 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.