From Berlin to Bucha: Vladimir Gelfand's Diary and the Mirror of Repeated Violence

Content warning: The following text contains descriptions and images of wartime violence and sexual violence. Please read with care.

The everyday reality of "victory" in wartime was anything but honorable. Gelfand's Berlin diary records the suppressed and uncontrolled violence of 1945-1946, and it also reflects mechanisms visible in Russia's present war against Ukraine: dehumanization, cycles of revenge, the breakdown of law, and spirals of silence. Eighty years later, we are still overlooking diaries and testimonies that should have been read.

By War and Memory Workshop · Updated: 21 August 2025

World War II: Red Army soldiers, Germany, 1945. Family archive.

The wartime diary of Soviet officer Vladimir Gelfand is one of the sharpest private chronicles of the Second World War. It records not only the exhilaration of victory but also the moral collapse of everyday occupation: looting, coercion, sexual violence, exhaustion, a desire for revenge, and occasional flashes of humanity. Eighty years later, the text functions like a mirror in which our own present is painfully recognizable.

1945-1946: the reality of large-scale sexual violence in Germany

Scholars including Antony Beevor and Norman Naimark, together with extensive journalistic testimony, broadly agree on a central point: in 1945-46, conflict-related sexual violence in the Soviet occupation zone was large-scale and persistent. Estimates differ, ranging from hundreds of thousands to more than a million, but even conservative estimates for Berlin alone speak of roughly 100,000 victims. The violence included beatings, threats with weapons, repeated gang rape and killings; many women died or took their own lives. The article attributes the causes to propaganda fueled by hatred and revenge, alcohol, failures of discipline, and de facto impunity; it says the situation declined only after discipline was tightened in 1947-48.

World War II: Red Army soldiers resting outdoors, 1945-46. Family archive.

What can be seen in the diary

Gelfand rarely launches into extended argument. He observes and records. In an immediate, "as it happened" manner he writes about tailors, the black market, meetings and partings, but also about the shadow of victory - coercion, looting, plunder, trauma and the collapse of order. This raw viewpoint shows how rapidly violence can become embedded in daily life when restraints disappear.

Two diary scenes:

21 February 1945. "The day before yesterday a women's battalion fought on the left flank. They were badly defeated. The captured German 'she-cats' declared that they wanted revenge for their husbands killed at the front. I do not know what happened to them afterward - but these bad women ought to have been executed without mercy. Our soldiers suggested, for example, stabbing them through the genitals; I would simply have destroyed them."

25 April 1945 (near Berlin / a frontline town). "A girl's mother told me that her daughter had been raped in turn by twenty Russian soldiers the previous night: 'Don't you want to sleep with my daughter? Every Russian comrade who came here wanted to! They will come again, or there will be another twenty, and then my misfortune will be complete!' The girl embraced me, forcing a smile through tears, and pleaded..."

The article says that the bluntness of these passages is shocking: they are neither counter-propaganda nor an excuse, but snapshots of occupation as everyday experience.

World War II: Red Army group photograph; officer Vladimir Gelfand is seated in the front row. Berlin, 1945. Family archive.

2022-2025: Ukraine - the present being documented

The article states that international monitoring missions have recorded similar types of crimes in Russia's war against Ukraine: conflict-related sexual violence, including sexual violence used as torture; abduction and arbitrary detention; systematic torture; large-scale looting of property; and extrajudicial killings. It cites a United Nations report for July 2025 recording 286 civilian deaths and 1,388 injuries - the highest monthly level since May 2022 - and says that since the full-scale invasion in February 2022 at least 13,883 civilians had been killed and 35,548 injured, while acknowledging that the real figures were much higher. The article presents these numbers as records from monitoring missions, rights organizations and judicial material rather than as commentary.

Contemporary: Russian soldiers at an assembly point (video still / official release), 2022-25.

