Daily Archives: May 27, 2025

Lend-Lease: how much did the USSR pay for the help of the Allies in the Great Patriotic War

Posted on by
Reading time: 8 minutes

We present in this article several materials about the WWII Lend-Lease program. The materials are comprised of publications from a friendly channel, our translation of a Russian article, Marshal Zhukov’s memoirs, and our closing thoughts on solidarity.

Lend-Lease

Today is a good opportunity to dispel another myth: the myth of the US Lend-Lease Act during World War II and the idea that it was precisely this aid that enabled the Soviet Union to defeat the German Reich.

In fact, this aid from the United States—which also went to Great Britain—accounted for only four to ten percent of the Red Army’s total materiel during World War II. The USSR produced 90 to 96 percent of its weapons, equipment, and supplies itself.

In addition, there was also a reverse lend-lease relationship: the USSR supplied raw materials such as manganese, platinum, chromium, asbestos, leather and even gold to the USA to support the production of those relief supplies that were later sent back to the Soviet front via the Arctic convoy.

The USSR – and later Russia – repaid $722 million to the US Treasury for this aid.

Lend-Lease: how much did the USSR pay for the help of the Allies in the Great Patriotic War

– translated from a Dzen article, 18.10.2018

Lend-lease is a program of “crediting” of the US allies during the Second World War. The supplies included military equipment, food, equipment and raw materials. How long have we been paying off our lend-lease debts?

How did they help?

Historian Lebedev writes that during the Great Patriotic War, the USSR received from the United States more than 18,000 aircraft (including fighter jets “Aerocobra”, “Kitty-hawk”, “Tomahawk”), 12,000 tanks. Communication equipment: 100,000 kilometers of telephone wires, 2 million telephones. Products: 15 million pairs of boots, more than 50 thousand tons of shoe leather; as well as more than a million tons of food and provisions; several thousand steam locomotives, tank cars on wheels, locomotives and self-loading wagons. They were used to deliver more than 300,000 tons of explosives and petroleum products to the front; and military-technical plants received copper and bronze, aluminium and special steel.

The total volume of American supplies amounted to about 11 billion US dollars. According to the lend-lease law, only what had survived the war had to be paid for. Coordination on the total amount of the payment began in 1948.

How much do we owe?

Continue reading →

WWII Memory Becomes a Propaganda Battleground: How Politicians Are Erasing the USSR’s Heroism and Sacrifice.

Posted on by
Reading time: 3 minutes

In 2010, NATO troops joined Russia’s Victory Day Parade in Moscow to mark the 65th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat. The British, Americans, French, and Poles stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Russians—the Welsh Guards, the U.S. 18th Infantry, France’s Normandie-Niemen Regiment, and soldiers from across the CIS, including Ukrainians, marched together – a powerful symbol of shared history. It was a rare moment of unity: gratitude outweighed geopolitics.

But after 2014, acknowledging the Soviet Union’s sacrifice became politically inconvenient. Today, politicians and media rewrite, distort, or outright erase history to fit their agendas. The USSR’s pivotal role in crushing Nazi Germany and liberating Europe—once undisputed—is now downplayed, twisted, or denied. Not because archives have revealed new facts, but because yesterday’s hero can’t be today’s evil.

Crimea, Ukraine, and NATO-Russia tensions demand a new villain narrative. Acknowledging Russia’s past heroism complicates today’s propaganda.

The Uncomfortable Truth They Now Ignore

• Winston Churchill (1945): “It was the Russian Army that tore the guts out of the Nazi war machine.”

• U.S. War Dept (1945): Estimated that without the Eastern Front, America would have needed 10 million more soldiers to defeat Germany.

• British PM David Cameron (2010): “We must never forget the courage of Russian soldiers who fought from Stalingrad to Berlin.”

• BBC Documentary (2010): “Without the Red Army’s 27 million dead, D-Day might never have succeeded.”

• Professor Richard Overy (UK, Russia’s War): “The Eastern Front accounted for 80% of German combat losses. Denying this isn’t just dishonest—it’s bad history.”

Rewriting History in Real Time

• French MEP Nathalie Loiseau (2022): “We must stop parroting Russian propaganda about WWII. Europe’s liberation began with D-Day, not Stalingrad.”
Continue reading →

«17 Moments of Spring» (1973) – Fragment about the future of the Third Reich

Posted on by
Reading time: 3 minutes

In this fragment from episode 11 of the legendary Soviet film, «17 Moments of Spring», the truth is heard through the mouth of the brilliant Soviet actor Leonid Bronevoy, playing Gestapo chief, SS Gruppenfuhrer Heinrich Müller, in his monologue addressed to Stirlitz, played by Vyacheslav Tihonov.


Backup at Rumble.

👉 The complete series with English and Spanish subtitles can be watched at this YouTube palylist.

«17 Moments of Spring» is a novel by Julian Semyonov, the plot of which is based on the real events of the Second World War, when German representatives tried to negotiate a separate peace (BATS note: see our earlier publication The SVR has published new declassified documents on the Nazis’ ties with the West in 1945) with representatives of Western intelligence services (the so-called “Operation Sunrise”) in the spring of 1945. The novel was first published in the “Moscow” magazine in issues 11-12, 1969.

Prior books about the Soviet intelligence officer turned out to be so successful that even the chairman of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, liked them, and personally contacted Semyonov praising his work. The gratitude turned out to be not only verbal: Andropov gave the writer permission to visit the KGB archives, and also initiated the film adaptation of the novels.

The events described in the novel are based on the memoirs of Brigadefuhrer Walter Schellenberg. This man held the position of chief of intelligence of the Third Reich. According to the verdict of the Nuremberg trials, he received a rather short sentence, given his position. He later wrote a memoir, which was published in Europe after Schellenberg’s death. The book ended up in the Soviet Union and was kept in a closed KGB archive until Semyonov managed to read it. So the writer had a ready-made plot with real characters in his hands, which only needed to be finalised and add the sharpness of a political detective story.

Julian Semyonov did a tremendous job writing the book. In addition to working for hours with archives, he personally interviewed several SS leaders — among them, Paul Blum, an employee of the Bern residency of A. Dulles — and representatives of the Third Reich as a correspondent, and also participated in the search for Hitler’s henchmen.

In 1973, a 12-episode film adaptation of the novel directed by Tatiana Lioznova premiered.
Continue reading →