Throughout the whole disaster the Soviet leadership—just as it would a decade later—never relinquished its desire for hard currency. Even as the famine raged, the Bolsheviks secretly sold gold, artworks and jewellery abroad in order to buy guns, ammunition and industrial machinery. By the autumn of 1922 they began openly selling food on foreign markets too, even while hunger remained widespread and foreign aid was still coming in.34 This was no secret: Hoover fulminated against the cynicism of a government that knew people were starving, and yet exported food in order to “secure machinery and
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