Interesting thesis, however, you can’t expect people not to notice that you buried the lede here:
The US provided aid
Here are thoughts on that from people who know an awful lot more about the USSR’s war effort than anyone alive does. My italics:
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.
– Nikita Khrushchev
And:
Today [1963] some say the Allies didn’t really help us … But listen, one cannot deny that the Americans shipped over to us material without which we could not have equipped our armies held in reserve or been able to continue the war.
—Georgy Zhukov
The military commissar and the Marshal of the Soviet Union are not mincing words here, they unequivocally confirm that the United States bankrolled their ability to continue to be at war and that the USSR would have been fucked without Lend-Lease. That scenario ends one way: with an Axis victory.
I agree with you that most probably without the US the Allies would have lost the war, but to the press secretary’s point about how they would be speaking German right now if it were not for them, I highly doubt that Germany could have held control over the entirety of Europe after the war. They would most probably collapse from revolutions/rebelions, but who knows what would have happened.
Interesting thesis, however, you can’t expect people not to notice that you buried the lede here:
Here are thoughts on that from people who know an awful lot more about the USSR’s war effort than anyone alive does. My italics:
– Nikita Khrushchev
And:
—Georgy Zhukov
The military commissar and the Marshal of the Soviet Union are not mincing words here, they unequivocally confirm that the United States bankrolled their ability to continue to be at war and that the USSR would have been fucked without Lend-Lease. That scenario ends one way: with an Axis victory.
I agree with you that most probably without the US the Allies would have lost the war, but to the press secretary’s point about how they would be speaking German right now if it were not for them, I highly doubt that Germany could have held control over the entirety of Europe after the war. They would most probably collapse from revolutions/rebelions, but who knows what would have happened.