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Stalin had to have someone actually physically read the mail — a huge expenditure of manpower during years when literally millions were being fed to the guns. After the “allies” met in Germany, all of those Red Army soldiers who could be identified from news photos and eyewitnesses were sent to the Gulags. When Marshall Zhukov was asked how the families of the slain should be notified (probably an impossible job), he said, eh, after a couple of years when they don’t come home, the families will get the idea.

Even when the Wehrmacht was in retreat, and Hitler was demanding “counterattacks” (i.e., feeding whole armies into the Red Army guns) the carnage was horrendous on the Soviet side; the figures for the Battle of Berlin have been systematically and ludicrously understated (wikiwacky states 81K, a UK source claims 70K) by the various Stalinists in and out of all gov’ts and alleged institutions of learning — the Red Army losses (mostly 1st Ukrainian and 1st Byelorussian, they were tasked with it, due to the anti-Soviet activity during most of the war) were in the 100s of 1000s; in the street and house-to-house fighting, and with seriously superior artillery and other firepower, they managed to lose 2000 tanks in that period of not quite two weeks, and must have endured atrocious friendly-fire losses in their ground forces, a phenomenon which had also taken a serious toll during the open-country fighting.

The T34 is widely regarded as the best tank in WWII, but most of the Soviet tanks weren’t T34s. During the first year of Operation Barbarossa, a couple of million RA soldiers were shot down, another million/millionfive were captured or gave themselves up, and of the various tanks the RA was using, 1500 remained in working order (it sez here) out of the 22,000 (astonishing number!) they’d started with.

Molotov went east for very secret meetings with the Japanese (there was hardly a shot fired for years between the Red Army and the Japanese until victory in Europe) and came back to tell Stalin that he believed the czarist-era treaty would hold, so 70 divisions deployed in the east were brought west as quickly as they could be loaded on trains. The trains went back empty to bring another massive load. Had it not been for that tremendous redeployment, the defeats and collapse would have been much worse.