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Being as it was their home, and the Russians had been dealing with Russian winters as long as they had lived there, I'm sure they had developed several "tricks" to start and keep vehicles running in the extreme cold.

One I remember reading about was demonstrated to Luftwaffe pilots and ground crew by a "Hiwi" (Soviet POW working for the Germans)

He opened the lower engine cover of a 109, and "called for a parts tray" (large shallow pan) put gas in it, and lit it. The Germans were horrified, thinking it would burn away the wiring, but it didn't. The flames blazed away merrily licking the underside of the engine for a few minutes, the died, leaving the engine and wiring untouched, just warmed up enough to turn over and start.

My Father in law got a GMC diesel pickup in the 80s, for a good price, diesels weren't that popular back then. We live in an area where below freezing is common in the winter, but single digits or sub zero is not that usual, but does happen, in a hard winter. And, did one year, sudden really cold snap, and he truck wouldn't run. The fuel had "jelled". Required replacing the injectors and some other work to fix. I recall he bitterly complained that "no one told me about needing to add stove oil to the fuel when it got really cold.."

Thinning the fuel and the oil, warming the engines and other tricks were well known and used by the people experienced living in arctic temps, but not so well known to others.

One of the gadgets the Germans came up with after their first Soviet winter was the Kuhlwasserubertraeger, a system connecting the cooling systems of vehicles, allowing the warm coolant of a running engine to be exchanged with a cold one, warming up the cold engine so it could be started.