This post was supposed to go up on Monday, but events intervened, and I didn’t get around to collecting all the data until just now.
Last week’s (quarterly fundraiser, with its Soviet May Day theme) kept things hectic all last week. Fundraising weeks are grueling, and I didn’t fully recover from this one until this morning, when I slept in for an extra hour. What bliss!
Once again, the remarkable thing was the number of modest donations that came in from so many different places. Here’s the final list — I hope I didn’t leave out any locations:
Stateside: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming
Near Abroad: Canada and the Dominican Republic
Far Abroad: Australia, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, India, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, and the UK
See you in the middle of the long, hot summer, comrades.
Your caption under the photograph of Lenin reading The New York Times is a quite unjustified and historically inaccurate slur; it was Stalin who loved reading that newspaper during the Walter Duranty period!
Imagine being a dictator who is perpetrating a mass genocide upon his people and reading in the “newspaper of record” of the world’s most powerful democracy that what you were doing was not taking place? Mere money couldn’t buy that sort of PR.
And the longer term ramifications of Duranty’s lies about what the Ukrainians call the Holomodor upon the American public’s assessment of and attitude towards the Soviet Union were vast and far reaching. Query whether, but for Duranty, the American public would have condoned even an alliance of convenience with the Soviet Union during WW2, much less gifted it over 11 billion dollars worth – in 1940’s dollars – of Lend Lease aid? In checking that figure from the official (and sympathetic to the program) US government source, I learned the following horrific statistic concerning the “Atlantic Sealift”, which formed only one segment of the transport of Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union ( the Montana-Alaska-Soviet Union “airlift” of aid also cost many American lives) :
“About 9,300 U.S. merchant mariners were killed in the convoys; the U.S. merchant marine suffered a larger percentage of casualties than any U.S. military service.”
[1] http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2010/05/20100518114619zjsredna0.3529736.html#axzz48TcbrRxO
More at: http://iipdigital.usembassy.gov/st/english/article/2010/05/20100518114619zjsredna0.3529736.html#ixzz48Tdd3ZZH
There is an entire book waiting to be written about the deprivations Americans suffered during WW2, rationing of foodstuffs and clothing for starters, just in order that Stalin’s odious regime could be maintained.