Russia lost a staggering number of casualties in the war (an entire generation of young men). For that you have to admire their bravery, their sacrifice, and the ability of their commanders to get peasants armed with turn-of-century weaponry to charge wave after wave into Nazi armies.
To argue that the US played a trivial role in their victories would simply be ignorant however.
Bravery had nothing to do with it. Not with most, anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_No._227If they turned around, they'd be shot and their families would be sent to concentration camps and shot there.
PS. They lost 13 million military personnel and about 10 million civilians. The bulk of the latter deaths were from starvation, because the Soviet authorities couldn't feed them. The former were mainly from the Soviet military leadership's exceptional bungling in the first year of the war, and their reckless use of manpower to slow the Germans by flooding them with oncoming human waves in the last 3. By comparison, the Germans lost 3.5 million military and about the same civilian. That's with fighting every country in Europe, the US, the USSR, and carpet bombing for 3 years straight.
And all that despite US help. Fuck the Russians. They can't even beat those Chechen rebels after 15 years of fighting in their OWN country. And now they want to occupy Ukraine too, defenseless countries in other words.
