Friends and Comrades: How Quakers Helped Russians to Survive Famine and Epidemic by Sergei Nikitin (translated by Suzanne Eade Roberts) York, UK, Radius Publishing, 2022 385 pp., $16.40 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-912728-57-2 

JOHAN MAURER

In 1947 the Nobel Committee of Norway’s parliament awarded that year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the Quakers, also known as Friends, “represented by their two great relief organizations, the Friends Service Council in London and the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia.” In his presentation speech at the award ceremony, Nobel Committee chair Gunnar Jahn cited the Quakers’ role in peace and relief work in many countries, including Russia. As Jahn recalled: “It is through silent assistance from the nameless to the nameless”—my emphasis—“that they have worked to promote the fraternity between nations cited in the will of Alfred Nobel.” 

At the peak of the famine relief work in the 1920s, over 400,000 Russians were depending upon Quaker food rations to stay alive. Between 20 and 30 thousand were treated in Quaker malaria clinics every month. Many people will indeed remain “nameless” in the history of this campaign. We will never know the identities of most whose lives were saved from starvation and disease through Quaker efforts, or of those who offered prayer and funds to support this work. Thanks to Sergei Nikitin’s book, Friends and Comrades, however, the full scale of the effort and the names of many of its central figures are made known and brought to life. 

Nikitin’s book is organized into five broad areas, four of which correspond to the chronology of British and U.S. Quaker relief and reconstruction work in Russia:

• Assistance to First World War refugees in 1916-18 
• Assistance to children suffering in 1920-21 as a result of the post-revolutionary Russian Civil War
• The massive famine relief, medical aid, and agricultural rehabilitation efforts of 1921-27 centered upon the settlements of Buzuluk and Sorochinskoe (southeast of Samara), and the continued official Quaker presence in the USSR until 1931
• Individual Friends’ continuing involvements in the Soviet Union after 1931
•  Reflections on the complex relationships between Friends and the Soviet authorities throughout this history

Missions of this magnitude generate an enormous amount of archival material— logistical records and ledgers; official and unofficial correspondence among every conceivable subset of actors; public relations and fundraising materials; news accounts; photos, films, and graphics of all kinds; and memoirs. It is a huge challenge to make a judicious selection that can bring these voices into our own time with an appropriate mix of accurate reportage and fair analysis, all in a  package of manageable length. It is my judgment that Sergei Nikitin has succeeded in this task. 

Previous treatments of this story include an article by John Forbes in the Bulletin of Friends Historical Association, “American Friends and Russian Relief 1917-1927,” published in two parts (vol. 41, no. 1, Spring 1952, and vol. 41, no. 2, Autumn 1952). While Richenda C. Scott’s excellent book Quakers in Russia (London, UK: Michael Joseph, 1964) ranges from the first Quaker contacts with Tsar Peter the Great all the way to her own time, more than half is devoted to this same famine and refugee relief work. More recently, David McFadden and Claire Gorfinkel told this story following a more thematic approach, in their book Constructive Spirit: Quakers in Revolutionary Russia (Pasadena, CA: Intentional Productions, 2004), to which Sergei Nikitin contributed an introductory chapter in the form of a personal overview. 

As Nikitin explains in his new book, he had been gathering relevant archival materials and personal interviews ever since he first heard about the story of Quakers in wartime Russia and the early Soviet Union. During his 15 years as head of Amnesty International’s office in Moscow, he had no free time to put this material together in book form, but his retirement from that service afforded him the time needed to collect additional material and write Friends and Comrades. 

Nikitin has taken full advantage of the archives already available to previous authors, although he often makes different selections from this material. All have described a crucial debate among the Quakers: Was their work of famine relief and medical aid in itself the main Quaker message to Russians, or was it a means by which Friends could spread their spiritual beliefs in Russia, and also build relationships with Tolstoyans and likeminded Russians? Along with previous historians, Nikitin quotes a memorandum to the Bolshevik authorities that was proposed—but not sent— in 1920 by those supporting the latter priority:

“We are upon an active campaign to overcome the barriers of race and class and thus to make of all humanity a ‘Society of Friends’.” The letter’s authors were frank about the historical examples of Quakers’ dissidence due to their basic principles: “This has led us to follow a course, on some occasions, different from that of fellow citizens; even to act contrary to the law of our country when our legislators bid us violate our principles, particularly when called upon to take human life in warfare.” In closing, the Quakers asked the Bolsheviks openly: “Hence we seek to know your attitude towards us and our concern to unite in fellowship with Russian people. With that in view, we desire to ask if you will allow representatives of the Society of Friends to come to Russia for the purpose of establishing independent work for the administration of physical relief and to give expression to our international and spiritual ideals and principles of life.”

