Mock the Russians all you want. There is much to mock. However you and many other Americans may never have come to exist if it were not for the ordinary Russians, who at tremendous sacrifice, between 1941-1945 decimated and mauled the very best and core of the German military. If America had tried to liberate Europe against an intact German army, American casualties would have been unimaginable. Many of our future fathers and grandfatherssoldiers would have died and would have never come home to procreate.
As I see it, there are no good guys in this Ukraine-Russia war. It’s a miniature version of WW1 - Christians slaughtering Christians in great numbers over relatively minor things.
However, you make a very good point about the sacrifices made by the average Russian in WWII. It’s part of the Russian psyche today. That’s something the West does not often consider.
Not mocking them at all. The people have been victims of their successive governments for centuries. And you’re absolutely right about the key Russian contribution to WWII. If their vicious oppressor du jour, Stalin, hadn’t previously murdered the upper echelons of military leadership, Russian could have accomplished the same thing with millions fewer casualties. Rather, just as in WWI, their sons got to be cannon fodder until sheer numbers, the inherent logistics problems for the Germans, and the weather turned the tide
Of course, the flip-side is that if the West had stayed out, Russia would have been easily destroyed by Nazi Germany.
I, personally, view WWII as the War to Save Communism. Hitler and Mussolini did not spring to life on a vacuum. Fascism was Europe’s response to the Russian Revolution of 1917. A lot of people realized they didn’t like the idea of waking up to their throats being slit.
In a sense, you are right that Hitler probably wouldn’t have stopped with Russia, and the West would have faced a much more formidable adversary.
But the cost of how it went down was the Soviet Union. I wonder how different the results would have been.