But I just can't help but not care about Russia's loss because of their role in the Korean war, the Cuban Missile Crisis, The cold war, etc. afterwards.
The Russian peasents who got chewed up didn't have any choice but to die for the state. If you deserted your family could be executed. The US napalmed villages in N. Korea killing the majority of the civilian population time and again. N. Korea's current dictatorship and propoganda campaign is founded on the memory of brutal US war crimes. War is brutal and evil. Soviet leadership was brutal and evil but its not like any other country has cornered the market on justice, compassion and truth.
This isn't an uncommon sentiment in the context of historical loss of life. The reason for this is that we have no real connection to those who did die. I hate to quote Stalin but when "one man dies its a tragedy, when a million die its a statistic". We can learn about a person, or know them and through that we can empathize more readily with that man's death, but when you look at all of them together its so overwhelming, there is essentially a nameless, faceless crowd that ceased to exist long before we ever lived. Its easier with distance to look at the events of world war 2 and feel disconnect, with time we are not spurred to an impassioned, emotional response and are more like a third, uninvolved party. Of course I'm not advocating that loss of millions upon million wasn't tragic, and its def a bit different when coupling all of the resulting chaos. Something to think about.
The issue with that mindset, is that these examples you reference, weren't decided by Russians who were killed in WWII. Therefore the concept that we can dismiss the loss of life in one instance due to the future actions of others seems a little futile if you don't mind me saying.
Had the exact same thought. The men and women who lost their lives in WWII clearly weren't the ones who decided to back the communist agenda later on.