As the 70th anniversary of Stalin's death is commemorated (celebrated?), it is far from inappropriate to tackle a growing narrative, the fact that in the past few years, we hear more and more the simplistic phrase that Russia was the true victor of the Second World War.

And more than that: In Europe, this has become especially egregious, not least in France, where it has become routine to hear that "Russia defeated Hitler" and even — with anti-Americanism never lurking far from the surface — that "the Soviets bled and died for us" and "the Red Army (were the ones who truly) liberated Europe" from Nazism. (Notice how they never — should I replace that with "they no longer"? — say that "Stalin liberated Europe" — probably because that sounds too ridiculous.)

So it's far from inappropriate not only to recollect not only how the Soviets "won", or helped to win World War II, but how they behaved after the Germans surrendered, i.e., during "peacetime."

In Quelques remarques sur la russolâtrie (A Few Remarks on Russia-Lovers), Evelyne Joslain takes on "the chorus of new useful idiots"

Because the French are in despair due to the malfeasance of our political class and the lack of a credible saving successor, some are taking the easy way out, that is to say, aiming for utopia. Thus, we happily swallow the myths built by Putin in the tradition of his late USSR and with all the humor of his late KGB.

All these myths are perfect inversions of factual reality, starting with this example of historical revisionism: « It was the Russians who defeated Hitler and who died en masse for us French people. »  

  … Communism, Nazism, and now Islamism and Eurasianism… Evils and perils always come from the East!

Max Hastings:

Although the leaders of the western states quickly understood the threat posed by the new Soviet Empire to freedom and democracy, many of their citizens did not. Between 1941 and 1945 so much praise had been heaped upon Uncle Joe, the defenders of Stalingrad, heroic factory workers of the Volga and suchlike, that thereafter it proved a hard task to disabuse many people of their illusions about Mother Russia.

… the supply of useful idiots — western apologists for the Soviet Union — seemed limitless

We have already seen how, contrary to common belief, The Imperial Japanese Army was every bit as evil as the Nazi SS, and more lethal. Let us see about the Soviets…

After a brief introduction underneath the photo below, the following post is divided into the following seven chapters:

1) How Did World War II Start Anyway, and by Whom Was It Started?

2) Paranoia? The Red Scare? Witch Hunts?

3) The Red Army's Huge Losses

4) Was Soviet Victory Possible Without Yankee Can-Do?

5) The Red Army Under World War II and
the Treatment of Veterans in the Aftermath

6) 3 Mind-Boggling Revelations About a Century of Russian History

7) Conclusion

"You celebrated the liberation in 1945" said one Estonian to a West European. "But for us, the liberation was the beginning of an occupation of 45 years."

Indeed, Tallinn's museum on the 20th century is called the Museum of OccupationS and Freedom (in the plural). Likewise, the Museum of the Occupation in Riga (see its History of KGB Operations in Latvia exhibit) speaks not of the occupation in the singular, but of three occupations, from 1940 to 1991: first that of Russia (the Soviet Union), then Germany's (the Third Reich's), and then again Russia's (the USSR's).

First, the occupation by the Vozhd, then by der Führer, then by the Vozhd again. 

"We survived the Germans" said a Polish woman after leaving Auschwitz; "But we won't be escaping the Russians" (The Nazis and the Final Solution, RMC Découverte). Antony Beevor:

The Poles had no illusions in either direction, trapped as they were [in Warsaw in 1944] between the two pitiless totalitarian systems which fed off each other.  [One] Home Army poet wrote:

'We await you red plague / to deliver us from the black death.'

In 2019, National Review published a journalist’s recollection of the Fall of the Berlin Wall 30 years earlier. A couple of years after the wall came down, John Fund

visited [Peter Janz, who was the energetic first secretary of the East German Embassy in Washington during the 1980s, and] asked him when he first realized that he was working for a regime that didn’t serve its people and was built on untruths.

He explained that as the son of Communist Party insiders, he had gone to high school in Moscow and been trained for a career as a top government official. But a school vacation trip he and four fellow East German classmates earned to the Baltic States changed his perspective.

