Workers International Relief

[1] Lenin's call for international support was motivated by a desire to counteract the influence of Herbert Hoover's American Relief Association (ARA) in providing food aid to the people of the Volga as well as in the rest of Eastern Europe, as Soviet troops were in the process of confiscating food supplies in the Volga region.

[1] Lenin regarded the ARA as "mercenaries" who were seeking to defeat Bolshevism by alleviating hunger in Soviet Russia, thus embarrassing the Bolshevist government as ineffective and incompetent.

[1] This attitude was echoed by left-leaning commentators and editors in the United States, with the Nation speculating that Hoover might "use his food to overturn the Soviet government.

"Its initial function was to provide a Left-wing counterweight to the generous relief supplies sent to Soviet Russia by the ARA and other bourgeois agencies to mitigate the horrors of the famine.

[1] The FSR and similar relief organizations set up by Münzenberg were conceived as a method of raising money from a broad coalition of left-wing groups for famine relief in Soviet Russia while simultaneously concealing the Soviet government's role in organizing such groups (a fact which might have otherwise impeded fundraising efforts).

In subsequent years WIR supported workers in Germany and other countries suffering from the effects of strikes, armed conflict, and natural catastrophes by distribution of clothes, food, and funds by adding an industrial assistance program.