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"some animals are more equal than others"--George Orwell

One should not forget that the Red Army was the Russian Army and so far as possible Russian in composition especially in the officer corps and the NKVD. Despite being a Georgian Stalin was suspicious of non-Russians as was the party. Early in the war some ethnic units were raised and fought to the bitter end but their true purpose was propaganda. As the war went on and causualties mounted more non-Russian troops were fed into the grinder but mostly as part of regular army units. Eastern ethnicities being more isolated from the bourgeois ideas seeping into the western Soviet Union were seen as more politically reliable and controllable. Ukranians were never really trusted despite the sacrifices they made. The local Baltic territorial units were not trusted at all and largely they surrendered in mass as soon as possible in 1941 thus proving the point. They were not reformed. Units formed from the Islamic areas of the country were perhaps more casually thrown to the wolves than others because of the "reactionary" nature of their religion. With the young men at the front or dead beneath it the NKVD could more easily exercise control over those areas.

The Cossacks were a beaten oppressed minority that fought in greater numbers for the Germans than they did for the Soviets. There were relatively few actual ethnic Cossacks in those cavalry formations. Those that fought in the Red Army did so out of a sense of Russian patriotism that makes little sense to us today. The best I can explain it is being vaguely like a similarity with American soldiers from the southern states during the Spanish American War and WWI putting aside historic animosity and fighting for the government there fathers and grandfathers had fought against, heck some of that still lingers in the background today. But I digress. . .

The NKVD did everything possible to keep ethnic pride from rising during the war while at the same time co-opting the idea to further the aims of the Soviet state. As PrvtNoClass alludes to above distribution of awards, propaganda stories, etc. were all carefully designed to emphasize Soviet authority, and Soviet greatness. The group/state over the individual and an over arching sense of Russian hegemony over non-Russians within the system were goals of the state propaganda apparatus, and thus the goals of the party. This made it easy to dismiss the great effort put forth by all of the people especially the Army after the war and claim the Soviet state had won the war almost without anything more than the power of the dialectic. Evil rat bastards those commies.

As for "first nation" peoples, the proper headsculpt is the hard part. Good Luck! Uniforms would be Ivan issue like everyone else. Native head gear would be a personal affectation that would be out side regulations, but arguably plausible. Such a soldier be uncommon in specific though representative if not typical as regards eastern asian faces.