Lend-Lease for the USSR

On 30 October 1941 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent Joseph Stalin a message that closed the first chapter of American aid to the Soviet Union. He announced that he had examined the protocol of the three-power conference concluded in Moscow a month earlier, had approved all the items of armaments and munitions listed in it, and had ordered deliveries to begin at once and “in the largest possible quantities”. To avoid financial difficulties, he directed that shipments be made under the Lend-Lease Act, signed in March, up to a value of one billion dollars. The United States was to charge no interest on the debt the Soviet government incurred in this way, and repayment was to begin only five years after the end of the war and to run for a further ten years. The President also asked that the USSR sell America whatever raw materials it had available, with the proceeds credited against the debt.

War chronologies record under this date that Roosevelt approved a billion dollars of Lend-Lease aid for the Soviet Union. This is essentially true, but two points need adding. First, in October 1941 the aid took the form of an interest-free credit, not the free deliveries that Lend-Lease meant for Britain; the terms were only brought into line later. Second, the Soviet Union was formally brought under the Act a week later: on 7 November Roosevelt declared in a letter to the programme’s administrator that the defence of the USSR was vital to the defence of the United States. The decision of 30 October itself was not an act of Congress but of the President, who was drawing on funds already voted.

From Hopkins to Moscow

When Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the prevailing view in Washington and London was that the Red Army would last a few weeks at most. The American ambassador in Moscow, Laurence Steinhardt, cabled that aid to the Russians would be wasted, and General George Marshall’s General Staff reckoned on a German victory before the winter. The United States, though formally neutral, nevertheless quickly lifted restrictions on trade with the Soviet Union and unfroze its assets, and on 2 August an exchange of notes between the State Department and Ambassador Konstantin Umansky promised economic assistance within the limits of what was possible. Moscow paid for the first deliveries in gold and raw materials.

The breakthrough came with the journey of the President’s closest adviser, Harry Hopkins. At the end of July he flew from Britain via Arkhangelsk to Moscow, and on 30 and 31 July he held talks with Stalin in the Kremlin. He was told that the USSR needed above all anti-aircraft guns, machine guns, aviation fuel and aluminium, and he came back convinced that the Russians would fight. He passed this conviction on to Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, whom he joined in mid-August in Placentia Bay, where the Atlantic Charter was proclaimed. From there the two leaders sent Stalin a joint message: they proposed a conference in Moscow at which senior representatives of both countries would draw up a long-term supply programme, and in the meantime they promised to send supplies as quickly as possible. Ambassadors Steinhardt and Stafford Cripps handed it to Stalin on 15 August, and he immediately dictated a reply expressing his agreement.

Britain, bound to the USSR since 12 July by the agreement on joint action, had by then already begun to send equipment. On 31 August the first Arctic convoy, codenamed Operation Dervish, reached Arkhangelsk: seven ships carrying rubber, wool, tin and dismantled Hurricane fighters, as well as the personnel of an RAF wing that was to provide air cover for Murmansk. Civilians also sailed with it, among them the Polish painter Feliks Topolski. At the end of August British and Soviet troops entered Iran, partly in order to open a supply route from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus. On 3 September Stalin, in a letter to Churchill, demanded a second front in the Balkans or in France and monthly deliveries of at least 400 aircraft and 500 tanks, as well as 30,000 tons of aluminium by the beginning of October. These figures became the starting point for the talks in Moscow.

Three evenings in the Kremlin

The delegations sailed from Scapa Flow aboard the cruiser HMS London and flew on from Arkhangelsk to Moscow, where on 28 September they were welcomed by the Deputy Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Andrey Vyshinsky. The British delegation, which also included General Hastings Ismay, was led by the Minister of Supply, Lord Beaverbrook; the American one by W. Averell Harriman, since the spring the President’s Lend-Lease envoy in London, who brought a personal letter from Roosevelt to Stalin. Hopkins, on whose initiative the conference had been called, was too ill to travel.

The most important talks took place not at the conference table but in Stalin’s study, where he was joined by Vyacheslav Molotov and, as interpreter, the former Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov. The first meeting, on the evening of 28 September, was businesslike and friendly. The second, on 29 September, went disastrously according to both envoys: Stalin was brusque, got up, smoked, made telephone calls and is said to have remarked that the meagreness of the Western offers showed that the British and Americans wanted the Soviet Union to be defeated. On the third evening, 30 September, the mood was reversed. Beaverbrook and Harriman went through the Soviet list item by item, indicating what they could provide and what they could not, and Stalin accepted the proposal. Litvinov, they recalled, then leapt from his chair and exclaimed: “Now we shall win the war!”

The official part of the conference, hosted by Molotov, began on 29 September in the Foreign Commissariat’s mansion on Spiridonovka Street. The first session lasted half an hour: six committees were set up – military, naval, aviation, transport, raw materials and medical – which were to compile the Soviet requirements by 3 October. Thanks to the agreement reached in the Kremlin, the delegates met again two days ahead of schedule, and on 1 October Beaverbrook, Harriman and Molotov signed the protocol later known as the First or Moscow Protocol. It covered nine months, from October 1941 to June 1942. Britain and the United States undertook to deliver 400 aircraft (300 fighters and 100 bombers) and 500 tanks every month, as well as aluminium, lead, tin, armour plate, toluene, lorries, machine tools, food and medical supplies – more than seventy items in all. It was agreed that they would provide the transport, since the USSR had neither enough ships nor escorts. A dinner in the Kremlin and a joint communiqué, in which the three governments promised a peace that would allow the world to live “free from fear and want”, brought the meeting to a close. On 3 October the delegations flew off to the White Sea.

