Yes, Petr, the Russian famine relief effort (as well as the food relief to Belgium most notably) led by Hoover was the latter's real breakthrough to prominence on the American political scene.
As for the Russian famine; it wasn't manmade as in the Ukrainian/Northern Caucasus/ Kazakhstan Terror famine of 1932-33 orchestrated by Stalin, but it was aggravated by Bolshevik grain confiscations which were still being carried out about that time. Maybe worse, Lenin opposed domestic Russian relief efforts, primarily by the Russian Orthodox Church, but even by prominent Soviet stalwarts like Maxim Gorky who caught hell from Lenin. A disaster of this magnitude made the 4 year old Bolshevik regime look awful and incompetent , to put it mildly , in the eyes of the world. That world was looking with hope and curiosity at the Soviet "experiment" and was seeing the real face of communism, namely massive human suffering. It was a major failure, not only in its occurence in the first place, but also in the necessity of having to rely on Western, bourgeois, capitalist (the horror!) agricultural bounty and generosity to feed the Russian population.
The Lenin regime allowed Western aid and its administrators into Russia, but , in its typical paranoia, saw the Quaker relief workers as potential capitalist spies and saboteurs, or at the least purveyors of the ugly Soviet truth back home in the US. The Aid workers were constantly hassled in their movements and limited as to their contact with the actual famine victims.
The lesson learned, there would be no similar foreign famine relief in the Ukraine in 1932-33, though the West offerred.
And yes, those photos of what were after all cannibals were (are) pretty sickening.
