172

[introduction.]

One of the decisive factors determining the progress of a war and its outcome is the economy as the 173 foundation of the military might of a state. "Victory or defeat prove to be dependent on material, that is, economic conditions,” wrote Engels  [173•1  This idea was amplified by Lenin, who held that to wage a war in earnest a strong and organised rear was needed. "Even the best of armies,” he said, "even people most sincerely devoted to the revolutionary cause will be immediately exterminated by the enemy, if they are not adequately armed, supplied with food and trained.”  [173•2 

Economic Prerequisites of Victory

p In the years of the struggle against the Nazi invaders, the Soviet people, under the leadership of the Communist Party, succeeded in putting the national economy on a war footing in a brief span of time-and that in spite of the unfavourable start of the hostilities-and in increasing the production of arms and ammunition, in providing the Soviet armed forces with all that was necessary for defeating the enemy.

p The economic foundation for providing the Soviet armed forces with essentials in the event of an attack by a strong and well equipped enemy was laid in the period of socialist transformation in the USSR. One of the goals of the prewar five-year plans, as envisaged by the Soviet Communist Party and Government was to close the economic gap between the USSR and the developed capitalist countries. Having laid the foundations of socialist society, the Soviet people built a powerful and highly developed industry whose volume of output was ten times as great as that of pre-revolutionary Russia. In the years that preceded the war, big industrial centres sprang up in the Urals and Siberia to open the eastern part of the country to comprehensive development. Collectivisation of agriculture and mechanisation of farming ensured 174 the victory of socialism in the countryside, which led to an increase in commodity production. The development of the planned socialist economy, which drew on the rich raw material resources of the country, nabled it to achieve economic independence and build up its defence capacity. The French military historian Aime Constantini, author of the three-volume treatise, L’Union Sovietique en guerre (1941-1945), writes that "by the time the Germans started their aggression, the Soviet Union was in a position to create a developed war economy. It had key industries with tremendous productivity and was in possession of vast resources of raw materials, fuel and electric energy.”  [174•1 

p At the same time the Soviet Union was behind the advanced capitalist countries, including Nazi Germany, in the volume of output in important industries.

Even without the European countries it had occupied, or had made its satellites, Germany produced more coal, steel, aluminium, lead, and magnesium than did the Soviet Union. Germany’s chemical, machine-tool manufacturing, automobile and some other industries produced more than the corresponding industries in the Soviet Union. Germany had more than twice as many machine-tools as the USSR.  [174•2  Its economic potential for aggression against the USSR was augmented considerably when Germany laid its hands on the industrial capacities of the * European countries it had occupied and on those of its allies. This helped Nazi Germany increase its resources of electric energy by 110 per cent, coal by 90 per cent, steel by 100 per cent, aluminium by 70 per cent, grain by 300 per cent.  [174•3  The occupied countries were the source of manpower Germany needed for war production. At the end of September 1944, 7.5 million workers who had 175 been transported from the occupied countries to Germany were employed in its industry and farming.  [175•1 

War of the Armies,
War of the Economies

p The war unleashed by the Nazis put the economic system of the socialist state to the severest of tests. Particularly difficult was the initial period of the Great Patriotic War which was extremely unfavourable for the USSR. Having a huge battle-ready army seasoned in major offensive operations, taking advantage of its superiority in manpower and materiel, and making the best of the factor of surprise, Germany succeeded in temporarily occupying a considerable part of Soviet territory with 40 per cent of the population of the USSR. The national economy was deprived of 63 per cent of its total output of coal, 35 per cent of manganese ore, 68 per cent of pig iron, 56 per cent of steel, 60 per cent of aluminium, 38 peir cent of grain, 38 per cent of cattle, and 60 per cent of pigs.  [175•2  Between July and November 1941, the volume of industrial output in the USSR dropped by more than 50 per cent. The enemy destroyed or shipped out of Soviet territory to Germany 175,000 metal-cutting machine-tools, 62 blast furnaces and 213 open hearth furnaces, 18 million tons of farm produce, 7 million horses, 17 million head of cattle.  [175•3 

