Being Soviet: Identity, Rumour, and Everyday Life Under Stalin 1939-1953 (35 page)

^{42
Krasnaia Zvezda}
, 9.11.41, p. 1,
Pravda
, 02.10.41, p. 10; 14.12.41, p. 1.

^{43
Almost 20% of the available space in a series of}
listovki
in the Komsomol archive from December 1941 was devoted to this story. RGASPI M-f. 1, op. 32, d. 15, ll. 1–12.

Patrons or Predators? 1941–45
93

Soviet war effort.
^{44
This policy of sparing commentary continued until}
the end of the war. One historian even claims that the Soviet military removed the brand names from American and British-made equipment in an effort to obscure their origin.
⁴⁵

The challenge to Official Soviet Identity presented by Lend Lease was
also softened by discussing it in the context of the allied failure to open the Second Front. In a typical example of this, Gromyko, the Soviet Ambassador to the USA, offered a toast to President Roosevelt in October 1943 in which he began by noting that the ‘heaviest burden of force and suffering’ was being carried by the USSR. Gromyko went on to thank the President for the tanks, weapons, and food the USA was sending, before returning to his call for greater allied military action.
^{46
The same dynamic was evident in a model lecture circulated by the}
Komsomol in association with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Rev- olution in 1942. The lecture summarized the official position that, ‘The help that has been shown us by England and America so far has only had a small effect in comparison to the help that we have given them.’
^{47
Allied weapons could not compensate for the blood of the Soviet}
soldiers who operated them.

In private, at both the Tehran and Yalta Conferences, Stalin ex-
pressed his warmest appreciation for the ‘absolute necessity’ of allied goods and technology.
^{48
In public, however, Soviet leaders hesitated to}
thank the Allies for Lend Lease; it was the Allies who should thank them. This lack of gratitude precipitated a diplomatic incident in May 1943 when the American Ambassador, Standley, angrily attacked the Soviet government for minimizing the significance of Lend Lease. Official coverage of the programme increased a little afterwards.
^{49
On the other hand, Soviet officials exploded with anger in 1944}
when Gruilow, a representative of the American charity Russian War Relief, sent a message back to the USA expressing the ‘greetings and thanks’ of a group of Russian orphans to the American people.

^44
Pravda
, 15.12.1942, p. 4. See also,
Krasnaia Zvezda
, 21.04.1944, p. 4.

^{45
van Tuyll,}
Feeding the Bear,
37.

^46
Pravda
, 06.10.43, p. 4.

^{47
RGASPI M-f. 1, op. 32, d. 67, l. 42.}

^{48
van Tuyll,}
Feeding the Bear,
38; Werth,
Russia at War
(1964), 980.

^49
See:
Pravda,
13.05.43, p. 4.

94
Being Soviet

Kemenov, the head of VOKS, accused Gruilow of ‘intolerable
exaggeration of the significance of American aid to Russia’.
^50
As
Kemenov explained in a letter to Russian War Relief, the extraordinary nature of Soviet suffering and endurance in the war meant that American ‘gifts’ to the USSR could never be presented as ‘charity’. The gratitude should flow the other way.
^{51
Lozovskii complained}
in similar terms at a Sovinformburo meeting in February 1943: the allied aid organizations wanted the Soviet government to ‘tell them how their 15 cans of conserves helped destroy 300,000 Germans at Stalingrad’.
⁵²

The strategic calculation that Lend Lease should be minimized in
order to stress the debt owed by the Allies to the Soviet Union is typical of subtle dynamics of gift exchange described by Marcel Mauss in his
Essai sur le Don
in 1924. Mauss observed that the giving of a gift creates a burden of obligation on the receiver ‘to reciprocate the present that has been received’.
^{53
Mauss’s ideas have been challenged,}
particularly by Iuri Lotman, who has argued that the notion of reciprocity is alien to the Orthodox Slavic tradition of unconditional self-giving.
^{54
However, the reaction of Soviet officials and the Soviet}
press to Lend Lease exemplifies Mauss’s notion that gift giving is an assertion of prestige. Mauss notes that if one party fails to express due thanks for the gift, then the exchange can ‘go wrong’, leading to tensions between the parties. In Maussian terms, the Official Soviet Identity of the USSR, as the leading moral and military force within the Grand Alliance, was preserved by stressing that Lend Lease was not a gift. It was merely an act of reciprocation for the much greater gift of the lives of Soviet citizens.

^{50
RGASPI f. 17, op. 125, d. 248, ll. 1–4.}

^{51
Ibid. ll. 5–8.}

^{52
Borisov et al.,}
Rossiia i Zapad
:
formirovanie vneshnepoliticheskix stereotipov v sozna-
nii rosiiskogo obshchestva pervoi polovini XX Veka (Moscow, 1998), 283.

^{53
M. Mauss, trans., W. D. Halls,}
The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in

Archaic Societies
(London, 1990), 6.

