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Friends United Meeting |
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January 1998
Quakers and the Great Russian Famine
by Sergei Nikitin
I heard a wonderful story of Quakers doing relief work during the Great Famine of 1921 in central Russia, in Buzuluk. According to some estimates, 10 million people died in the famine.
I wanted to go to Buzuluk, hoping to find somebody who could remember that time, and intending to explore the archives. I received a grant from the Friends House Moscow to go to Samara and Buzuluk in the hope that some traces of the Quakers' work could be found in their archives.
I wrote an article for the local newspaper, asking if anyone could remember their childhood, the famine and the relief received from Friends. At the end of the article I asked those people to write to me. I was pleased with the responses I received.
Mrs. Popova sent me a very long letter where she told me a story of her grandfather who lived in a village in Buzuluk province. He was appointed head of the village soup kitchen since everybody knew him as an honest man.
Mrs. Popova also interviewed two elderly women who shared their recollections with her. One of them, Mrs. Morozova, remembered how when she was nine the Communist Red Army ran through their village Torpanovka like a gang of raiders, relieving civilians of all food supplies, horses and carts.
Later, Quakers came to Torpanovka. They opened an orphanage in a church school for orphans and for those children whose parents were not able to feed them. Mrs. Morozova said she was saved by Quakers, they gave her quinine when she was sick. She still remembers the food they were given: beans, rice, flour, chocolate and egg powder.
I learned that in 1916 the population of the Buzuluk area in the middle of Russia had increased due to people escaping from the western provinces [see map page 6]. World War I battles were at their peak there. The newcomers were not prepared for the climate, they had no warm clothes, there were no jobs for them and they were short of food.
Quakers from Britain in 1916 sent a study group of four Friends, with William A. Cadbury as its head, to investigate. After the investigations, three of the group went to the most needy part of Russia to see how they could serve the sufferers.
Several refugee centers were established in villages around Buzuluk. An orphanage for refugee children was opened in the village of Mogootovo. New hospitals in villages were opened with doctors coming from Britain.
A group of six American Friends joined the British Friends in the area in 1917. They were all women: Nancy Babb, Emily Bradbury, Amelia Faberzewski, Anna Haines, Lydia Lewis and Esther White.
The Friends Relief Unit worked until October 1918. They had to leave Buzuluk because the Russian Revolution battles had reached there. Life had become more dangerous. They escaped safely via Siberia, the Far East, Japan, and the USA.
The terrible famine in Russia began about 1921. In August 1921, Anna Haines joined a Russian investigation party which traveled to Buzuluk. Haines, an American Friend, had worked there along with Theodore Rigg and other Quakers until 1918.
In September 1921, Quakers arrived in the Samara region, and then proceeded to Buzuluk to begin with the relief work. American Quakers had to work with the American Relief Administration (ARA) since all American relief organizations were required to work through the ARA. American Friends worked with the ARA until June 15, 1923, when the ARA officially finished working. The American Quakers then united their efforts with British Friends and they worked together until 1925.
There were no documents in the archives concerning the first phase of the Friends' work in 1916-1918. The second period was illuminated with more details. Six voluminous folders in the Samara archives mainly contained reports of the goods delivered and distributed by Quakers, correspondence between Friends working in Buzuluk and the Soviet authorities in charge of the foreign relief workers.
There were eight other foreign relief groups working in the Samara province apart from Quakers. The Friends Relief Unit fed 397,723 people of the 478,772 who needed food. So, 83 percent of the local people were fed and saved by Quakers!
I had read some literature about the Friends relief work. But reading books brings different feelings than touching the real history: yellowed pages of old documents compiled some 70 years ago. I saw these letters with the Quaker dove on the top, and the name "Society of Friends" written in Russian.
The earliest documents were mainly in English. As time passed Friends became more acquainted with the Russian language. The Head of the British Unit, Arthur Watts, began signing his name in Russian: "A. YOTC." They were assisted by Russian helpers and interpreters -Peter Norosky, who worked as Russian Head of warehouses and interpreter since October 1921; Andre Bartschewich, interpreter; Andy Pavloff, interpreter, and others. I wondered what happened to these Russians in the purges of the 1930s. They could easily have been accused of being American spies and killed or sent to Siberia.
Quakers there were not accustomed to the cold winters, and they were not immune to the epidemics. Miss Pattison died of the typhus. Miss Babb, who had come to Buzuluk first in 1917, and Mr. Kenworthy, the representative of American Group of the Society of Friends, developed typhus too.
In December 1921, Arthur Watts wrote "We are very shorthanded here through the illness of our members and also very much occupied in developing our plans for feeding a very much larger number of people in the Buzuluk province. We hope very soon to reach the number of 100,000." Quakers fed children in orphanages in Buzuluk. They also opened "soup kitchens" in nearly 900 villages in the Buzuluk province.
I received other letters from eyewitnesses who remembered the Friends relief work. Ms. Konnova wrote that she now could understand a story her grandmother told her. The woman said she had not taken it seriously. Her grandmother told her that when she was a young girl terrible famine began and her parents died. So the grandmother said she had been adopted temporarily by an American family and lived with the family for a year. The Americans actually saved her life.
Ms. Konnova said in her letter that she had thought her grandma was a great inventor of stories: "How on earth could she find Americans in the vast steppes, in a small village?" It was clear after my article that this was true.
An elderly man recalled in his letter how he got malaria, so his mother took him to a hospital run by Quakers where he was given quinine and a chocolate bar to sweeten the taste of the medicine. Another unforgettable food for locals was condensed milk distributed by Friends. The man described to me all the details about the milk tin in his letter.
Mrs. Nikiforova remembered the wonderful wool they had been given by Quakers. She says that local women spun the wool. The clothes made out of this wool were of an outstanding quality which no one had seen before. The women who worked with wool were paid in wool from which they sewed skirts. These skirts were very special and were worn only to church. They were handed down from one generation to another.
When things improved in 1923, Quakers turned their attention to a medical program. They supplied local hospitals with medical equipment. They helped the neediest peasants to plow with "Quaker tractors" and they brought horses from Astrakhan, a city down the Volga. All the medical equipment as well as the tractors were handed to locals when Friends left the area.
No doubt their help was very important; they saved many lives. As Mrs. Semenova wrote in her letter to me: "People were very grateful for the material and moral help brought by Friends. All my life my mother told us the stories about that. She always said that people should treat each other with love and kindness, the way Quakers did it."
Sergei Nikitin attends the worship group in St. Petersburg, Russia where he lives with his wife and son. He has worked as a builder for 15 years. He learned English because of his interest in the Beatles' music and poetry. He spent the past fall term studying at Pendle Hill and researching in the AFSC archives.
Copyright (c) 1998 Friends United Meeting
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