p All this shows that in the initial period of the war, when the national economy was being put on a war footing, the Soviet Union lost a considerable part of its economic potential. Not only the leaders of the Nazi Reich but also most of the so-called Russian experts in America and Britain thought that the Soviet economy would not be able to stand up under such losses, and 176 would collapse. These augurs did not take into consideration the most important features of the Soviet economyits socialist character. Back in September 1917, Lenin pointed out that the defence capacity of a country which throws off the capitalist yoke and gives land to the peasants, and puts the banks and factories under the workers’ control, would be many times greater than the defence capacity of a capitalist country.  [176•1  This far-sighted idea was borne out by the trying years of the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War.

p The Soviet people, under the leadership of fhe Communist Party, performed an unparalleled feat of heroism by building, in wartime conditions, a powerful war industry which soon began to produce better arms than, those manufactured by Nazi Germany and its satellites, and in greater quantities.

p The Soviet Communist Party and Government did a great deal of organisational work to move industrial facilities from the western areas of the country to the east where, hundreds of miles away from the battle front, new factories and plants were built. That was the most massive and the most effective evacuation ever undertaken in history. In the second half of 1941, 1,523 industrial enterprises were moved, in whole or in part, from the front-line zone to the east. These included 1,360 large factories and plants. At the same time, large stocks of grain and foodstuffs, a large number of farm machines, 2,393,300 head of cattle were evacuated.  [176•2  Already in the first half of 1942, more than 1,200 major industrial enterprises thus transferred from the west were put back into operation. To all intents and purposes a whole industrial country with a population of more than 10 million was moved thousands of kilometres to the east. And there, in what had hitherto been howling wilderness, the newly-brought machine-tools were put into operation as soon as they had been unloaded from railway platforms.

177

p Western historians more often than not prefer to say nothing about the scale of the evacuation of industrial facilities to the eastern areas of the Soviet Union and the effect this unprecedented phenomenon had on the entire course of the war and its outcome. The silence is only occasionally broken by fairly objective assessments, like the one made by Klaus Reinhardt, the West German historian: "This relocation of the defence industry was something the Germans did not expect. It had a decisive effect on the plans of the German wartime industry which fell far short of its targets, for a considerable part of what it was expected to ’produce was to come directly from the occupied areas.”  [177•1 

p The war demonstrated the superiority of Soviet economic organisation. The socialist system ensured the fullest possible use of the economic potential of the nation for the war effort. The raw material resources, production capacities, the labour of workers and peasants were put to much better and effective use in the Soviet Union than in any capitalist country. Soviet scholar G. S. Kravchenko cites eloquent figures on the effectiveness of the socialist wartime economy. For example, for every million tons of steel smelted during the war in the Soviet Union, it manufactured 50 per cent more aircraft than Britain, 160 per cent more than Germany, and 220 per cent more than the United States; 200 per cent more tanks and self-propelled guns than Germany, 280 per cent more than Britain, 530 per cent more than the United States; 440 per cent more artillery pieces than Britain, 670 per cent more than the United States and over 300 per cent more than Germany.  [177•2 

p The devotion of the Soviet people, who gave unstintingly of their effort to achieve victory, and the purposeful organisational role of the Communist Party ensured appreciable achievements by the war industry. In spite of the tremendous odds and the shortage of material 178 resources and manpower, the Soviet Union rapidly increased the production of arms. At the end of 1942 the Nazi army lost the superiority it had earlier over the Soviet armed forces in the main types of weapons. Soviet plants gave the Soviet army weapons which helped it to crush the war machine of the Nazis, which had been drawing their strength from the industrial might of almost the whole of Europe. At the end of the war the Soviet armed forces had a more than three-fold superiority over the Wehrmacht in tanks and self-propelled guns, and an almost eight-fold superiority in aircraft.  [178•1  Over the years of the war the Soviet Union manufactured 112,100 aircraft, 102,800 tanks and self-propelled guns, 482,200 guns, 70 warships in all main classes.  [178•2 

p Lenin said that "the country cannot be made capable of self-defence without the supreme heroism of the people in boldly and resolutely carrying out great economic transformations.”  [178•3  This idea of the founder of the Soviet state was borne out during the war.

