The Soviet Red Army, during the Invasion of Poland (1939). Wikimedia Commons.
10. The Soviet Red Army was described as an “army of rapists” due to the millions of sexual assaults they inflicted upon the liberated populations of Eastern Europe
Whilst the Red Army is commonly held in a poor account by Western popular opinion, due in part to the legacy of the Cold War, the specifics of their wartime atrocities is less widely understood; among these crimes, the mass rape and assault of civilians throughout Europe and Asia by Soviet soldiers must be acknowledged. Although extremely difficult to account for each instance, it has been estimated that the Soviet Army was responsible for the rape of at least 2,000,000 women and children in what has been considered the largest mass rape in history; many of these victims were assaulted as much as one hundred times by Russian soldiers, with at least 250,000 subsequently murdered after being subjected to repeated sexual assaults.
Routinely occurring after the liberation of cities and regions from Nazi occupation, notably Danzig, Silesia, Budapest, and Berlin, these actions were not limited to the Eastern Front, with 1,800 Japanese women and children in refuge at Gegenmiao Monastery brutally raped and murdered by the Red Army in August 1945 during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria. Reports from war correspondents support these events, with Vasily Grossman noting “Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them” whilst Natalya Gesse witnessed the Red Army “raping every German female from eight to eighty.”
Justified by Stalin on the grounds that what does it matter “if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with women or takes some trifle”, the Soviet Union adopted the position that women were spoils of war for the men to enjoy as a reward and who should be grateful for their liberation; the conduct was also encouraged as a method of psychological warfare against the enemy.