All-Russian Committee to Aid the Starving

All-Russian Committee to Aid the Starving 

created in Moscow with the consent of the Soviet government on July 21, 1921, by a group of prerevolutionary bourgeois social and cultural leaders, predominant among whom were former Constitutional Democrats (Cadets).

Initially the All-Russian Committee to Aid the Starving consisted of 63 persons, including 12 representatives of the Soviet regime. This committee had its representative organizations in the major cities. However, it did almost nothing to combat hunger and refused to send its members to regions of the country that were suffering from drought. The committee’s leaders, S. N. Prokopovich, E. D. Kuskova, and N. M. Kishkin (from the initial letters of their last names the committee was ironically called Prokukish [“the Fig”]), propagandized the idea that the fight against hunger was possible only if materials were received from abroad and capitalist relations were reestablished.

Using the slogan of the fight against hunger, the leaders demanded the transfer of administrative and economic functions to their committee; they waged anti-Soviet propaganda and established connections with the representatives of a number of capitalist governments, as well as with White emigre circles. By a decree of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, dated Aug. 27, 1921, this committee was dissolved. The fight against hunger was led by the Soviet government and by an organization that it created, the Central Commission to Aid the Starving, which was under the jurisdiction of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.

REFERENCE

Chemerisskii, I. A. “Iz istorii klassovoi bor’by v 1921.” In the collection Istoricheskie zapiski, vol. 77. Moscow, 1965.

I. A. CHEMERISSKII