The Russian Famine of 1921: When Lenin's Revolution Starved

In 1921, as the Russian Civil War wound down, a catastrophic famine swept across the Volga region, Ukraine, and the Caucasus. Over five million people died in what became known as the Povolzhye famine. This episode explores the tangled causes: drought, War Communism's grain requisitions, the collapse of transport, and the Bolsheviks' ideological struggle over international aid. We meet the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, which fed over ten million Russians, and the Soviet officials who debated accepting capitalist help. We examine the famine's role in pushing Lenin toward the New Economic Policy, and how the disaster reshaped the Bolsheviks' relationship with the peasantry. A story of survival, ideology, and the human cost of revolution.

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