p The victory of the USSR in the military-economic confrontation with Germany was achieved by the superhuman effort of the Soviet people, by the hard and purposeful organisational work of the Communist Party. The watchword of the nation was "Everything for the battle front, everything for victory!”. The front and the rear were fused into one. The selfless labour of Soviet men and women and the gallant struggle of the Soviet troops combined in an unprecedented heroic feat of the Soviet people fighting for their socialist Motherland.

p Thus the Soviet system proved not only the best form of organisation of the economic and cultural advance in the years of peaceful construction, but also the best form of mobilisation of all the forces of the nation for the struggle against the enemy in wartime. No other 179 nation would have been able to withstand such trials as did the Soviet Union.

p The victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany in the military and economic spheres is both significant and impressive. This is admitted by many Western historians who point out the key role of Soviet industry in routing the Third Reich.

p “Magnitogorsk defeated the Ruhr" is the conclusion made even by those authors who are not at all sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In the period of the prewar five-year plans "the Soviet Union did indeed become industrialized, and did become able to defend itself, as World War II showed”,  [179•1  writes Horace Davis, an American historian. Earl Ziemke believes that "the Soviet bureaucracy proved itself capable of mobilizing manpower, industry, and agriculture for the war effort even under the tremendous handicap...”  [179•2 

p The book War. A Historical, Political and Social Study, published in the United States in 1978, points to the positive qualities of the Soviet economic system, such as its planned character, and the existence of the industrial centres in the Urals and Siberia built before the war, and says that "the Russian wartime economic achievement demonstrated tremendous ability to improvise and sacrifice”, that "Russia still managed to set and maintain high productive levels”, and to maintain agricultural production.  [179•3 

p Commenting on the Soviet economic performance during the war the French scholar Rene Girault writes: "The planning system introduced by the Soviet Government since the beginning of the era of five-year plans undoubtedly enabled it to site more evenly new factories in the Urals and in Siberia. It is just as incontestable that the evacuation of the main centres of production to the east was carried out due to the active participation of the masses of workers and peasants drawn into this 180 gigantic migration.”  [180•1  Girault points to the unity and heroic effort of those working on the home front for the sake of victory over the enemy. "The fact that the [Soviet. -Ed.} rear not only held out in 1941-1942 but supplied the battle front with arms,” he writes, "was the result of the enormous physical and moral strain of the entire Soviet people organised by the Communist Party.... The impression was of a ship whose passengers, regardless of class of travel, left their cabins in stormy weather in order to join sailors, in the belief that it would take more than the crew alone to sail her to the shore."  [180•2 

p However, such admissions of the advantages of the Soviet socialist economy occur very rarely in the works of Western historians. More often than not they merely state the fact that the Soviet industry produced a vast amount of materiel, without mentioning the specifics of the Soviet economic organisation or the sources of the heroic labour effort under the socialist system. Instead of making a scientific study of the phenomenon, some of the those historians refer to the economic victory of the USSR as “inexplicable”.

At the same time reactionary historians do not shrink from any means of discrediting the socialist system and the economic foundations of the victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War. They even do not stop short of inventions about the use of forced labour in the Soviet Union in the war years, or about the crucial importance of the lend-lease weapons, equipment and some strategic materials for the ultimate Soviet victory.

The Truth about Lend Lease

p For three decades now reactionary historians and politologists have been arguing that the Soviet Union would 181 not have been able to stand the pressure of the Nazi juggernaut and would have surely lost the war if it had not received the “disinterested” assistance in weapons and strategic materials from its western allies. These contentions fill the books and magazines of the capitalist countries of Western Europe and America, have infiltrated schpol textbooks and are spread in every way by the Western mass media.

p The conveyor belt loaded with inventions about the crucial effect of the U.S. economy on the course and outcome of the Second World War was set in motion back in the days of the war. American historians and propaganda-mongers picked up the words Roosevelt said prior to the entry of the United States into the war about the need to create the Arsenal of Democracy and inflated them into the myth that the United States had assured victory by creating a formidable wartime industry and did all it could to provide the Soviet Union with the means of warfare.

