Putin’s rapist purple military: As Russia is accused of committing vile atrocities in Ukraine, historian PATRICK BISHOP unearths the chilling similarities to the Soviet forces’ march thru Germany

The apprehensive girls huddled in a dormitory within the German the town of Bunzlau listened to the sounds of wrestle getting closer – with emerging hope of their hearts.

They had been all Soviet voters, seized by means of Hitler’s forces once they swept thru their house cities and villages within the early levels of the battle and packed off to the Reich to paintings as slave labourers.

But now the tide had became and, with the Red Army on the gates, their ordeal gave the impression nearly over.

It was once to not be. The access of the Third Guards Tank Army was once the beginning of an orgy of drunkenness, looting, random killing and, above all, indiscriminate rape.

On the evening of March 5 1945, a gaggle of 60 officials and males, maximum of them under the influence of alcohol, broke into the ladies’s shelter. When their commander confirmed up and attempted to reserve them out, they threatened to shoot him. Then they pressured themselves at the terrified girls, many simply youngsters. That their sufferers had been the very other folks whom they had been supposedly combating to loose made no distinction.

‘I waited for the Red Army for days and nights,’ recorded Maria Shapoval bitterly. ‘I waited for my liberation and now our soldiers treat us worse than the Germans did.’

Neither this incident nor any of the numerous equivalent tales which stain the historical past of the Soviet advance into German-occupied territory throughout the remaining months of the battle had been discussed within the lavish Victory Day celebrations which came about in Russia and occupied Ukraine this week.

Vladimir Putin was once decided that the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s triumph in its ‘Great Patriotic War’ can be lengthy remembered.

Historian Patrick Bishop says the struggle in Ukraine has taught us that ‘despite the fact that 80 years have handed, Russia nonetheless wages battle in a lot the similar means’. Pictured: Protestors outdoor Downing Street in April 2022 dangle placards drawing consideration to a bloodbath within the Ukrainian town of Bucha by means of Russian infantrymen

Vladimir Putin (pictured right here at Friday’s Victory Day army parade) was once decided that the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s triumph in its ‘Great Patriotic War’ can be lengthy remembered

A welter of occasions to vaunt a ‘sacred feat of valour’ incorporated re-enactments of the long-lasting second when Red Army infantrymen planted a hammer-and-sickle flag top at the Reichstag development within the centre of Berlin at the night time of April 30, 1945, with a battle-scarred life-size replica of the parliament erected in a Moscow park for the aim.

The top level was once a mass parade in Red Square. The rumbling tanks and phalanxes of goose-stepping troops despatched an unsubtle message of brute army power to Putin’s personal other folks and the arena at massive.

But the spectacle may be designed to support a historic narrative which is central to the best way that Putin and maximum Russians see the arena – and which shapes their perspective to their neighbours and the West.

This view states that it was once they, now not us, who stored the arena from Nazism and that with out the heroic sacrifices of the Red Army, we’d all be talking German.

In this telling of the Second World War saga, it’s the Soviets who’re overwhelmingly the great guys, with the British, Americans and the remainder of the Western Allies enjoying a secondary and steadily cynical and duplicitous position. This legend has been force-fed to the folk of the previous Soviet Union since 1945 with really extensive luck.

Yesterday, facet by means of facet along with his fellow dictator and ever-closer good friend, Chinese president Xi Jinping, Putin gazed proudly on the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles lumbering around the sq. and presented a couple of gracious phrases of appreciation for the contribution of the Western allies. But he reiterated that the Soviets had been ‘the true victors over Nazism’. The match was once larded with symbolism and rhetoric to hyperlink the ‘Great Patriotic War’ of 80 years in the past along with his so-called ‘Special Military Operation’ of lately. Some 1,500 of the marching infantrymen had been veterans of the present struggle and a few of the army package on show had been Lancet, Geran and Orlan drones used to batter Ukrainian towns and positions.

Putin painted the present struggle as a continuation of Russia’s historical position as ‘an indestructible barrier against Nazism’ – an unsubtle connection with the Kremlin’s false claims that President Zelensky and his executive are neo-fascists. Then, as now, he stated, the ‘entire country, society and people’ had been united at the back of the battle effort.