"Russia does not count its own losses"

As in the Second World War, the article argues, the state shows a willingness to absorb enormous personnel losses while continuing what it calls "human-wave" or attritional assaults. Russia has not published complete casualty statistics. Independent estimates cited by the article - from allied agencies and think tanks - put cumulative casualties in the hundreds of thousands, with some combined estimates approaching or exceeding one million. Exact figures differ, but the article's conclusion is that the human cost is appalling and that lives are treated as expendable material for command and propaganda.

Contemporary: Russian soldiers on an armored vehicle in the Ukrainian war zone, 2022-25.

Repeated mechanisms

• Dehumanization and the logic of revenge turn violence into an "acceptable practice."
• Failures of discipline and accountability allow crimes to spread when they are not stopped and are instead tolerated or rewarded.
• A spiral of silence among victims - shame, threats and fear of renewed victimization - makes documentation and accountability difficult both in Berlin and in Ukraine.

Contemporary: vehicles and patrols marked with "Z," 2022-25.

Why this is a text about the present

Gelfand did not know us and did not write for a "future tribunal." He simply recorded what he saw: how violence entered the daily life of the victors and existed alongside looting, coercion, alcohol, exhaustion, occasional emotion and the disappearance of boundaries. That is why, the article argues, the diary feels strikingly modern. Almost the same sentences could be used today to describe Ukrainian cities destroyed by Russian forces; the difference is that today every word must be documented as evidence.

Conclusion

History does not automatically move forward. Where violence is justified and goes unpunished, it returns - in a new uniform and under new slogans. Gelfand's diary, the article argues, reminds us that without facing the past we cannot stop the present from repeating it.

War returns to the home front

The article says that many men returning from the front on leave, after discharge, after wounds or disability, or after receiving a "pardon," bring home the sense of impunity and habits of cruelty formed in the war zone and redirect violence against their own country's citizens - often strangers, neighbors or family members. Summaries of court judgments and police reports by independent media are cited as showing more than a hundred servicemen convicted of intentional homicide in 2023, while investigative media counted nearly two hundred criminal cases against pardoned Wagner personnel, including murder and attempted murder, rape, robbery and serious assault. Official reports are said to acknowledge that serious violent crime is at a high level, with murders in public places, sexual assaults and severe bodily harm increasing. At the same time, the article describes a pattern of institutional leniency: courts frequently treat combat service as a mitigating factor, impose minimum or suspended sentences or fines in cases including domestic violence, or send defendants back to the front. The result, it argues, is a breakdown of internal boundaries, normalization of violence, and movement by perpetrators between a "hero" narrative and lenient criminal treatment, while people living in the same cities and apartment buildings become victims.

Contemporary: Russian servicemen returning from the front on leave or after discharge, at railway or bus stations and in their home towns (illustrative image). Public sources.
 

Contemporary: court proceedings and police reports involving serving or former servicemen have not stopped the growth in cases committed by Russian soldiers returning from the battlefield (illustrative image). Source: public data / media reports.

For seventy-five years - first throughout the Soviet Union and then in Russian society - people sang songs of the Second World War, laid flowers, repeated "never again," and produced and watched countless films about Nazism and the concentration camps. Gradually, the article says, Putin-style fascism came to be treated as a "normality," just as Hitler's fascism had once been normalized. Ordinary Russians believe television and believe in the supposed "just wars" waged by their country - the conflicts listed by the article include Georgia (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) in 1991-93, Moldova (Transnistria) in 1992, the First Chechen War in 1994-96, the Second Chechen War in 1999-2009, the invasion of Georgia in 2008, and Syria from 2015 onward. They do not view these as aggression, the article says, justify their country's crimes, and even gladly receive parcels of "trophies" sent from Ukraine. Somewhere between the Second World War and the current war, it concludes, a crucial moment was missed - perhaps in the diaries and testimonies that were never seriously read: Gelfand, Solzhenitsyn, Rabichev, Alexievich, Grossman, Shalamov, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Lydia Chukovskaya, Nikolai Nikulin, Lev Kopelev, Viktor Nekrasov, Ales Adamovich and others. "Fascism has been revived in Russia."

Contemporary: members of the "National Socialist Initiative" at a May Day march in St Petersburg, 2014. Source: Wikipedia.