World War II Behind Closed Doors (52 page)

Of course, there are cases in all armies of mistreatment of civilians on enemy territory. And there are many Red Army veterans who wish to contextualize these crimes as a common, if regrettable, historical occurence. This, for example, is the view of tank commander Boris Likhachev, who fought in the battle for Budapest: ‘There might have been cases of maltreatment, but I don't know of them. But logically there could have been. Logically,
because historically the winners always want to look for some benefits for compensation for the hardships. Recently I read about Alexander the Great's army. When Alexander took the southern states, women suffered the first for the army. Women cooked food and satisfied all the needs of the winners. This is history and this is very colourfully described. Take Napoleon and his victories. It was the same’.

But in the context of the Second World War in Europe this excuse is not sustainable – because as far as the crime of rape was concerned the Soviets were in a league of their own. The Western Allies committed no comparable crimes of this enormity – mass rape was not tolerated. And whilst there are no accurate figures for the overall number of women raped by Soviet men in Hungary, the crime was clearly committed on a massive scale – one estimate is that around fifty thousand were raped in Budapest alone. Witness this report from the Hungarian Communists in Köbánya, which was presented to the Soviets in 1945. In January, so the report says, when the Red Army arrived, they committed a series of sexual crimes in an outbreak of ‘mindless, savage hatred run riot. Mothers were raped by drunken soldiers in front of their children and husbands. Girls as young as 12 were dragged from their fathers and raped in succession by 10–15 soldiers and often infected with venereal disease…. We know that intelligent members of the Red Army are communists, but if we turn to them for help they have fits of rage and threaten to shoot us, saying: “And what did you do in the Soviet Union? You not only raped our wives before our eyes, but for good measure you killed them together with their children, set fire to our villages and razed our cities to the ground”’.
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For the most part nothing was officially said about the crimes. Significantly,
Pravda
, the Soviet newspaper, never referred to them. And although there were – on occasion – attempts to enforce the official line that rape committed by Soviet soldiers was a crime, so few cases were prosecuted that it is impossible not to conclude that the offence was often tolerated by the Soviet authorities.

‘No one paid attention to these things’, says Fiodor Khropatiy,
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one of the few Red Army soldiers prepared to acknowledge that
rapes took place at all in occupied eastern Europe. ‘On the contrary, soldiers gossiped about it, and they were proud, they felt like heroes, that he slept with such and such a woman, one or two or three. This is what soldiers shared with each other…it was normal behaviour. Even if somebody was killed, such a thing wouldn't be reported, to say nothing of the fact of a soldier sleeping with a girl…. I feel hurt, because our army earned itself such a reputation, and I feel angry about the people who were acting that way. I am negative about such things, very negative…. To some extent, I can understand the soldiers. If you are at war for four years, and in the most horrible conditions, this [desire for] violent behaviour can be justified. I can justify the soldiers' desire to rape a woman, but not the execution of it, not the actual performance. Of course, it's natural to understand the desire to have a woman, because officers and soldiers, for four years, were deprived of any sex’. As to what proportion of the Red Army committed the crime of rape, Fiodor says: ‘It's difficult for me to speak about percentages. Probably there were 30 per cent who did it’.

