A Delicate Balance in Ukraine

The efforts of the American Relief Administration (ARA) to combat the famine in Soviet Russia in 1921–23 ran up against many challenges, among them the vast distances to be covered, harsh winter conditions, a dilapidated transportation system, obstructionist and inefficient Soviet officials, and a lethargic population worn down by hunger. A complication that is easy to overlook was the tensions among the various ethno-national groups. As the central government in Moscow sought to establish political control over the former territories of the tsarist empire, these groups desired varying degrees of autonomy within Soviet Russia. The resulting power struggles and maneuverings frequently entangled the American relief workers, who, as they attempted to administer relief, were often ignorant of the issues involved and impatient with politics.

Ukraine presented Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s government with its greatest political challenge. Ukraine had experienced tumultuous years of violence since the declaration of an independent Ukrainian Republic in January 1918. It was a period of civil war and anarchy in which Ukraine was overrun by the forces of the Russian Red and White armies, Germans, and Ukrainian nationalists, and by marauding bands of self-described anarchists. Power changed hands in the major cities at least a dozen times, setting off waves of refugees fleeing in various directions, trying to escape the violence. Harold Fisher, the official ARA historian, wrote of this period: “To find a parallel to these conditions it is necessary to go back to the later days of the Thirty Years' War.”¹

Jewish people were especially targeted during the rampant violence. Anti-Jewish pogroms—ethnic riots—claimed the lives of at least 100,000 Jews, while at least 600,000 fled their homes. The homes and businesses of Jews were subject to looting and destruction.² This violence, which occurred in both small villages and larger cities and lasted anywhere from a few hours to multiple days, arose from growing economic and political instability, which many antagonists accused Jews of fomenting.

It is understandable that the Soviet government in Moscow initially attempted to block the ARA from setting up operations in Ukraine in 1921. As historian Bertrand Patenaude writes:

Across Ukraine the dying embers of the Civil War still smoldered and occasionally flared up. Pockets of armed anti-Bolshevik resistance persisted, with partisan bands still roaming the countryside, while Ukrainian peasants, a defiantly individualistic lot who did battle with the grain requisition squads, remained bitterly hostile. Whatever the specific basis for it, Moscow had good reason to be wary of Ukraine’s peasants and therefore of having American relief workers at liberty among them.³

In an attempt to win over Ukraine, the Bolsheviks had offered it a special status in a confederation with Soviet Russia. Once the Kremlin gave permission for ARA investigators to enter Ukraine, the Americans found that Ukrainian officials were fiercely protective of their nation’s formal independence. Ukrainian officials insisted to ARA investigators that the Riga Agreement, signed by the ARA and the Soviet government in August 1920, did not apply to Ukraine. The ARA’s investigators explained that the document signed at Riga applied to all the federated republics of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). This was an interpretation supported by the central government in Moscow, which had, after all, sanctioned their trip to Ukraine, they pointed out. Officials countered that Ukraine was no ordinary federated republic and insisted it was not a signatory to the Riga Agreement. After some hesitation, the ARA chiefs in Moscow decided they had no choice but to accept this state of affairs. The Americans inserted into the Riga text an additional “whereas” recognizing Ukrainian independence and added a paragraph incorporating the food remittance agreement. This ARA-Ukraine agreement went into effect on January 10, 1922.⁴

The JDC had been founded in 1914 to provide aid to Jews living in Palestine under Ottoman Turkish rule. The organization’s unofficial byword was that it distributed relief supported by funds collected “by Jews, from Jews, for Jews.”⁷

The JDC naturally desired to feed the largest possible proportion of Jews in Ukraine and Belorussia while also adhering to the ARA’s practice of nonsectarian relief. The challenge for the JDC in Ukraine was that most of Ukraine’s Jews were situated in the northern and western sections of the republic, including in Kyiv, while far fewer lived in the famishing areas in the south, where the ARA established its child-feeding operations. In order to smooth the way for the JDC’s food package operations in Ukraine, which would largely benefit its Jewish population, the organization agreed to contribute funds to support ARA child feeding and medical relief across Ukraine and in the Volga Valley.

One rationale for the JDC to extend the reach of its beneficence was spelled out by Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the JDC’s Committee on Russia. In a letter dated December 16, 1921, to Edgar Rickard, executive director of the ARA based in New York, Strauss pledged a donation from the JDC of $25,000 for the delivery of food packages to physicians in Russia.

I understand that in this particular case the actual recipients of this fund will be informed of the fact that its source is a Jewish Relief Organization. I was anxious that this should be done because of the fact that only a small proportion of the doctors are likely to be Jewish, and I am hopeful that it may create a certain amount of good will among a cultured and intelligent group of Russians toward their Jewish fellow-citizens.⁸

The JDC also took full advantage of the ARA’s clothing remittance program, a supplementary activity established in October 1922. This was an operation smaller in scale than the food remittance program but no less appreciated by its grateful recipients, especially in Ukraine, where Jews had been dispossessed of basic personal items during the pogroms. Independent of the ARA, the JDC would undertake a rural “reconstruction” program directed principally at the Jewish farming community, including the import of tractors into Ukraine.