He explained that he and his friends had been taught that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had all been liberated by Stalin from Nazi rule during World War II. They were now proud, loyal republics of the Soviet Union. But when he and his friends spoke Russian on the streets, they were met with hostile glares and suspicion by the local population. When they switched to German, they were approached by curious passersby and greeted warmly. “I suddenly realized my world was upside down. Nazis had indeed brutalized the Baltic States, but the Soviets had been at least as bad and stayed far longer”

Indeed, a few years back, a Lithuanian testified that his father had said if he had the choice, he would rather live under 10 years of Nazi occupation than under one single year of communist occupation.

Today, when people extol the Soviet soldiers dying for our freedom, I invariably reply by saying that I would love to take a vacation with them. Oh? What? Why? Yes, we could travel together through the countries of Eastern Europe, and every time you feel like saying the Red Army liberated the continent, I will put my hand over your mouth so you don't end up in an insane asylum.

1) HOW DID WORLD WAR II START ANYWAY, AND WHOM BY?

This brings up a critical issue of foremost importance: that the German invasion, the Wehrmacht's juggernaut, and the Nazi occupation of countries throughout Europe, whether the Balts or the Scandinavians or Holland or France, could only have occurred and only did in fact come about because of one thing and one thing only: the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Which also unleashed Stalin's Red Army, and at roughly the same time.

At The Daily Chrenk, Arthur Chrenkoff describes the particulars of

the signing in Moscow of the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov non-aggression pact between … Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and the accompanying secret protocols on cooperation in dividing between them “the bloodlands” in the middle.  Not surprisingly, the state legatee of one of the original signatories is getting quite defensive about it: 

 … The [Kremlin's] message is loud and clear: don’t single out Russia (or the Soviet Union) because you all cosied up to Hitler just as bad.

There are, however, a few reasons why the Ribbentrop-Molotov (or the Molotov-Ribbentrop, as Russians seem to prefer it) pact stands out:

1. While the shameful Western appeasement of Hitler, culminating in the infamy of Munich, allowed the Reich to bloodlessly dismember the sovereign and democratic Czechoslovakia, neither Great Britain nor France participated in or benefited from Germany’s cannibalism of this “faraway country of which we know little”. The difference is that while the West remains ashamed of Munich (a name which quickly become synonymous with a craven sell-out), a few years back, Russia’s culture minister Vladimir Medinsky called the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact “a great achievement of Soviet diplomacy”.

2. Unlike all the other agreements signed with Germany during the 1930s, it was the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact that green-lit the armed German aggression and led to the outbreak of the deadliest war in human history. It’s difficult to blame Germany’s neighbours or countries threatened by the Soviet Union (like Poland, Romania and the Baltic states) for trying to stay on Germany’s good side. It was naive and in any case it didn’t work in the end, as they all later found out to their detriment and downfall. [The] Soviet Union, on the other hand, not only climbed into bed with Nazi Germany but it fully and enthusiastically consummated this marriage of convenience.

3. Unlike other agreements cited above, thanks to the “secret protocols” attached to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the Soviet Union was both a co-aggressor in and a co-beneficiary of the start of World War Two. Stalin has relatively bloodlessly acquired the by-then (mid-September) almost defenseless eastern Poland (subsequently incorporated into Belarussian and Ukrainian Soviet Republics; these historically Polish areas remain today parts of Belarus and Ukraine), Bessarabia from Romania (incorporated into the Moldovan Soviet Republic), the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, as well as being given a free hand in the invasion of Finland, a country which otherwise might have counted on German friendship and support. All these aggressive territorial gains were the consequence of the Ribbentrop-Molotov division of Eastern Europe between the Reich and the Soviet Union into the respective spheres of interest, soon confirmed as the “facts on the ground” by Wehrmacht and Red Army.

4. While Britain and France, their empires and their allies, fought Germany for almost two years after September 1939, first through the period of the “phony war”, then through the Blitzkrieg in the West and the Battle of Britain, the Soviet Union remained a de facto Nazi ally, continuing to cooperate in security matters and supplying Germany with food and raw materials. Grain trains were still rolling west across the border with the Reich as Wehrmacht was launching Operation Barbarossa in the morning of 22 June 1941. During the period of Nazi-Soviet cooperation, Germany conquered Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia and Greece.  Soviet exports helped to feed and build up the German war machine before it was unleashed against the West in 1940; German troops surging into the Low Countries walked on their stomachs (to borrow from Napoleon) full of bread baked from Russian wheat or were carried on the tanks and trucks made with Russian coal and ores. Never forget that for Russia, World War Two – or the Great Patriotic War as it is called there – begins only in June 1941, not September 1939, as it does it all Western history books. [See Jeff Jacoby's argument below for arguing that WWII did not actually start in September (September 1, but in August (on August 23).]

