Oleg Sdvizhkov: “Do Not Introduce Soviet Ways!” The Red Army in Europe, 1944–1945

Introduction

In March 1945, at a meeting with Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš, I. V. Stalin said that the Red Army was “indeed a valiant, brave and glorious army, but it has many shortcomings. This army is large; it is fighting a major war. Together with the people serving its immediate rear, it numbers approximately 12 million people. These 12 million people are different people. One should not think that they are all angels.” [1]

Seventy-five years ago the Second World War ended. For our country it was the Great Patriotic War, the hardest and most destructive war in Russian history. It began with the invasion of the Soviet Union by the armies of Germany and its satellites and ended with the complete defeat of the enemy on its own territory and the entry of the Red Army into Berlin.

From the first days of the war, the Soviet government declared that the Red Army's purpose was not only to liberate Soviet territory but also to liberate European countries occupied by Germany or subordinated to it against the interests of their peoples.

The Red Army crossed the Soviet border in the spring of 1944. By the beginning of May 1945 it had completely or partially liberated ten European countries with a combined population of more than 100 million. More than one million Red Army soldiers were killed during a year of fighting in Europe.

Soviet soldiers not only fought at the front; they also took part in restoring peaceful life in liberated countries, maintaining order, providing humanitarian assistance to the population, rebuilding civilian infrastructure, and helping organize local self-government and restore institutions of political authority.

When Soviet troops entered towns and villages in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland and Czechoslovakia, crowds of citizens greeted them joyfully as liberators. There is a great deal of written and documentary evidence, including photographs, recording this response.

In our country the Red Army's actions in Eastern Europe came to be known as the “Liberation Mission.” The concept became firmly established in Soviet mass consciousness and was transmitted beyond the country's borders through literature, film and monumental propaganda.

In the West, above all in Great Britain and the United States, a different picture of events in Eastern Europe during the final stage of the war gradually took shape. This began in the press even before the fighting had ended. Many journalists searched for cases of improper behavior by Red Army soldiers and repeated rumors that made it possible to portray the Red Army as a savage crowd ready to destroy everything in its path. The commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower, was even forced to explain to journalists that depicting an allied army in this way was not constructive while military operations were still continuing.

In the 1960s the same process continued in historical journalism and scholarly publications. What in our country was regarded as liberation began to be described there as a new “occupation” whose purpose was allegedly to impose political regimes alien to the peoples of Europe. Publications placed particular emphasis on cases of misconduct by Red Army soldiers toward civilians. A picture was created of violence against inhabitants of Germany and other countries along the Red Army's route as unprecedented and without parallel in world history.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, works by popular Western authors began to be translated and published in Russia. The growth of the internet also opened Western media products to everyone. Many Western information outlets, for example the BBC in Britain and Deutsche Welle in Germany, publish their material in Russian as well. Concepts and ideas dominant in their information space therefore began to spread in Russia.

The Soviet-era depiction of the Red Army's liberation mission was extremely generalized and slogan-like. The overwhelming majority of scholarly works were devoted almost exclusively to military operations. Other aspects of events were treated only episodically. Everyday life at the front did not interest historians at that time. Perhaps in the 1950s–1970s there was no perceived need for such research: millions of people who had personally served at the front, including in Europe, were still alive, as were tens of millions whose relatives or acquaintances had been soldiers in the war.

Historical literature, films and media publications formed an image of the Soviet soldier that was broadly accurate but idealized. Western authors, while acknowledging Soviet military achievements, concentrated on “everyday” facts, paying particular attention to cases of misconduct by Red Army personnel. Gradually such facts, though not isolated, represented only a small fraction of everything that happened, yet acquired the status of the main, meaning-defining content of the final stage of the war.

One of the most serious accusations against the Red Army is the allegation of mass rape of women in Germany and other European countries. The estimated number of victims has grown as the war has receded into the past: beginning with several tens of thousands, it has by now reached claims of two million in Germany alone. Confirmation of such a figure is not easy to find in memoirs, notes and diaries by Soviet participants in the events. Western authors complain that Soviet veterans still refuse to acknowledge the fact.

