Russia and the U.S. had a long history even before the Cold War. In The Russian Job, one of the foremost historians of 20th-century Russia, Douglas Smith, investigates the work of a semi-private charity headed by Herbert Hoover that fed the starving Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Much of that country became a charnel house after war, civil war and the new regime’s ruthless application of bad economic and social theories. Cannibalism was common and starvation claimed uncounted numbers of lives. Smith’s fascinating account is a reminder that Hoover had been known as “the Great Humanitarian” before the Great Depression and will be strong medicine for anyone who still believes that the Bolsheviks were guided by lofty ideals. Smith quotes Lenin, upbraiding Stalin for being “too soft.”
