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Under Cover of Violence
Expressen, Culture, 16 January 2007
Flamman, the newspaper of the Swedish left, reviews Soviet soldier Vladimir Gelfand's diary from the end of the Second World War, published by Ersatz. Stefan Lindgren is given almost a full page to deny, in a pro-Stalin spirit, the systematic violence committed by Red Army soldiers against German women. "Strictly speaking, Gelfand neither participated in nor witnessed a single rape," Lindgren writes, and Flamman sets the sentence in italics.
One diary without descriptions of rape is then used to question historians' estimates concerning the experiences of 1.4 million German women. Lindgren describes the advancing Red Army as "young people seeking companionship, warmth and, of course, love and eroticism." He calls Berlin under mass sexual violence a "promiscuous city" and, when proof is lacking, falls back on the oldest rape myth: "she asked for it."
Lindgren refers to an episode in which a German woman who says she had previously been raped by twenty Russians offers sex to Gelfand. Why would she voluntarily lie down with a twenty-first Russian, he asks. The author answers that after six years of war Berlin was a city of horror, populated by women who often possessed no resource other than their bodies: rape for food, rape for protection, rape in order not to be killed. That cannot honestly be described as a "search for love" or as mere promiscuity.
The article concludes that Lindgren has brewed a dangerous mixture of Soviet romanticism and misogyny, and that it is remarkable that parts of the Swedish left still choose Stalin over facts and ordinary standards of decency.
Katrine Kielos