Making the Kremlin Queasy: Massive American Aid Has Helped Russians Three Times in the Last Century
As American officials struggle to meet an Oct. 1 deadline for closing the 20-year-old USAID office in Moscow, it is worth looking at America’s other great 20th century aid program to Russians.
In a corner of Public School 1262 in Moscow, there is a one-room, privately run museum, the Museum of the Allies and Lend-Lease. It celebrates a crucial act of American generosity largely unknown to Russians.
Under the bland title of the Lend-Lease Act, American taxpayers sent to the Soviet people, from 1941 to 1945, $11.3 billion worth of war supplies. That is $146 billion in contemporary dollars.
This steel river of jeeps, trucks and bombers was neither a loan nor a lease. Franklin Roosevelt chose that title in the hopes of deluding American isolationists who opposed what they saw (correctly) as an outright gift to Moscow.
What did this money buy for the USSR? 3,770 bombers, 11,594 fighter planes, 5,980 anti-aircraft guns, 2,000 railroad locomotives, 51,000 jeeps, 361,000 trucks, 56,445 field telephones, 600,000 kilometers of telephone wire, 22 million artillery shells, almost one b
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