^{54
Iu. M. Lotman, trans. N. F. C. Owen, ‘“Agreement” and “Self-Giving” as Arche-}
typal Models of Culture’, in A. Shukman, ed., ‘The Semiotics of Russian Culture’,
Michigan Slavic Contributions
, 11 (London, 1984), 125–40. See also M. Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics
, 2nd edn (London, 2004); N. Thomas,
Entangled Objects: Exchange,
Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

Patrons or Predators? 1941–45
95

LEND LEASE WITHIN THE SOVIET WARTIME IMAGINATION

Lend Lease was not widely discussed in the Soviet wartime oral infor-
mation network. Soviet citizens rarely spoke of, and frequently demon- strated ignorance about, the flow of goods arriving from outside. It is striking how infrequently Soviet citizens are recorded speculating and wondering about Lend Lease during the war. It might be the case that secret police informers and prosecutors were not interested in comments about Lend Lease. However, the programme touched on a highly sensi- tive aspect of wartime Official Soviet Identity: informers would have been likely to report on it. Furthermore, this explanation would not account for the absence of Lend Lease within wartime letters and diaries. It seems far more likely that the Soviet press successfully shaped the concerns and interests of its audience. The lack of rumouring and conversation about Lend Lease is in stark contrast to the centrality of the Second Front to the thinking, worrying, and speculating of the Soviet population at war. The Soviet press was very effective at focusing the attentions of its audience on to, or away from, particular topics. However, its capacity to ‘strike dumb’ its readers exceeded its ability to shape their attitudes towards the issues they were interested in.
⁵⁵

When Soviet citizens did discuss Lend Lease it was often in a highly
confused manner. Residents of the Arctic ports were, at least initially, mystified by the new arrivals. At an October 1941 lecture in Arkhan- gel’sk one of the listeners enquired where the English people had come from and where they had gone away to.
^{56
Igor Andreevich, aged 11}
when the war broke out, remembered that he and his friends deduced from observation that these foreign sailors must be bringing relief supplies to the USSR, ‘We could just guess because we could see the foreign ships that were arriving in Arkhangel’sk with various goods . . . There was no information.’
^{57
Lend Lease was so badly understood that}
the few rumours that did circulate about it sometimes stated that ‘the Caucuses have been sold by the Soviet Union to England for 20 years’ or ‘For all the American goods the Soviet Union will pay not with gold but

^{55
K. Verdery,}
National Ideology Under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in
Ceausescu’s Romania (Oxford, 1991).

^{56
Inf. GAOPDiFAO f. 834, op. 2, d. 69, l. 17.}

^{57
Int. Igor Andreevich, Arkhangel’sk, August 2004.}

96
Being Soviet

will give the Far East to Baikal on a lease.’
^{58
Such miscomprehension}
reflected the very limited volume of information available about the programme.

Those individuals who understood the programme rather better
often regarded it as a minor factor alongside the strategically significant allied failure to fulfil their military responsibilities. Tins of American spam were ironically dubbed ‘Second Front’ by Red Army soldiers: they reminded the soldiers of the Allies’ failure to do more.
^{59
Viktor Dmi-}
trovich, a Red Army medical officer who claimed to despise the Soviet regime, remembered that, ‘My attitude was twofold. On the one had it was help. But on the other—it was done in a criminal fashion . . . When people are dying in their thousands—600 thousand to take Poland alone, 300 thousand to take Berlin!’
^{60
Margaret Wettlin remembered}
that her fellow academics also felt that ‘The signing of pacts, the sending of food and munitions, were one thing. Blood was another. Blood was the great common denominator.’
^{61
Some Soviet citizens even commen-}
ted directly on the official silence concerning Lend Lease. When Stalin ignored the allied war contribution in his 1943 speech which sparked the Standley incident, Professor Kornoukhov of the Ukrainian Acade- my of Sciences noted, ‘How pleasant the order of Com. Stalin is, that in the struggle with Hitlerism we have single-handedly won a victory without any help. He did not even refer to the technical help of the Allies. It is obvious that the impact of this help is not great.’
⁶²

A few individuals who were prosecuted for anti-Soviet agitation
during the war went even further and described Lend Lease as part of a wider picture of allied perfidy. G.I.K. was arrested in January 1945 for speculating that the allies would use the debt accrued by Stalin’s government to apply pressure for further internal changes within the USSR.
^{63
M.V.G. suggested that the destruction of the}
kolkhozy
might be an appropriate payment.
^{64
Such attitudes were shaped by the wider}
experience of the Anglo-American failure to open the Second Front in 1942 and 1943.

^{58
Proc. GARF. f. R8131, op. 31a, d. 13613, l. 17; Sv. RGASPI f. 17, op. 122, d. 66,}

l. 18.

^{59
Mem. Werth,}
Russia at War,
586.