Initially Lenin rejected aid of any kind and furiously declared, ‘one must punish Hoover, one must publicly slap his face so the whole world sees’. But he was talked round by comrades in the Kremlin, principally Litvinov, Foreign Commissar Chicherin and Zinoviev, who argued that continuing to refuse help would look bad internationally. Lenin showed no gratitude and ordered the Cheka to spy on the ARA teams. He wrote to Vyacheslav Molotov, then a high-ranking official in the Sovnarkom secretariat: ‘We can expect the arrival of a lot of Americans. We must take care of surveillance and intelligence…the main thing is to identify and mobilise the maximum number of Communists who know English to introduce them into the Hoover Commission and for other forms of surveillance.’ Hoover’s aid workers fed twenty-five million people in the Volga region alone and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the ARA closed down its Russian efforts – prematurely. When it was revealed that the Soviets were taking foreign aid but at the same time selling its cereals for hard currency, it caused a scandal that forced the ARA teams to leave Russia, amid bitterness.

Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The man, the dictator, and the master of terror, New York, 2017, p. 481