5. It’s true that the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was partly defensive in nature as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, aiming to postpone the inevitable armed clash between the two rival totalitarianisms and in the meantime give Russia some essential breathing space to build up its army and strategic reserves (the top leadership of the Soviet armed forces was decapitated by Stalin during the purges in 1937-8, leaving them even more unprepared to face Germany than would have otherwise been the case). But as I pointed out above, it was also offensive and directly benefited Stalin’s territorial ambitions while it lasted. In some ways, the legacy of the pact lives on in the shape of Poland’s post-war borders, which have nothing to do with its thousand-year history. This is the real #TruthAboutWWII and this is why the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact remains singled out in the infamy of the interwar European democracy.

As mentioned, Jeff Jacoby is just as, if not even more, explicit: World War II may not actually have started on September 1, 1939, as is traditionally written, but nine days earlier. And the rapprochement of Nazis and communists is not surprising when it is remembered, as Jeff Jacoby writes, that

for the first two years of World War II, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were allies. They secretly planned and jointly began the war that inflicted such horror and destruction. Later, of course, Hitler double-crossed Stalin and ordered the Wehrmacht to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. But before that turning point, the two totalitarian powers cooperated closely. 

…  From 1939 through mid-1941, Soviet Russia collaborated with the Nazis in wreaking slaughter and savagery on the nations of Europe.

 … There is no denying that a vast number of Soviet citizens lost their lives in World War II. Without the Russian people’s appalling suffering and sacrifice, the Allies might not have triumphed in the end.

But there is also no denying that Moscow was Nazi Germany’s partner in unleashing the war, the deadliest in human history, in the first place. Victory Day is a good opportunity to review the record of Russian culpability in plunging the world into war — a record the Kremlin’s propagandists have been trying to obscure for decades.

World War II is commonly said to have started on Sept. 1, 1939, when German forces invaded Poland. But it would perhaps be more accurate to date the start of the war nine days earlier. On Aug. 23, 1939, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a treaty of non-aggression, whereby their governments agreed to conquer and divide Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. It was under the terms of this pact that the Nazi Wehrmacht moved into western Poland on Sept. 1 and Josef Stalin’s Red Army invaded Poland from the east 16 days later. 

 … In the months that followed the Nazi-Soviet takeover of Poland, as Hitler’s troops conquered Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and France and bombed much of London into rubble, Stalin’s forces continued their illegal war of aggression and conquest [the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the formerly Romanian territories of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, and Finland]

As it happens, "history has long held that Stalin spent the two intervening years building up his defenses against a Nazi attack." It seems much more logical that "Soviet warplanning reflected its expansionist orientation" and that Koba was simply preparing his own attacks on the USSR's own neighbors. Indeed, in his book about Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939-1941, Albert L Weeks goes even further:  

With the gradual declassifying of former Soviet documents, though, historians are learning more and more about Stalin's grand plan during the years 1939-1941. Longtime Soviet expert Albert L. Weeks has studied the newly-released information and come to a different conclusion about the Soviet Union's pre-war buildup_it was not precaution against German invasion at all. In fact, Weeks argues, the evidence now suggests Soviet mobilization was aimed at an eventual invasion of Nazi Germany. The Soviets were quietly biding their time between 1939 and 1941, allowing the capitalist powers to destroy one another, all the while preparing for their own Westward march. Stalin, Weeks shows, wasn't waiting for a Nazi attack—Hitler simply beat him to the punch.

2) PARANOIA? THE RED SCARE? WITCH HUNTS?

Shouldn't "McCarthyism" be a term which should be abolished? (Just like all the other words made up by leftists — racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, etc, etc, etc, should be declared non grata, certainly by conservatives.) No matter what sins and private demons the Wisconsin senator might have (or might not have) been obsessed about, let us ask a question: who was the head of the Soviet Union when the Grand Chute native entered the Senate and during most of his career?

