Encyclopedia of Russian History

by James Millar

  LENINGRAD AFFAIR

  materials to those countries whose defense the president deemed vital to the defense of the United States itself. According to the system, the materials destroyed, lost, or consumed during the war should not be subject to payment after the war. The materials that were not used during the war and that were suitable for civilian consumption should be paid in full or in part, while weapons and war materials could be demanded back. After the United States entered the war, the concept of lend lease, originally a system of unidirectional U.S. aid, was transformed into a system of mutual aid, which involved pooling the resources of the countries in the anti-Hitler coalition (known as the concept of “pool”). Initially authorized for the purpose of aiding Great Britain, in April 1941 the Lend-Lease Act was extended to Greece, Yugoslavia, and China, and, after September 1941, to the Soviet Union. By September, 20, 1945, the date of cancellation of the Lend-Lease Act, American aid had been received by nearly forty countries.

  During World War II, the U.S. spent a total of $49.1 billion on the Lend-Lease Act. This included $13.8 billion in aid to Great Britain and $9.5 billion to the USSR. Repayment in kind-called “reverse lend-lease”-was estimated at $7.8 billion, of which $2.2 million was the contribution of the USSR in the form of a discount for transport services.

  The Soviet Union received aid on lend-lease principles not only from the United States, but also from the states of the British Commonwealth, primarily Great Britain and Canada. Economic relations between them were adjusted by mutual aid agreements and legalized by special Allies’ protocols, renewable annually. The First Protocol was signed in Moscow on October, 1, 1941; the second in Washington (October 6, 1942); the third in London (September 1, 1943); and the fourth in Ottawa (April, 17, 1945). The Fourth Protocol was added by a special agreement between the USSR and the United States called the “Program of October 17, 1944” (or “Milepost”), intended for supplies for use by the Soviet Union in the war against Japan.

  On the basis of those documents, the Soviet Union received 18,763 aircraft, 11,567 tanks and self-propelled guns, 7,340 armored vehicles and armored troop-carriers, more than 435,000 trucks and jeeps, 9,641 guns, 2,626 radar, 43,298 radio stations, 548 fighting ships and boats, and 62 cargo ships. The remaining 75 percent of cargoes imported into the USSR consisted of industrial equipment, raw material, and foodstuffs. A significant portion (up to seven percent) of supplies was lost during transportation.

  Most of the cargoes sent to the USSR were delivered by three main routes: via Iran, the Far East, and the northern ports Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. The last route was the shortest but also the most dangerous.

  After the war the United State cancelled all lend-lease debts except that of the USSR. In 1972 the USSR and the United States signed an agreement that the USSR would pay $722 million of its debt by July 1, 2001. See also: FOREIGN DEBT; WORLD WAR II; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH, NORTHERN CONVOYS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Beaumont, Joan. (1980). Comrades in Arms: British Aid to Russia, 1941-1945. London: Davis-Poynter. Hall, H. Duncan; Scott, J. D., and Wrigley, C. C. (1956). Studies of Overseas Supply. London: H. M. Stationery Off. Herring, George C. (1973). Aid to Russia, 1941-1946: Strategy, Diplomacy, the Origins of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press. Jones, Robert Huhn. (1969). The Roads to Russia: United States Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Van Tuyll, Hubert P. (1989). Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945. New York: Greenwood Press.

  MIKHAIL SUPRUN

  LENIN ENROLLMENT See COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION.

  LENINGRAD AFFAIR

  The “Leningrad Affair” refers to a purge between 1949 and 1951 of the city’s political elite and of nationally prominent communists who had come from Leningrad. More than two hundred Lenin-graders, including many family members of those directly accused, were convicted on fabricated political charges, and twenty-three were executed. Over two thousand city officials were fired from their jobs. Hundreds from many other cities were jailed during this purge.

