Lieutenant Vladimir Gelfand, a young Jew from Ukraine, from 1941 until the end of the war, kept his notes with extraordinary sincerity, despite the then ban on keeping diaries in the Soviet army.
His son Vitaly, who let me read the manuscript, found the diary when he was sorting through his father's papers after his death. The diary was available online, but now it is being published for the first time in Russia as a book. Two abridged editions of the diary were published in Germany and Sweden.
The diary tells about the lack of order and discipline in the regular troops: meager rations, lice, routine anti-Semitism and endless theft. As he says, the soldiers even stole the boots of their comrades.
In February 1945, Gelfand's military unit was based near the Oder River, preparing to attack Berlin. He recalls how his comrades surrounded and captured a German women's battalion.
“The day before yesterday, a women's battalion was operating on the left flank. It was utterly defeated, and the captured German cats declared themselves avengers for their husbands who died at the front. I don’t know what they did to them, but it would be necessary to execute the villains mercilessly,” wrote Vladimir Gelfand.
One of Gelfand's most revealing stories relates to April 25, when he was already in Berlin. There Gelfand rode a bicycle for the first time in his life. Driving along the bank of the Spree River, he saw a group of women dragging their suitcases and bundles somewhere.

In February 1945, Gelfand's military unit was based near the Oder River, preparing to attack Berlin.

"I asked the German women where they live, in broken German, and asked why they left their home, and they told with horror the grief that the frontline leaders caused them on the first night of the arrival of the Red Army here," writes the author of the diary ...
“They poked here,” the beautiful German woman explained, lifting her skirt, “all night, and there were so many of them. I was a girl,” she sighed and began to cry. “They ruined my youth. everyone poked me. There were at least twenty of them, yes, yes, and she burst into tears. "
“They raped my daughter in front of me,” the poor mother put in, “they can still come and rape my girl again.” This again made everyone horrified, and bitter sobs swept from corner to corner of the basement, where the owners brought me. here, - the girl suddenly rushed to me, - you will sleep with me. You can do whatever you want with me, but only you alone! "Gelfand writes in his diary.
"The hour of revenge has come!"
German soldiers by that time had stained themselves on Soviet territory with monstrous crimes that they had been committing for nearly four years.
Vladimir Gelfand came across evidence of these crimes as his unit fought towards Germany.
"When every day there are murders, every day they are wounded, when they pass through villages destroyed by the Nazis ... Dad has a lot of descriptions where villages were destroyed, down to children, young children of Jewish nationality were destroyed ... Even one-year-olds, two-year-olds ... And this was not for some time, it was years. People walked and saw it. And they walked with one goal - to take revenge and kill, "says Vitaly, the son of Vladimir Gelfand.
Vitaly Gelfand discovered this diary after his father's death.
The Wehrmacht, as the ideologues of Nazism assumed, was a well-organized force of the Aryans who would not stoop to sexual contact with "Untermensch" ("subhuman").
But this ban was ignored, says Oleg Budnitsky, a historian at the Higher School of Economics.
The German command was so concerned about the spread of venereal diseases in the troops that they organized a network of army brothels in the occupied territories.

Vladimir Gelfand wrote his diary with amazing sincerity at a time when it was deadly

It is difficult to find direct evidence of how German soldiers treated Russian women. Many victims simply did not survive.
But at the German-Russian Museum in Berlin, its director Jörg Morre showed me a photograph from the personal album of a German soldier, taken in Crimea.
The photograph shows a woman's body sprawled on the ground.
"It looks like she was killed during or after the rape. Her skirt is pulled up and her hands are covering her face," says the director of the museum.
"This is a shocking photo. We had a debate in the museum about whether to exhibit such photographs. This is a war, this is sexual violence in the Soviet Union under the Germans. We are showing a war. We are not talking about a war, we are showing it," says Jörg Morre ...
When the Red Army entered the "den of the fascist beast," as the Soviet press called Berlin at the time, the posters encouraged the soldiers' fury: "Soldier, you are on German soil. The hour of revenge has struck!"
The political department of the 19th Army, which was advancing on Berlin along the coast of the Baltic Sea, announced that a real Soviet soldier was so full of hatred that the idea of ​​sexual contact with German women would be repugnant to him. But this time, too, the soldiers proved that their ideologues were wrong.
Historian Anthony Beevor, doing research for his book Berlin: The Fall, published in 2002, found in the Russian state archives reports of an epidemic of sexual violence in Germany. At the end of 1944, these reports were sent by employees of the NKVD to Lavrentiy Beria.
"They were passed on to Stalin," says Beevor. "You can see from the marks whether they were read or not. They report the mass rapes in East Prussia and how German women tried to kill themselves and their children to avoid this fate."
"Dungeon dwellers"
Another wartime diary, kept by a German soldier's fiancée, recounts how some women have adapted to this dire situation in an attempt to survive.
Since April 20, 1945, a woman, whose name has not been named, left on paper observations that were ruthless in her honesty, shrewd and in places flavored with the humor of a gallows.
The author of the diary describes herself as "a pale blonde, always wearing the same winter coat." She paints vivid pictures of the lives of her neighbors in a bomb shelter under their apartment building.
Among her neighbors are "a young man in gray trousers and thick-rimmed glasses, who upon closer inspection turns out to be a woman," as well as three elderly sisters, as she writes, "all three are dressmakers huddled together in one big black pudding."

