A severe drought in 1921 fell on a peasantry whose seed grain and reserves had been taken by the forced requisitioning of war communism and whose transport and administration had broken down in the civil war. The famine that followed centred on the middle and lower Volga, the southern Urals, the Crimea and southern Ukraine. The Soviet government appealed for international help in July 1921 and admitted the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover, Nansen's International Russian Relief Committee, the Save the Children Fund and others, whose kitchens at their peak fed some 10 million people. The Warwick University Modern Records Centre records the League of Nations describing it as the worst famine in Europe in modern times as regards both numbers affected and mortality, and gives estimates of victims from 1 million to 10 million with 5 million the most frequently quoted. Relief in Ukraine was delayed because Moscow initially declined to recognise the Ukrainian famine areas while grain was still being moved out of and exported from Ukraine.
Drought struck a countryside already stripped by Soviet grain requisitioning, civil war and the collapse of transport; the Soviet government eventually admitted foreign relief agencies, principally the American Relief Administration and Nansen's International Committee
Soviet and American Relief Administration surveys placed roughly 30 million people in the declared famine zone, of whom the ARA was feeding about 10 million at the peak in mid-1922. Excess deaths are usually estimated at about 5 million; the displacement figure counts those who left the famine provinces as refugees, recorded incompletely by railway and provincial authorities.
The Warwick Modern Records Centre states that estimates of famine victims from starvation or associated disease vary from 1 million to 10 million, with 5 million the figure most often quoted. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine documents 235,000 recorded deaths in five southern Ukrainian gubernias in the winter of 1921-22 alone and suggests the Ukrainian total may have exceeded a million. The range reflects the absence of vital registration, the concurrent typhus and cholera epidemics, and disagreement over the baseline population.
Forced grain requisitioning including seed grain, and continued grain movement and export during the famine, are documented in Soviet decrees and in the relief agencies' reporting collected by the Warwick Modern Records Centre and the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine.
Russia