  LENINGRAD, SIEGE OF

  The “Leningrad Affair” derived largely from a power struggle between Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s two leading potential successors: Andrei Zhdanov, Leningrad’s party chief during the city’s lengthy wartime siege, and Georgy Malenkov, supported by the head of the political police, Lavrenti Beria. Zhdanov’s sudden death of apparent natural causes in the late summer of 1948 left his prot?g?s from Leningrad vulnerable. In early 1949 Malenkov charged that the Leningraders were trying to create a rival Communist Party of Russia in conspiracy with another former Leningrad party chief, Alexei Kuznetsov. Malenkov used as pretexts a wholesale trade market that had been set up in Leningrad without Moscow’s permission, as well as alleged voting irregularities in a Leningrad party conference. The Leningrad party members were also charged with treason.

  Aside from Kuznetsov, the most prominent victims of the “Leningrad Affair” were Politburo member and Gosplan chairman Nikolai Voznesensky and first secretary of the Leningrad party committee Pyotr Popkov. The three were shot along with others on October 1, 1950. The purge signaled a return to the violent and conspiratorial politics of the 1930s. It eliminated the Leningraders as contenders for national power and downgraded Leningrad essentially to the status of a provincial city within the USSR. See also: BERIA; LAVRENTI PAVLOVICH; MALENKOV, GEORGY MAKSIMILYANOVICH; ZHDANOV, ANDREI ALEXANDROVICH; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONVICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Knight, Amy. (1993). Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1991). Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, ed. and tr. Harold Shukman. New York: Grove Wei-denfeld. Zubkova, Elena. (1998). Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957, tr. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

  RICHARD BIDLACK

  LENINGRAD, SIEGE OF

  For 872 days during World War II, German and Finnish armies besieged Leningrad, the Soviet Union’s second largest city and important center for armaments production. According to recent estimates, close to two million Soviet citizens died in Leningrad or along nearby military fronts between 1941 and 1944. Of that total, roughly one million civilians perished within the city itself.

  The destruction of Leningrad was one of Adolf Hitler’s strategic objectives in attacking the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. On September 8, 1941, German Army Group North sealed off Leningrad. It advanced to within a few miles of its southern districts and then took the town of Schlisselburg along the southern shore of Lake Ladoga. That same day, Germany launched its first massive aerial attack on the city. Germany’s ally, Finland, completed the blockade by retaking territory north of Leningrad that the Soviet Union had seized from Finland during the winter war of 1939-1940. About 2.5 million people were trapped within the city. The only connection that Leningrad maintained with the rest of the Soviet Union was across Lake Ladoga, which German aircraft patrolled. Finland refused German entreaties to continue its advance southward along Ladoga’s eastern coast to link up with German forces.

  Hitler’s plan was to subdue Leningrad through blockade, bombardment, and starvation prior to seizing the city. German artillery gunners, together with the Luftwaffe, killed approximately 17,000 Leningraders during the siege. Although supplies of raw materials, fuel, and food dwindled rapidly within Leningrad, war plants within the city limits produced large numbers of tanks, artillery guns, and other weapons during the fall of 1941 and continued to manufacture vast quantities of ammunition throughout the rest of the siege.

  Most civilian deaths occurred during the winter of 1941-1942. Bread was the only food that was regularly available, and between November 20 and December 25, 1941, the daily bread ration for most Leningraders dropped to its lowest level of 125 grams, or about 4.5 ounces. To give the appearance of larger rations, inedible materials, such as saw dust, were baked into the bread. To make matters worse, generation of electrical current was sharply curta
iled in early December because only one city power plant operated at reduced capacity. Most Leningraders thus lived in the dark; they lacked running water because water pipes froze and burst. Temperatures during that especially cold winter plummeted to -40 degrees Farenheit in late January. Residents had to fetch water from central mains, canals, and the Neva River. The frigid

  LENINGRAD, SIEGE OF

  Soviet troops launch a counterattack during the Nazi siege of Leningrad. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS winter, however, brought one advantage: Lake Ladoga froze solid enough to become the “Road of Life” over which food was trucked into the city, and some 600,000 emaciated Leningraders were evacuated.

