| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Bertrand M. Patenaude. The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2002. Pp. viii, 817. Cloth $70.00, paper $29.95.
Bertrand M. Patenaude's book is aptly titled. American Relief Administration (ARA) workers in the Soviet Union during the Great Famine of 1921–1923 called Bolsheviks "bolos," and the enormous influx of American money and personnel made it "a big show." But Patenaude's study is not only massively researched and hugely engrossing, it is also crucial for our understanding of a largely forgotten and often misunderstood episode in twentieth-century U.S.-Soviet relations. Not since Benjamin M. Weissman's Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia, 1921–1923 (1974) has a scholar tackled this topic. Considering the richness of the sources and the complexity of the politics, on both the Russian and American sides, this book was long overdue. For far too long, the ARA story has been seen either as a brief and forgotten example of "Herbert Hoover's Brush with Bolshevism" (the title of an earlier paper by Patenaude) or as an interesting but aberrant example of the perils of negotiating with Soviet Russia in the 1920s (see Benjamin Weissman, "Herbert Hoover's 'Treaty' with Soviet Russia," Slavic Review [1970]).	1
Most other historians of either the United States or Russia have relied on Weissman, or the early official history by Harold H. Fisher, The Famine in Soviet Russia, 1919–1923: The Operations of the American Relief Administration (1927), or the contemporaneous memoir of Frank Golder and Lincoln Hutchinson, On the Trail of the Russian Famine (1927). Most have neglected to delve into the voluminous archives of the ARA at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, Hoover's own papers at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, or the innumerable collections of private and government papers in the United States, Britain, and Russia.	. . .

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