The Making of Humanitarian Visual Icons: On the 1921–1923 Russian Famine as Foundational Event

Abstract

In the summer of 1921, the specter of famine stalked the territory of Soviet Russia. A combination of sociopolitical and economic factors—the aftermaths of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, civil war between Red and White forces, and the Bolshevik policies of forces collectivization of agricultural lands—formed an unholy alliance with natural causes (principally, a severe drought in the Volga River Valley) to bring parts of Southern Russia and Ukraine to their knees. Agricultural production was decimated, leading to mass starvation and the consequent migration of several hundreds of thousands of peasants flooding into Russian cities. The famine had the potential to seriously destabilize the Bolshevik regime, which already had its hands full fighting a Western-backed, antirevolutionary enemy. Thus, on June 26, 1921, via the pages of Pravda, the Soviet government could do little but to officially confirm the famine’s existence to the rest of world (Cosandey 1998: 3). This admission was followed, shortly thereafter, by dramatic appeals from two of Russia’s towering figures—appeals that captured the tension between the two incipient ethicopolitical logics of humanitarianism: Maxim Gorky’s “To All Honest People” (“Soviet Accepts” 1921) evoked the highest liberal humanist ideals of dignity of the person and the overcoming of ideological differences between peoples, whereas Vladimir Lenin’s “Appeal to the International Proletariat”¹ called upon international working-class solidarity to protect the accomplishments of the Russian Revolution.