They lost at least 1.5 times as many people as we did in all of WWII there, same for the krauts. And that doesn’t count those that went into captivity and never came back.
Remembering that battle is legitimate. Renaming the city to that Stalin era name would be bad, but this is fine.
They would have been overun without us, and then they tried to overun the World. World saved twice, and it still takes us for granted.
Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin
Numbers of deaths caused by Stalinism, 1924–1953 (excluding killings outside of Soviet borders)
Event Est. number of deaths
Dekulakization 530,000–600,000
Great Purge 700,000–1,200,000
Gulag 1,500,000–1,713,000
Soviet deportations 450,000–566,000
Katyn massacre 22,000
Holodomor 2,500,000–4,000,000
Kazakh famine of 1931–33 1,450,000
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin
