The high level politicians who started the war were not the ones who died by the millions in the trenches.
The various peoples of the USSR paid a high price for the decisions of their politicians, both before the war, and during the war.
Standard response.
It wasn’t high level politicians who were machine-gunning Cossacks, jews, Poles, etc. by the millions. Those machine gun carrying russians could have dispensed with the “high level politicians” many, many times. But they didn’t.