>>20321166>26 million of Soviets livesWhat ethnic groups did they belong to? Russian, Kazakh, Turkmen, Tatar, Georgian, etc. Many of them had uncles or parents who had died for the Russian Empire in WWI. They didn't die for the Soviet regime any more than Union soldiers who died in the American Civil War did it for the Lincoln presidency. Persian soldiers who died in Greece under Shah Xerxes I did not do it in the name of Xerxes, or even in the name of the Achaemenid Empire, but rather for the Persian domain. Likewise, Union soldiers died for the territorial integrity of America and its ideals. Did George Washington switch sides when he went from being a soldier of the Royal Army to being a general of the Armed Forces of America? No. During the American theatre of the Seven Years' War, known as the French and Indian War, George Washington fought not for the Royal Armed Forces, but for the Virginia Regiment for the sake of preserving them free from the influence of the nefarious foreign kingdom of France, and during the American Revolutionary War, he fought as part of the Continental Army for the preservation of the rights and freedoms of the Commonwealth of Virginia, free from the oppresssive influence of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Likewise, Soviet soldiers fought not for communism, but rather for the unity of the peoples formerly under Russian rule against the German people. WWII wasn't an ideological war. It was a war between the Germanic peoples and the Slavic and Turkic peoples. Polish democrats suffered just as much as Soviet communists did.
