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Dima Vorobiev
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Former Propaganda Executive at the Soviet Union (1980–1991)Updated 4y
Would the Soviet Union have survived the German invasion without American military aid?
Originally Answered: Would the Soviet Union have survived the German invasion without American military aid? My stance is yes they would have survived.
If we divide the American help to the USSR in WW2 into three most important parts, the answer would be:

“Without American weapons”: probably yes.
“Without American deliveries for military production and logistics”: most probably, no.
“Without American food”: certainly no.
Among the critical deliveries to military production was the welding equipment that sped up and improved the production of our T34s enormously. Half of the explosives and gunpowder we spent on the Nazis, came under the lend-lease. Almost all aluminum and three quarters of copper was from the Allies, as well as hundreds of thousands of military vehicles. Tires for these, and the fuel for our air forces also came from the Allies. Almost all the rolling stock and railway engines, too.

UPD: The aluminum, copper, and some other stats vary from source to source depending on whether they include the USSR’s production throughout the entire year 1945 or not. For example, in 1945 the production of Soviet aluminum tripled because two additional plants were taken into use (Kamensk-Uralsky and Bogoslovsky.)

What is almost certain, is that without American deliveries of food to our troops, the USSR wouldn’t have lasted past the winter/spring of 1943. Consider the following:

In January 1941, the combined food reserves of the USSR amounted to 16,162,000 metric tons. This means about 80 kilograms per head of population. Much of this was lost in the summer and fall of 1941 to the advancing Germans and as a result of the scorched earth policy. Almost the entire stock of canned meat on the European territory also was lost.
The food production in the most fertile territories west of Volga was lost in 1942, and most of it was also lost in 1941.
The agriculture lost millions of work hands when men from the countryside were drafted into the army and mobilized for military production.
Horses from the collective and state farms were requisitioned for the army. Almost the entire stock of agricultural machines was rendered idle because of a strict fuel rationing and the absence of spare parts to the shoddily made tractors and other equipment.
The appalling losses of human lives in Leningrad where over a million succumbed to starvation, cold, and diseases in 1941–1943 indicates what happened elsewhere in the country where the scorched earth policy left remaining civilians without food and shelter. My mom was on the verge of starvation in Moscow in the fall of 1941—imagine how bad it was in the provinces.

Below, is a piece of a government-endorsed painting of Alexander Deineka “Tanks are heading to war”. According to canons of official propaganda, the apples and the Sunday clothes the peasant woman is wearing for work symbolize the wealth of Soviet countryside at the start of the war. However, the fact that the woman uses a milk cow for plowing her plot subtly indicates a huge problem food production faced in wartime USSR: no horses for food production, and no tractors.

Below, this is how the fields really were worked during the war. An agriculture in such a state of despair simply couldn’t carry the mighty Soviet war machine through the dark first half of the war without massive help from the US and other allies.

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