An insight into Stalin's views on the subject can be gained from his behaviour in the Kremlin in the winter of 1944 during a visit from Milovan Djilas, a leading Yugoslavian Communist. Djilas had previously criticized the behaviour of the Red Army in Yugoslavia. Just like the Communists of Köbánya, Djilas had been concerned by reports of rape and had complained to the Red Army authorities. Subsequently, at a banquet held at the Kremlin for the Yugoslavian delegation, Djilas' protest was clearly on Stalin's mind. He began by speaking about the horrors endured by the Red Army as they fought the Germans back out of the Soviet Union and then into eastern Europe. He then said: ‘And such an army was insulted by no one else but Djilas! Djilas of whom I could least have expected such a thing, a man whom I receive so well! And an army which did not spare its blood for you!’ Finally, Stalin said, ‘Can't he [Djilas] understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousand of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?’
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The ‘climax’ of the evening, according to Djilas, was when ‘Stalin exclaimed, kissing
my wife, that he made his loving gesture at the risk of being charged with rape’. On another occasion, when Stalin was told that Red Army soldiers were sexually mistreating German refugees, he is reported to have said: ‘We lecture our soldiers too much; let them have some initiative’.
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Stalin, at least, only condoned rape. But Beria, the head of the NKVD, was a rapist himself. In 1953, after Stalin's death, one of Beria's bodyguards revealed at the trial of the NKVD chief for ‘treason’ that he and a colleague would cruise the streets of Moscow in order to select potential victims for their boss, and then transport them to his house. And despite claims that these accusations were created only to help disgrace Beria after his fall from power, it is clear from other evidence – like that of an American diplomat who knew at the time about ‘girls brought to Beria's house late at night in a limousine’
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– that they have substance. Indeed, direct testimony from Tatiana Okunevskaya,
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a Russian actress selected to be taken to Beria's house, confirms the method the NKVD chief used in order to commit rape: ‘These are such awful memories. He undressed himself and rolled about in his luxurious bed, his eyes ogling me. He looked like…not quite like a jellyfish, but like an ugly, shapeless toad. He said: “Let's have supper. You are a long way from anywhere, so whether you scream or not doesn't matter. You are in my power now. So think about that and behave accordingly. Aren't you going to eat or talk to me?” I remained silent; I didn't know what to do. Even now that I am eighty I still wouldn't know what to do. All these years have passed but I am certain of one thing. I may be frightened, I may be robbed, my house may be burned, but already in the camp I was sure of one thing – if I was ever raped again, I would commit suicide’.

Khrushchev later revealed that Malenkov, who had once served as Beria's deputy, took him to one side at the time of Beria's arrest and said: '“Listen to what my chief bodyguard has to say”. The man came over to me and said: “I have only just heard that Beria has been arrested. I want to inform you that he raped my stepdaughter, a seventh-grader. A year or so ago her grandmother died and my wife had to go to the hospital, leaving the girl at home
alone. One evening she went out to buy some bread near the building where Beria lives. There she came across as old man who watched her intently. She was frightened. Someone came and took her to Beria's home. Beria had her sit down with him for supper. She drank something, fell asleep, and he raped her”.

‘I told this man, “I want you to tell the prosecutor during the investigation everything you've told me”. Later, we were given a list of more than a hundred girls and women who had been raped by Beria. He had used the same routine on all of them. He gave them some dinner and offered them wine with a sleeping potion in it’.
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All of which means, of course, that if reports of Red Army soldiers raping women in eastern Europe were sent to the NKVD in Moscow, they finally reached the desk of a rapist himself.

THE YALTA CONFERENCE

In preparation for the Big Three conference at Yalta, Stalin tried to drum up as much support as he could for his puppet government in Poland. It was a subject, for example, that dominated the visit of General de Gaulle to Moscow in December 1944.

De Gaulle, president of the provisional government of newly liberated France, was clear in his judgement of Stalin. The Soviet leader was ‘a dictator secluded in his own craftiness, winning others over with an air of good nature which he applied to allay suspicion. But so raw was his passion that it sometimes showed through, though not without a kind of pernicious charm’.
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And Stalin's passion – during his meetings with de Gaulle – was to ensure that Poland was subservient to Moscow.

