Nah, Russia isn't all that. Napoleon and Hitler both fukked up by attacking Russia right before historically bad winters hit. The Russians went scorched earth, burned the fields and abandoned their cities to Napoleon. They didn't even beat him. Napolean's army was heading home with all the loot when the winter fukked them up.
They at least fought back against Hitler, but again a historic winter fukked up the Nazis.
Agree though that the Russians didn't get the credit for how much of Hitlers effort and attention they took to stop the war.
It's still the largest country (surface area wise) in the world which is one of the many reasons why the Germans , the French and the Brits have always had a hard on to conquer it.
It's worth what someone is willing to pay/do to get it so for Napoleon to have gone out of his way to exhaust his resources after it shows you they hold SOMETHING over there in high regards. I'm sure there were plenty more easier targets.
Winters in Russia are always historic, remember. Winter storm records keep getting broken every couple of years. Napoleon knew this. Hitler knew this.
They had very to little defense against Napoleon but put up enough if a fight to drag the fight into the winter at which point they have they advantage. They still didn't have the firepower as young Russian recruits were being drafted to defend their Homeland and being sent to battle fields without weapons and being told to just find their dead comrades bodies and use those weapons to carry on the fight.
As for WW2, Stalin put up enough of a fight to delay them from reaching key positions until the winter. And then , again, let the Russian winter do what she does best over there. The terrain and weather is part of their defense strategy. Even in their aircraft designs you can see they factor in survivability in rough conditions such as shytty airfields and so on whereas american aircrafts are designed to be more high maintenance and therefore require higher maintenance to the aircraft and its supporting ecosystem (airfields, hangars, etc) . Look at the aircraft design videos and see things like the air intake guards they put on theirs just so that it doesn't require neat clean airfields to keep debris from entering the intakes.
Americans approach to the same problem is...maintain squeeky clean airfields
