Things from 20th Century Russian History which would piss off PETA vol XI

For those of you interested in exploring the discomfort in laughing at stupid decisions which cost a whole bunch of lives a long time ago, you can't get any better material than a history of the Soviet military in World War II. Aside from one good general and the willingness to sacrifice in grotesque number its citizens and soldiers, the USSR could have easily collapsed (the long standing joke about the Russian winter helped, yes, but not nearly as much as those other factors) and thus the Allies may have lost the war. There's something for everyone: Stalin's paranoia leading to the execution of almost all of his top ranking military advisors, Stalin's naive belief that Hitler would never betray him, the fact that in some battles between the siege of Leningrad and the turning point of Stalingrad, Russian soldiers had to take arms (uh, weapons, not appendages, though I wouldn't be surprised) off of casualties.

None of that compares to the Anti-Tank Dog. The idea was to train the dogs by starving them and hiding food underneath tanks - since they were training, the tanks were obviously Soviet; this is important to remember. Once in battle, the soldiers would strap explosives onto the backs of the dogs and then hope they would run underneath the assaulting German tanks looking for food and then they could detonate them.

This however, was one simple idea that did not work terribly effectively in combat. As the dogs were trained by placing food under Soviet tanks they would run to the familiar smells and sounds of any Soviet tanks in battle rather than the strange smells and sounds of the German tanks, and with hindsight, one would also expect that in battle a dog would run anywhere but towards a moving tank firing overhead, and in doing so become a menace to everyone else on the battlefield.

Eventually, they must have succeeded because the Germans had a name, hundminen, for this crap and the Germans are pretty serious about naming things. They noticed that the tanks had a hard time hitting the small puppies and so decided to come back at them with flame throwers. Jesus Christ.

I'd like to know what the Soviets had against dogs. It may be that there are so damn many of them running about the country. But they have a long history of doing crazy shit to canines: there was Laitka, the dog they shot into space, the anti-tank dogs and, let's not forget Pavlov. I wonder.