A front emlékezete. A Vörös Hadsereg kötelékében tömegesen és fiatalkorúakon elkövetett nemi erőszak kérdése a Dél-Vértesben (előtanulmány)

István Sántha

Memory of the Front

Sántha, István (2016). “Memory of the Front: Sexual violence committed by the Red Army, including mass rape and violence against minors, in Southern Vértes — a preliminary study.” In Replacement: Dictatorships in Rural Hungary, HAS-BTK-NEB, Budapest, pp. 119–154.

Memory of the Front

The Red Army committed large-scale crimes, including crimes against minors. This study examines rape in the Southern Vértes region as a preliminary social-anthropological investigation.

Foreword

The principal aim of my research is to develop a social-anthropological approach for studying Red Army practices in rural Hungary. This is a preliminary stage of wider field research concerned with mass sexual violence, sexual violence against minors, and Russian discourse about these events. One of the main tasks is to test different methodological approaches to the material collected. I ask: who were Red Army soldiers as individuals? What histories did they carry with them when they arrived in Hungary? What state ideologies shaped them? What deeper personal motivations moved them? What had they experienced during the years of war? Questions of this kind form the point of departure for selecting concepts and methods.

After the introduction I present the kinds of sources and resources used and explain why the subject remains relevant. I then outline the methodological approaches. The factual material is organised around three themes: the role of state ideology, the personal motivations of participants, and the terminology needed to interpret the evidence. The conclusion offers a preliminary synthesis of fieldwork in rural Hungary together with accessible Russian and Hungarian sources. I hope this helps us better understand the trauma experienced in Hungary.

Memories of the front and occupation continue to live actively among villagers. Under socialism the subject remained taboo: Hungarian authorities tried to avoid political tension with the Soviet occupiers. Today the political environment has changed and speaking about these events has become possible, yet rape is still rarely discussed openly even among local inhabitants themselves.

Memory of the front and of sexual violence is not merely a matter of the past. These recollections still exist in individual memory. The question is therefore how ready contemporary society is to understand and empathise with those who endured such experiences, and how the social structure created immediately after the war continues to shape their interpretation today.

To interpret field material correctly, the former social organisation of the community must be taken into account. This in turn affects the structure of the researcher’s own text: both the ethics and the aesthetics of description have to respect the characteristics of the society being described. Although socialism is over, people remain cautious. For some inhabitants, openly stating a position is itself a declaration of a freedom they felt deprived of during the socialist period.

This article is therefore an attempt to establish a framework after preliminary fieldwork and to describe the organisation of social life in the region. Wartime sexual violence remains an important part of personal, unofficial collective memory.

A personally important influence was my reading, in the 1990s, of Alaine Polcz’s book, in which the trauma of sexual violence is represented as individual psychological experience. In January 2015 I learned that the events described there had occurred in the Southern Vértes area. Every woman had her own history of trying to survive and avoid rape; this allowed me to see Polcz’s narrative as part of the region’s collective memory.

The subject has become increasingly visible. New studies appear every year, often using comparable sources and methods and following both international and Hungarian scholarly trends. Andrea Pető’s pioneering work was especially important in shaping my understanding of the problem.

I am aware that my own position as a man could influence how I was perceived during fieldwork, especially by women whose memories I sought to collect. Women might understandably refuse to discuss such experiences with a male researcher. At the same time, living within the community and sharing everyday circumstances could sometimes narrow that distance. Local people also knew my family background: my wife has Russian, German, Polish and Jewish roots. My earlier fieldwork among hunter-gatherers in eastern Siberia had also shaped the way I approached people and their worlds.

Introduction: Preliminary Work

Types of sources

Diaries — published or unpublished, anonymous or attributed

Vladimir Gelfand’s diary. Gelfand’s diary covers the entire period of the Second World War and provides a rare opportunity to understand an individual soldier who served in the Red Army throughout the conflict. Gelfand was a Jewish officer, and his record also makes it possible to observe the army’s internal cultural and ethnic differences, including everyday antisemitism. The emotional history of Soviet entry into and occupation of Eastern and Central Europe developed from a long experience of defending Soviet territory from invasion, a process that can be traced from before the Battle of Stalingrad.