p In the introduction to R. Buchanan’s book The United States and World War II American historians Henry S. Commanger and Richard B. Morris made this high-handed statement: "But in the end it was the sheer weight of American production that turned the tide in the war-the American ability to produce enough bombers, ships, tanks, food and oil, for her own needs, and for the needs of Britain, Russia and even China.”  [181•1  Another American author, Quincy Howe is even more emphatic: "American technology, American resources, and American manpower had put the Anglo-Soviet-American coalition in position to impose unconditional surrender on all its enemies on all fronts."  [181•2 

p The book Great Events of the 20th Century, brought out by the Reader’s Digest Association, claims that "although the U.S.A. entered the war late, most historians agree 182 that her contribution was decisive. Without her fighting men and without her overwhelming production of bombs, ships and planes, the Allies might well have been defeated.”  [182•1 

p This highly exaggerated assessment of the role played by the American economy in the war years is typical not only of historians in the United States. The French historian Rene Remond insists that "the entry of the United States into the war laid its imprint on the nature of the conflict, turning it into an industrial war. The United States reconverted its economy and turned it into a tool that opened for it the way to Berlin."  [182•2 

p Those are “global” assessments of the role of the United States in the Second World War. Some Western authors consistently overrate the role of the American and British lend-lease assistance and go as far as to actually claim that the fate of the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War hinged on the United States which allegedly "saved Russia”.

p The American historian Henry Pachter writes that without American and British assistance "the Soviet Union could not have turned the tide all by itself’.  [182•3  Pachter is echoed by L. Rose who says that the growing might of the Soviet army and the victories over the countries of the fascist bloc in the closing stages of the Great Patriotic War would have been impossible without "generous American lend-lease assistance".  [182•4  American author Robert Jones supports this version with a reference to General Marshall, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, who said in March 1944 that if the United States had cut off 183 its lend-lease assistance the Nazis "could probably defeat" the USSR.  [183•1 

p Professor Edgar Erickson of the University of Illinois writes in the introduction to Jones’s book that "without the American help Russian resistance might have collapsed from want of food alone".  [183•2  In Albert Seaton’s view, "without United States vehicles and railway equipment some of the great Soviet victories in Belorussia and the Ukraine would not have been possible".  [183•3 

The idea of the crucial role of lend-lease in the Second World War is pushed not only in historical publications but also in school textbooks. One of them says, for example, that the Soviet troops could take up an offensive only after they had received "thousands of British tanks and American trucks".  [183•4  Therefore there is nothing surprising about the fact that the falsifiers of history not only ignore the facts and figures which show the real worth of lend-lease, but deliberately keep silent about the objective assessments of this assistance made by responsible U.S. officials at the time.

Three and a Half Per Cent

p At the end of May 1945, when Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s personal representative, was in Moscow for talks, he said: "We had never believed that our LendLease help had been the chief factor in the Soviet defeat of Hitler on the eastern front. That had been done by the heroism and blood of the Russian Army."  [183•5  In his assessment of the Allied assistance to the Soviet 184 Union, the prominent British statesman Ernest Bevin said: "All the aid we have been able to give has been small compared with the tremendous efforts of the Soviet people. Our children’s children will look back, through their history books, with admiration and thanks for the heroism of the great Russian people.”  [184•1  But today the American and British people are given a different interpretation of the events of that time.

p There is nothing accidental about the exaggeration of the part the U.S. wartime economy played in the Second World War, about how crucial the Anglo-American supplies of arms, materials and foodstuffs were to the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany. Ordinary readers are led to believe that capitalist America was strong and powerful and that socialist Russia was weak.

