“Any “knowlegable” WWII historian knows that, while Stalin was personally an evil SOB, he did lead (or order at the point of a bayonet) some ten million Russian soldiers to their death to defeat Hitler on the Eastern Front.”
The Soviets incurred something on the order of 9.5 million military dead on their Western front, 3 million POW deaths, and another 2 million military dead on their Far Eastern front, totaling about 14.5 million military deaths. In return they inflicted a small fraction of the Soviet casualties in German military dead, wounded, and captured. Depending upon the German and non-German sources used, the Russians inflicted somewhere between about 1.1 million to somewhere over 2 million military dead upon the Germans. With this rate of exchange the Soviet Union was basically committing suicide to little purpose, until the United States brought its forces against the Third Reich. Using a fraction of the military personnel and incurring less than 150,000 U.S. military deaths in the ETO, the United States and its Western allies inflicted more killed, wounded, and captured casualties than the Soviet Union did. Furthermore, the U.S. inflicted a major fraction of those casualties upon the German military in only about 2.5 years, whereas the Soviet Union required four years to reach its score of German casualties. Consequently, by reason of casualties and an extensive assortment of other measures, the Soviet Union and Russians tended to be highly ineffective at inflicting casualties with British and U.S. assistance to keep them in the fight. Without British and U.S. assistance, Moscow would have fallen in 1941 and Russia would have surrendered by the time the first U.S. 8th Air Force bomber squadrons began flying combat missions out of England. Yes, Russia sacrificed a terrible toll in lives, but their role contributed little that the Western allies proved capable of doing twice as fast with a tiny fraction of the casualties while inflicting a far greater toll of casualties and material losses upon the German military.