Watches and bicycles were common trophies in Berlin

Waiting for the approaching Red Army units, the women joked: "Better the Russian on me than the Yankees on me," meaning that it is better to be raped than to die in the carpet bombing of American aircraft.
But when the soldiers entered their basement and tried to get the women out of there, they began to beg the author of the diary to use her knowledge of Russian to complain to the Soviet command.
On the ruined streets, she manages to find a Soviet officer. He shrugs. Despite a Stalinist decree prohibiting violence against civilians, he says "it happens anyway."
Nevertheless, the officer goes down to the basement with her and chastises the soldiers. But one of them is beside himself with anger. “What are you talking about? Look what the Germans have done to our women!” He shouts. “They took my sister and…” The officer calms him down and takes the soldiers out into the street.
But when the author of the diary goes out into the corridor to check whether they have left or not, the waiting soldiers grab her and brutally rape her, almost strangling her. Horrified neighbors, or "dungeon dwellers" as she calls them, hide in the basement, locking the door behind them.
“Finally, two iron bolts opened. Everyone stared at me,” she writes. “My stockings are down, my hands are holding the remnants of my belt. I was raped here twice in a row, and you leave me lying here like a piece of dirt! "
As a result, the author of the diary comes to the conclusion that she needs to find one "wolf" to protect herself from new gang rapes by the "male beast".
She finds an officer from Leningrad with whom she shares a bed. Gradually, the relationship between the aggressor and the victim becomes less violent, more reciprocal and ambiguous. A German woman and a Soviet officer even discuss literature and the meaning of life.
"In no way can you say that the major is raping me," she writes. "Why am I doing this? For bacon, sugar, candles, canned meat? To some extent, I'm sure that he is. But I also like major, and the less he wants to get from me as a man, the more I like him as a person. "
Many of her neighbors made similar deals with the victors of defeated Berlin.

Some German women have found a way to adapt to this dire situation.

When the diary was published in Germany in 1959 under the title "A Woman in Berlin", this candid account sparked a wave of accusations that it defamed the honor of German women. Not surprisingly, the author, anticipating this, demanded that the diary not be published again until her death.
Eisenhower: shoot on the spot
Rape was not only a problem for the Red Army.
Bob Lilly, a historian at the University of Northern Kentucky, was able to access the archives of the US military courts.
His book (Taken by Force) caused so much controversy that at first no American publisher dared to publish it, and the first edition appeared in France.
Lilly estimates that about 14,000 rapes were committed by American soldiers in England, France and Germany from 1942 to 1945.
“There were very few cases of rape in England, but as soon as American soldiers crossed the English Channel, the number skyrocketed,” says Lilly.
According to him, rape has become a problem not only of the image, but also of the army discipline. "Eisenhower said to shoot soldiers at the scene and report the executions in military newspapers such as Stars and Stripes. Germany was at its peak," he says.
- Were the soldiers executed for rape?
- Oh yeah!
- But not in Germany?
- Not. Not a single soldier has been executed for the rape or murder of German citizens, Lilly admits.
Today historians continue to investigate the facts of sexual crimes committed by the Allied forces in Germany.
For years, the topic of sexual violence by allied troops - American, British, French and Soviet soldiers - was officially hushed up in Germany. Few people reported about it, and even fewer were willing to listen to all this.
Silence
It is generally not easy to talk about such things in society. In addition, in East Germany it was considered almost blasphemy to criticize Soviet heroes who defeated fascism.
And in West Germany, the guilt that the Germans felt for the crimes of Nazism overshadowed the theme of the suffering of this people.
But in 2008 in Germany, according to the diary of a Berlin resident, the film "Nameless - One Woman in Berlin" was released with actress Nina Hoss in the title role.
This film was a revelation for the Germans and prompted many women to talk about what happened to them. Among these women is Ingeborg Bullert.
Now 90-year-old Ingeborg lives in Hamburg in an apartment full of photographs of cats and books about the theater. In 1945 she was 20. She dreamed of becoming an actress and lived with her mother on a rather fashionable street in Berlin's Charlottenburg district.