  During the spring and summer of 1942, those remaining in Leningrad cleaned up debris and filth from the previous winter, buried corpses, and planted vegetable gardens in practically every open space they could find. A fuel pipeline and electrical cable were laid under Ladoga, and firewood and peat stockpiled in anticipation of a second siege winter. The evacuation over Ladoga continued, and by the end of 1942 the city’s population was pared down to 637,000. Repeated attempts were made in 1942 to lift the siege; yet it was not until January 1943 that the Red Army pierced the blockade by retaking a narrow corridor along Ladoga’s southern coast. A rail line was extended into the city, and the first train arrived from “the mainland” on February 7. Nevertheless, the siege would endure for almost another year as German guns continued to pound Leningrad and its tenuous rail link from close range. On January 27, 1944, the blockade finally ended as German troops retreated all along the Soviet front.

  Leningrad’s defense held strategic importance for the Soviet Union. Had the city fallen in the autumn of 1941, Germany could have redeployed larger forces toward Moscow and thereby increased the chances of taking the Soviet capital. Lenin-graders who endured the horrific ordeal were motivated by love of their native city and country, fear of what German occupation might bring, and the intimidating presence of Soviet security forces. In just the first fifteen months of the war, 5,360 Leningraders were executed for a variety of alleged crimes, including political ones.

  Relations between Leningrad’s leadership and the Kremlin were tempestuous during the siege ordeal. The city’s isolation gave it a measure of autonomy from Moscow, and the suffering Leningrad endured promoted the growth of a heroic reputation for the city. From 1949 to 1951 many of Leningrad’s political, governmental, industrial, and

  LENIN LIBRARY

  cultural leaders were fired, and some executed, on orders from the Kremlin during the notorious Leningrad Affair. See also: LENINGRAD AFFAIR; WORLD WAR II

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Glantz, David M. (2002). The Battle for Leningrad, 1941-1944. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Goure, Leon. (1962). The Siege of Leningrad. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Petrovskaya Wayne, Kyra. (2000). Shurik: A Story of the Siege of Leningrad. New York: The Lyons Press. Salisbury, Harrison. (1969). The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. New York: Harper amp; Row. Simmons, Cynthia and Perlina, Nina, eds. (2002). Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Skrjabina, Elena. (1971). Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

  RICHARD BIDLACK

  LENIN LIBRARY See RUSSIAN STATE LIBRARY.

  LENIN’S TESTAMENT

  Lenin’s so-called Political Testament was actually a letter dictated secretly by Vladimir Ilich Lenin in late December 1922, which he intended to discuss at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923. The letter was initially known only to Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya and the two secretaries who took down its contents. Unfortunately, on March 10, 1923, Lenin suffered a stroke, which put an end to his active role in Soviet politics. It is widely believed that Krupskaya, fearing that its contents might cause further Party disunity, kept the testament under lock and key, until Lenin’s death in January 1924. She then felt it safe enough to be read to delegates at the Thirteenth Congress. All those attending this Congress were sworn to keep the contents of the letter a secret. It was then suppressed in the Soviet Union, and so the document did not appear in English until 1926.

  A number of versions are currently in circulation, each of which has been manipulated for political purposes, especially by those who wish to criticize Josef Stalin or show how positively Leon Trotsky was viewed by Lenin. Nevertheless it is clear that Lenin was concerned in the Testament with potential successors and that most of all he favored Trotsky rather than his actual successor Stalin. The Testament of December 29 indicates it clear that Lenin wanted to avoid an irreversible split in the Party and provides a balanced assessment of all prospective candidates. With regard to Trotsky, Lenin notes that “[as] his struggle against the CC [Central Committee] on the question of the People’s Commissariat has already proved, [he] is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present CC, but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.” Concerning Stalin, by contrast, Lenin points out that he “is too rude, and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a general secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing (sic) another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, less capricious, and so forth.” In a postscript dated March 5, 1923, Lenin criticizes Stalin for insulting Lenin’s wife and adds that unless they receive a retraction and apology then “relations between us should be broken off.” In relation to other members of the CC, Lenin points to the October episode in which Zinoviev and Kamenev objected to the idea of an immediate armed insurrection against the Provisional Government and also to Trotsky’s Menshevik past, but he adds that neither should suffer any blame or personal consequence.