Harriman agreed to American participation in the protocol without conditions. Stalin had made it clear that he would not accept aid hedged with reservations, and both envoys judged that the Soviet Union, which was tying down the main forces of the Wehrmacht in the east, mattered more to the West than political concessions. According to some studies, Harriman exceeded his authority in signalling American aid worth a billion dollars – the President still had to approve it. The most important conclusion the two men brought back from Moscow, in any case, was their conviction that Russia would not collapse before the end of 1941.

October – a month of difficult decisions

The conference ended just as Army Group Centre was launching Operation Typhoon. In the following weeks the Germans closed the pockets at Vyazma and Bryansk, and in mid-October panic broke out in Moscow. The government, the commissariats and the diplomatic corps, including the American and British embassies, were evacuated to Kuibyshev on the Volga. Stalin stayed in the capital.

In the United States aid to a communist state met with resistance. Isolationists and some Catholics recalled that only two years earlier the USSR had been Hitler’s partner in the partition of Poland and had attacked Finland. Roosevelt tried to soften this opposition. In September his personal representative to the Vatican, Myron Taylor, pressed Pius XII for a clarification that the condemnation of communism in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris did not forbid aid to the Russian people, and at a press conference on 30 September the President himself cited the provisions of the Soviet Constitution of 1936 on freedom of religion, which many commentators greeted with derision. In October Congress debated a second tranche of Lend-Lease funding, almost six billion dollars; amendments intended to exclude the Soviet Union from the aid were defeated, and the bill was passed in the last days of the month.

In the Atlantic the US Navy was already escorting convoys and since September had been under orders to shoot at German submarines. On 17 October a U-boat torpedoed the destroyer Kearny, and on 31 October, the day after Roosevelt’s message to Stalin, the Reuben James was sunk. In the Arctic the route was quiet for the time being: convoy PQ 1, which left Hvalfjörður in Iceland on 29 September, reached Arkhangelsk without loss on 11 October, carrying, according to British sources, 20 tanks and 193 fighters. Cargoes also sailed in American ships, and the shipyards that had launched the first Liberty ships in September were soon to turn them out by the dozen.

The message of 30 October and Stalin’s reply

It was against this background that Roosevelt signed his message to Stalin on 30 October. The American embassy was already in Kuibyshev and communications with Moscow were difficult, so at first only its content reached the addressee: on 2 November Ambassador Steinhardt handed Vyshinsky in Kuibyshev a memorandum summarising the eight points of the President’s message. Besides approving the protocol and the billion-dollar credit, Roosevelt thanked Stalin for the speedy conduct of the conference and expressed the hope that Stalin would contact him directly whenever necessary.

Stalin replied on 4 November, noting that he did not yet know the full text of the message. He agreed with the assessment of the conference’s results, attributing its success above all to Harriman and Beaverbrook. The Soviet government accepted the decision to grant an interest-free loan of a billion dollars “with heartfelt gratitude, as vital help in its immense and arduous struggle against our common enemy – bloodthirsty Hitlerism”, and accepted the repayment terms – a five-year grace period followed by ten years of repayments – in full. He promised to supply America with the raw materials it needed and gladly agreed to direct contact with the President. Three days later Roosevelt signed the formal finding that opened Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union on the same terms as to other allies; the aid was administered by Edward Stettinius, but Hopkins still had the decisive say.

Place in the war

For Stalin the billion-dollar credit was above all a political argument. In a speech delivered on 6 November in threatened Moscow, on the eve of the anniversary of the October Revolution, he mentioned the conference attended by Beaverbrook and Harriman, the British deliveries of aluminium, lead, tin, nickel and rubber, and the fact that “a few days ago” the United States had decided to grant the Soviet Union a loan of a billion dollars, and declared that the coalition of the United States, Britain and the USSR had become a reality.

The reality of the deliveries was more modest. By the end of 1941 only part of the promised equipment had arrived: American industry was only just converting to war production, ships were scarce, and after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December some of the orders were taken over by the US armed forces. According to research by Russian historians, however, some of the British tanks and fighters that arrived in the autumn were in time to take part in the November fighting before Moscow. In February 1942 Roosevelt offered a second billion, and on 11 June 1942 the US–Soviet mutual aid agreement replaced the credit with the standard Lend-Lease terms, with no obligation to pay for equipment used up in combat. The Moscow Protocol was followed by others: Washington (1942), London (1943) and Ottawa (1944–1945).

In all, the United States supplied the Soviet Union with goods worth about 11 billion dollars, including more than 400,000 lorries and jeeps, about 11,000 aircraft, several thousand tanks, locomotives, rails, aviation fuel and millions of tons of food. They travelled by three routes: by Arctic convoy to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, the shortest but most dangerous route (convoy PQ-17 became a byword for tragedy in 1942); through Iran by the Trans-Iranian Railway, which only became fully operational in 1942; and across the Pacific to Vladivostok in ships under the Soviet flag, which carried roughly half the tonnage. The contribution of these deliveries to the Red Army’s victory was played down in Soviet times; today historians agree that in 1941 they did not decide the outcome of the fighting, but that later on – especially the lorries, communications equipment, fuel and food – they did much to make the Soviet offensives possible.

The settlement of the debt dragged on for decades. After the war the United States demanded payment for equipment that had not been used up, and the dispute became one of the minor threads of the Cold War. A settlement of 722 million dollars was reached in 1972, and Russia paid the last instalments only in the 21st century. The decision of 30 October 1941, however, had a significance that cannot be measured in dollars: the United States, while not yet at war, bound its fate to that of the Soviet Union and accepted that holding the Eastern Front was in its own interest. The grand coalition that was to defeat Germany began to exist on paper before America entered the war.