The diary appeared in book form in Russian only relatively recently. The full institutional name of the Red Army was the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. It is misleading to equate the Red Army simply with “the Russians”: it contained people from many peoples and republics of the Soviet Union, and the importance of these cultural distinctions has still not been adequately assessed.

A Woman in Berlin. The central value of this diary lies partly in the author’s anonymity. It was published in West Germany in the 1950s, but under public pressure the author chose not to reveal her identity. Anonymity helped separate publication from her private life. In this respect the diary differs from Svetlana Alexievich’s work, where speakers recount their stories to an interviewer and must decide what to say, what to withhold and how much trust to place in the listener.

A Woman in Berlin was published anonymously, while Gelfand’s diary appeared only after his death and for a long period could not be issued in book form in Russia. Both texts, despite necessary reservations, are valuable personal sources on the Second World War. Both also raise editorial questions. The Berlin diary may contain later authorial editing. Gelfand’s published text was prepared by his son, who preserved his father’s intellectual legacy but omitted some passages and edited others. Despite their differences, the two diaries can fruitfully be compared.

Edited interviews and oral history

Svetlana Alexievich’s books are constructed according to a distinct authorial principle. Their chapters are literary compositions based on interviews. A single interview might last for hours, while only a small portion of the recording is selected to illuminate the themes Alexievich wants to develop. Thousands of interviews were gathered, so only a fraction could be mobilised in the published books.

Much of the documentary material was collected in the second half of the 1970s and then repeatedly supplemented. The 2015 edition allows the reader to see changing political atmospheres because testimonies recorded in different periods were not flattened into one uniform tone. Statements recorded around 1985 and later ones bear traces of different conditions of speech, making political change visible to a careful reader.

Although these interviews are personal testimonies, the interviewer’s interests cannot be completely separated from the respondent’s confession. This has to remain part of the analysis.

Fieldwork: oral history and participant observation

Fieldwork in rural Southern Vértes adds another layer of evidence. Oral history is not simply a storehouse of facts; it is a social event in the present. What can be told, to whom, and in what form depends on family relations, local hierarchies, political memory, gender and the continuing presence of witnesses or descendants. Participant observation is therefore essential for understanding both speech and silence.

The local military memorial itself demonstrates the complexity of categories such as “Russian” and “Soviet.” Names and inscriptions on graves show Jewish, Tatar and other non-Russian backgrounds. A local account that simply calls all Red Army dead “Russians” can conceal the diversity of the army that arrived in Hungary.

Relevance

The topic remains highly relevant because wartime sexual violence was suppressed for decades and because the public meaning of the Second World War continues to influence politics and identity. Hungarian scholarship has increasingly examined rape, occupation, memory and the social consequences of war. Andrea Pető’s research is central here, as are studies of the siege of Budapest and the Soviet occupation.

The theme is also relevant outside Hungary. Soviet victory has remained a foundational public myth in Russia. Debates over the conduct of Soviet soldiers therefore touch not only on historical facts but on moral identity, family memory and the legitimacy of the state’s own narrative of the war.

Methodological Considerations

As a social anthropologist, I want to show how events and stories from the past have been understood at different times and in different places, and how the organisation of contemporary society is connected with the Second World War. The immediate focus is one village in Southern Vértes, a pseudonymised community whose present-day interpretations reveal recurring tendencies.

My approach is close to ecological anthropology. I treat the local environment as a network in which living beings, people, places and resources form relations of cooperation, dependence and conflict. Wartime events therefore need to be understood not as isolated acts but in a wider ecological and social setting.

Earlier studies often compared countries that had experienced Red Army occupation in broadly similar ways. I also include tendencies visible within Russian society. This allows a chronological dimension to be added even where Hungarian sources alone cannot provide it, because developments within Soviet society shaped what soldiers later did elsewhere.

