I don't think that anyone on this website would argue that the Soviets were anything but brutal in their use of personnel during what they labeled (quite cynically really) the Great Patriotic War.

Vis-à-vis this thread theme, that attitude towards persons is, to me, all part and parcel of why the Soviet version of the directed economy did not work. The expenditure of human capital was barbaric, but the "human" was often missing from those directed economies in search of the "worker's paradise."