Iron Curtain (9 page)
Authors: Anne Applebaum
They searched for explanations. One political officer wrote back to Moscow, explaining that “this is a kulak agriculture based on the exploitation of labor. That is why everything looks nice and rich. And when our Red Army soldier, particularly one who is immature in the political sense with a petty bourgeois private ownership view, compares involuntarily a collective farm with a German farm, he praises the German farm. We even have some officers who admire German things …”
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Or perhaps it was all stolen: “It’s obvious from everything we see that Hitler robbed the whole of Europe to please his blood-stained Fritzes,” one soldier wrote home. “Their sheep are the best Russian merinos and their shops are piled with goods from all the shops and factories of Europe. In the near future, these goods will appear in Russian shops as our trophies.”
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And so they stole back. Liquor and ladies’ lingerie, furniture and crockery, bicycles and linen were taken from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Baltic and the Balkan states as well as Germany. Wristwatches seemed to have almost mythical significance for Russian soldiers, who would walk around wearing half a dozen at once if they could. An iconic photograph of a Russian soldier raising the Soviet flag atop the Berlin Reichstag had to be touched up to remove the wristwatches from the arms of the young hero.
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In Budapest, the obsession with them remained part of local folklore and may have helped shape local perceptions of the Red Army. A few months after the war, a Budapest cinema showed a newsreel about the Yalta Conference. When President Roosevelt raised his arm while speaking to Stalin, several members of the audience shouted: “Mind your watch!”
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The same was true
in Poland, where for many years Polish children would “play” Soviet soldiers by shouting: “
Davai chasyi
”—“Give me your watch.”
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A beloved Polish children’s television series of the late 1960s included a scene of Russian and Polish soldiers during wartime, camping out in deserted German buildings having amassed a vast collection of stolen clocks.
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For many, these thefts heralded the bitter disillusion that would be experienced by those who had eagerly awaited the arrival of Soviet troops. Márai tells of an elderly man, a “venerable patriarchal figure,” who received his first Soviet visitor with solemnity, and respectfully revealed to him that he was a Jew:
The Russian soldier broke into a smile, removed the submachine gun from his neck, walked up to the old man, and, according to Russian custom, kissed him gently—from right to left—on the cheeks. He said he was a Jew, too. For a time he silently and heartily squeezed the old man’s hand.
Then he hung the submachine gun around his neck again and ordered the old gentleman to stand in the corner of the room with his entire family and to turn with raised hands toward the wall … After this, the Russian robbed them slowly, at his leisure.
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Some Soviet soldiers also found this deeply disturbing. Years later, the writer
Vasily Grossman told his daughter that the Red Army had “changed for the worse” when it crossed the Soviet border. One night, Grossman remembered, he slept in a German house, along with several other Russian soldiers, including a “majestic” colonel, with a “good Russian face,” who was so tired he seemed ready to collapse: “All night, we hear noises coming from the room where the tired colonel is staying. He leaves in the morning without saying goodbye. We go to his room: chaos, the colonel has emptied the cupboards like a real looter.”
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What they didn’t steal, they often destroyed. The street fighting in Berlin and Budapest caused plenty of what we would now call collateral damage, but the Red Army also engaged in wanton destruction, apparently for its own sake. In
Gniezno, the cradle of Christianity in Poland, Soviet tanks deliberately destroyed a thousand-year-old cathedral that had no military significance whatsoever. Photographs taken at the time (and then hidden for seventy years) show the tanks standing alone, in the town square, firing at
the ancient building without provocation.
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After taking the city of Breslau, Soviet soldiers deliberately set the buildings in the ancient town center alight, burning to the ground the priceless book collection of the university library as well as the city museum and several churches.
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Both the robbery and the destruction would continue for many months, growing more sophisticated with time, eventually taking the official form of “reparations.” But the unofficial robbery also went on for many months. As late as 1946, East German officials were complaining that Soviet officers in
Saxony had set themselves up in private apartments and were ordering furniture, paintings, and porcelain from the Saxon state collections to be sent to them from local castles: “Once they leave the area they take them with them.” The owner of Castle Friesen near Reichenbach complained that he had lost a table worth 4,000 Reichsmarks (the prewar currency), three carpets worth 11,500 Reichsmarks, a rococo chest of drawers worth 18,000 Reichsmarks, and a mahogany desk worth 5,000 Reichsmarks. There is no record that any of this was returned.
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More horrific, and ultimately of deeper political significance, were violent attacks on civilians that began long before the
Red Army reached Berlin. They started as the Red Army crossed Poland, intensified in Hungary, and reached an astonishing level as Soviet troops crossed into Germany. To those whom they encountered, the brutalized, angry soldiers of the Red Army seemed consumed by a desire for revenge. They were enraged by the deaths of friends, spouses, and children, enraged by the burned villages and mass graves the Germans had left behind in
Russia. Once, Grossman witnessed a procession of hundreds of Soviet children, walking eastward on a road, leaving German captivity. Soviet soldiers and officers stood solemnly alongside the road, “peering intently into their faces.” The men were fathers, looking for lost sons and daughters who had been deported to Germany: “One colonel had been standing there for several hours, upright, stern, with a dark, gloomy face. He went back to his car in the dusk: he hadn’t found his son.”
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The Red Army may have been enraged by its own commanders, their heartless tactics and their constant use of threats and political spies, as well as its own losses. The historian
Catherine Merridale, who interviewed hundreds of veterans, believes that they were often expressing political rage: “Consciously or not … Red Army soldiers would soon be venting anger that had built up through decades of state oppression and endemic violence.”