p Soviet official documents and historical studies have never denied the importance of the Allied assistance to the Soviet Union. As pointed out in Soviet sources, the USSR received from the United States 14,700 aircraft, 7,000 tanks, about 400,000 vehicles, a certain amount of communication equipment, foodstuffs and other materials.  [184•2  The same sources point out that on the whole lend-lease amounted to only 4 per cent of Soviet wartime production. An itemised list of the U.S. deliveries shows that the number of aircraft brought in under lend-lease constituted 12 per cent of the total number of aircraft manufactured in the Soviet Union during the war, 10 per cent of armoured vehicles, 2 per cent of guns, 2.8 per cent of grain. In toto, the Soviet Union received about 10 billion dollars worth of wartime assistance, which is equivalent to only about one-third of all the American deliveries under the lend-lease programme to the countries of the antiHitler coalition, or 3.5 per cent of the total military expenditure of the United States.

p The deliveries of materials and equipment to the Soviet 185 Union were erratic. On July 18, 1942, on the second day after the Battle of Stalingrad began, Churchill informed the Soviet government that he had ordered a halt to aid deliveries by sea. In spite of the strong protest from Stalin, who referred to this move by the Allies as inadmissible at a time when Soviet armed resistance was stretched to breaking point, neither the United States nor Britain agreed to reconsider their earlier decision. What they did was to send two convoys-one in September and the other in December 1942. The next year the interval between the two convoys sent to the USSR was even longer: from April to November. As a result, Britain and the United States defaulted on half of their aid commitments.  [185•1 

p At the same time Soviet industry, already in 1942, succeeded in sharply increasing the output of military equipment. Suffice it to say that in 1942 the Soviet war industry manufactured 25,436 aircraft, 24, 466 tanks, more than 158,000 guns and mortars, 15 warships.

p Commenting on the significance of American lend-lease assistance, Soviet Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin wrote: "Deliveries of this size could not have possibly had any marked effect on the course of the war. What is more, the deliveries themselves were not always made on time when we needed certain types of equipment very badly. The tactical and technical characteristics of this equipment also left much to be desired. For it included many obsolescent tanks and aircraft which were inferior to Soviet models and which we could therefore use only for operations of secondary importance.”  [185•2 

p In some of their works on the Second World War Western historians give a true picture of the role and significance of lend-lease.

p The authors of an illustrated history of the Second World War published by the Time and Life Corporation 186 for sale in European countries gave the following assessment of the role of the lend-lease deliveries in the grimmest period of the war for the Soviet Union: "In the winter of 1941-1942, the first deliveries arrived too late to be of any help to the Red Army during its struggle to save the Soviet Union. In those critical days it was the Russians, and they alone, who bore the brunt of the German aggression with whatever means they themselves had, and on their own land, without any great help from the Western democracies.”  [186•1 

p The British historian Alan Clark drew the following conclusions: "It does seem that the Russians could have won the war on their own, or at least fought the Germans to a standstill,’ without any help from the West. Such relief as they derived from our participation ... was marginal, not critical".  [186•2 

p But such assessments literally drown in the murky torrent of lies about the “altruism” and “nobleness” of the American ruling quarters which allegedly hastened to the aid of the Soviet Union.

p It must be emphasised in the first place that the United States administration regarded the Soviet Union as an indispensable ally in the struggle against Nazi Germany, which, having reached a military and political agreement with Japan and Italy, and having seized almost all the countries of Europe, turned into a dangerous enemy threatening the independence of America itself. Nevertheless, there were powerful forces at work inside the USA which spoke against assistance to the Soviet Union. The American historian Robert Divine points out that, biased as they were, these men acted out of purely political motives.  [186•3  However, President Roosevelt and many of his close associates believed, and quite rightly so, that American assistance to the 187 Soviet Union primarily served the interests of the USA itself.

p In June 1941, Harry Hopkins, assistant to the President, ordered that a special memorandum be drafted, called Three Paragraphs on the Russian Situation. It pointed out that:

p 1. Hitler regarded Russia as his main and the most dangerous enemy, and as the main obstacle to his plans for world dominatioa

p 2. Russia, locked as she was in combat with the Reich, was wearing down the aggressor, depriving him of his manpower resources and shattering his hopes for enslaving the world.

p 3. The practical considerations that the United States had to follow in that situation were clear; it was in U.S. interests to send assistance to the Soviet Union (whether the USA liked some of the aspects of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy or not).  [187•1 

The plans of the Nazis for world domination and the plans of Japan for unchallenged dominance in Asia and the Pacific threatened the interests of American monopoly capital. Therefore the main task of the ruling quarters in the United States was to foil these plans. In the conditions of the Second World War this task could be resolved only by military means.

