Tanks for Stalin: On the Publication of I.V. Bystrova’s Monograph on Lend-Lease

The article offers a critical analysis of a new monograph by well-known Russian historian Irina V. Bystrova, which is devoted to the history of Lend-Lease. Published in 2019, the monograph fits in contemporary historiographical situation determined by the changes in social and political discourse. Attention is paid to a comprehensive range of sources – documents found by I.V. Bystrova in Russia’s largest Federal archives. The asset of the monograph is the wide variety of problems to be examined – from the issues of organizing Lend-Lease to the everyday life of Soviet personnel on the US territory during World War II. For the first time in Russian historiography I.V. Bystrova undertakes a detailed examination of practically unknown aspects of Lend-Lease, such as organizing the storage, delivery to the ports and transportation of supplies, the lack of transport ships, which limited the supplies to the USSR. The author of the monograph comes to the well-grounded conclusion that the delays and failures of deliveries from the USA and Great Britain to Soviet ports had objective reasons, whereas the limited volumes of Lend-Lease in 1941–1942 were caused by unresolved organizational problems as well as by the outbreak of the war in the Pacific, which made the US switch its efforts to supplying its own armed forces. The article concludes that I.V. Bystrova’s monograph has already become a significant historiographical phenomenon and an undeniable contribution to the study of one of the most controversial phenomena of World War II.