Death by starvation threatened millions. Despite the fact that the new USSR government declared its hatred for the United States, the Americans wanted to provide humanitarian relief for the ordinary Russian citizens, who were victims of their own government.
Food delivered to the Russians from the United States saved lives. The chief organizer of this rescue effort was Republican Party leader Herbert Hoover. As the Encyclopedia Britannica states,
Hoover was the natural choice to head the American Relief Administration. The ARA sent shiploads of food and other life-sustaining supplies to war-ravaged Europe — including Germany and Bolshevik Russia during the famine in that country in 1921–23.
The communist government of the USSR, in the person of Vladimir Lenin, continued its war on the Russian people - its war on its own people.
Instead of thanking the United States for life-saving aid, Lenin continued his accusation that America was a capitalist society. As an excuse for his hostility toward the U.S., Lenin referenced American aid that had been given during the Russian Civil War.
