I saw this article (http://ukrainianweek.com/History/33990) which talks about using penal batallions as more or less cannon fodder.
"'These units were of great use to commanders,' claimed Mykhailo Kliuchko, a one-time officer of penal battalion 322. 'On the one hand, they maintained at least some semblance of discipline in the army. On the other, the officers could check whether their decision was correct, by using “cheap” cannon fodder. For instance, an officer had an order to seize a strategic landmark. How could they find out the military force of the enemy located there? The officer instructed the commanders of a penal battalion or two, or sometimes a squadron, to go on a nighttime reconnaissance patrol. Nobody cared about any losses suffered by the squadron.'"
'Basically, the life of a common soldier was of no value on the frontline or for commanders. Nobody thought of us as people,' Maksym Voronkov, a retired colonel, reflected in 1989. In the summer of 1943, he was the commander of a reconnaissance unit with infantry regiment 128, later downgraded to a regular soldier in a penal battalion. 'Is there any other way to interpret the attitude of the top commanders that threw use against the enemy units that were 8-10 times larger? They knew we would all die, but still sent us there. The Germans would shoot at the penal battalion soldiers and thus reveal their positions. Then, our artillery would hit them. Of course, our army lost less people after such patrols but wasn't the price too high?'
Also from here (http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=29529)
"Throughout the Cold War in Europe Soviet tactiocs reamined virtually unchanged from the mass assaults of WWII.
Soviet tactics now substituted the second rated units of the Warsaw Pact and it's own 2nd rate units for the penal battalions of old, but the goal remained constant - to force the enemy to take casualties and expend vital ammo by throwing lesser units at them. The cost in men and equipment of the units sacrificed in this fashion was not a consideration.
When the enemy was deemed sufficiently weakened by this throw-away tactic, massed forces of armor and mech infantry were to assault the weakest point, hoping to force a breakthrough that could be exploited.
Per Soviet doctrine, units which needed help were denied it; all aid and support went to the unit achieving breakthrough - none went to units being crushed by firm resistance. This was a policy designed to waste lives and units on a massive scale.
While the NATO forces, predominantly American, used the tactics of the sword, using highly selective strikes to slow down and undermine the enemy, the Soviets planned for the tactics of the sledgehammer, conducted without finesse or regard for casualties - only overwhelming the enemy counted for anything.
The Soviets learned little from war against Germany, and even less from the tactics of the Allies. When the Soviets went to war in Afghjanistan, they lost in large part because they were unable to adapt to new tactical requirements on a battlefield where massed assaults and overwhelming force accomplished nothing."
Did the Soviets really still use frontal assaults straight into machine guns in this manner through the war? Didn't they think to maneuver around them? Did they not care about their soldiers' lives? This seems like the opposite of the American and British tactic of trying to spend as little human life as possible.
What those quotes are describing is a concept called "Reconnaissance-in-force " and was practiced by all nations in WWII. The idea is to probe the enemy with your own attack in order to get them to reveal themselves. This is why reconnaissance units would be equipped with quick, lightly armed vehicles. Usually these were armoured cars, but the Germans had a whole line of aufklärungspanzer tanks where the regular turrets were replaced by open topped turrets with small caliber autocannons in order to reduce the weight of the tank and improve observation.
Regarding Soviet breakthrough strategy, the whole point of any breakthrough operation is to, well, achieve a breakthrough. The one advantage the attacker has over the defender is that he gets to choose the place to strike and is capable of concentrating his forces there. If support is spread thinly and evenly over the whole front, the breakthrough will fail. Properly organizing a breakthrough and concentrating your forces on it is the "finesse" that the poster seems to think the Red Army lacked, whereas just pushing with the whole front is the "sledgehammer" approach he accuses them of.
Edit: it is also entirely incorrect to state that the Red Army learned nothing in WWII. For example, here is just a small piece of operational research that came from city fighting in Berlin alone. You can read plenty about going around strong German defenses and not running into them like shown in Hollywood.