The graves of Izyum have once again shown the world how brutal the Russian occupation forces are in Ukraine. For many, the question once again arises: Where does the willingness of so many Russian soldiers to commit the worst atrocities against civilians come from?
Observers have pointed out that violence is part of everyday life in Russia, especially in families. What is much more important, however, is that torture, rape and shootings have a long tradition in the Russian military that has never been dealt with. While the Bundeswehr broke away from the legacy of the Wehrmacht in a painful process, the Russian army glorifies its violent past to this day.
Since the Bolshevik coup of October 1917, indiscriminate killing became an instrument of state policy in Russia. A Soviet government decree of September 1918 called it “absolutely essential” to shoot anyone “involved in conspiracies, uprisings and uprisings on the spot.” Up to 200,000 people are said to have been liquidated at the time.
With merciless violence, the young Soviet Russia also annexed numerous neighboring countries. Uprisings in Ukraine and Georgia were brutally put down. Between 8 and 10 million people died in the Russian Civil War up until 1922, most of them civilians. Although the head of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, soon fell out of favor, none of those responsible were ever brought to justice.
Under Stalin, terror became the central principle of politics – and not only internally. In alliance with Hitler, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in September 1939, where it committed the most serious war crimes. More than 4,000 prisoners of war were shot in the Katyn massacre alone. Thousands of reserve officers, police officers and intellectuals were liquidated in further murderous actions; over 300,000 Polish citizens were deported. The incorporation of the Baltic States and Bessarabia was not much different.
Not a single participant was held responsible for these atrocities either. Rather, until 1990, the Kremlin claimed that German occupying forces had committed the massacres at Katyn. Only under Mikhail Gorbachev did the Soviet Union express its regret over the “tragedy”. A criminal case brought by the Kharkiv Region Prosecutor’s Office against several NKVD officers, which the Moscow Military Prosecutor’s Office took ownership of, was dropped after fourteen years. The heavily incriminated head of the prisoner of war department, Pyotr Soprunenko, died unmolested in Moscow in 1992.
In June 2020, Vladimir Putin even blamed Poland for his fate because it had participated in the partition of Czechoslovakia in 1938. In an essay he wrote, among other things: “The ensuing tragedy in Poland is entirely on the conscience of the Polish leadership at the time.” About the annexation of the Baltics, he claimed that this was done “on a contractual basis, with the consent of the elected authorities”.
Countless atrocities also occurred during the advance of the Red Army at the end of World War II. This time, the main victims were German civilians, but also residents of the Baltic States and other countries. Especially in the eastern German territories, Soviet soldiers committed mass rapes and shootings. But they also committed terrible war crimes in the Soviet occupation zone.
The deeds were not spontaneous acts of revenge, but took place with the consent of the Soviet leadership. The commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front ordered his soldiers before the attack on East Prussia: “There is no mercy – for anyone, just as there was no mercy for us either. The country of the fascists must become a desert.” And the State Defense Committee decided: “By merciless liquidation on the spot, people who are convicted of terrorist acts of diversion are to be ruthlessly settled.” Such an act was, for example, when someone telephoned or listened to the radio.
Rarely was anyone held accountable for Soviet war crimes in Germany. What’s more, as the Germanist Lev Kopelev reports in his autobiography, his superiors repeatedly instructed him that it was not his job to stop marauders. In April 1945 he was even arrested and sentenced to three years in a labor camp for “propagating bourgeois humanism” and “pitying the enemy”.
While the Stalinist persecutions are no longer taboo in Russia, the war crimes of the Red Army are still being suppressed today. For most Russians, World War II didn’t start until 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The memory of the “Great Patriotic War”, massively promoted under Putin, cultivates a pathetic narrative in which the Russians are always victims and heroes, but never perpetrators. The Stalinist memorial in Berlin, which shows a Red Army soldier with a child in his arms, symbolizes this to this day.
Dealing with the past in this way would be unthinkable in Germany. More than 20 years ago, two traveling exhibitions made the crimes of the Wehrmacht known to a broad public. The traditional decree of the Bundeswehr also states very clearly: “For the armed forces of a democratic constitutional state, the Wehrmacht as an institution is not worthy of tradition.”
In Russia, on the other hand, the founding day of the Red Army is still celebrated today as a work-free “Defender of the Fatherland Day”. Celebrations and parades take place in many cities, and the heads of state lay wreaths at the Kremlin wall. A direct line from the beginnings of the Red Army to the present day is also drawn in the huge Moscow Armed Forces Museum. Under their banner of victory, children there recently even had to write letters to Russian soldiers who were “doing their duty in Ukraine”.
But even in Germany, the more than 100-year-old trail of blood from the Kremlin is rarely talked about. Out of shame about the crimes of the Wehrmacht, those of the Red Army are relativized or kept secret. The documentation center on German occupation in Europe planned by the federal government also omits the topic.
The deputy head of the Moscow Armed Forces Museum is even still the head of the Berlin Surrender Museum. The murders in Ukraine show that those who remain silent about yesterday’s crimes help ensure that they are repeated today and tomorrow.