I get your stance on WWII , but you seem to have somewhat hacked overview of European geopolitics prior to the war . It was a clusterfuck . Everyone was a fucking ass . UK and France propped up Hitler to attack USSR , allowing them to be increasingly antisoviet and militaristic . Poland and Germany were allies in partition of Czechoslovakia . USSR was trading with everyone they cold for an advantage , that includes Germany and US that both were political enemies . Landlies was paid for BTW , it wasn ' t a gift , and western sources greatly overegsagerate it , it was without doubt veryvery important , but not the lifeline as they call it . The fact that most western historians never even saw or read any of the declassified soviet archives and reprint info from 607080 s is a good show of what many popular authors think of the eastern front . The whole thing is so complex it ' s not even worth searching for the underlying truth . Studebaker Katyushas were rolled out in 1943 , 2 years after the war started and ZISbased Katyusha was adopted into the army . Soviet tactics and losses are too huge of a topic to get into . But i ' ll just say , you are wrong and wright at the same time , as each case is very different and changes as the war goes on . Academia usually knows what ' s up with WWII , but not the media , the same populism as we see in Russia is seen in US . Try counting Hollywood movies where soviets aren ' t caricatures . Heck , even Russian themselves . Russia is an easy scapegoat and a caricature to them . And provocations or not , Georgia attacked first with an aim to occupy south Ossetia . EU reports condemn them for that .