If it hadn't been for Churchill's emergency aid in saving Moscow he quite possibly would have won. Without U.S. and British supplies and engineering assets they would never have been a big player even after saving Moscow.
Yes, that's a plausible position, although one that's hard to prove, and it's a question where everyone already, before they know any facts, has a hard, emotionally-rooted belief.
Russians point to the enormous "iron price" they paid in driving back Hitler: some 20 million or more lives. (Allied casualties were well less than a million.) . We paid with our tax dollars, they paid with their sons ... as they see it.
They point to the fact that, as the rightwing historian Alan Clark said, sometimes up to 90% of the Werhmacht was engaged on the Eastern Front, and never less than 75%.
They believe we delayed the 'Second Front' so that, as Truman had crassly said when he was a Senator, before we entered the war, we should support whichever side was losing so as to prolong the war, and thus let "[the Germans and Russians] kill as many of each other as possible". [We sent packets of butter to Russia during the war, which they informally named, with bitter irony, "Second Front".]
They recall that Russian troops in non-Russian Europe had always been in response to Russia being invaded -- by Napoleon, and by the Germans (twice in the 20th Century).
And they recall that America sent troops into Russia after WWI, to support the counter-revolutionary forces against the Bolsheviks.
So they see things differently
More profoundly, they see things like all continental European powers see them. They see them as people who do not have two huge oceans on either side of their country, and weak/friendly neighbors above and below, see them.
Americans don't understand how our geography has definitievely shaped not only our history, but our unconscious world-view. We invade other countries, they don't invade us.
Despite what certain loons say from time to time, we're not going to see Chinese landing-craft coming ashore on the West Coast (okay, okay, fellow rightwingers, I know what you're going to say, serve 'em right, etc .. but it won't happen).
We never faced even the faintest possibility of defeat and occupation in any war we have fought since 1812. (There is a very moving passage in Churchill's memoirs, recounting his first being told about Pearl Harbor -- he was entertaining the American in charge of Lend-Lease at the time. He said he knew then that they had won. [He also said that although there were those who thought the Americans would not be up to fighting a modern war, that he had studied the history of the Civil War ... "fought out to the last desperate inch" ... and he went to bed feeling saved and grateful.)
The Russians see things differently, and not just old Stalinists or pro-Putinites. Our ambassador to Russia in 2008 -- now the head of the CIA -- wrote then that Ukrainian membership of NATO was "the brightest of bright red lines" for everyone he knew in Moscow, not just the people around Putin.
Our wise leaders decided to march towards that bright red line, and the Russians have responded exactly like anyone with knowledge of them would have predicted they would respond.
