The Soviet Union sided with Nazi Germany literally to the day Hitler invaded them. There would have been no modernized Luftwaffe, tanks or rocket program without the assistance of the Soviet Union during the inter-war years and they also divided up Poland. I have no sympathy at all for the Russians and what happened to them in that era. We could have bested the Axis without the USSR, although it would have been much more costly and hard-fought.
“...although it would have been much more costly and hard-fought.”
The USSR did suffer some minor casualties, somewhere around 20-22 million
Russia served as a way to drain German resources and distract the German military command.
Having studied the war between Nazi Germany and the USSR most of my adult life, it wasn't quite that simple. And I would point out that the Soviets felt the same way about our participation.
Very few people in the West know the guy who actually won the war for the Soviet Union; Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, who developed the Red Army mobilization plans. It was his work that allowed the Stalin to create fresh armies on the fly more rapidly than the Germans could destroy them. And all the while, even though those armies were destroyed in the meatgrinder, they wore down the Germans who could not replace their losses.
Yes, Stalin's brutality and incompetence cost a lot of lives in that war. Most of that was because of the condition he put the Red Army on June 22, 1941, with the officer purges, the rapid expansion of the force structure, the obsolete worn out equipment and occupation of unfortified and unfriendly areas. Because of that the Red Army was going to have to learn its craft in the field, and those lessons were going to be expensive. It was never going to be a rapier like the German panzer units, but instead, by necessity, it was a club used to bludgeon the Wehrmacht into submission. By 1943, Stalin found the generals who knew how to swing the club.
Could we have defeated the Axis in Europe without the USSR? Maybe. Over the course of two wars and two generations at the cost of copious amounts of American blood. The German war machine was in decline by June 6, 1944. We had complete air and naval superiority. And yet, Normandy was not a cakewalk.
Well put.