In 1921, Vladimir Lenin's new Soviet government was facing one of the worst famines in history, and it invited Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration to save communist Russia from ruin. For two years, a small band of Americans fed more than ten million people across a million square miles of territory. It was the largest humanitarian operation in history, preventing the loss of countless lives, social unrest on a massive scale, and perhaps the collapse of the communist state. Returning to a watershed moment in U.S.-Soviet relations, the author of Rasputin recounts the little known history of the A.R.A.