  Lenin was therefore extremely worried about the degree of power Stalin had attained and thought this was dangerous for the future of the Party and Russia insofar as he was capable of abusing this power. He advocated that Stalin be removed from the post of general secretary. It is generally agreed by historians that Trotsky’s failure to use the Testament was a major political mistake and an error that allowed Stalin to rise to power. But it is also conceded that Trotsky, in agreeing not to use it in this manner, was abiding by Lenin’s wishes to avoid a split. Trotsky therefore put Party unity before his own ambitions. See also: LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARI-ONOVICH; TROTSKY, LEON DAVIDOVICH

  LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Buranov, Yuri. (1994). Lenin’s Will: Falsified and Forbidden. Amherst, NY: Prometheus. Volkogonov, Dmitri. (1994). Lenin: A New Biography. New York: Free Press. Wolfe, Bertram D. (1984). Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History. New York: Stein and Day.

  CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS

  ers consciously manipulated popular sentiment about Lenin for utilitarian political goals. Yet this would not have created such a powerful political symbol if it had not been rooted in the spiritual, philosophical, and political culture of Soviet leaders and the Soviet people. More than a decade after the fall of communism, Lenin’s Tomb continued to stand on Red Square even though there were periodic calls for his burial.

  LENIN’S TOMB

  Shortly after the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin in 1924, and despite the opposition of his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Soviet leaders built a mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square to display his embalmed body. The architect Alexei V. Shchusev designed two temporary cube-shaped wooden structures and then a permanent red granite pyramidlike building that was completed in 1929. The top of the mausoleum held a tribune from which Soviet leaders addressed the public. This site became the ceremonial center of the Bolshevik state as Stalin and subsequent leaders appeared on the tribune to view parades on November 7,
May 1, and other Soviet ceremonial occasions. When Josef V. Stalin died in 1953, his body was placed in the mausoleum next to Lenin’s. In 1961, as Nikita Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin’s cult of personality intensified, Stalin’s body was removed from the mausoleum and buried near the Kremlin wall. Lenin and his tomb, however, remained the quintessential symbols of Soviet legitimacy.

  Because of Lenin’s status as unrivaled leader of the Bolshevik Party, and because of Russian traditions of personifying political power, a personality cult glorifying Lenin began to develop even before his death. The Soviet leadership mobilized the legacy of Lenin after 1924 to establish its own legitimacy and gain support for the Communist Party. Recent scholarship has disproved the idea that it was Stalin who masterminded the idea of embalming Lenin, instead crediting such figures as Felix Dzerzhinsky, Leonid Krasin, Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, and Anatoly Lunacharsky. It has also been suggested that the cult grew out of popular Orthodox religious traditions and the philosophical belief of certain Bolshevik leaders in the deification of man and the resurrection of the dead through science. The archival sources underscore the contingency of the creation of the Lenin cult. They show that Dzerzhinsky and other Bolshevik leadSee also: CULT OF PERSONALITY; KREMLIN; KRUPSKAYA, NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA; LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH; RED SQUARE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Tucker, Robert C. (1973). Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929. New York: Norton. Tumarkin, Nina. (1983). Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

  KAREN PETRONE

  LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH

  (1870-1924), revolutionary publicist, theoretician, and activist; founder of and leading figure in the Bolshevik Party (1903-1924); chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR/USSR (1917-1924).

  The reputation of Vladimir Ilich Lenin (pseudonym of V.I. Ulyanov) has suffered at the hands of both his supporters and his detractors. The former turned him into an idol; the latter into a demon. Lenin was neither. He was born on April 22, 1870, into the family of a successful school inspector from Simbirsk. For his first sixteen years, Lenin lived the life of a child of a conventional, moderately prosperous, middle-class, intellectual family. The ordinariness of Lenin’s upbringing was first disturbed by the death of his father, in January 1886 at the age of 54. This event haunted Lenin, who feared he might also die prematurely, and in fact died at almost exactly the same age as his father. Then, in March 1887, Lenin’s older brother was arrested for terrorism; he was executed the following May. The event aroused Lenin’s curiosity about what had led his brother to sacrifice his life. It also put obstacles in his path: As the brother of a convicted terrorist, Lenin was excluded from Kazan University. He eventually took a law degree,