The Pacific theatre was a whole other war fought simultaneously with the latter half of the other one. The Soviets killed up to 15 million of their own before

The Pacific theatre was a whole other war fought simultaneously with the latter half of the other one. The Soviets killed up to 15 million of their own before the war even started. (This number may be an overestimate because most locales had been required to overreport their own population over the past century, such that when an accurate census was conducted, the new number lacked both those killed and also the overreports.) How many million Ukrainians were deliberately starved before the war? 2 million? 4 million? (We may compare this to Churchill personally arranging to starve 3 million in and near what is now Bangladesh, around that time.) Neither Germans nor Soviets saw any reason to bother feeding or sheltering their POWs. Soviet POWs were treated as deserters and sent to the GULag on their return, along with many thousands of Cossacks who had escaped well before the war, and were rounded up and sent back. We need not doubt that there was a great deal of ineptitude in the Soviet officer corps, which had been mostly exterminated before the war and then repopulated according to purely political criteria. And, we need not doubt extreme disregard for the lives of conscripts, both Soviet and many, many others shanghaied from occupied territory. None of this is to minimize the heroism of the people sent to fight against the Nazis, subject to attacks both from their own government and from a foreign invader. Fairly early in the war (1940?) the NKVD was ordered to abandon its quota of deserters to be shot from the rear for not advancing eagerly enough.