They did not need commissars to tell them whether or not to be grateful.

From The Ghost Ships of Archangel by William Geroux.  Page 265.

During and after the Great Patriotic War, Stalin tried to boost Soviet pride and demonize the West by downplaying the convoys’ importance. He suggested the Soviet Union would have beaten Hitler without the West’s help, but accepted it when it was offered. The official Soviet line was that Lend-Lease supplies from the convoys amounted to only 4 percent of total Soviet war production, and thus played a minor role. Stalin never changed his view that the West tried to provide only enough help to prop up the Red Army so that the Soviets and Nazis could keep slaughtering one another—the scenario described by Harry Truman. Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union through some of the most anxious years of the Cold War, between 1958 and 1964, wrote that while America and Britain provided valuable aid in World War II, they were not true friends of the Soviets: “[T]hey . . . wanted the Soviet Union to be considerably weaker after the war so that they could dictate their will to us.”

Many conservative Russians still hold that view today. “I don’t go in for conspiracy theories, but it makes sense,” said Maksym Melnikov, a Russian cruise ship captain in “ his fifties. “I don’t blame America for acting in its self-interest. But America is not a shining city on a hill.” Melnikov, who grew up in Southern Russia, studied the polar convoys and convoy PQ-17 as a schoolboy and then in the maritime academy. “The convoys were important, and the Russian people are very grateful, very grateful,” he said, “but the convoys were not crucial. We could have won the war without you, although it would have taken longer and we would have lost more people.”

In the late 1980s, scholars in both Russia and in the West began reassessing the role of the convoys after many long-sealed Soviet files were opened for scrutiny. Russian historians such as Boris Sokolov and Mikhail Suprun concluded that the convoys provided more “help than the Soviet government was willing to acknowledge. Suprun, in an interview for this book, said Allied Lend-Lease supplies accounted for as much as 20 percent of Soviet war production, not 4 percent. And every piece of cargo on the ships had been specifically requested by Stalin—right down to the caliber of the ammunition and the caloric content of the foodstuffs—to fill the Soviet Union’s most desperate needs.

Suprun said the conflicting views of the Arctic convoys in Russia are generational. “It basically depends on when you grew up, whether you grew up with propaganda or have been allowed to talk openly.” His college students hear a very different assessment of the convoys from him than their parents and grandparents heard from their teachers. The window for reassessing the convoys in Russia may be closing, however. For years, the Russian government supported Suprun’s efforts to dig beneath the propaganda version of the Great Patriotic War. But recently, he said, “I have gotten some complaints.” That was a quite an understatement: In 2009, Suprun was charged with a criminal offense of “invasion of privacy” for researching the fates of ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union who “were sent to work camps in North Russia. The charge against him was dropped after a trial behind closed doors. Suprun’s lawyer told reporters the government had pursued the case to scare him and other historians into leaving the past alone.

Regardless of the official government’s position, Russian rear admiral Alexander Konayev said, “[M]illions of Soviet people at the front and the rear realized they were not struggling with fascism on their own.” They were fighting the Nazis with Western weapons and fighting off hunger with Western food. They did not need Stalin or his commissars to tell them whether or not to be grateful.