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Red Army Captain Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, arrested in Prussia in February 1945 for making a negative comment about Stalin in a letter to a friend, would secretly write his well-known book Archipelago Gulag and his little-known collection of poems Prussian Nights, in the Soviet concentration camps to which he was sentenced. From the latter I will quote:
“The little daughter’s on the mattress,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Dead. How many have been on it
A platoon, a company perhaps?
A girl’s been turned into a woman,
A woman turned into a corpse.”
.
Solzhenitsyn, who in Gulag Archipelago is ashamed of not having dared to defend a Russian Vlassovist prisoner from the barbarism of a political police sergeant at the front, in Prussian Nights weeps at the horror of the violations committed in occupied Germany by a Soviet army whose victory over German National Socialism made him proud.
Today we see a war on European soil because Putin and his party represent the worst of a false nationalism in which, despite not being communists, they fallaciously amalgamate the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with Russia to claim as “Russian” history victories of a genocidal Soviet power, whose massive crimes began with the extermination of entire categories of the Russian people and other nationalities of the fallen tsarist empire, then spread through Eastern and Central Europe and finally reached every corner of the world to which its influence extended. And lest historical reality unmasks the myth in Putin’s Russia, the law threatens anyone who denigrates “Russia’s” role in World War II with five years in prison.
As this week was celebrated in much of the world the International Women’s Day, a date in which it has been common to see in events monopolized by the neo-Marxist left woke, red flags of the hammer and sickle next to feminist flags, it is necessary to remember some of the many crimes that under those red flags were committed against millions of real women.
In his book, The Fall of Berlin 1945, Sir Anthony Beevor, English military historian and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, explains that upon entering Germany in 1945 Stalin’s troops raped countless women as they advanced toward the capital. But when Berlin fell on May 2, 1945, he began his “open season” to rape any woman, regardless of her age or what she did during the war.
The Soviets, Beevor notes, “were raping every German female from eight to eighty (…) the greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history.” In a maternity clinic and orphanage run by nuns in Haus Dahlem they raped nuns, young women, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth. They even raped Jewish women who had survived the Holocaust and forced laborers from Eastern Europe (including Russians) who had been enslaved by German National Socialism.
Beevor claims that between April and May 1945 the estimated rape victims in Berlin hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. About 10,000 Berliners committed suicide. As historian William Hitchcock explains in his book The Struggle for Europe, 1,400,000 women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia and many were victims of repeated rapes, some between 60 and 70 times by groups of two or more soldiers at a time.
On the orders of their political commissars, the Soviet soldiers ignored order 006 of January 1945, in which Marshal Rokossovsky urged them to confine hatred of the enemy to the battlefield. They also ignored those issued months later by Marshals Konev and Zhukov, threatening looters and rapists with punishment. Their looting and raping did not stop until 1948.
Although each one does it for his own reasons, in our confused times a nationalist authoritarian like Putin and a Chinese neo-communist totalitarian like Xi Jinping coincide with the neo-Marxist Woke of the West, by looking the other way before this and many other crimes of the real socialism of the 20th century.
Guillermo Rodríguez is a professor of Political Economy in the extension area of the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences at Universidad Monteávila, in Caracas. A researcher at the Juan de Mariana Center and author of several books // Guillermo es profesor de Economía Política en el área de extensión de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas de la Universidad Monteávila, en Caracas, investigador en el Centro Juan de Mariana y autor de varios libros