The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921

by Bertrand M. Patenaude

Release Date: November, 2002

Edition: Paperback

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co-winner of the 2003 Shulman Book Prize

The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, by Bertrand M. Patenaude, published by Stanford University Press was a co-winner of the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize, awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

The Shulman prize is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph dealing with the international relations, foreign policy, or foreign-policy decision-making of any of the states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.

The other winner of the prize was: Ted Hopf's Social Construction of International Politics: Identities & Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 & 1999, published by Cornell University Press.

The prize committee wrote: In The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, Bertrand Patenaude provides a compelling analysis of American efforts to mitigate the impact of the devastating famine that killed millions of Soviet citizens in the early 1920s. Along with vivid portraits of many of the relief workers and graphic descriptions of their activities to combat famine, Patenaude also explores the encounter between rescue workers and communist officials intent on exercising control over the Americans' operations. Yet The Big Show in Bololand is more than a detailed narrative of the famine relief effort. It offers invaluable insights into the first sustained cultural and political encounter between the United States and the fledgling Soviet Union and explores the underpinnings of the rivalry between the capitalist and communist systems. The book is an outstanding example of lively and engaging prose, impressive historical research, and persuasive analysis of the diplomatic underpinnings and consequences of the rescue mission.

Thorough, scholarly but overlong

The Soviet Union suffered two horrendous famines in the early 20th century but the US was only allowed to help with the first one. The 1921-1923 famine, coming hard on the heels of the Russian Civil War and World War I took unknown millions of lives. It would have been far, far worse had not the US, through Herbert Hoover and his American Relief Administration (ARA)provided thousands of tons of food. The focus here is on the ARA from an institutional approach. The first quarter of the text reviews the events chronologically. The rest of the book offers chapters approaching the catastrophe from various aspects, e.g., staff, transportation problems. Patenaude shows real care in writing and is clearly a better writer than 90% of historians, but the book is too long. The text runs over 740 pages (including photographic sections) and must have been meant to be the definitive. One can really doubt if another book on the ARA will ever be published. Unfortunately, the length, small type size, and the book's larger than normal physical size may reduce its audience to grad students and russian specialists. That's too bad; the topic is interesting and Patenaude is such a skilled wordsmith that he could draw more readers to russian history. He should consider doing books on Lenin's NEP, the Ukrainian famine of the 1930's and the Comintern.