American Relief Administration

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American Relief Administration was an American relief mission to Europe and later Soviet Russia after World War I. Herbert Hoover, future president of the United States, was the program director.

The ARA's immediate predecessor was Committee for Relief in Belgium, also headed by Hoover, which fed seven million Belgians and two million northern French during World War I. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the ARA delivered more than four million tons of relief supplies to twenty-three war-torn European countries.

Once mass famine (that would eventually take an estimated 5.1 million lives) broke out in Soviet Russia in mid-1921, the ARA's director in Europe, Walter Lyman Brown, began negotiating with Soviet deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov, in Riga, Latvia. An agreement was reached on August 21, 1921 and an additional implementation agreement was signed by Brown and People's Commisar for Foreign Trade Leonid Krasin on December 30, 1921. ^[1]

At its peak, the ARA employed 300 Americans, more than 120,000 Russians and fed 10.5 million people daily. Its Russian operations were headed by Col. William N. Haskell. The Medical Division of the ARA functioned from November 1921 to June 1923 and helped overcome the typhus epidemic then ravaging Russia. The ARA's famine relief operations ran in parallel with a much smaller Mennonite famine relief operation in Russia. ^[2]

The ARA's operations in Russia were shut down on June 15, 1923, once the famine was over.