Am I right to assume that some of the (indeed, deeply shocking) loss of life was of a piece with pre-War Stalinist political purging, economic reorganization, and social engineering?
Which is to say, being a Soviet citizen meant you had been dealt a bad hand, a situation that Operation Typhoon only exacerbated?
OTOH, it seems difficult to imagine a counterfactual Tsarist Russian economy turning back the Third Reich as did the centralized Leninist/Stalinist USSR’s.
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