Its not a +240 increase. That was only in the leaked notes.
What went live is a lump to 500 increase.
Ost had 30 more MP at start iirc. So this patch gave more MP to Sov, than to Ost.
Sov still has the 30 fuel headstart.
No. The typed patch notes on the official site are wrong. Both sides got +240 exactly(at least that is what it was supposed to be). Soviet starts with 490, Ostheer start with 530. This is because Combat Engineers are valued at 240 manpower, while pioneers are valued at 200 manpower. Effectively the sides actually start with the same amount of manpower, just that Ostheer have 40 more "raw" manpower since pioneers are a worse combat unit.
That being said... this change still helped Soviet significantly more than Germans. Conscript spam is still alive and honestly just out of control, plus snipers, m3s, maxims all come so much faster now while German is still pigeonholed into Gren spam because MG42s are almost completely useless and your tier 2 tech comes only a few seconds faster.
Also the manpower cost to tech is heavily in Soviet favor. They pay significantly less for their tech structures than Germans do once you've factored in advancing your Battlephase + building the structure - not really sure why this is the case... the only argument I can see is that German tech buildings are more "generalized" but honestly Soviet tech (t1 + t4, t2 + 3) compliments itself so well that you almost never have to build more than two total buildings.
Edit: ^ actually going to correct myself on that. Once you factor in molotovs and/or AT grenades everything evens out, and is actually slightly in favor of Geraman - unless German goes t4.
Edit: after testing it looks like both sides start with exactly 490 manpower... doesn't make any sense to me. This just gives soviet a flat MP bonus over German.