Statistics alone cannot answer the central questions. Soviet statistical sources do not directly register the mass sexual violence at issue, and the absence of a category from official statistics is not evidence that the phenomenon did not exist. Comparative estimates and non-Russian statistics may nevertheless be useful when handled cautiously.

Standpoint theory

Standpoint theory provides an anti-colonial and feminist critical methodology for describing social and material conditions. It directs attention to locality and to difference: people do not inhabit identical conditions or possess identical life experience. Knowledge is situated. What a person can know, say and see depends on their social position and on the structures of the dominant society.

The approach is valuable because it asks how a group appears from its own position and because it forces the researcher to recognise ethical and moral dimensions of representation. Donna Haraway’s work on “situated knowledges” is especially important. Against claims of a view from nowhere, it stresses partial, accountable scientific positions. This is useful when studying women, indigenous people, minorities and subordinated social groups.

I do not use standpoint theory because every proposition in it must be accepted uncritically. Its value is that it compels the researcher to make his own relation to the subject explicit and to treat accountability as part of the production of knowledge.

Subaltern research

A second methodological orientation comes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and debates over whether the subaltern can “speak” or be heard. Spivak’s examples — including women in colonial caste systems and politically interpreted acts of suicide — show how a subordinate person’s action can be translated into meanings imposed by dominant structures rather than understood on the person’s own terms.

This is relevant to wartime sexual violence because victims may be formally “visible” in historical discourse while their own knowledge remains inaccessible. Listening, comprehensibility and accountability are political and methodological problems, not merely technical ones.

Sources and Public Discourses

Russian-language internet discourse

In the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war, discussion gradually emerged in Russian society concerning sexual crimes committed by Soviet soldiers. Some early articles were published in Germany by émigrés from Russia and combined German-language scholarship with original Russian materials. The response was exceptionally polarised. Under one article, tens of thousands of comments divided roughly between those who denied that the events had happened and those who said that the victims “got what they deserved.” Only a small minority tried to ask what moral reflection on the past might mean for present-day Russian society.

Another article deliberately assembled hundreds of concrete cases, specifying date, place, participants and victims. A well-known Russian writer later repeated the estimate that roughly two million women had been raped by Soviet soldiers and made a provocative remark about Russian descendants in Germany. The reaction was immediate and massive: nationalist responses stood against arguments from women, intellectuals, liberals and humanists who challenged the claim and its moral framing.

The German film based on A Woman in Berlin used well-known Russian actors as Soviet soldiers. This partly explains why the diary and its adaptation have been difficult for many Russian viewers. The film shows women being searched and assaulted, but also cases in which women enter relationships with Soviet officers voluntarily or under conditions in which “voluntary” choice is inseparable from survival. Andrea Pető has likewise shown that in Vienna some communist and antifascist women entered consensual relationships with Soviet soldiers.

Consent, however, does not explain mass violence. Rural settlement patterns could make women especially vulnerable, because isolated houses left victims without witnesses or immediate help. A separate but related pattern was “protection prostitution”: a woman sought a powerful protector — a krysha, literally a “roof” — whose protection could shield her from other men but required loyalty and sexual access.

A Woman in Berlin and Alaine Polcz’s testimony both show how hunger changed the meaning of sexual relations. Women could seek Soviet officers because protection provided not only personal safety but food and material support for people around them. In Berlin, the career and transfer of an officer could therefore determine a woman’s security. When life stabilised, such relationships became harder to establish and women increasingly worked in Red Army labour detachments in exchange for rations or compensation.

This reveals a further parallel: German women after defeat often performed cleaning, cooking and washing for Soviet men — work very similar to that long performed by Soviet women around military units. Rather than seeing men and women simply as winners and losers, one can observe overlapping forms of suffering, dependence and survival across different societies.

Svetlana Alexievich and the Female Myth of War

Several lines of Svetlana Alexievich’s family history lead back to the Second World War through her Belarusian and Ukrainian grandparents; her mother’s father died somewhere in Hungary. The war therefore became central to her intellectual world. In the mid-1970s she began interviewing women who had served in the Red Army. Over the years she collected thousands of interviews and became interested not only in factual events but in the situation in which women could or could not speak about a difficult period of their lives.

