# First Soviet-British-American supply protocol is signed in Moscow

Date: 1941

## The fact

On 1 October 1941 in Moscow, a secret supply protocol among the USSR, the United Kingdom and the United States set quantities of tanks, aircraft, trucks and food. [Stalin](/people/joseph-stalin) received the Harriman-Beaverbrook mission. Deliveries then ran Arctic, Persian and Pacific routes.

Later speeches, the cult, and measured deaths are not mixed into this Fact.

## Context

This is a coalition logistics Fact. Soviet production remained the majority of Red Army equipment. Tonnage debates are later historiography, not a reason to drop the protocol.

Shared responsibility with the Politburo, Sovnarkom, NKVD, front commands, and later the State Defence Committee is part of the record. Sharing is not a reason to drop Stalin’s signature or chairmanship, and it is not a reason to treat every local killing as a personal handwriting sample.

## Evidence and sources

FRUS publishes the conference record. Britannica records Lend-Lease. Weeks and Harrison independently reconstruct delivery volumes as ranges.

Where later commissions publish death or deportee estimates, those estimates are attributed to the commission, not invented as a Factrail original count.

## Significance

Initiating allied-assistance path, medium confidence, shared with Roosevelt and Churchill. Direct Soviet acceptance.

The attached driver is [durability-of-allied-military-assistance](/drivers/durability-of-allied-military-assistance). A decree does not harvest grain, a pact does not fire a rifle, and a conference protocol does not occupy a city by itself. Implementation, if dated, is a later Fact. Mixed welfare effects are separate paths.

## What is established and what is not

Established: the 1 October 1941 Moscow protocol opened large-scale Allied supply. Not established: that Lend-Lease ‘won the war alone’, or that it was negligible.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original protocol with a different date or signatory; a demonstrated forgery of the cited order; or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of war, weather, or unauthorized local action.

The documentary limit is the same for every Stalin instrument in this dossier. Central files can show that an order was issued; they cannot, by themselves, reconstruct every raion’s implementation. Memoir and literary evidence (Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Grossman) is used here only as independent texture, never as the sole causal source. Soviet published statistics of the 1930s are treated as official claims with known incentives to over-report industrial output and under-report famine. Post-1956 party revelations, the 1991–92 archival openings, the 2010 Russian [State Duma](/organizations/state-duma) statement on Katyn, Ukrainian Holodomor statutes, and USHMM/Wilson Center document publications are later independent or successor-state records. They do not convert this Fact into a personality score. They do not cancel the original instrument. Readers who want the welfare path should open the named driver, then the indicator that driver already reaches, rather than treating the portrait as the mechanism.

The documentary limit is the same for every Stalin instrument in this dossier. Central files can show that an order was issued; they cannot, by themselves, reconstruct every raion’s implementation. Memoir and literary evidence (Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Grossman) is used here only as independent texture, never as the sole causal source. Soviet published statistics of the 1930s are treated as official claims with known incentives to over-report industrial output and under-report famine. Post-1956 party revelations, the 1991–92 archival openings, the 2010 Russian State Duma statement on Katyn, Ukrainian Holodomor statutes, and USHMM/Wilson Center document publications are later independent or successor-state records. They do not convert this Fact into a personality score. They do not cancel the original instrument. Readers who want the welfare path should open the named driver, then the indicator that driver already reaches, rather than treating the portrait as the mechanism.

## People

- Joseph Stalin: https://factrail.ai/people/joseph-stalin

## Drivers

- Durability of Allied Military Assistance: https://factrail.ai/drivers/durability-of-allied-military-assistance

## Sources

- https://www.britannica.com/topic/lend-lease
- https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1941v01

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/su-lend-lease-protocol-1941