>>64215033
It's a quote from a discussion with Eisenhower, so it's not necessarily a reliable source, and I've never seen real evidence of it being true either. The Soviets DID use penal troops for the task, but I severely doubt ordinary infantry did the job like that.
Even if they did, it's still better to consume human resources to achieve military objectives than it is to waste them in pointless frontal assaults on unassailable targets:
>When we come to a mine field our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of with mine fields. The attacking infantry does not set off the vehicular mines, so after they have penetrated to the far side of the field they form a bridgehead, after which the engineers come up and dig out the channels through which our vehicles can go.
This calculus is very much in Soviet style. Nobody cares about Russian lives, least of all the Russians themselves.