The manuscript was completed by the end of the 1970s, yet no Soviet publisher dared issue it. It instead became the basis for a successful documentary film. The book finally appeared in Minsk in 1985 during the early period of perestroika. It sold in enormous numbers. Alexievich continued to receive new testimony, and women she had interviewed earlier began to disclose more intimate and disturbing details.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Alexievich revised the work. In the 2000s she restored material previously removed by censorship and included dialogues with censors. The later version reveals both external censorship and the author’s own self-censorship.

The first edition largely fit a heroic mythology of the Second World War in a specifically female form. Yet behind that framework lay another kind of knowledge that had been difficult or impossible to articulate. Censored episodes threatened the immortal masculine myth of war because they concerned menstruation, sexual desire, bodily vulnerability, revenge, cannibalism, rape and the collapse of ordinary moral norms.

One wounded man asks a nurse to show him her breast because he has not seen a woman for a long time; he dies that night and she regrets not having kissed him. Elsewhere a woman after battle drags what she thinks is a person from the water and discovers that she has rescued a large fish, then feels ashamed of the instinct that guided her. Other testimonies describe prisoners killed for personal revenge, sexual assaults committed in front of female medics, and starving groups in which human beings could become food.

Other omitted episodes concern a boy who asks Soviet soldiers to kill his mother because she likes the German language; children raised in German surroundings who are mistrusted as “German”; a grandmother who follows partisans for kilometres begging them to return the family’s only cow; and a woman who remembers that the Germans’ first action after occupation was to dissolve collective farms and divide land. A former front-line woman asks her mother to turn her out of the house because she fears no one will marry a woman who served at the front.

For the present study, it is especially important that Soviet testimony about rape belonged to the material subjected to censorship or self-censorship. Its omission helps explain why rape did not become a publicly discussable part of Soviet and Russian war memory.

Alexievich’s work demonstrates that there is not one unified “female truth” of war. Her attempt to oppose male and female worlds can itself create another ideology. The testimonies instead reveal many different female wars, structured by different experiences and different possibilities of speaking.

A Non-Russian View of the Red Army: Vladimir Gelfand

I approached Vladimir Gelfand’s diary for 1941–1946 hoping to find a perspective different from the female narratives collected by Alexievich and also different from the dominant Russian male war myth. Gelfand’s position was unusual: he was a Jewish officer inside the Red Army.

The diary had been published abroad before any Russian publishing house issued it as a book. Russian-language discussion of Gelfand’s record draws attention to two themes that are especially important here: his unusually direct recording of everyday Red Army life, including antisemitism within the army, and the evidence concerning sexual violence by Soviet servicemen.

The book contains many portraits of officers and soldiers whose speech and behaviour were antisemitic. German propaganda on occupied Soviet territory tried to exploit such prejudice by presenting Russians and Germans as natural allies against Jews. Gelfand’s testimony shows that the social reality within the Red Army was far more complicated than the simple category “Russian soldier.”

Rape in Gelfand’s diary

Gelfand did not describe German occupation of Soviet territory primarily in terms of mass rape. In his account, Nazi policy centred on the destruction of Jewish communities and on punitive killings, including reprisals for German casualties. Sexual violence existed but was not the defining feature of his description of the first phase of the war.

After Stalingrad the atmosphere began to change. Soviet soldiers gained opportunities to interact with civilian populations beyond a purely defensive context. The Germans remained the central enemy, but in Romania and later farther west Gelfand records looting, killing and sexual violence alongside the search for food and accommodation.

Stalingrad was also a psychological turning point: soldiers began to believe in victory, and the army was swept by a new euphoria. In Poland, and then still more on German territory, Gelfand frequently records soldiers testing women’s willingness to enter sexual contact. He does not present himself as a participant in mass rape and generally reports collective rape through stories told by others, while giving much more detail about officers, party officials and their everyday social world.

