1941, that gave the president of the United States the right to sell, transfer into property, lease, and rent various kinds of weapons or
materials to those countries whose defense the president deemed vital to the defense of the United States itself. According to the system, the materials destroyed, lost, or consumed during the war should not be subject to payment after the war. The materials that were not used during the war and that were suitable for civilian consumption should be paid in full or in part, while weapons and war materials could be demanded back. After the United States entered the war, the concept of lend lease, originally a system of unidirectional U.S. aid, was transformed into a system of mutual aid, which involved pooling the resources of the countries in the anti-Hitler coalition (known as the concept of “pool”). Initially authorized for the purpose of aiding Great Britain, in April 1941 the Lend-Lease Act was extended to Greece, Yugoslavia, and China, and, after September 1941, to the Soviet Union. By September, 20, 1945, the date of cancellation of the Lend-Lease Act, American aid had been received by nearly forty countries.
During World War II, the U.S. spent a total of $49.1 billion on the Lend-Lease Act. This included $13.8 billion in aid to Great Britain and $9.5 billion to the USSR. Repayment in kind-called “reverse lend-lease”-was estimated at $7.8 billion, of which $2.2 million was the contribution of the USSR in the form of a discount for transport services.
The Soviet Union received aid on lend-lease principles not only from the United States, but also from the states of the British Commonwealth, primarily Great Britain and Canada. Economic relations between them were adjusted by mutual aid agreements and legalized by special Allies’ protocols, renewable annually. The First Protocol was signed in Moscow on October, 1, 1941; the second in Washington (October 6, 1942); the third in London (September 1, 1943); and the fourth in Ottawa (April, 17, 1945). The Fourth Protocol was added by a special agreement between the USSR and the United States called the “Program of October 17, 1944” (or “Milepost”), intended for supplies for use by the Soviet Union in the war against Japan.
On the basis of those documents, the Soviet Union received 18,763 aircraft, 11,567 tanks and self-propelled guns, 7,340 armored vehicles and armored troop-carriers, more than 435,000 trucks and jeeps, 9,641 guns, 2,626 radar, 43,298 radio stations, 548 fighting ships and boats, and 62 cargo ships. The remaining 75 percent of cargoes imported into the USSR consisted of industrial equipment, raw material, and foodstuffs. A significant portion (up to seven percent) of supplies was lost during transportation.
Most of the cargoes sent to the USSR were delivered by three main routes: via Iran, the Far East, and the northern ports Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. The last route was the shortest but also the most dangerous.
After the war the United State cancelled all lend-lease debts except that of the USSR. In 1972 the USSR and the United States signed an agreement that the USSR would pay $722 million of its debt by July 1, 2001. See also: FOREIGN DEBT; WORLD WAR II; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH, NORTHERN CONVOYS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beaumont, Joan. (1980). Comrades in Arms: British Aid to Russia, 1941-1945. London: Davis-Poynter. Hall, H. Duncan; Scott, J. D., and Wrigley, C. C. (1956). Studies of Overseas Supply. London: H. M. Stationery Off. Herring, George C. (1973). Aid to Russia, 1941-1946: Strategy, Diplomacy, the Origins of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press. Jones, Robert Huhn. (1969). The Roads to Russia: United States Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Van Tuyll, Hubert P. (1989). Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945. New York: Greenwood Press.
LENIN ENROLLMENT See COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION.
The “Leningrad Affair” refers to a purge between 1949 and 1951 of the city’s political elite and of nationally prominent communists who had come from Leningrad. More than two hundred Lenin-graders, including many family members of those directly accused, were convicted on fabricated political charges, and twenty-three were executed. Over two thousand city officials were fired from their jobs. Hundreds from many other cities were jailed during this purge.
LENINGRAD, SIEGE OF
The “Leningrad Affair” derived largely from a power struggle between Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s two leading potential successors: Andrei Zhdanov, Leningrad’s party chief during the city’s lengthy wartime siege, and Georgy Malenkov, supported by the head of the political police, Lavrenti Beria. Zhdanov’s sudden death of apparent natural causes in the late summer of 1948 left his prot?g?s from Leningrad vulnerable. In early 1949 Malenkov charged that the Leningraders were trying to create a rival Communist Party of Russia in conspiracy with another former Leningrad party chief, Alexei Kuznetsov. Malenkov used as pretexts a wholesale trade market that had been set up in Leningrad without Moscow’s permission, as well as alleged voting irregularities in a Leningrad party conference. The Leningrad party members were also charged with treason.
Aside from Kuznetsov, the most prominent victims of the “Leningrad Affair” were Politburo member and Gosplan chairman Nikolai Voznesensky and first secretary of the Leningrad party committee Pyotr Popkov. The three were shot along with others on October 1, 1950. The purge signaled a return to the violent and conspiratorial politics of the 1930s. It eliminated the Leningraders as contenders for national power and downgraded Leningrad essentially to the status of a provincial city within the USSR. See also: BERIA; LAVRENTI PAVLOVICH; MALENKOV, GEORGY MAKSIMILYANOVICH; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Knight, Amy. (1993). Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1991). Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, ed. and tr. Harold Shukman. New York: Grove Wei-denfeld. Zubkova, Elena. (1998). Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957, tr. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
For 872 days during World War II, German and Finnish armies besieged Leningrad, the Soviet Union’s second largest city and important center for armaments production. According to recent estimates, close to two million Soviet citizens died in Leningrad or along nearby military fronts between 1941 and 1944. Of that total, roughly one million civilians perished within the city itself.
The destruction of Leningrad was one of Adolf Hitler’s strategic objectives in attacking the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. On September 8, 1941, German Army Group North sealed off Leningrad. It advanced to within a few miles of its southern districts and then took the town of Schlisselburg along the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. That same day, Germany launched its first massive aerial attack on the city. Germany’s ally, Finland, completed the blockade by retaking territory north of Leningrad that the Soviet Union had seized from Finland during the winter war of 1939-1940. About 2.5 million people were trapped within the city. The only connection that Leningrad maintained with the rest of the Soviet Union was across Lake Ladoga, which German aircraft patrolled. Finland refused German entreaties to continue its advance southward along Ladoga’s eastern coast to link up with German forces.
Hitler’s plan was to subdue Leningrad through blockade, bombardment, and starvation prior to seizing the city. German artillery gunners, together with the Luftwaffe, killed approximately 17,000 Leningraders during the siege. Although supplies of raw materials, fuel, and food dwindled rapidly within Leningrad, war plants within the city limits produced large numbers of tanks, artillery guns, and other weapons during the fall of 1941 and continued to manufacture vast quantities of ammunition throughout the rest of the siege.
Most civilian deaths occurred during the winter of 1941-1942. Bread was the only food that was regularly available, and between November 20 and December 25, 1941, the daily bread ration for most Leningraders dropped to its lowest level of 125 grams, or about 4.5 ounces. To give the appearance of larger rations, inedible materials, such as saw dust, were baked into the bread. To make matters worse, generation of electrical current was sharply curtailed in early December because only one city power plant operated at reduced capacity. Most Leningraders thus lived in the dark; they lacked running water because water pipes froze and burst. Temperatures during that especially cold winter plummeted to -40 degrees Farenheit in late January. Residents had to fetch water from
