Helping The Soviets

[upintheattic]

The reason the Soviets are often so damn hard to do anything with is because they're running around with 7/6 or 7/5 morale, making them very difficult to rally. It's hard to get my head around the idea of a soldier that continuously pisses himself and then jumps back up full of passion for the Motherland!

Maybe if the proposal only applied when rallying with the aid of a leader?

Shad has hit it on the head here. The best way to simulate passion for Mother Russia without causing cognitive dissonance over mediocre RKKA morale is through the existing Kommissar rules. The Kommissar's job is to instill that passion at the point of a gun, and they do it it very well, allowing the demoralized units to roll against the Kommissar's morale rather than their own.

I didn't develop Eastern Front, but my take on that game is that Soviet troops should be tough to control in that era due to Stalin's purges of the Red Army officer corps. So the dearth of Soviet leaders relative to Soviet troop numbers and the resulting difficulty in controlling Soviet troops is valid. However, if one finds that a scenario is just too heavily weighted against the Soviets due to a lack of leaders, then I'd suggest adding a Kommissar or two to the Soviet leader list (one in small scenarios, two in medium to large ones).