Do still want to make some kind of case that the U.S. won the war?
The U.S. lost less and provided more materials. It looks like the russians lost more than anyone else. The courage of the US soldiers was right up there with the best.
The Soviet WWII-time Mosin-Nagants are generally of poor "war-time" quality, when numbers were valued much more than quality. So a WWII rifle has solely memorial value - to Russians. Other people won't find this in them, of course.
But the Soviet-made 193x generation is much better, as well as the Finnish-made.
Do you need me to provide a comparison of how many divisions were committed on which fronts?
Seriously? The casualty numbers are pretty easy to look up, so I did that. I’ll recommend you read some actual war history if you want more data than that. Anyone who actually studies the war seriously, understands my point. The Soviets are the ones that ground down the German army. They paid dearly for it (to a good extent because Stalin was an idiot, and had gutted his officer corps right before the war, and then he refused to pay attention to any warnings about the invasion).
The didn’t hold off the whole German army, just the vast majority between 1940 and 1944, and then ground most of the rest into dust after that.
Once Germany invaded the Soviet Union, they were fully committed other than the rather minor front in North Africa, and that was mostly Italians under German command.
History and the numbers speak for themselves. The U.S. can pride themselves on their logistical support for what the Russians did, but the Russians actually did it. Normandy invasion and the following Battle of France was all well and good, but even had that not happened, the Russians would have still made it to Berlin.
The Western Front sped things up, but were in no way a tipping point of the war. The main thing they accomplished was keeping some countries out of the Soviet Sphere which is an undeniably good thing.
The Russians had crap leadership until Zhukov was put in charge, and honestly I think even he is very overrated. Stalin had purged the leadership of the Red Army in the 1930s and it was very evident when the Germans invaded. That’s why they got plowed early on and lost so many men. Then even with Zhukov in charge, they didn’t really follow a tactical style which cared much about casualties. Zhukov was pretty happy to trade blood for victory, which was unlike either the Allies or the Germans.
The Mosin Nagant is really nothing special as rifles go. It’s another bolt action firing a powerful cartridge (quite comparable to the Mauser K-98 or the Springfield 03). Honestly I don’t see that it can be either credited or discredited all that much. It worked for the job at hand. It wasn’t revolutionary like the Garand or STG-43.