As the war receded in time, the negative image of the Red Army became increasingly popular. Memoirs that in the 1950s provoked negative or skeptical reactions among readers who had themselves lived through the war became bestsellers in the 2000s. During the same period, the theme of “Soviet rapists” reached cinema.

Authors interested in “promoting” their historical reconstructions have to observe certain conventions in presenting their texts, accompanying them with references to documents, eyewitness testimony, quotations from diaries and letters, and so on. The ordinary reader generally has no opportunity to assess how conscientiously an author worked with the sources or the quality of the sources themselves. Doing so is even harder in relation to films.

Attempts to assess the evidentiary basis of accusations directed at the Red Army in popular historical writing or feature films lead to a discouraging result. As a rule, the most striking testimonies cannot, in a scholarly sense, be recognized as fully reliable sources. For example, the diary A Woman in Berlin, extremely popular among Western historians and also the basis of the film of the same name, describes the horrors of the first days of the Soviet occupation of the city but has no identified author. Disputes over who wrote it began immediately after the first edition in the 1950s and still have not produced a convincing answer. It therefore cannot be asserted with certainty that it is a chronicle recorded by a real participant rather than a literary work created to serve a particular ideological purpose.

The East Prussian Diary of the chief physician of Königsberg's city hospital does have an identified author, but the sequence of events described in it with pedantic precision, including dates and days of the week, does not coincide with the sequence recorded in Soviet documents. When the book was first published in the 1960s those documents were classified, but they are now available online. One no longer even needs to travel to an archive in order to reconstruct the events.

The film 4 Days in May was based on a fictional story from the journal Rodina that its author initially presented as a documentary study. Nevertheless, the film opens with the words “based on real events” appearing on a black screen.

For more than seven decades, the author argues, a “black myth” about the Red Army has been created in the West. The volume of information in the media, the authority and popularity of writers of historical “studies,” and the high artistic quality of films give many readers and viewers the impression that Soviet troops really were “Bolshevized Mongol and Slavic hordes” that burst into Europe to enslave it.

According to this interpretation, the image of the Red Army and the Soviet soldier created by authors, editors and producers is not the result of serious scholarly research that has opened people's eyes to the real content of the last year of the war in Europe. It is an ideological product created in an information war that began against the Soviet Union and is now, in the author's view, being waged against modern Russia.

Of course, the dominant interpretation of events cannot be refuted simply by opposing this generally primitive “black myth” with the idealized Soviet-era image of the liberating Soviet soldier. Millions of Soviet soldiers took part in the liberation of Europe — people of different nationalities and very different educational and cultural backgrounds. Among them were people with criminal records and recent prisoners of Nazi concentration camps; many had lost relatives and loved ones or endured occupation. “One should not think that they were all angels.” The author emphasizes that these were the people who brought peace to the peoples of Europe, helped them restore their economies, saved them from hunger and epidemics, and guaranteed the possibility of further national, cultural and political development.

Text visible in the book images

Front cover: “Oleg Sdvizhkov — ‘Do Not Introduce Soviet Ways!’ — The Red Army in Europe, 1944–1945.” The cover identifies the series as the Library of the Russian Military Historical Society.

Back cover: Oleg Vladimirovich Sdvizhkov is identified as a military historian. The promotional text states that in 1944–1945 the Red Army liberated many peoples of Europe from Nazism and that the book examines the price of liberation, the conduct of Soviet soldiers, and later historical controversies over the Red Army's role in Europe. The back cover also quotes the author's argument that accusations and myths about Red Army behavior should be checked against documents and evidence.

The publishing-information image identifies the Russian Military Historical Society's “Library” series, the author Oleg Sdvizhkov, the publisher Yauza, Moscow, 2021, and the same ISBN as listed above.