While no historian denies that the greater than 8 million Soviet infantrymen who died defeating Hitler made a huge and decisive contribution to victory, the Kremlin’s retelling of the Second World War is a ludicrously simplistic and one-sided presentation of occasions.

Military cars and infantrymen parade thru Red Square as a part of the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of Victory within the Great Patriotic War at Red Square in Moscow, Russia on May 9, 2025

Russians flooded directly to the streets of St Petersburg on May 9, sporting portraits of other folks together with Red Army infantrymen, to have a good time their victory over Nazi Germany in World War 2

For something, it makes no point out of the truth that for the primary 22 months of the battle Hitler and Stalin had been successfully allies. For every other, it shamelessly ignores the appallingly savage habits of the Red Army in opposition to the civilian populations who lay of their trail – be they Germans, Poles and even their very own other folks.

The Germans knew that retribution can be harsh when ‘Ivan’ arrived in the hunt for vengeance for the atrocities perpetrated by means of the SS and Wehrmacht anywhere that they had set foot in Eastern Europe. Just how horrible it might be was once made transparent when the Red Army entered East Prussia in pressure in mid-January 1945, fired up by means of propaganda issued by means of their political officials urging them: ‘Soldier, remember, you are now entering the lair of the fascist beast!’

They wanted little encouragement. Emma Korn detailed what took place when the frontoviki – frontline troops – discovered her and two different German girls hiding in a cellar: ‘They pointed their weapons… and ordered us into the yard,’ she stated. ‘Twelve soldiers in turn raped me. Other soldiers did the same to our two neighbours.’ The subsequent evening, ‘six drunken soldiers broke into our cellar and raped us in front of the children’.

All this was once widely known to the Soviet government, from Stalin down. This explicit tale was once recounted by means of an officer of the NKVD secret police to his boss Lavrentiy Beria and was once found out within the state archives by means of the historian Antony Beevor whilst he was once researching his 2002 e book Berlin: The Downfall 1945.

The meticulous stories of mass rapes and the ensuing suicides had been handed directly to Stalin. ‘You can actually see from the ticks whether they’ve been learn or now not,’ Beevor printed.

These thuggish troops had little to worry from their superiors. When a personnel officer advised Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky, commander of the third Belorussian Front, in regards to the fashionable looting and vandalism performed by means of his males, he answered: ‘I don’t give a f***.’ Now that that they had entered Germany, stated Vasilevsky, ‘It is time for our men to issue their own justice.’

The German army may be expecting no mercy after the horrific cruelty that they had inflicted on Soviet infantrymen and civilians.

But the Red Army had been similarly ruthless of their remedy of German girls – who had performed no direct phase within the atrocities.

The Soviet Red Army infantrymen raped an estimated two million German girls after the autumn of Hitler’s Third Reich on the finish of the Second World War. Pictured: Joseph Stalin, the Red Army’s commander-in-chief from 1941 till his loss of life in 1952

Russian infantrymen (document photograph) had been accused by means of Ukraine of committing intercourse crimes towards civilians and the use of rape as an ‘software of battle’ throughout the new struggle

In April, they after all reached the German capital. Estimates from Berlin’s two major hospitals put the collection of girls raped at between 95,000 to 130,000. In general, as many as two million German girls will have been raped, in step with one learn about.

Few women escaped. According to historian Roger Moorhouse ‘pre-pubescent girls, nuns, grandmothers, pregnant women and nursing mothers were subject to the campaign of rape. Even fugitive Jews and liberated forced labourers received the same treatment.’

When nightfall fell, the ‘hunting hours’ started. Every girl in Berlin confronted the similar nightmare as Soviet infantrymen, under the influence of alcohol on looted alcohol, went from space to accommodate on the lookout for sufferers.

‘Throughout the night,’ one girl wrote, ‘we huddled together in mortal fear… a horde of Soviet soldiers returned and stormed into our apartment house. Then we heard what sounded like a terrible orgy with women screaming for help, many shrieking at the same time.’

On discovering the ladies, the warriors would shine torches of their faces earlier than making their variety then ordering in German: ‘Frau, komm!’ [‘Woman, come!’] To face up to was once to chance a beating or loss of life. Husbands and sons who attempted to interfere had been at risk of obtain a bullet within the head. Many of the sufferers had been subjected to a couple of violations. ‘Red Army soldiers don’t consider in particular person liaisons,’ wrote one Soviet officer in a sour jibe on the Communist means of doing issues. ‘Nine, ten, twelve men at a time – they rape them on a collective basis.’

