quote:
Russia had a seemingly endless supply of meat for the grinder. They always seemed to sustain disproportionally high losses and still kept coming.

Yep... they just kept sending in fresh bodies. By the end of the war they had lost something like 25,000,000 people. The US lost a little over 400,000 by comparison.

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Posted by Darth_Vader

A galaxy far, far away

Member since Dec 2011

64810 posts

Posted on 4/28/15 at 1:56 pm to terd ferguson

quote:
Yep... they just kept sending in fresh bodies. By the end of the war they had lost something like 25,000,000 people. The US lost a little over 400,000 by comparison.

Keep in mind that less than 10 years before the Germans invaded in 1941, the Soviet Union had a famine (thanks to Stalin) in the Ukraine that killed somewhere between 2.4 to 7.5 million people. And on top of that, the Red Army had gone though the Great Purge where....

quote:
The purge of the Red Army and Military Maritime Fleet removed three of five marshals (then equivalent to five-star generals), 13 of 15 army commanders (then equivalent to three- and four-star generals), eight of nine admirals (the purge fell heavily on the Navy, who were suspected of exploiting their opportunities for foreign contacts),[29] 50 of 57 army corps commanders, 154 out of 186 division commanders, 16 of 16 army commissars, and 25 of 28 army corps commissars

And then there was the wider aspects of the Great Purge....

quote:
According to the declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 persons, of whom 681,692 were shot - an average of 1,000 executions a day

quote:
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, numerous mass graves filled with executed victims of the terror were discovered.[87][88][89][90] Some, such as the killing fields at Kurapaty near Minsk and Bykivnia near Kiev, are believed to contain up to 200,000 corpses.[91][better source needed]

In 2007, one such site, the Butovo firing range near Moscow, was turned into a shrine to the victims of Stalinism. Between August 1937 and October 1938, more than 20,000 people were shot and buried there.

And don't forget that this was less than a generation after the Russian Civil War where about 2.7 million Russians died right on the heels of World War I where between 2.8 million and 3.3 million Russians died.

Long story short... The first half of the 20th Century was a bad time to be Russian.