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I just finished watching a British TV series titled "War Factories." I learned things about war production in WWII, that I had never known. The last episode was about Russian military production during WWII. It pointed out that while Stalin liked to take the credit for all the factories that were built in Russia to produce war machinery, he never bothered to mention that Russia had hired U.S. Engineers to design those factories, nor the fact that all building components, and the machines needed to produce a product, were shipped over to Russia from the U.S. Even our engineers went to Russia to oversee the building of these factories. Britain was producing military equipment for Russia as well...sending them Spitfires.

When Hitler invaded Russia, Stalin order all of the military producing factories dismantled, and had them sent by rail, over 800 miles further into the interior to be rebuilt. Of course they ended up sending thousands, if not millions of people along as well to work in those factories. It was basically slave labor.

Stalin had discontinued the production of farm machinery during this time, so of course food production greatly suffered, and thousands of people starved to death, or died from disease. The other thing the Russians failed to realize was that they'd need vehicles to get needed supplies to the soldiers in the field. That's one of the reasons why Liberty ships were built to carry tanks, jeeps, trucks, etc., overseas for the war effort.

This series really opened my eyes when it came to our part in war production during WWII, and how the people of this country created a level of mass production never seen on the planet until that time...and will likely, never be seen again.

You might like this book: The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, by Tim Tzouliadis. It’s very very good.

A history of the migration of thousands of Americans to Soviet Russia in the years prior to World War II recounts how Depression-era Americans from all walks of life pursued what they believed would be better opportunities in Russia only to be targeted, incarcerated, and executed by the Stalin regime.

https://www.amazon.com/Forsaken-American-Tragedy-Stalins-Russia-dp-1594201684/dp/1594201684/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=

Nikita Khrushchev, having served as a military commissar and intermediary between Stalin and his generals during the war, addressed directly the significance of Lend-lease aid in his memoirs:

I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin’s views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were “discussing freely” among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany’s pressure, and we would have lost the war. No one ever discussed this subject officially, and I don’t think Stalin left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state here that several times in conversations with me he noted that these were the actual circumstances. He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so.