What were some of the tactics used by Russia in ww2?
You seem to be asking two somewhat different questions—the Soviets had many tactics, such as “deep operations”, night assaults, and massed artillery fronts which had no relationship to penal battalions. Having said that the only other such tactic using “prisoners” (not really the term I would use) I can think of would be “reconnaissance by fire”, i.e. determining the strength of defenses in a certain area by launching an assault using penal battalions, or any other units whose members the Soviet regime deemed worthless or useless (or in some cases, arguably people they actually *wanted* to get rid of, more below). The purpose of these such attacks would be to determine how many machine guns the Axis forces had in place, whether they responded with mortars/artillery/air strikes/etc., in order to plan how they (the Soviets) would attack that spot later on with their “real” forces (thereby minimizing losses among the latter). The so-called Russian “disregard for human life” needs to be th