Was Lend-Lease an Act
of Altruism?

p On June 23, 1941, the day after the Nazi Reich attacked the Soviet Union, Under-Secretary of State Summer Welles said that "Hitler’s armies are today the chief danger of the Americans".  [187•2  On August 6, 1941, The New York Times made no bones about the position of the American policy-makers: "...It must be clear that our primary interest is not in ’helping Russia’ but in 188 ‘stopping Hitler’.” M. Arnold-Forster writes: "The Russian winter offensive of 1941, besides gaining ground, restored the Allies’ morale as nothing else could have done. It was a time when good news was scarce. The Japanese, apparently invincible, had destroyed most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and were sweeping through South-East Asia. Only Russians seemed to be prevailing.... In a dark hour the Russians’ confidence spread comfortingly to other Allies.”  [188•1  All these statements and documents clearly show that the United States needed the Soviet Union as an ally in the war against Nazi Germany, and it was these realistic considerations that prompted the Roosevelt Administration to render assistance to the USSR under its lend-lease programme, which, as American leaders believed, could help the United States to achieve its military and strategic goals.

p The French historian Maxime Mourin writes that according to the U.S. military and political philosophy the enemy was to be routed at the time "when the USSR was holding most of the Wehrmacht on its fronts".  [188•2  Moreover, certain quarters in the United States were inclined to taper off direct American participation in the struggle against the fascist-militarist bloc in the main land theatre of the war. In his memoirs Averell Harriman writes that President Roosevelt "hoped that if we [USA] could help the Russians continue to fight, the Red Army would be able to keep the Axis armies engaged, and by using our air and sea power we could avoid committing major ground forces on the continent of Europe".  [188•3 

p Until the summer of 1943, the United States did very little fighting, if any, on the European continent, except for bombing raids. When finally the Allies opened the Second Front in France, following a long period of indecision and procrastination, the American political and military leaders undoubtedly saw that Nazi Germany would 189 not be able to put up strong resistance to the armies of the United States and Britain, because its forces were tied up in Russia. This fact is specifically pointed out in the documents from General Eisenhower’s personal archives made public in 1970. The Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces in Europe believed that the American deliveries to the USSR had strengthened the combat efficiency of the Soviet troops and in this way forced Germany to expend its main forces on the Eastern front.   [189•1 

p The ruling quarters of the United States were in an excellent position to build up its military and industrial potential. The country had vast sources of energy and raw materials, a powerful industry, manpower. Another important factor was that the United States was a long distance away from the theatres of war. The official "Summary of War Production in the United States 1940-1945" reads: "The initiative possessed by the Axis in the first stages of the war was first wrested from them by the Russians during the winter of 1941-1942 and decisively in the fall of 1942- The effect of these events on our war production efforts was to give us more time and to reduce the potential overall magnitude of our military task in the European theatre."  [189•2 

p George Marshall, Chief of Staff of U.S. Army, wrote in an official report on the results of the war: "The element on which the security of this nation most depended was time.... We were given this time through the heroic refusal of the Soviet and British peoples to collapse under the smashing blows of the Axis force. They bought this time for us with the currency of blood and courage.”  [189•3 

p The American historian George Herring also refutes the allegation that the United States Was acting out of purely altruistic motives in extending assistance to its Allies. He writes: "Lend-lease was not ... the most unsordid 190 act in the history of any nation. It was an act of calculated self-interest and Americans were ever conscious of the advantages that might be secured from it.”  [190•1 

p In his memoirs U.S. ex-President Harry Truman unwittingly exploded the myth about the “unselfish” American assistance to the Allies during the war. "The money spent for Lend-Lease unquestionably meant the saving of a great many American lives. Every soldier of Russia, England, and Australia who had been equipped by Lend-Lease means to go into that war reduced by that much the dangers that faced our young men in the winning of it."  [190•2  Significantly, in the years of the war the United States received from the Soviet Union, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, 300,000 tons of chromium ore and 32,000 tons of manganese ore, a considerable amount of platinum, fur, and other materials and finished products.

