Daniel Ward87 said:Stalin's friend used the exact same playbook when the Germans were charging hard toward Moscow, mostly because the Soviet military—just like the Russian one today—was falling apart on every single front. His move was to turn to the inmates, specifically those career criminals who basically ran the prisons and the concentration camps. He gave them the same deal Putin does: if you survive, you walk free.
Once the fighting stopped, he sent most of the survivors right back behind bars, killed some of them, and left only a tiny handful actually free. It's all just a little bit of history repeatin'.
Under Stalin, prisons were mostly filled with political dissidents, and there's almost nothing recorded about their combat service because files were shredded and wartime merits were ignored. You look at the top Soviet ace, Ivan Kožedub, with his 64 German planes downed, but over on Russian forums, they talk about a pilot named either Fedorov or Fedotov flying in one of those penal squadrons. They claim he shot down between 80 and 90 planes, but because he was labeled an "enemy of the people," he never got decorated or promoted, and his victories weren't even counted. His only reward was not being tossed back into a concentration camp—at least not until someone else decided he was a foreign spy, a saboteur, or an enemy of the state.