Joseph Stalin. 

Wasn't Tail-Gunner Joe right to be wary of the Red Tyrant?

Was it, is it, truly a good description of someone who is wary about communists, local or foreign, as being "paranoid"?

Was it a scare, a "Red Scare," to be wary of people, domestically and internationally (people outright on Moscow's payroll — whether overtly communist or not — or useful idiots), who praised the great Guide (the Vozhd) of the Peoples, indeed participated in a cult of Stalin?

When accused of being a traitor whose testimony before Congress encouraged HUAC's "witch hunt", Elia Kazan made the movie On the Waterfront and said later, Witches do not exist, but Stalin's spies certainly did. David Horowitz:

there is no secret anymore that virtually all the victims of the blacklist were also defenders of a monster regime that was America's sworn enemy

It's amazing how people still smirk about American "paranoia" and "Red Scares" and "witch hunts", although the USSR's crimes have been known for a long time.

As Monty Python or the Protest Warriors would say, tongue firmly in cheek, 

Communism Has Only Killed 100 Million People…
Let's give it another chance!

The West's useful idiots, its Drama Queens, and the Russians themselves have forgotten that the Stalinist USSR in 1939 was "a totalitarian state characterized by repression, deportation, and massive executions" (…If they ever knew it… ) with an apparatus including psychopaths such as Lavrentiy Beria and Vasily Blokhin, the Red Tyrant's chief executioner of the NKVD.

We need not spend time on the Soviet atrocities of Stalin's time or any earlier or later period, but here are quickly a few: How can you say (indeed snicker) that the communists were harmless when the KGB or its predecessors were responsible for the Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомо́р — Guillaume Ribot : "In 1933 Ukraine, 4,5 million people are killed in silence and alone by the weapon of hunger"); the building of the White Sea-Baltic Canal; Stalin's purges, including of the Soviet Military; Order 00447, the code of terror; the photos that Stalin hid or doctored; the Novocherkassk killings of 1962; and, of course, the gulag.

As David Satter wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time of the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution:

 … the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale [led in total to] no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.

To this list should be added nearly a million Gulag prisoners released during World War II into Red Army penal battalions, where they faced almost certain death; the partisans and civilians killed in the postwar revolts against Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltics; and dying Gulag inmates freed so that their deaths would not count in official statistics.

… The effect of murder on this scale was to create a “new man” supposedly influenced by nothing but the good of the Soviet cause. The meaning of this was demonstrated during the battle of Stalingrad, when Red Army blocking units shot thousands of their fellow soldiers who tried to flee. Soviet forces also shot civilians who sought shelter on the German side, children who filled German water bottles in the Volga, and civilians forced at gunpoint to recover the bodies of German soldiers. Gen. Vasily Chuikov, the army commander in Stalingrad, justified these tactics in his memoirs by saying “a Soviet citizen cannot conceive of his life apart from his Soviet country.” 

Notice that (rightly) nobody snickers, rolls their eyes, or lets out deep sighs about American "paranoia" regarding Nazis or the Brown scare or the witch hunt by (yes) HUAC — which was founded in 1938, before World War II (this is something you probably did not learn in school) — and whose targets were originally not just communists but… Nazis, at a time when the two dictatorships were soon to become allies (!), allied (as seen above) by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Regarding Stalin and his informers:

Stalin set about building a new universe, in which every old loyalty to kin, friends, colleagues was extinguished and replaced by one fealty alone - to "The People", of whose interests he was sole arbiter.

… The victims often had no clue what "crime" they had committed.

They were merely shipped to the Gulag, where they slaved until hunger, disease or execution ended their sufferings.

In 1942, the death rate in Russia's camps reached 25 per cent - in that one year, a quarter of the vast prison population died.

 … This is the society which historian Orlando Figes chronicles in terrifying detail in his new book, The Whisperers. 

 … Yet the war brought scant relief to the inmates of the Gulag.

While some ordinary criminals, mere thieves and cutthroats, were released to fight, political prisoners remained enslaved.

When the war ended, the Gulag population actually expanded.