Stalin put considerable pressure on de Gaulle to recognize the Lublin Poles as the legitimate government of Poland. Although de Gaulle had no practical power to determine events on the ground, it would obviously have been hugely to Stalin's advantage to have gained French recognition of his puppets before the Yalta Conference. But de Gaulle, despite the relative fragility of his position
as leader of the new French regime (there had, as yet, been no elections), refused to comply with Stalin's wish. ‘If I had determined not to commit France in the attempted subjection of the Polish nation’, wrote de Gaulle in typical portentous style, ‘it was not that I had any illusions as to what this refusal might effect from a practical point of view. Obviously we had no means of keeping the Soviets from executing their plans. Further, I foresaw that America and Great Britain would let them proceed as they wished. But however little weight France's attitude might have at the moment, it could later be important that she had adopted it at that particular moment. The future lasts a long time. All things are possible, even the fact that an action in accord with honour and honesty ultimately appears to be a prudent political investment’.
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Revealingly, given that Churchill and Roosevelt were to form such a positive impression of Stalin at Yalta in a few weeks' time, the Soviet leader hid nothing of his bloodthirsty nature from de Gaulle. At one memorable banquet in the Kremlin that December, in front of both de Gaulle and Harriman, the American ambassador to Moscow, Stalin toasted the health of Chief Marshal Novikov, commander of the Red Army air force, in a distinctly sinister way. ‘He has created a wonderful air force’,
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said Stalin. ‘But if he doesn't do his job properly then we'll kill him’. Stalin then spotted his Director of Supply, General Khruliov. ‘There he is!’ said Stalin. ‘That is the supply director. It is his job to bring men and material to the front. He'd better do his best otherwise he'll be hanged for it. That's the custom in our country!’

De Gaulle gained a further insight into Stalin's character directly after the banquet when the French leader finally signed a treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union – though without recognizing the Lublin Poles. ‘You have played well’, Stalin said to him. ‘Well done! I like dealing with someone who knows what he wants even if he doesn't share my views!’
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Stalin then remarked: ‘After all, it is only death who wins’. Finally, he called over Boris Podzerov, his interpreter that night, and said: ‘You know too much. I had better send you to Siberia’.

It was against the background of this meeting with de Gaulle,
suffused with black humour, and in the happy knowledge that the war was progressing towards its end, that Stalin boarded a train from Moscow for Yalta in the Crimea in February 1945. He had just learnt that at the end of January Marshal Zhukov's Belorussian Front had crossed into Germany and were now encamped on the eastern bank of the river Oder, little more than 50 miles from Berlin. In the West he knew that the Allies had successfully repulsed Hitler's attack through the Ardennes, known as the Battle of the Bulge. And in the Far East General Douglas MacArthur was poised to recapture Manila in the Philippines, the British had forced the Japanese back across the Irrawaddy river in Burma, and American bombers were pounding the home islands of Japan. Victory now seemed certain – though, particularly in the war against Japan, it was uncertain just how soon and at what cost that victory would come.

The conference at Yalta has come to symbolize in the minds of many people the sense that somehow dirty deals were done as the war came to an end – dirty deals that brought dishonour on the otherwise noble enterprise of fighting the Nazis. But it wasn't quite like that. In the first place, of course, it was at the Tehran Conference in November 1943 that the fundamental issues about the course of the rest of the war and the challenges of the post-war world were initially discussed and in principle resolved. Little of new substance was raised at Yalta. Nonetheless, Yalta is important, not least because it marks the final high point of Churchill and Roosevelt's optimistic dealings with Stalin.

On 3 February Churchill and Roosevelt flew from Malta to Saki, on the flat planes of the Crimea, north of the mountain range that protects the coastal resort of Yalta. They, and their huge group of advisers and assistants – around seven hundred people in all – then made the tortuous drive down through the high mountain passes to the sea. Churchill, who had cherished the hope that the United Kingdom would be chosen as the site of the conference – one suggestion had even been Invergordon in Scotland – was not enthusiastic about the Crimea. He later described the place as ‘the Riviera of Hades’ and said that ‘if we had spent ten years on research, we
could not have found a worse place in the world’.
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But once again Stalin's will had prevailed about the location of the conference.

There is no evidence that the bleak irony of the setting occurred to the Western Allies – that it was in the Crimea that they were about to discuss the future of millions of people, the very place where eight months earlier Stalin had demonstrated his own particular way of dealing with dissent, real or imagined, in deporting the entire nation of Tatars.