His diary documents alcohol use and its consequences, sexual bargaining and the everyday presence and treatment of venereal disease. These details place him inside the broader sexual and epidemiological reality of the Red Army. At the same time, he does not normally treat women in his own writing as objects of deliberate cruelty; when rape appears in his personal narrative it tends to appear as attempted or reported violence rather than a boast about his own participation.

Hungarian Sources

The study also relies on two Hungarian authors. Alaine Polcz’s A Woman on the Front is one of the earliest Hungarian works to describe sexual violence by Red Army soldiers and became available in Russian translation. It treats sexual trauma not simply as a political fact but as an encounter with the limits of human nature and evil.

Polcz’s memoir provides an entry into local knowledge. Her movement through the region intersects with places that survive in the memories of present-day villagers. Elderly residents do not necessarily speak about Polcz herself, and her book does not name them, but some were children at the time and could have witnessed the same events, occupied the same spaces or encountered the same people. Individual biography is thus woven into a local infrastructure of collective memory.

Polcz also observes patterns in Soviet social organisation: the tension between hierarchy and equality, the force of orders and their immediate execution, and the paradox that Russian hierarchy could sometimes offer a route of protection from other soldiers. A Woman in Berlin contains comparable social observations.

Pál Závada’s 2014 novel Natural Light assembles diary-like detail into a family mythology. A short but significant episode shows a brother and sister separated by war and unable to speak openly about what they have experienced. Their dialogue is blocked from both sides, a motif that becomes central to the culture of silence discussed later in this study.

State Ideology and Personal Motivation

Ideology

In pre-war Soviet society ideology repeatedly overturned ordinary reality: Stalinist repression and the absurdities of the supply system are obvious examples. The Second World War forced a sudden confrontation with practical reality, and many necessary tasks had to be solved by pushing through or around the power structure. Paradoxically, many people experienced some wartime changes as a kind of release: repression was modified, bureaucratic controls loosened, religious persecution was reduced and practices previously forbidden became temporarily possible.

German cultural influence had long been strong. German remained a major foreign language in schools and universities even during the war. Gelfand’s diary repeatedly records the encounter with European material culture — clothing, boots, household goods and equipment — and the discovery that occupied European economies had supplied the German military.

Some rural Hungarians also had direct prior experience of Russians. Former prisoners of war from the First World War could speak Russian, and their language skills became important when Soviet forces arrived. Sympathy for left-wing ideas existed not only among peasants but among some aristocrats as well.

At the beginning of the war Soviet state ideology often mattered more than personal hatred because not every family had yet suffered a direct loss. People closer to the front or living under occupation could have more complicated views of the enemy than those living in the Soviet interior. Conversely, the appearance of Soviet armed forces created panic among German populations. Posters, newspaper articles and patriotic songs condensed ideology into powerful visual and rhythmic messages.

Gelfand was acutely aware of German ideological propaganda, including anti-Jewish appeals intended for Russian speakers. In the ideology circulating in western Hungary, Russians could be imagined as embodiments of “Asian barbarism.” Soviet soldiers, meanwhile, entered Hungary with their own fragmentary knowledge and motives.

Two ideological points are especially important. Soviet officers knew that Hungary had fought on Germany’s side, but some also understood Hungary’s position after German occupation as constrained. Second, Hungary was formally an enemy country, yet research suggests that the scale and pattern of sexual violence there differed from Germany. The categories of ally, enemy, occupier and liberated population did not translate mechanically into one level of violence.

Wartime Stalinist ideology of victory mixed with pre-war and post-war political structures in individual lives. A person might survive repression, German captivity and then a Soviet camp after liberation. “Motherland” — Rodina — was a powerful emotional construction joining mother, soil, homeland and state. After Stalingrad, the rhetoric of victory increasingly displaced simple defence of the homeland. Once victory became the supreme criterion, almost any action could potentially be rationalised as serving it.

On enemy territory ideology and personal emotion fused into euphoria: reach Berlin, see the enemy on his own soil, humiliate him. Yet Soviet soldiers were sometimes shocked by signs of normal civilian life amid destruction — women sitting over coffee while fighting continued nearby, or whole families killing themselves from fear of the approaching Red Army. The reality of the enemy did not always match the image soldiers had been taught to expect, raising the disturbing question of what their enormous sacrifice had meant.

