Clearly the issue of Russian logistics is in the middle of the news today but it got me thinking about the historical perspective of the Red Army as an unstoppable land force.

A thread that I have seen lately is that Putin has spent the last 15ish years building up the Russian armed forces to become a more modern force after the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the collapse of military spending/military preparedness in Russian armed forces. This thought implies that the Soviet Union was a vaunted land force prior to collapse and clearly it was given NATO direct defense spending and preparedness not to mention proxy war and other indirect costs.

I was trying to go through the major examples of Red Army operations post-WWII to come up with evidence that the Red Army was actually vaunted and not just perceived as vaunted. Afghanistan rings out as the major example of Soviet forces operating extraterritorially and then the Czech and Hungarian interventions on a smaller scale. Those operations didn't involve invasion against a fully hostile state - there's an argument that some part of the state apparatus cooperated thus simplifying the logistical side of the operation (i.e. rail/air access)

Is the last point at which at which we have evidence Red Army logistics matched the outward perception of Red Army combat power the Eastern Front in World War II? I seem to remember that a huge number of American trucks were the backbone of the Soviet advance during Bagration and the like. Is it possible that our perception of the Red Army in combat is a vestige of access to the "arsenal of democracy" via Lend-Lease?