This period was also one of regular food shortages, caused by famine and the lack of long-distance transportation of food during the fighting. Coupled with the typhus epidemic and famine of the early 1920s,The Volga Germans and the Famine of 1921 as many as a third of Russia's Germans may have perished. Russian German organisations in the Americas, particularly the Mennonite Central Committee, organised famine relief in Russia in the late 1920s. As the chaos faded and the Soviet Union's position became more secure, many Russian Germans simply took advantage of the end of the fighting to emigrate to the Americas. Emigration from the Soviet Union came to a halt in 1929 by Stalin's decree, leaving roughly one million Russian Germans within Soviet borders.