A million new prisoners were admitted between 1945 and 1950.

As for the Soviet Union's policies and tactics during World War II compared to those of Germany's, try reading Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands.  The statistics of the Soviet hecatomb and of the Kremlin's repressions have been published in the French monthly Géo, as has the article Five episodes of the Second World War II That Still Feed Tensions with Russia, such as the Katyn massacre.
 

3) THE RED ARMY'S HUGE LOSSES

It is common to mention the Russian Army's huge losses in winning the war after Operation Barbarossa was launched and thus the Soviet Union's "great sacrifice", especially at Stalingrad, in attaining victory.

And yet: this is one of the rare times that I disagree with Instapundit's Stephen Green over at PJMedia:

the Soviet Union did most of the bleeding and dying destroying Nazi Germany. Their losses were so staggering that to this day nobody know exactly how many died fighting the Great Patriotic War. Hell, not even Moscow is certain how many divisions the country raised during the war -- some estimates go as high as 600 or more.

You want perspective? The U.S. didn't raise even 100 divisions, from a population base comparable to the U.S.S.R.'s. American combat and combat-related deaths totaled 407,300, with a further 12,000 or so civilians killed. The Soviets lost between 9 and 12 million soldiers, with 8 million civilians lost to "military activity and crimes against humanity," plus a further 5-10 million dead due to war-related famine and disease.

Those losses are beyond staggering. Somewhere between 23 million and 30 million Soviets lost their lives between June 22, 1941 and May 7, 1945. That's roughly 18,000 people per day.

After 17 years of hard fighting against Islamic terrorism, our total losses don't even approach the Soviet's daily average.

In fact, the three nations with the most soldier deaths — not to mention the most civilian deaths — were communist Russia along with (wait for it)… Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Does that tell us all those nations were the most patriotic and should be praised to the heavens?  Or — simply — that those nations were dictatorships? Dictatorships who have little need of valuing the lives of their soldiery/citizenry and have little compunction of sacrificing them on the battlefield.

Indeed, Stephen Green himself adds that

This is not to excuse Communism, Joseph Stalin, or the Red Army's notorious war crimes -- including the officially winked-at rape of some two million German women in the war's last months.

As it happens, Stephen's Vodkapundit has penned a lengthy post against leftists trying to replace the Yanks as the good guys of the war with the Soviet communists.

With regards to dictatorships, the greatest aces during World War II were Germany's pilots, not those of the allies (40 enemy planes shot down by America's top ace compared with close to 300 shot down by Germany's!). Why? Because while the democracy's pilots were rotated and transferred back to their offices, the German pilots flew until their deaths.

So,  to a certain extent, it can be said that — at least in military matters —  dictatorship has certain upsides.

As Antony Beevor says about The Soviet Role in World War II about "heartless sacrifices" and the "blood debt to the Red Army": regarding the "staggering disregard for human life on the part of Stalin",

One can never expect the army of a liberal democracy to fight as ruthlessly as that of a dictatorship

It was not always propaganda (whether for external or internal use); it was also fear of punishment. In his monumental The Second World War (almost 1,000 pages), Antony Beevor mentions that

The Stakhanovite mentality was deeply ingrained in the Red Army, and officers felt compelled to inflate and even invent accounts, as a junior officer explained.

"A report had to be sent in every morning and evening on the losses inflicted on the enemy and on the heroism of the men in the regiment.  I had to carry these reports because I had been appointed liaison officer  since our battery had no guns left …  One morning just out of curiosity I read a paper marked 'SECRET' sent by the regimental commander. It said that troops of the regiment had repulsed the enemy's attack and damaged two tanks, suppressed the fire of four batteries, and killed a dozen of Hitler's soldiers and officers with artillery, rifle, and machine-gun fire.  And yet I knew perfectly well that the Germans had been sitting peacefully all day in their trenches and that our 75 mm guns did not fire a single shell.  I cannot really say that this report surprised me.  By that time we were already used to  following the example of the Sovinform Bureau [an official news agency]." 

