
PortugueseThe Left, History and Rape
By Andrey Gonçalves
30 May 2016
“Little daughter on the mattress,
Dead. So many, so many had been on her—
A platoon, or perhaps even a company?”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize in Literature — Prussian Nights.
In recent days your Facebook and Twitter timelines must have been flooded with dozens of posts by people aligned with the left, obviously sympathizers with collectives and post-modern ideologies. These same people love to talk about history. For that reason, this article will say a little about the history of that ideology which preaches love and justice.
In 2013, a Polish artist made a sculpture depicting a Soviet soldier raping a pregnant woman. The work is called Komm Frau (“Come here, woman!”) and was placed beside a statue honoring communist warriors. The act provoked considerable debate and complaints from historians and supporters of the ideology, and the sculpture was later removed.
It is no secret that the Second World War began with the invasion of Poland, when Germany and the USSR invaded Poland.
In Poland, since 2010, communism and all its symbols have been prohibited because of the atrocities the country suffered during the Red invasion.
In Germany alone, according to historian William Hitchcock, TWO MILLION women were raped by Soviets. Some official documents encouraged soldiers to rape women.
One incident was recounted in the book by Soviet officer Vladimir Gelfand:
“With horror on their faces, they told me what had happened on the first night after the Red Army arrived,” he wrote.
“They poked at me here all night,” explained the pretty German girl, lifting her skirt. “They were old, some were covered in pimples, and all of them climbed onto me and poked me—no fewer than twenty men.” She began to cry.
“They raped my daughter in front of me, and they can still come back and rape her again,” said the poor mother. The thought left them all terrified.
Another account, this time by Gabriele Köpp:
(…)
While fleeing, she reached a village, where she was found by a Soviet soldier searching for women with a large flashlight in his hands. This was only the first rape.
The young woman hid in a house, where another soldier found and raped her. After that she was raped by yet another soldier. The next day two soldiers dragged her into a pen and raped her there. In the afternoon she entered a room full of women—refugees—but from there she was taken away first by soldiers and then by an officer.
This whole hell lasted exactly two weeks—fourteen days.
(…)
The documentary below tells something of the hell these women endured at the hands of the Red Army.
Joseph Stalin
The Soviet leader encouraged soldiers to rape women, according to the book World War II: Behind Closed Doors. Historian Laurence Rees notes that although rape was officially a crime in the Red Army, Stalin in practice explicitly tolerated it as a way of rewarding soldiers and terrorizing German civilians.
Stalin said that people should “understand if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle.”
On another occasion, when he was told that Red Army soldiers were sexually assaulting German refugees, he said:
“We demand too much of our soldiers; let them have their initiative.”
While Stalin tolerated rape as an instrument of state military policy, his police chief Lavrentiy Beria was a serial rapist.
An American diplomat, one of Beria’s bodyguards, and Russian actress Tatiana Okunevskaya gave testimony about his methods of picking women up from the street, forcing them into his limousine and then into his bed. He would say:
“You are in my power now. So think about that and act accordingly.”
More than one hundred schoolgirls and young women were drugged and raped by the man who ran the NKVD, the feared precursor of the KGB. During the rape of the female population in Berlin—anyone between the ages of thirteen and seventy was in danger—it was a cruel period.
Things were not very different in China, where Mao raped boys and girls, as described in The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Li Zhisui, one of Mao’s physicians.
Communism was responsible for the greatest collective rape in history—indeed, it cannot even be called collective; it was the greatest mass rape in history. And today I see women defending those ideologies. It is regrettable.
Note: This article does not ignore the fact that rape occurred in every war, but argues that those were isolated cases and not an ideological tactic of war.
© 2016 — Olhar Atual