The ARA-JDC collaboration was further complicated by pernicious anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Aside from—or perhaps because of—local popular anti-Semitism, Soviet officials were concerned that the presence of the JDC would spark acts of anti-Semitism, perhaps even violence. For a Jewish organization to come into Ukraine and be seen as feeding its own was bound to raise tensions. In fact, one of the ARA’s rules for staffing its operations in Soviet Russia was a prohibition on employing members of the Jewish “race,” in the parlance of the day. “This was based on the well-founded assumption that should order completely break down, there would ensue large-scale pogroms, which in Russia in troubled times was an especially savage version of rounding up the usual suspects,” explains historian Patenaude, in his book about the famine relief mission, The Big Show in Bololand:

Pogroms had become part of the American image of Russia during the last quarter of the previous century, pounded in by waves of Jewish immigrants. The Bolsheviks were widely assumed, at home and abroad, to be predominantly Jews; true or not, who could tell what a horrible bloodbath of innocents their downfall might inspire? . . . The ARA would have to compromise when, in 1922, the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee set up a semi-autonomous unit in Ukraine and American Jews partially staffed the operation. Their involvement aside, the very fact of a distinct JDC presence would arouse predictable anti-Semitic sentiments among local citizens and officials, which would complicate matters in Ukraine, Moscow, and New York.⁹

The awkwardness resulted from the fact that the ARA chiefs, especially in Moscow, did not want to be perceived as giving special treatment to the Jewish population of Ukraine. This was in part because it might create tensions with the Soviet government and also because it might compromise the reputation of the ARA for practicing nonsectarian relief. This made for delicate discussions when, for example, the JDC lobbied to ensure that at least some ARA food packages were kosher or pressed for the distribution of Passover flour for the holiday.

The JDC, meanwhile, had to walk a fine line as it tried to balance the need to satisfy its Jewish donors in America by directing most of its aid to Jewish famine victims while at the same time engaging sufficiently in nonsectarian relief in order to avoid alienating the ARA, Soviet officials, and local non-Jewish citizens. According to an internal ARA communication written in June 1922, the JDC had been warned by the president of the Ukrainian Republic that

The American relief workers of the ARA often felt caught in the middle. Walter Coleman wrote about this in his history of the ARA’s operations in Elizavetgrad (today Kropyvnytskyi). Elizavetgrad had been the scene of deadly anti-Jewish riots during the outbreak of violence targeting Jews sparked by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 by revolutionary terrorists. That was the starting point for mass anti-Jewish violence becoming a regular feature of incidents of political unrest in Russia, with the crescendo being the pogroms of 1918–21. Coleman described the delicacy of his situation:

A great majority of the population in the district are Jewish and they had to be handled with extreme care at all times, for we have learned that they are not extremely careful about excusing and exaggerating in letters sent to relatives in America. We have been accused of being anti-Semitic, pro-Semitic, anti-Soviet, pro-Soviet, anti-bourgeoisie, pro-bourgeoisie and all the other pros and cons which are applicable to Russia today. May we say that we feel that we have kept pretty well in the middle of the road regardless.¹¹

Nothing better illustrates the precariousness of the situation than the fate of a sign introduced into American feeding stations in Ukraine as a way to recognize the contribution of the JDC to the relief operations. By the terms of the original ARA-JDC agreement of March 1922, the JDC was to be given clear and equal credit in public advertising by the relief mission in Soviet Russia. This was spelled out in a confidential memorandum sent from London by Walter Lyman Brown, ARA director for Europe, to William N. Haskell, ARA director for Soviet Russia in Moscow. Brown, in describing the discussions just concluded in London with representatives of the JDC, mentioned two outstanding points that emerged from the conference that shed light on the JDC’s balancing act as an ARA-affiliated organization in Soviet Russia:

1st: that to combat anti-Semitism and to improve the relations between Christians and Jews in the areas where we are working, the necessary publicity should be given to the fact that the American Jews through the J.D.C. are contributing in a large measure to the funds of the American Relief Administration, a non-sectarian organization, for the purpose of carrying out non-sectarian relief.

2nd: The Joint Distribution Committee, of course recognizes the Riga Agreement and that under it all work done by or through the A.R.A. must be of a non-sectarian nature. They have contributed some three-quarters of a million dollars to the general funds for Volga usages. In their prospective $5,000,000 contribution they would feel justified in limiting it to the general parts of Russia where there are the largest number of Jews, as otherwise they would not be justified vis-à-vis their Jewish contributors in making this donation. The Ukraine and White Russia are the predominantly Jewish portions of Russia, and they might perhaps go so far as to consider that certain governments in these areas where there are the most Jews should have preferential treatment.¹²

A meeting in Moscow on June 19, 1922, involving JDC representatives and ARA directors from New York, London, and Moscow discussed ARA-JDC arrangements going forward at a time when the ARA was considering withdrawing at the harvest and handing over operations in Ukraine entirely to the JDC. One decision reached at the meeting was to raise the JDC’s profile among its beneficiaries. Point eight of the agreement resulting from the meeting reads: “The ARA kitchen signs in the whole of the Ukraine will bear the additional wording ‘Supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.’”¹³

This idea of clear advertising of the JDC’s contribution to nonsectarian relief in the form of child feeding was reiterated in an agreement between the ARA and the JDC signed in London on August 14, 1922, after the ARA had decided to remain in Soviet Russia for a second year of operations. The agreement specified the sums and the terms of the JDC’s prospective contributions to ARA child-feeding operations and for medical relief. Point five (of six) of this agreement states:

American Relief Administration will see to it that the Joint Distribution Committee shall receive full credit throughout the Ukraine and White Russia by appropriate signboards at feeding stations, hospitals, clinics, etc., so that the population shall know that the work both of childfeeding and medical relief is ASSISTED BY THE AMERICAN JEWISH JOINT DISTRIBUTION COMMITTEE. This wish of the Joint distribution Committee is prompted by its hope of fostering better relations between elements of the Russian people.¹⁴