How about some payback first for the weapons that won the big war?

WASHINGTON, DC – War makes strange bedfellows, the old maxim went. Peace makes strange bedfellows, too. Otherwise, how can we explain the fact that America’s George W. Bush is in Moscow, making chika-chika with Russia’s evangelist of a new Soviet Empire, without Communism – but neither is he a Democrat (much less a Republican) – the post-Stalin "man of steel" and Yukos-basher – Vladimir Putin?

Next-door neighbors Estonia and Lithuania have refused Moscow’s invitation to join the celebration – still bitter over Russia’s refusal to apologize (it’s not just the Chinese who resent no apologies) for the old Soviet Union’s atrocities and iron-clad rule over them.

But Bush is merrily in the heart of what his fellow Republican Ronald Reagan once dubbed The Evil Empire, sunnily holding hands with Mr. Putin and preparing to sing the chorus tomorrow (May 9, the 60th anniversary of the Fall of Nazi Germany and Victory in Europe): "All hail to Josef Stalin and the Great Patriotic War – for having crushed Adolf Hitler and liberated Europe!"

For that’s what tomorrow’s fanfare and military goosestepping (yep, the Kremlin Guards have their own high-kickin’ style, balancing their rifles like ballet dancers on the palm of one hand) are all about.

We’re all for Mr. Bush cozying up somewhat to Mr. Putin, the former KGB in natty suits and with a killer smile. For Russia’s a good card to play – though it’s the other way around – with Pyongyang’s nuclear rockets (the current buzz) ready to test their "new" delivery systems in the direction of Tokyo and Washington DC. Believe me, that’s what they’re biting their nails about here in the corridors of frustration and power. North Korea’s Kim Il Sung may look crazy, but to risk a bromide, crazy like a fox.

Putin, of course, has his own agenda. He’s already selling weaponry, aircraft, technology and systems to the Chinese, but his nostalgia for past Soviet Power is what’s worrisome, not his mercantile instincts. David Satter, a Russian expert from the Hoover Institution and my alma mater, SAIS Johns Hopkins University, ran two timely quotations from Putin in The Wall Street Journal Friday. Putin, in his speech last year at the Victory Day celebrations had declared: "We were victorious in the most just war of the twentieth century. May 9 is the pinnacle of our glory." In his recent state of the nation address last April 25, Putin had even called the break-up of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

Longing for the old USSR? You betcha. Putin doesn’t hide his yearning under a bushel. Nobody was ever punished in Russia for the atrocities of Stalin and the Soviet gulags, no Communist commissar ever called to book, no former KGB torturer unmasked and made to pay for crimes. The victims continue to be victimized by loss of memory – and are forgotten. It was the bullies and murderers who were rehabilitated.

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Tomorrow it will be emphasized how Russia demolished Hitler, pounded Berlin to rubble, overran the Hitler Bunker, in effect, ended the war by bringing Germany down to the ashes of defeat. Indeed, the Russians did score a magnificent victory, by overwhelming then crushing Nazi Germany in a final offensive, tearing the Swastika from its pinnacle in the Reichstag, planting the Red flag on Potsdam Square. Russia did so at the horrible cost of 27 million dead. We salute the courage and valor of the Russian people and their fighters from the Soviet Republics.

Yet, this might be a propitious moment for Bush to hand oil-rich Putin, Moscow and Petersburg, the unpaid bill.

It’s already forgotten – deliberately I’d say – that America supplied its Allies with more than $50 billion in war material through Lend-Lease, with most of the weaponry, warplanes, tanks, locomotives, the sinews of war, being rushed to embattled Russia.

Stalinist propaganda, throughout the Cold War, and that of his Soviet successors, claimed that United States military equipment (a scant four percent! they alleged) delivered was not substantial.

This was nonsense. I remember one of my professors at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins, here in DC was Dr. Moses Harvey – unknown despite his heroic contribution to winning the war. He had been one of the ranking supervisors of the Lend-Lease equipment and weaponry rushed to the Soviet eastern front to help Stalin stem the advance of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa. He kept on complaining to us in class that the Russians had never paid back a cent.

"When we presented them our first bill of US$7 billion Stalin and his Kremlin gang scoffed. They offered to give everything back! Everything was, by then, mainly junk." But the Cold War was on and nobody, even in Washington, listened to Harvey’s rantings. He became almost a pathetic figure of fun.

Since the fall of the USSR and the demolition of the Iron Curtain, Soviet archives were finally opened and the real impact of Lend-Lease has just been revealed. Russian scholars A.S. Orlov and V.P. Kozhanov, citing data from the suddenly available archives reported in a Russian historical journal some long-suppressed details of more than 17 million tons of US Lend-Lease war material delivered to Russia under the agreement’s four protocols, from 1941-1945.

This is only a partial list of what helped Russia defeat Hitler:

Airplanes, 22,195!

Armored vehicles, 12,980, including 7,000 tanks.

Chemical products, 842,000 tons.

Food, 4.3 million tons.

Locomotives, 1,981.

Medical supplies, 2.6 million tons.

Petroleum products, 345,000 tons.

Railroad cars, 11,156.

Ships, 560.

Trucks and other vehicles, 427,000.

Could Russia have won without US Lend-Lease help? Many American captains, their crews and ships went to the bottom of the Baltic, destroyed by German attack or Baltic winter storms, as well as British and other Allied ships and crews, to rush this stuff to Joe Stalin’s "brave" warriors. Will they be remembered, too – tomorrow, May 9th? Not likely.

As for our professor, Moses Harvey, we thought he was exaggerating, but he was right! Finally vindicated by history. Small consolation. They still haven’t paid and never will – not even in terms of gratitude or a salute.