John Mearsheimer

In the end, I believe that.

I think in the end, the Soviets would have won no matter what, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

No, I think there's a great deal of truth in that.

But let's just unpack it a bit in the case of the Soviet Union in World War II.

The counter-argument to that is that in World War I,

Russian army disintegrated.

And if you look at what happened when Napoleon invaded in 1812, and you look at what happened in 1917, and then you look at what happened between 41 and 45, the Napoleon case looks a lot like the Hitler case, and it fits neatly with your argument.

But World War I does not fit neatly with your argument because

the Russians lost and surrendered.

And you had the infamous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk where the Soviet Union then, because it went from Russia to the Soviet Union in October 1917, the Soviet Union surrendered large amounts of Soviet territory because it had suffered a humiliating defeat.

My argument for why the Russians, let me take that back, why the Soviets fought like wild dogs in World War II is,

is that they were up against a genocidal adversary.

You want to understand that the Germans murdered huge numbers of Soviet POWs.

The overall total was 3.7 million.

And by December, December of 1941, remember the invasion is June 41.

By December of 1941, the Germans have murdered 2 million Soviet POWs.

At that point in time, they had murdered many more POWs than they had murdered Jews.

And this is not to deny for one second that they were on a murderous rampage when it came to Jews.

But they were also on a murderous rampage when it came to Soviet citizens and Soviet soldiers, right?

So those Soviet soldiers quickly came to understand they were fighting for their lives.