Personal motivation

Personal revenge frequently reinforced ideological hatred. Many Red Army soldiers had relatives at the front or family members living under occupation. Deaths within one’s own family turned an abstract enemy into a personal target.

Gelfand’s diary and extensive correspondence allow us to look for the growth and escalation of these personal motives. His relatives included people who fled occupied territory and an aunt who survived the siege of Leningrad; other family members did not survive German occupation. He repeatedly lost friends and potential lovers. Yet even this exceptionally self-reflective wartime document does not give a simple formula connecting private grief to state ideology. Not every soldier was driven primarily by personal revenge.

Alexievich’s interviews likewise show ideology and personal motivation intertwined. One woman kept both the official telegram announcing her father’s heroic death and an article calling for revenge until Berlin was taken. Political and personal motives became parts of the same emotional structure.

Women experienced the war through a different set of prohibitions. They were not supposed to fall in love, remember childhood, display tenderness or think about children. To overcome fear and to kill, women too had to mobilise both ideology and personal motives. Afterwards many were left with guilt: some could not eat meat because it recalled human bodies; others could not enter a forest because forests were associated with death. Such experiences became part of the separate “female myth” of war that Alexievich tried to record.

Women at the Front and the “Field Wife”

The everyday “field wife” (PPZh)

Before using the two competing concepts — the heroic “front-line woman” and the “campaign-field wife” or PPZh — it is necessary to define an ethical boundary. The categories overlap and cannot always be separated. Each case belongs to a particular context and involves people caught in tragic circumstances often imposed from outside. Classification must never erase the suffering of the individual.

Alexievich constructs a positive mythology of the front-line woman: discipline, taboo, sacrifice and control of the body. A different Russian discourse centres on the term PPZh and presents women attached to officers as an unofficial institution of army life. In this view, patriotic feeling and state ideology brought women into the armed forces, while a long war produced a demand among officers for some approximation of ordinary domestic and sexual life.

Women linked to officers could become loyal companions and were often exposed to less danger because senior officers spent less time at the front line. Some received high state decorations. Yet after the war many were condemned socially, remained unmarried or were abandoned; only exceptionally did the wartime relationship become a legal marriage.

The line between the two discourses is narrow. Alexievich’s heroines wanted to be good people and patriots and often treated love itself as something important even under wartime taboos. Some entered relationships with commanders. Gelfand’s post-war German entries add further evidence: Russian women could be sought after as lovers but were often not treated as eligible marriage partners, while marriage to German women was restricted by Soviet policy.

The Red Army had no formal brothel system. Informal PPZh relationships could therefore normalise officers’ private lives while leaving ordinary soldiers’ sexual life chaotic. Some women attached to units were passed among soldiers; rank-and-file men also turned to local civilian women. This environment contributed to both mass rape and rape of minors. Soviet servicemen could later feel shame, especially in front of Soviet women who themselves faced post-war stigma for having been labelled “field wives.”

The concepts are useful but cannot produce a perfectly clear picture. Every case was different, and each could be suppressed, narrated or interpreted in a different way by the people involved.

Collecting Trophies

Red Army practice included a custom, reported in several localities, of allowing soldiers a limited period of looting after victory in a newly occupied area, while officers were formally forbidden from participating. In places such as Csákvár and elsewhere in Hungary, looting could include drinking, sexual assault, destruction and the seizure of goods.

The habit of taking objects as trophies became increasingly visible from the Stalingrad period onward. Soldiers faced shortages and took items that had relative value. As the army moved west, the practice also became an encounter with another culture and with higher material living standards. Goods acquired in Central Europe and Germany were expected to be valuable at home.

The contrast between German and Soviet standards of living could produce shock, envy and destructive anger. Soldiers did not merely collect property; they sometimes smashed or burned it, especially under the influence of alcohol. Before Soviet forces reached Csákvár, Prince Esterházy reportedly ordered alcohol stocks destroyed in an effort to prevent drunken violence. Such precautions could not prevent the local population from being shocked by looting, destruction and the unpredictability of Soviet soldiers.