The bodily and mental price of the Red Army’s rampage is incalculable. Many of the warriors had been diseased and conquest was once adopted by means of a deadly disease of syphilis and different venereal illnesses. Clinics had been inundated by means of requests for abortions however 5 consistent with cent of kids born in Berlin in 1946 had been believed to be the results of rape.

Some discovered the ordeal insufferable. In Berlin on my own, it’s reckoned that one in ten rape sufferers killed herself. Everyone would lift the psychological scarring of the ordeal all over the remainder of their lives.

Not each Soviet soldier was once an culprit. Some confirmed kindness and made buddies with households, turning in desperately wanted meals for shared foods. There are accounts of officials stepping in to rescue girls and diary entries which report the disgust of a few at what was once going down. But legitimate makes an attempt to keep watch over the troops had been restricted to limp exhortations by means of commissars of the significance of troops upholding ‘the honour and dignity of the Red Army warrior’.

Ukraine’s former international minister Dmytro Kuleba (pictured right here in February 2024) stated that there are ‘a large number of instances’ of Russian intercourse crimes on blameless civilians on report

Oksana Minenko, a Ukrainian girl who alleges she was once again and again detained and tortured by means of occupying Russian forces in Kherson

What drove such ugly violence in opposition to girls? There had been makes an attempt to justify or no less than contextualise it as a predictable response to the horrendous battle crimes dedicated by means of the German occupiers, which additionally incorporated the rape and homicide of Soviet girls.

But as Beevor issues out, this argument is undermined by means of the proof of Russian rape of ladies who have been taken forcibly from the Soviet Union and delivered to Germany.

All battle brutalises however the battle at the Eastern Front was once in a depressing magnificence of its personal, with each Germans and Russians behaving like beasts. Both facets had been serving ideologies that dehumanised the enemy, soldier and civilian, and validated cruelty and killing. The Red Army was once militarised Communism. ‘Stalin’s regime waged battle in the similar spirit because it prosecuted peace,’ wrote historian Catherine Merridale in Ivan’s War, her definitive paintings at the Soviet rank and document. ‘The first rule was that human life counted for little… compared to interests of state.’

Commanders perceived to care not anything about the price in blood in their operations. Their males spoke of being fed into the ‘meat grinder’ – a time period used to explain Russia’s strategies in Ukraine lately. If a soldier believed his existence supposed not anything, then why will have to any person else’s?

Soviet officialdom by no means stated the warriors’ crimes. Putin’s ever-more autocratic rule has snuffed out to any extent further investigation. Under present legislation, any person who denigrates Russia’s report within the Second World War faces steep fines and as much as 5 years in jail. Last month, Putin made it transparent that anybody making an attempt to cloud the rosy propaganda image was once losing their time. ‘No matter how hard they try, no one can distort or overshadow the feat of the Red Army soldiers who saved the world from Nazism,’ he declared.

The lavish scale of the celebrations is his try to hyperlink the reminiscence of the glories of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ to his personal battle in Ukraine. There are certainly many similarities between the 2 conflicts, however in all probability now not ones that Putin would revel in.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion started in February 2022, there was a gentle flow of proof, steadily recorded on smartphones by means of the perpetrators themselves, of the homicide of Ukrainian civilians, the cold-blooded killing of captured Ukrainian infantrymen and the torture, mutilation and mistreatment of prisoners of battle.

And then there’s the rape. Ukrainian prosecutors have registered 344 instances of sexual violence in spaces that had been briefly occupied by means of Russia however have since been liberated.

The struggle in Ukraine has taught us that despite the fact that 80 years have handed, Russia nonetheless wages battle in a lot the similar means.

In March, testimony printed in a report back to the UN’s Human Rights Council carried a grim echo of the spring of 1945. ‘A civilian woman who had been raped during confinement in a detention facility held by Russian authorities stated that she pleaded with the perpetrators, telling them she could be their mother’s age,’ it learn. ‘But they disregarded her announcing: “Bitch, don’t even compare yourself to my mother. You are not even a human. You do not deserve to live.”’

Patrick Bishop is the creator of Paris ’44: The Shame And The Glory, printed in paperback subsequent month