The way I've heard it, the Soviets basically were okay with shoving their men into a meat grinder during battle as long as they got an eventual victory. The Germans were not willing to throw away their soldiers' lives so easily, and this was one of the reasons the Soviet juggernaut was able to muscle its way through German defenses and straight into Berlin.
How accurate is this? If true, how significant was this "win at any cost" mentality in the grand scheme of things?
Yes and no.
Josef Stalin was certainly OK with losing as many men as necessary-I don't know how it is possible for the mildly historically cognizant to come to any other conclusion. The man just did not value human life, period, and it amply showed during episodes like the "Rzhev Meat Grinder" of 1942, a case where the Soviets did essentially do what you described. However, so was Adolf Hitler. The first of the two dictators to issue a "Stand or Die" order (and enforce it, brutally albeit successfully, during the retreat from Moscow) and use punishment battalions was Hitler, not Stalin. He was every bit as fine with throwing away the lives of his soldiers as Stalin-the Germans did not lose for a lack of squeamishness on Hitler's part. Stalin himself noted that he took these ideas, that he would use during Stalingrad, from the Germans in one of his 1942 speeches.
And this also underestimates the tactical skill of many Red Army commanders, men like Chuikov and Rokossovsky. The Stavka showed strong finesse as the war went on. Nowhere was Red Army skill more specularly on display than in Operation Bagration, where they used deception and a Soviet style of Blitzkrieg that emphasized wider rather than narrow attacks. The Soviet victories over the Japanese before the war also showed some of the skill of the Red Army. While the Red Army was far from perfect, as seen in the Winter War and much of the early fighting against the Germans, they could hold their own on more than just numbers.
I feel /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov put together a pretty good series of comments on this subject in this thread: