Amnesia: How Russian History Has Viewed Lend-Lease.

LEND-lease operations (1941-1945); HISTORY & politics; HISTORICAL revisionism; WORLD War II & economics; MARXIST philosophy; IDEOLOGY; SOVIET Union-United States relations; TWENTIETH century; HISTORY; HISTORIOGRAPHY

During the Second World War the United States sent billions of dollars worth of military equipment and supplies to the Soviet Union through the Lend-Lease program. In the Soviet official memory of the war, however, Lend-Lease aid was either marginalized or disappeared completely. Past scholars and even Soviet rulers have given different reasons for this amnesia, which often include a paranoid Stalin or high tensions during the Cold War. This essay argues instead that Marx’s ideology was mainly responsible for marginalizing the memory of U.S. aid to the Soviet Union. For many, World War II legitimized the Soviet’s collective economy. The memory of aid from the capitalist West did not fit the ideological narrative and thus was forgotten. It also demonstrates how memory can be shaped to fit an ideological view. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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