Rachel is pointing out that the Soviets did defeat the Nazis

[Igel]

55. The numbers are disputed.

On the high end, they say about 14 million military personnel were lost--some in fighting, some from illness, others in labor camps.

On the low end, it's around 8 million.

In other words, you've elevated the Jews killed during pogroms under the Germans and those civilians who died from artillery shells and starvation in Leningrad to the status of Red Army soldiers. Lots of people died from other reasons, and half or more weren't military. Unless we want to consider every Soviet citizen a member of the armed forces.

So much for truth in the casualty figures.

The US entered the war late, mind you. And once entered, the war wasn't on its territory--and for a decent chunk of the war what was happening was preparation and build-up as the Germans fought their idiot cross-channel 'not quite war'. That meant the action on the ground was in N. Africa. During that time German forces could, under the Soviet version of events, have just put up border crossings at Calais and in N. Africa and left a few border guards. Instead they continued to put significant resources into the Western and southern fronts. Not that they had any other use for those resources, of course. But the Germans thought keeping those forces in the West worth the price of losses in the East.

Lend-lease started helping the USSR soon after its entry in the war when the USSR was really hurting. Hard to know how much of a difference it made. Stalin had the USSR military in a relatively sorry shape--and yes, while the USSR economy wasn't great this was largely the result of Stalin's mismanagement and reign of terror.

Da zdravstvuet tsar' Vladimir Vladimirovich, tsar' nash batiushka. Uzh kak na nebe solntsu krasnomy slava!

With apologies to Pushkin-Mussorgsky.