Mass Violence and “Minor” Violence

Alexievich’s work contains both themes, although relevant passages were partly censored in early editions. She also records partisan violence against civilians and cases in which educated soldiers later struggled to understand how they had taken part in collective brutality.

Sexual violence against minors could occur where the adult population was absent or scattered and soldiers sought women among those who remained. Sources also describe food being offered after rape as a kind of “compensation,” an act that did not erase the violence but shows how perpetrators and victims were forced into continuing material relations.

Gelfand does not present himself as a participant in collective rape, but he knew about it through German women’s testimony and through stories circulating among soldiers. Alaine Polcz gives the victim’s view from Hungary and places specific assaults inside the wider social system in which people tried to save themselves, their relatives and neighbours.

Synthesis: Rape and Silence

The sources suggest that rape cannot be separated from the wider organisation of occupation, hunger, military hierarchy, alcohol, revenge, looting and the collapse of local authority. Nor can violence be reduced to one single national character. Soviet, German and Hungarian soldiers all committed killings in different circumstances, while Soviet sexual violence acquired its own particular scale and post-war politics of memory.

Local vocabulary is itself revealing. The same word, such as “partisan,” could carry different meanings depending on whether it was used by Soviet soldiers or villagers. Soviet reconnaissance groups might be called partisans by locals, while Soviet troops might interpret local resistance as partisan warfare. These shifting meanings placed armed men and civilians in overlapping semiotic worlds of fear.

Forests played a special role. They offered private space for acts that could be hidden from the community and thus helped sexual violence become surrounded by secrecy. Seclusion could protect a victim from public humiliation at the moment of assault, but it also made later testimony more difficult and entrenched silence around individual cases.

Oral History

The culture of silence is confirmed by how rarely direct testimony of Soviet sexual violence can be obtained from victims themselves. There is no single final “truth” available through oral history; rather, there is a fragile historical consensus made from memories shaped by present politics, family interests and social position.

Descendants of aristocratic families, former party functionaries, Volksbund members, Arrow Cross supporters and poor peasants all perceive the past through different moral histories. In village society, uncertainty or an admission of vulnerability could be dangerous. Violations of unwritten rules might provoke harsh self-regulating forms of revenge.

One remembered case concerns a Soviet officer quartered with a village family who behaved protectively and shared food with relatives over several months. No one openly discussed the woman who accepted a relationship with him, but witnesses later remembered her with a kind of silent respect because her choice helped sustain an overcrowded household.

Village sexuality had ordinarily belonged to the sphere of privacy. War exposed its darkest opposite: women could be raped before the community while neighbours stood powerless, involuntary witnesses who did not know how to help. This helpless witnessing remains traumatic. In some cases rape was followed by murder.

One story tells of a Soviet soldier who raped a woman in front of about twenty villagers. When an officer learned what had happened, he shot the rapist in front of everyone. The act of “justice” created another immediate problem: the village now had to decide what to do with the corpse.

Public violence had to be hidden. It could be mentioned only within the narrowest family circle, sometimes erupting years later in quarrels: “You should have shown what you were worth when the Russians took me…” Suicide could appear as a possible escape from unbearable shame and despair.

There are memories of mothers who, after seeing their daughters repeatedly assaulted, told them to jump into a well, as another girl had done. One such suicide attempt was stopped only because relatives noticed in time. After the war women who had become pregnant through rape were officially given ways to abandon unwanted children, but neither that option nor keeping the child removed the trauma.

The Fate of War Children

Children conceived through sexual violence remained one of the most painful legacies. Mothers often avoided speaking about the circumstances of conception. Some families accepted such children as part of their own fate; in other cases mothers or children were rejected or moved away to escape social judgement.

Only many decades later have some brothers and sisters begun to ask questions about their origins. Even a suspicion can destabilise a family, producing mistrust and pain. Fear remains embedded in the memory of these events. A story can be told more easily when the person escaped or survived, because the community then has a morally safer form in which to express sympathy.