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The women of the newly occupied territories would bear the brunt of
this rage. Women of all ages were subjected to gang rapes and sometimes murdered afterward. Though more famous as the chronicler of the Gulag, the Russian writer
Alexander Solzhenitsyn also entered East
Prussia with the Red Army in 1945, where he encountered, and later put into verse—translated by
Robert Conquest—scenes of horror:
A moaning by the walls half muffled:
The mother’s wounded, still alive.
The little daughter’s on the mattress,
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.
It’s all come down to simple phrases:
Do not forget! Do not forgive!
Blood for blood! A tooth for a tooth!
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These acts of vengeance were often apolitical, and they were not even necessarily directed at Germans or Nazi sympathizers. As Grossman noted, “Soviet girls liberated from the camps are suffering a lot now. Tonight, some of them are hiding in our correspondents’ room. During the night, we are woken up by screams: one of the correspondents couldn’t resist the temptation.” In his memoirs,
Lev Kopelev, at the time a political officer in the Red Army, recounts the fate of a Russian girl who had been a forced
laborer in Germany, but who was mistaken for one of the enemy. She was “beautiful, young, cheerful, hair like gold tumbling down her back—some soldiers, drunk I guess, were walking down the street, saw her—‘Hey, Fritzie, hey, you bitch!’—and a spray from a submachine gun across her back. She didn’t live an hour. Kept crying: ‘What for?’ She had just written her mother that she’d be coming home.”
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Sometimes the victims were Polish forced laborers, who had the bad luck to be in the Red Army’s way: “Just then there was a frenzied scream and a girl ran into the warehouse, her long, braided blonde hair disheveled, her dress torn across her breast, shouting piercingly, ‘I’m Polish! Jesus Mary, I’m Polish!’ Two tank men were after her. Both were wearing their black helmets. One of them was viciously drunk.”
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When Kopelev tried to intervene—theoretically rape was punishable by execution on the spot—his
companions upbraided him, grumbling: “ ‘Some commanders … They’ll shoot their own men over a German bitch.’ ” He was similarly reproached for objecting when fellow soldiers shot a feeble-minded old woman as a “spy”: “Are you going to turn against your own people over a lousy German crone?”
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Both the rapes and the violence horrified local communists, who immediately understood what their political impact would be. In public, the rapes were attributed to “diversionists dressed in Soviet uniforms.” In private, local communists petitioned authorities to help take control. One Polish security officer wrote to the propaganda boss of the Polish army in February 1945 to complain that Red Army troops “behave toward Poles in a manner that is harming Polish-Soviet friendship and weakens the feelings of gratitude the people of
Poznań had for their liberators … rape of women is very common, sometimes in the presence of parents or husbands. Even more common are situations when soldiers, usually younger officers, compel women to their quarters (sometimes under the pretense that they will help with the wounded) and attack them there.”
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Others tried to deny what was happening. One young Hungarian, a communist at the time, explained that he hadn’t known about any rapes: “In our family circle one would have said that ‘this is Nazi nonsense’ … at that time we were still convinced that they [the Soviets] were new men.” But over time, they found the “new men” didn’t quite conform to expectations. At one point, he was given responsibility for a group of young Russians: “At night [they] were regularly jumping out of their windows and going to drink somewhere or pick up some whores or whatever else, which we were very embarrassed by. Very embarrassed by them. Didn’t denounce them, but we knew about it …”
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Some were touched personally.
Robert Bialek, one of the few active, underground communists in the then-German city of Breslau, arrived home after his first, celebratory encounter with the Soviet commandants who had occupied the city—as a communist, he wanted to offer them his help—to discover that his wife had been raped. This, for him, was the beginning of the end: “The brutish instincts of two common Russian soldiers had brought the world crashing down about my head, as no Nazi tortures nor the subtlest persuasion had ever done.” He wished, he wrote, “that I had been buried, like so many of my friends, under the ruins of the town.”
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It is frequently and correctly observed that this wave of sexual violence was not planned, in Germany or anywhere else, and there is no document “ordering” such attacks.
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Yet it is also true that officers such as Kopelev and
Solzhenitsyn found that their immediate superiors weren’t much interested in stopping them, and both rape and random killings were clearly tolerated, at least in the early weeks of occupation. Though decisions were left up to local commanders, this tolerance flowed from the highest possible level. When the Yugoslav communist
Milovan Djilas complained about the behavior of the Red Army to Stalin, the Soviet leader infamously demanded to know how he, a writer, could not “understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?”
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This sort of “understanding” was enhanced by Soviet propaganda about the Germans and Germany, which became especially bloodthirsty during the final attack on Berlin, and by the desire to humiliate German men. “Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed,” wrote one war correspondent, in an article reread and reprinted often after February 1945: “Kill the German—this is your mother’s prayer. Kill the German—this is the cry of your Russian earth.”
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Even if the looting, violence, and rapes were not part of a political plan, in practice they had a deep and long-lasting political impact on all of the territories occupied by the Red Army. On the one hand, the violence made people doubtful about Soviet rule, and deeply suspicious of communist propaganda and Marxist ideology. At the same time, violence, especially sexual violence, made both men and women profoundly afraid. The Red Army was brutal, it was powerful, and it could not be stopped. Men could not protect women; women could not protect themselves; neither could protect their children or their property. The horror that had been inspired could not be openly discussed, and official responses were usually oblique. In Hungary, the
Budapest National Committee suspended the ban on abortions in February 1945, though without explaining exactly why. In January 1946, the Hungarian Social Welfare Minister issued an evasive decree: “As an effect of the front and the chaos following it there were a lot of children born whose families did not want to take care of them … I ask hereby the bureau of orphanages … to qualify all babies as abandoned whose date of birth is from nine to eighteen months after the liberation.”
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