bolshevism, recognized that saving lives could reshape perceptions. The ARA’s work became a masterclass in soft power.

​Across history, the ability of great powers to wield humanitarianism as strategy has marked inflection points far beyond the reach of bullets or ballots. One sees echoes of the ARA in America’s postwar Marshall Plan – another ideologically agnostic lifeline to a continent in ruins. While its economic motives were clear, the Plan also served as a moral assertion: that dignity and recovery, even of one’s former enemies, was in America’s national interest. Conversely, the Soviet response – the Molotov Plan – emphasized control, not care, revealing a fundamental divergence in how mercy is deployed. In our own time, China's Belt and Road Initiative seeks to blend development with dependency, echoing the imperial logic of ports-for-loans rather than soup-for-souls. The ARA, by contrast, asked for no railroads, no ports, and no allegiance – only the preservation of life.

​The ARA's mission projected a potent image of the American people as fundamentally humane, generous, and possessing remarkable organisational capabilities, starkly contrasting the Bolshevik regime's revolutionary and often austere image. While publicly disavowing political aims, American leaders privately hoped their aid would showcase Western efficiency and capitalist pragmatism, which might counter communism’s appeal.  While Lenin feared hidden agendas like smuggled arms or anti-communist resistance, the ARA’s neutrality disarmed suspicion. Food and medicine spoke a universal language. The ARA’s meticulous administration became a quiet advertisement for the “American way.” Workers documented their logistical triumphs, contrasting American dynamism with what they saw as Russian passivity. Yet this influence flowed not from propaganda but from tangible results – trains running on time, children fed, and harvests restored.

ARA kitchen (in the former palace of the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna), Petrograd, circa 1922.

Even for Lenin, the ARA was a godsend, a proof that pragmatism could coexist with ideology. Even brutal ideologues like head of the secret police Felix Dzerzhinsky mirrored this efficiency, racing American-supplied grain across revitalised railways. Derzhinsky was "efficiency personified" in ensuring that trains ran on time to deliver American corn. Historian Bertrand Patenaude notes that constant American goading became the key to the revival of Russia’s railroads in 1922. The same railways that delivered American grain also became lifelines for Russia's most vulnerable. Between 1922 and 1923, the Soviet state evacuated approximately 150,000 children from famine-stricken regions, particularly the Volga area, to more stable territories like Turkestan. In an act of humanism and moral courage, cities such as Tashkent and Samarkand, despite their own struggles and anti-Bolshevik sentiments, opened their hearts to starving children of the very regime that sought to subjugate them. The scenes in Samarkand – locals receiving the children of their imperial center – mirror, in miniature, the larger geopolitical inversion carried out by the ARA. It was not dominance, but decency, that preserved the Soviet state in its hour of collapse.

American corn, arriving without conditions or coercion, became the scaffolding on which Bolshevik authority rebuilt itself. That irony – of capitalism feeding communism – is not a contradiction, but a strategic insight. Humanitarian diplomacy does not reward allies; it rescues adversaries, and in doing so, redefines them. Today, in Ukraine, the calculus is not dissimilar. Acts like returning children, repairing energy grids, or feeding besieged towns are not moral luxuries; rather, they are vital moral imperatives and strategic investments in the future. They write the memory of America not in missile trajectories, but in the quiet arithmetic of survival.

The ARA’s impact transcended immediate survival. By 1923, the worst famine had abated, aided by restored harvests from American-supplied seeds. However, one can argue that the mission’s ripple effects stretched beyond anyone's expectations. The ARA’s efforts were concentrated in the Volga region, which was ground zero for the famine with tens of millions of people starving to death. Two decades later, that same region became the crucible of another historic struggle: Stalingrad. In February 1943, the city halted Hitler’s eastern advance in a siege that marked a turning point in World War II. Veterans of the ARA who followed the battle of Stalingrad from across the ocean may have wondered: Were the children we fed the ones who held the line? There’s no way to trace it directly, but the connection illustrates how acts of mercy can yield unforeseen dividends. Acts of compassion ripple into history.