Arthur Watts, a British Quaker based in Moscow, was viscerally opposed to this approach, believing that any stated purpose other than strictly disinterested relief work would threaten their hitherto relatively unfettered access to Russia. Nikitin takes up the story:

He [Watts] called the draft “A mild lecture and an explanation of our ‘chief concerns’.” Reasonably enough, he criticised the part of the text where the Quakers talked about social class: “It will be difficult for me to convince the recipients of the activeness of your ‘campaign to overcome the barriers … of class’.” On this point, Watts was right to reproach the authors of the letter of hypocrisy, reminding them that British Quakers still withheld control in industry from their workers, and that their British employees did not have control of anything. He wrote: “I have a strong objection to pretending to be better than we are.” 

Arthur Watts also condemned the London committee’s apparent caution and concern that Quaker help would be interpreted as an expression of sympathy for Bolshevik methods. He wrote that he could not believe that Quakers might abstain from helping Russian children out of fear of being misunderstood. He added: “This is really most unworthy of you. Did you demand a statement from the Tsarist Government that our help was not to be taken as indicating approval of their aims and methods?” He drew parallels with the parables in the Bible, asking, “I wonder if Christ thought of issuing a Statement of Aims before raising the Centurion’s daughter,” and made the sarcastic comment that if the Good Samaritan had drawn up a careful minute, “we might have admired his ‘Quaker Caution’ but it would have spoilt the point of the parable.”

Here, Nikitin is the only historian to include Watts’ commentary on class hypocrisy. 

Another new element that Nikitin brings to his book is his research in Russian government archives. Previous histories looked at these events primarily through the eyes of the British and American participants. For example, Nikitin touches upon the debates between the American Friends Service Committee leadership and the future Quaker president of the USA, Herbert Hoover, who headed the American Relief Administration and its program of famine relief. McFadden and Gorfinkel’s Constructive Spirit goes into these conflicts in fascinating detail, illustrated by numerous extracts from letters and memoirs. While Nikitin treats this aspect of the history more briefly, he describes the awkward consequences of this conflict for relations between the British and American relief teams. 

Thanks to Nikitin’s Russian sources, we learn far more about the Bolshevik authorities’ own secret reports from the hardest-hit famine districts, their scrutiny of the Quaker teams, their generally favorable assessments of those teams, their worries about Quaker influences on the population, and the role of the secret police in infiltrating and monitoring the Quakers’ work. Nikitin also describes the sad fates during Stalin’s Great Terror of some of those Russians who collaborated in that work—and, ironically enough, the fates of some who spied on the Quakers and were shot regardless. Equally powerful in their own way are the numerous statistical reports provided by the Russian sources. According to archives held in Buzuluk, “in June 1922, American and British Quakers fed 85 percent of the population in need in Buzuluk district!”

Nikitin’s own voice and viewpoint are the other distinctive elements of his book. He observes and comments as a Russian. He learned about this whole history with something of the same astonishment that I heard myself from people in Buzuluk as they remembered their greatgrandparents’ recollections, saying in effect: “How could it be that these British and American people cared enough about us to make the hazardous journey, face all the risks of civil war and famine, and even die for us?” (Typhus killed two of the women on the Quaker teams, Mary Pattison and Violet Tillard.) Nikitin reports on some of the dozens of interviews he conducted among people with first-hand experiences of the famine years, and among their descendants.

Nikitin covers not only such heroism, but also the mistakes, disorganization, and discouragements that inevitably accompany disaster relief in unfamiliar surroundings, where nobody arrives with adequate preparation, and everyone involved is learning as they go. Furthermore, Quaker idealism—in some cases, taking the form of sympathy for the Bolshevik cause—could have made them “useful idiots” for the new regime. Some Quakers naïvely assumed that their Russian counterparts would be as honest as themselves. Nikitin gives several examples of the Quakers’ capacity to believe what they wish to believe despite evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, his overall assessment remains generous:

Looking back today at the history of interaction between Quakers and the Russian authorities, the Society of Friends clearly did extraordinary work. Through incredible effort, hundreds of thousands of people were saved from death. Goodness, honesty, openness, and a willingness to help—these characteristics of the British and American Quakers left a warm glow in the heart of each Russian who interacted with them.

Among the book’s useful supplementary material is a detailed chronology and a roster of every team member involved in the missions of 1916-19 and 1920-31. The author additionally includes many archival photographs, as well as bibliographies of his English-language and Russian-language sources.

Johan Maurer has served as general secretary of Friends United Meeting and editor of Quaker Life. He taught classes in English, American Studies, and Mass Media at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal, Russia, during 2007-17. In 2008 and 2011 he visited Buzuluk, Sorochinsk [formerly Sorochinskoe], Totskoe and other famine-related sites.