Furthermore, adds Beevor, a large number of deaths were Gulag prisoners

On 28 July [1942], Stalin issued his Order No. 227 entitled 'Ni shagu nazad ' — 'Not one step back' — … The retreat mentality must be decisively eliminated.  …

 … Blocking groups were to be set up in each army to gun down those who retreated.  Punishment battalions were strengthened that month with 30,000 Gulag prisoners up to the age of forty, however weak and under-nourished.  In that year [1942], 352,560 prisoners of the Gulag, a quarter of its whole population, died.

So: how many of the USSR's wartime deaths were due to Soviet troops ordered to gun down fellow soldiers trying to retreat?

As for executions, an incredible 300.000 Soviet soldiers seem to have been executed by their countrymen, a number — another number — that never seems to be added to that of the USSR's "sacrifices."

Many Red Army troops who weren't executed were again persecuted, but this time by their liberators and countrymen, convinced that all Soviet prisoners were potential traitors. “I was always hungry” remembered one who was released from prison in 1953 at the death of Stalin.

Responding to a Quora question, a former infantry marine replies that Churchill and Stalin both discussed which army was superior, the British Army or the Red Army?

Churchill, somewhat appalled at the enormous blood sacrifice being made by the Red Army suggested that the troops would be of a higher quality of they received more than two weeks training. I believe British soldiers were receiving 12–20 weeks of training before shipping out. For comparison the US Army was 12–13 weeks.

Stalin replies to Churchill with the infamous line, “quantity has its own quality”, meaning of course that he was going to continue to pour untrained conscripted recruits into battle at huge cost because they kept on winning and he had many more.

 … in the final months of the war, the Germans were killing as many Russians EVERY month as the British lost in the entire five+ years of the war.

4) WAS SOVIET VICTORY POSSIBLE WITHOUT YANKEE CAN-DO?

As they stand in awe of the rapid advances of the Red Army, a number of people and Drama Queens are fond of declaring, hardly wrongly, that the Allies would never have won without the Soviets. (Hardly wrong, but to those who nonetheless want to voice their gratitude to comrade Stalin's USSR, don't forget this post's initial point, that there would have been no war to speak of in the first place, had not the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (les coulisses de l'accord secret entre Hitler et Staline) been signed.

In any case, what people rarely mention is one simple truth:
that the Soviets would not have won without the Americans;
they would have lost.

Indeed, in The Second World War, Antony Beevor points out that

Roosevelt's decision to aid the Soviet Union was genuinely altruistic as well as munificent. Soviet Lend-Lease took time to get under way, much to the president's exasperation, but in scale and scope would play a major part in the eventual Soviet victory (a fact which most Russian historians are still loath to acknowledge). Apart from high-quality steel, anti-aircraft guns, aircraft, and huge consignments of food which saved the Soviet Union from famine in the winter of 1942-3, the greatest contribution was to the mobility of the Red Army. Its dramatic advances later in the war were possible thanks only to American Jeeps and trucks.

 … [The] greatest problem [of Zhukov's armies] was not German resistance but the difficulties of their supply service, desperately trying to keep up with them on bad winter roads and without any rail line functioning.  Had it not been for the American trucks provided under Lend-lease, the Red Army would never have made it to Berlin before the Americans.

Quite correct. There is a lot of evidence that the USA was instrumental in the victory of the Red Army, not least through the very own testimony of none other than… the Vozhd (!) himself:

The United States is a country of machines

Josef Stalin is quoted as saying in 1943 in W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel's Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946 (Random House, N.Y., 1975, p. 277 );

Without the use of these machines through Lend-Lease, we would lose this war.

In Khrushchev's memoirs, the Vozhd's successor quotes Stalin as saying the same thing. According to the Albert L Weeks book Russia's Life Saver (Lend-Lease Aid to the U.S.S.R. in World War II),

The United States shipped more than $12 billion in Lend-Lease aid to Stalin's Russia during World War II. Materials lent, beginning in late 1941 before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, included airplanes and tanks, locomotives and rails, construction materials, entire military production assembly lines, food and clothing, aviation fuel, and much else. Lend-Lease is now recognized by post-Soviet Russian historians as essential to the Soviet war effort. Wielding many facts and statistics never before published in the U.S., author Albert L. Weeks keenly analyzes the diplomatic rationale for and results of this assistance. Russia's Life-Saver is a brilliant contribution to the study of U.S.-Soviet relations and its role in World War II.