One of Russia’s most popular children’s poets Kornei Chukovsky in 1923 lionized the ARA by saying “I doubt if any American will ever understand our poetical happiness on the great day when, dusted with flour, my whole family dragged home the cart with the long-awaited ARA packages and carried them up to our lodgings on the third floor.”

However, the embrace of “amerikanizm” would soon end, as the Soviet Union turned to an autarkic campaign of socialist industrialisation. When the United States fell into depression in 1929, just as the Soviet Union started portraying itself as the beacon of industrial virility, Herbert Hoover and the ARA were forgotten. Over time, Cold War tensions buried the story further, and Soviet propaganda recast ARA workers as spies. One of the few lasting memorials to the ARA is something "safely beyond the reach of even the mightiest totalitarian dictator", a small planet, number 849, which a grateful Crimean astronomer had named "Ara."

​As the U.S. navigates the peace negotiations of the Ukraine War, this forgotten chapter of history asks us: Can compassion help write the next chapter of peace?

​Recent multilateral talks in Riyadh have yielded fragile agreements: Guarantees for Black Sea navigation, nebulous bans on targeting energy infrastructure, and protocols for prisoner exchanges and repatriating forcibly displaced Ukrainian children. These measures, though incremental, reflect a critical truth: Humanitarian imperatives cannot wait for the war’s end. They must be woven into the fabric of negotiations, much like the ARA’s insistence on feeding starving Russians while ideological tensions simmered.

In Jeddah, U.S. and Ukrainian officials recently brokered a 30-day ceasefire proposal, contingent on Russia’s acceptance. Beyond resuming paused military aid and intelligence sharing, the deal prioritizes humanity amid attrition: Expedited prisoner swaps, safe corridors for evacuations, and the return of abducted children. Like the ARA’s food kitchens in 1921, these gestures are both moral and tactical. They force global audiences to confront the human cost Moscow seeks to obscure. These acts are not mere charity. They are strategic tools that amplify a nation’s moral authority, expose adversaries’ failures, and forge grassroots bonds no sanctions regime can replicate.

Harold  Blandy (seated with X on torso) and his Russian interpreter Gorin (seated with + on torso), winter 1922. Digital record. Between the two seated men is a display of food from an ARA remittance package.

The ARA’s story reminds us that suppressed acts of mercy can resurface to temper future aggression. Today, grain shipments to famine-stricken nations, medical evacuations across frontlines, and prisoner swaps amid artillery fights echo this ethos. These efforts reject the false choice between pragmatism and compassion, proving that superpowers can wage peace while waging war, that is, if survival is prioritised over supremacy.

​We must ask ourselves what becomes of the world when the architecture of aid is politicised into paralysis. The American ARA of 1921 faced no sanctions regime, no UN Security Council veto – only famine and its urgency. Today, aid to Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine remains hostage to geopolitical deadlock, where suffering becomes a bargaining chip. Yet history teaches that the true cost of withheld mercy is paid not in headlines but in the erosion of legitimacy. Humanitarian diplomacy is not a luxury; it is a metric of civilisation. It is the soft ledger on which nations record not just their might, but their moral seriousness.

And moral seriousness is of the utmost impact and importance, too: Just as the ARA’s seeds fed future defenders of Stalingrad, today’s quiet gestures, like returning children and safeguarding energy infrastructure, plant hope in the ruins. Americans were saving from famine, and those who were saved, helped save the world from Nazism.

Integrating mercy into statecraft is power’s most profound expression. The ARA’s legacy, suppressed by dictatorship yet preserved by human resilience, challenges us to see compassion as strategic foresight.

​Will 2025 be remembered as the year cynicism triumphed, or as the moment we relearned that empathy and aid are the highest form of diplomacy? The genuine concern for human suffering remains a potent, albeit often forgotten, tool in the pursuit of a more humane world. The answer lies in whether we choose to see humanitarian action not as a footnote to history, but as its most enduring chapter.