A wartime cartoon in The New Yorker shows the docks of Murmansk covered with off-loaded containers and a Soviet official having trouble finding the word "spam" in the dictionary. Spam was one of the many food items sent to the former Soviet Union by the United States under the Lend-Lease Program first suggested by Winston Churchill, to which the United States contributed the major portion. The subject has been previously covered by such books as Hubert van Tuyll's Feeding the Bear (1989), but the present well-written text has the advantage of access to Russian sources, which were put to good use by Albert Weeks. The author makes a clear case that the program was a major factor in the survival of the Soviet Union and the victory over Nazism.
Read Full Article »
