The Cold War was fake
The Soviet army in the Second World War was drastically ineffective, taking four or five casualties for every German whether retreating or advancing.
If this army had fought the Americans in 1945, the Soviets could have won every battle and still run out of young adult men before the Americans would have run out of soldiers.
Yet the belief spread immediately that the Soviets had a very strong army, an army that the Americans needed to fear and respect. By the 1950s and 1960s, this army had been reimagined into something fearsome. At that time, the right fringe said that the Soviets were weak as hell, and ought to be destroyed. By the 1980s, though, even the right fringe had come to believe that the Soviets were fearsome and an equal opponent or (because of Liberal defense cuts!) even a superior.
Now we see the Russian army is still drastically ineffective. Say what you like about their ability to pull off a win here somehow - maybe they’ll do it - but getting stuck in a tug of war with a country with a third the population and a tenth the economy isn’t exactly Napoleonic, or even Zhukovian.
Of course, we don’t know that their military sucked throughout the Cold War (by the way, it sucked in WWI as well!), but we do know it sucked before and after the Cold War.
If you see a broom with a big crack in the handle, and a big crack at the mop end, do you assume it must be perfectly fine in between, just because you can’t see it? Or if someone sucks in elementary school, and sucks in college, that maybe they were valedictorian in high school?
A more parsimonious explanation would be that the Soviet Union always sucked, that it was always a fake enemy and a fake crisis, with nuclear weapons waved in the face of the American public by the media whenever it got too visibly weak.
Remember when America couldn’t invade Cuba because Krushchev might push the button? Well, he only had about a dozen missiles back then. Russia has hundreds today. Apparently moving nuclear missiles into a neutral country just off the coast of the US with no other purpose than to strike at the US on a trajectory where they don’t have defences ain’t something you can risk responding to, but you can threaten to destroy the Russian army inside Russia because you don’t like what they’re doing to a third country thousands of miles away that is no particular economic, cultural, or strategic importance.
OK I guess?
Or remember when the US couldn’t attack North Vietnamese air fields from which Soviet planes were taking off to intercept American bombers? The Americans, as some Russians now like to point out, lost over 3,500 airplanes in Vietnam. But that only happened because they couldn’t destroy Vietnamese air defenses. Because they were afraid of the Soviets nuking them. Over Vietnam. Huh?
A useful heuristic for understanding history is to find out what the furthest, most mouth-frothing right wingers are writing (well, let’s limit ourselves to people who can write…) and presumptively believe it. The Soviet Union was a pinata that the US wasn’t able to hit because the media kept it drunk on nonsense stories about its fearsome power. Stories that have vanished without a trace.