p In his two-volume La seconde guerre mondiale brought out in a large edition by Larousse, the French historian Raymond Cartier writes: "An important element that helped change the balance on the Eastern front was American aid. There is no use looking for the slightest reference to that in Soviet publications. However, the stream of goods, the river of plenty that inundated Russia beginning from 1941 defies the imagination.”  [190•3 

p An American history textbook published in 1978 says that American help during the war was later "carefully disguised on Stalin’s orders".  [190•4  The idea is very simple: to have schoolchildren grow up with the belief that the Russians are an "ungrateful lot”.

p Soviet history books have never ignored or underestimated the importance of American and British wartime assistance to the Soviet Union. At the same time they 191 seek to give a correct, fair and balanced assessment of this aid. In his memoirs Marshal Zhukov calls attention to the way the lend-lease issue was interpreted in different countries. "It is true that in the war years the Soviet Union received important deliveries for its national economy, such as machines and equipment, materials of various kinds, fuel and foodstuffs. For example the United States and Britain shipped to us more than 400,000 vehicles, a large number of steam locomotives, and communication equipment. But how could all that have had the decisive effect on the progress of the war?”  [191•1  Marshal Zhukov cites some figures on the delivery of weapons under the lend-lease commitments.

p There is still another episode in lend-lease lore. In the summer of 1945, President Truman ordered a halt to all further deliveries to the Soviet Union. This unilateral action on the part of the United States had nothing in common with the end of the war in Europe, but was clearly the result of the "new approach" of the American administration to the question of economic assistance to the Soviet Union, which was badly in need of credits and industrial plant from the United States for the restoration of the war-ravaged national economy. The destruction wrought by the Nazis in the Soviet Union was appalling: 1,710 towns and more than 70,000 villages destroyed, more than six million buildings ruined or burnt, about 25 million people left homeless, 31,850 industrial enterprises, 65,000 kilometres of railways and 4,100 railway stations wrecked, 98,000 collective farms, 1,876 state farms and 2,890 machine-and-tractor stations ruined and looted. The direct damage the Soviet Union sustained in the temporarily occupied areas was estimated at 679 billion roubles. The overall damage, including the military expenditures and the lost revenues for the national economy in the occupied areas reached the staggering total of 2 trillion 569 billion roubles.  [191•2 

192

p As for the United States it not only did not lose, but even gained in the war. It would seem that the United States was best equipped to help the Soviet Union as its ally to restore the national economy, all the more so since the Soviet Union was not asking for charity or gratuitous assistance, but for long-term government credits on the basis of agreements, also for the placing of Soviet orders for industrial equipment in the United States. However, the U.S. administration decided to take advantage of what it thought was the “weakness” of the Soviet Union and to force it abandon its independent policies in the international arena. In September 1945, Moscow was visited by an American delegation headed by William Colmer, Chairman of the Special Committee for Post-war Economic Policy and Planning. John Lewis Gaddis writes: ,,Colmer and his colleagues demanded that, in return for an American loan, the Soviet Union reform its internal system of government and abandon the sphere of influence it had so carefully constructed in Eastern Europe.”  [192•1 

p The American historian Lisle A. Rose, an e^qaert in postwar international relations, writes that "in the spring of 1945 a number of American officials, most notably Averell Harriman and Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs William L. Clayton, did strongly urge the withholding of postwar credits from the Soviet Union until the Kremlin improved its conduct".  [192•2  However, the Soviet Union was not to be dictated to or blackmailed.

p Thus there was no question of American “altruism” on the matter of lend-lease, just as there is no question of the American lend-lease deliveries being a “decisive” factor at any time in the Great Patriotic War and least of all in the Soviet victory that ended the war.

In late 1941, the worst days of the war, the Soviet army committed 670 tanks in the Battle of Moscow. But 193 in the Battle of Berlin in 1945 the Soviet army had more than 6,000 tanks and self-propelled guns, 41,600 guns and 7,500 aircraft. All these weapons were of Soviet make. The implacable logic of history puts everything in its place.