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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

Was the Russian military ever that good, actually? In WW2 Russia definitely played a strong role against Germany, but they took massive losses to do so, they desperately needed US equipment/supplies to even do that, and then when they pushed back across Europe they were war criming all over the place, including mass rape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_war_crimes#Mass_rapes

Then when you look post WW2, they were mostly just used to brutally crush a few uprisings, never really had to fight a real war until the current one.

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>they desperately needed US equipment/supplies to even do that

US material aid helped a ton but the push to inflate it's importance to the end result of the war seems never ending.

Only less than 15% of lend lease supplies had arrived a year after the last axis attempt at and advance on the eastern front. The vast majority whilst incredibly helpful arrived when the axis was already rapidly retreating.

I agree that they were incredibly brutal and rapey tho. How much of that was revenge/progression of the horrors of the eastern front idk. I'm inclined to say it was a fragment of the time but there was a ton of rape by them in the Chechnyan and Georgian conflicts as well.

That's the Russian apologist defense yeah, "it was revenge", never mind that they conducted mass rapes among Polish women and girls as well.

I wasn't talking about importance as much as competence. Russia took massive losses to beat down the Germans on the eastern front. They won, but they ended up losing some 25 million people. Given that they were fighting on their home turf vs a smaller population invader, that doesn't make it sound like they were terribly effective other than drowning the Germans in bodies.

https://voxeu.org/article/how-war-was-won

I wonder if mass rape in world war two could be verified by DNA analysis of the following generation to see how many newborn were the product of males from occupying forces as opposed to previous generations.

You can start with DNA analysis of Vladimir Pukin and Angela Markel.

The fear and reputation of the Russian military/nuclear program/spying apparatus has often done more damage historically than the effectiveness of those programs. For example, because the CIA couldn't find evidence for the nukes and infra for deployment which they thought that Russia possessed (or could possess), they began to think the silos were just very cleverly disguised as mundane structures like farm silos, church architecture (IIRC), etc. Apparently they spent a lot of resources going down that rabbithole before realizing Russia simply wasn't that capable. Or how everyone was potentially a Soviet spy or secret communist; it got to the point that you could ruin a career just by suggesting it. This fear did more damage to the average American than any spies did.

Think about how the Vietnam War went for USA. USSR was doing there almost exactly what USA (and the rest of their alliance) is doing now in Ukraine.

I wouldn't use the Ukraine war as an example of the US army being competent (except for maybe logistics and intel). We're supplying then, but we're not doing the actual fighting.

And in the same way USSR didn't fight in the Vietnam war.

Seeing more of this Revisionism of WW2 since the cooling of US-Russia relations (adding to the long time downplaying of Chinese suffering in WW2 vs European suffering)

1 - While Russia was the biggest component, it was the Soviet army - which included Ukraine (and led by a Georgian). So you're tarring both sides of the current war in your comment.

2 - It was a World War, tragic for all parties involved. You look at each side and they had moments of brilliance and absolute disasters. The Soviet Union (nor the UK) didn't have the luxury to sit back and scale their industry because the Axis forces were literally on their front, not separated by an Atlantic Ocean. Would the SU have won without American supplies? We don't know, but to downplay the player who was involved in the biggest military operations of the war that made D Day look like a side battle (Stalingrad, Kursk, Seelow Heights, Leningrad, Operation Bagration, search any one of those) shows a lack of historical awareness.

Edit - Adding to the above - more Civilians died in the Soviet Union than the total combined military deaths of the other Allied Powers. War is hell and shouldn't be romanticised or seen as a solution.

> So you're tarring both sides of the current war in your comment.

Okay? What does this have to do with what I said? The Russians were obviously in charge of the USSR.

> We don't know, but to downplay the player

You're misreading what I wrote. I'm not talking about the importance of their contribution, but about their general competence. Even with US supplies, the USSR took absurdly huge losses against a smaller population invader, while fighting on their own home turf. That speaks to general ineffectiveness, that they could only win through overwhelming numbers.

The most important purpose of a military is to defend their country's populace. The USSR utterly failed here. You can argue that this is because the USSR was also just less economically developed than Germany, but that doesn't exactly paint the country in a flattering light either.

> The Soviet Union (nor the UK) didn't have the luxury to sit back and scale their industry

Bullshit, they could've done it earlier. Germany went back on peace to split Poland with the USSR, any idiot could see the likelihood of eventual backstabbing. Stalin knew it was coming, he was just wrong on exactly when because he didn't believe the intel he got.

> War is hell and shouldn't be romanticised or seen as a solution.

Obviously.

> led by a Georgean

You mean stalin? That's who you want us to sympathize with?

I don't think he referred to the theory that Putin is half-Georgian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Putina

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