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[I was reading Orlando Figes book on the 19th century Crimean war.

It is astonishing how similar the Russian forces today are to what they were then. In the 29th century their preferred enemy was the khanates to the south and east. When they faced western armies they were crushed.]

WWII may have been a fluke. When Stalin and Khrushchev admitted that the mountains of equipment we provided them were essential to their victory, they weren’t being modest. The Battle of Khalkin Gol is generally venerated as a crushing Russian victory over the Japanese. And yet new material from Soviet archives suggests that some of the commentary may be more myth than reality:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol#Soviet_assessment
[The battle was the first victory for the soon-to-be-famous Soviet general Georgy Zhukov, earning him the first of his four Hero of the Soviet Union awards. The two other generals, Grigoriy Shtern and Yakov Smushkevich, had important roles and were also awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union. They would, however, both be executed in the 1941 Purges. Zhukov himself was promoted and transferred west to the Kiev district. The battle experience gained by Zhukov was put to good use in December 1941 at the Battle of Moscow. Zhukov was able to use this experience to launch the first successful Soviet counteroffensive against the German invasion of 1941. Many units of the Siberian and other trans-Ural armies were part of this attack, and the decision to move these divisions from Siberia was aided by the Soviet spy Richard Sorge in Tokyo, who alerted the Soviet government that the Japanese were looking south and were unlikely to launch another attack against Siberia in the immediate future. A year after defending Moscow against the advancing Germans, Zhukov planned and executed the Red Army’s offensive at the Battle of Stalingrad, using a technique very similar to Khalkhin Gol, in which the Soviet forces held the enemy fixed in the center, built up an undetected mass force in the immediate rear area, and launched a pincer attack on the wings to trap the German army.

Following the battle, the Soviets generally found the results unsatisfactory, despite their victory. Though the Soviet forces in the Far East in 1939 were not plagued by fundamental issues to the same extent as those in Europe during the 1941 campaigns, their generals were still unimpressed by their army’s performance. As noted by Pyotr Grigorenko, the Red Army went in with a very large advantage in technology, numbers, and firepower, yet still suffered huge losses, which he blamed on poor leadership.[29]

Although their victory and the subsequent negotiation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact secured the Far East for the duration of the Soviet-German War, the Red Army always remained cautious about the possibility of another, larger Japanese incursion as late as early 1944. In December 1943, when the American military mission proposed a logistics base be set up east of Lake Baikal, the Red Army authorities were according to Coox “shocked by the idea and literally turned white”.[73] Due to this caution, the Red Army kept a large force in the Far East even during the bleakest days of the war in Europe. For example, on July 1, 1942, Soviet forces in the Far East consisted of 1,446,012 troops, 11,759 artillery pieces, 2,589 tanks and self-propelled guns, and 3,178 combat aircraft.[74] Despite this, the Soviet operations chief of the Far Eastern Front, General A. K. Kazakovtsev, was not confident in his army group’s ability to stop an invasion if the Japanese committed to it (at least in 1941–1942), commenting: “If the Japanese enter the war on Hitler’s side ... our cause is hopeless.”[75] ]

My guess is the Japanese gave up on attacking the Soviets because the cost-benefit ratio worked better in Southeast Asia, where there were oil fields to be seized in the Dutch East Indies, and European holdings in the Orient were woefully under-garrisoned because of the war in Europe. Another issue is that a Soviet collapse would have tested the true nature of Japan’s relationship with Germany. Would Japan and Germany be friends, or would they fight each other for land and resources the way many similar alliances of convenience have fallen apart once a common enemy was vanquished?