Conclusion

The culture of silence

Alexievich demonstrates that women were not the only people imprisoned by fear and silence; Soviet society as a whole was. Soldiers were formally expected not to allow themselves to be captured. Those who returned alive from German captivity could be treated with suspicion by both state institutions and society. Many former prisoners of war were sent to Gulag camps and were released only after Stalin’s death. Silence about wartime experience was therefore often a condition of survival.

Pál Závada’s Natural Light is a literary model of this culture of silence. The short exchange between a nurse and her brother is, in effect, a conversation that never happens. The reader knows that both characters possess deep experiences, but they are unable to convert them into shared language.

Sexual violence was still harder to discuss. Traditional social relations offered few acceptable forms in which a woman could tell family or neighbours what had happened to her. Hierarchy — among men in the Red Army and within the lives of women — helped maintain silence. Mass rape and rape of minors were suppressed not only by victims but by witnesses.

There were exceptions: some people broke the silence. Yet they had few illusions that confession alone could transform society. Fear of memory and judgement reinforced non-speech, while post-war societies wanted to imagine a better future rather than hear what many people had survived.

Only now, perhaps at the last possible moment while witnesses are still alive, has public and scholarly interest intensified in Germany, Hungary and Russia. So much suffering must not disappear without trace. Collective traumatic experience has to remain available for future social understanding.

Notes and References Cited in the Article

The article’s notes repeatedly cite Vladimir Gelfand’s Diary 1941–1946 (Russian book edition, 2015), Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (including the 2015 edition), A Woman in Berlin, Alaine Polcz’s A Woman on the Front, Andrea Pető’s studies of wartime rape and memory, Krisztián Ungváry’s work on the siege and occupation of Hungary, and methodological works by Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Catharine MacKinnon and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The original article contains numbered page references throughout; those reference numbers correspond to the scholarly bibliography below.

Bibliography

• Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War, editions cited from 1988 and 2015.
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• Isaak Kobylyansky, memoir material on PPZh and female comrades in wartime units.
• Laura Lee, “PPZh: Concubines or Fighting Companions? The Female Face of War.”
• Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence,” in Harding (ed.), The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader, Routledge, 2004, pp. 169–180.
• Fülöp Merán, works on hunting memories and local history, Budapest, 2002 and 2006.
• Gergely Mózessy (ed.), diocesan and wartime historical source collections, Székesfehérvár, 2002 and 2004.
• Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History, Hungarian edition, Budapest, 2010.
• Andrea Pető, studies on wartime sexual violence, memory and Soviet soldiers, 1999, 2003, 2014 and 2015.
• Alaine Polcz, A Woman and War / A Woman on the Front, editions cited in Russian and Hungarian.
• Péter Antal Polgár, memoir/history volume, Budapest, 2007.
• István Sántha and Tatiana Safonova, In the Land of the Evenki: Cultural Contacts in the Baikal Region, Budapest, 2011.
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and related essays, in Rosalind C. Morris (ed.), Columbia University Press, 2010.
• Krisztián Ungváry, The Siege of Budapest, 2005; and Hungarian Occupation Forces in the Soviet Union, 1941–1944, 2015.
• Yuri Veksler and Dmitry Volchek, material on Gabriele Köpp’s memoirs, Radio Liberty, 2010.
• Pál Závada, Natural Light, Magvető, Budapest, 2014.

Filmography

• Anonyma — A Woman in Berlin, dir. Max Färberböck, 2008, 131 min.
• Viktor Dashuk / Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War, documentary cycle, 1981.
• Márta Mészáros, documentary film cited in the article, 2014, 52 min.
• Sarah Sarre, Accusation, 1996, 84 min.
• Fruzsina Skrabski, documentary on silence and wartime violence, 2013, 52 min.
• Alexei Saltykov, Babye Tsarstvo (A Woman’s Kingdom), Soviet film, 1967, 97 min.
• Pyotr Todorovsky, Wartime Romance, Soviet film, 1983, 87 min.

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