Workers International Relief

The Workers International Relief (WIR) — also known as Internationale Arbeiter-Hilfe (IAH) in German and as Международная рабочая помощь (Mezhdunarodny Rabochy Komitet Pomoshchi Golodayushchim Rossii − Mezhrabpom) in Russian — was an adjunct of the Communist International initially formed to channel relief from international working class organizations and communist parties to famine-stricken Soviet Russia. The organization, based in Berlin, later produced films and coordinated propaganda efforts on behalf of the USSR.

The Internationale Arbeiter-Hilfe (IAH), also known as International Workers' Aid or Workers International Relief (WIR) was created in Berlin on September 12, 1921, in response to a call by Lenin, in order to recruit international support in response to a drought and famine in the Volga area, particularly those lands occupied by the Volga Germans. The drought and reduced crop production in the area was turned into a humanitarian disaster when Bolshevik forces known as "The Iron Broom" began a campaign of massive "tax collections" (food requisitions) to seize food supplies and redistribute them to other parts of Soviet Russia. 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. 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. 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."

In the view of Marxist historian E.H. Carr, the original purpose of the WIR was both humanitarian and ideological:

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