"I thought they were going to kill me," says Ingeborg Bullurt

When the Soviet offensive on the city began, she hid in the basement of her house, like the author of the diary "Woman in Berlin".
“All of a sudden, tanks appeared on our street, the bodies of Russian and German soldiers were everywhere,” she recalls. “I remember the horrific lingering sound of falling Russian bombs. We called them Stalinorgels ('Stalinist organs').”
Once, in between the bombings, Ingeborg climbed out of the basement and ran upstairs for a rope, which she adapted to a lamp wick.
“Suddenly I saw two Russians pointing guns at me,” she says. “One of them forced me to undress and raped me.
Then Ingeborg did not talk about what happened to her. She was silent about this for several decades, because it would be too difficult to talk about it. “My mother loved to brag that her daughter was not touched,” she recalls.
Abortion wave
But many women in Berlin were raped. Ingeborg recalls that immediately after the war, women between 15 and 55 years old were ordered to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
“In order to get ration cards, you needed a medical certificate, and I remember that all the doctors who issued them had reception rooms full of women,” she recalls.
What was the real scale of the rape? The most commonly cited figures are 100,000 women in Berlin and two million throughout Germany. These numbers, hotly contested, have been extrapolated from the meager medical records that have survived to this day.
Medical folders Image copyrightBBC World Service

These 1945 medical records miraculously survived

In just one district of Berlin, 995 abortion requests were approved in six months

In a former military factory that now houses the State Archives, his employee Martin Lüchterhand shows me a stack of blue cardboard folders.
They contain data on abortions from June to October 1945 in Neukelln, one of the 24 districts of Berlin. The fact that they have been preserved intact is a small miracle.
In Germany at that time, abortion was prohibited under article 218 of the criminal code. But Lüchterhand says there was a short period of time after the war when women were allowed to terminate their pregnancies. A special situation was associated with the mass rapes in 1945.
From June 1945 to 1946, 995 abortion requests were approved in this area of ​​Berlin alone. The folders contain over a thousand pages of various colors and sizes. One of the girls writes in a rounded childish hand that she was raped at home, in the living room, in front of her parents.
Bread instead of revenge
For some soldiers, as soon as they got drunk, women became as trophies as watches or bicycles. But others behaved very differently. In Moscow, I met 92-year-old veteran Yuri Lyashenko, who remembers how, instead of taking revenge, soldiers handed out bread to the Germans.

Yuri Lyashenko says Soviet soldiers in Berlin behaved differently

“Of course, we couldn't feed everyone, right? And what we had, we shared with the children. Small children are so intimidated, their eyes are so terrible ... sorry for the children, "he recalls.
In a jacket hung with orders and medals, Yuri Lyashenko invites me to his small apartment on the top floor of a multi-storey building and treats me to cognac and boiled eggs.
He tells me that he wanted to become an engineer, but was drafted into the army and, like Vladimir Gelfand, went through the entire war to Berlin.
Pouring cognac into glasses, he proposes a toast to the world. Toasts to peace often sound memorized, but here you feel that the words come from the heart.
We're talking about the beginning of the war, when his leg was nearly amputated, and how he felt when he saw the red flag over the Reichstag. After a while, I decide to ask him about the rape.
“I don’t know, our unit didn’t have this ... Of course, obviously, such cases were dependent on the person himself, on the people,” says the war veteran. it is not written, you do not know it. "
Look back in time
We will probably never know the true extent of the rape. The materials of the Soviet military tribunals and many other documents remain closed. The State Duma recently approved a law "on encroachment on historical memory," according to which anyone who belittles the USSR's contribution to the victory over fascism can receive a fine and up to five years in prison.
Vera Dubina, a young historian at the Moscow Humanities University, says she did not know anything about the rapes until she received a scholarship to study in Berlin. After studying in Germany, she wrote a paper on this topic, but was unable to publish it.
"The Russian media reacted very aggressively," she says. "People only want to know about our glorious victory in the Great Patriotic War, and now it is becoming more and more difficult to conduct serious research."

Soviet field kitchens were distributing food to Berliners

History is often rewritten for the sake of the conjuncture. This is why eyewitness accounts are so important. Testimonies of those who dared to speak on this topic now, in old age, and the stories of then young people who wrote down their testimonies about what happened during the war years.
Vitaly, the son of the author of the army diary, Vladimir Gelfand, says that many Soviet soldiers displayed great heroism during the Second World War. But that's not the whole story, he says.
“If people don’t want to know the truth, want to be delusional and want to talk about how beautiful and noble everything was, this is stupid, this is self-deception,” he reminds. “The whole world understands this, and Russia understands it. And even those who stand behind these laws about distorting the past, they also understand. We cannot move into the future until we understand the past. "

The Red Army men, mostly poorly educated, were characterized by complete ignorance of sex and a rude attitude towards women.

"The soldiers of the Red Army do not believe in 'individual ties' with German women," wrote playwright Zakhar Agranenko in his diary, which he kept during the war in East Prussia. "Nine, ten, twelve at once - they rape them collectively."

The long columns of Soviet troops that entered East Prussia in January 1945 were an unusual mixture of modernity and the Middle Ages: tankers in black leather helmets, Cossacks on shaggy horses with loot tied to their saddles, Doji and Studebakers obtained through Lend-Lease, followed by a second echelon of carts. The variety of weapons was fully consistent with the variety of characters of the soldiers themselves, among whom were both outright bandits, drunkards and rapists, as well as idealist communists and representatives of the intelligentsia, who were shocked by the behavior of their comrades.

In Moscow, Beria and Stalin were well aware of what was happening from detailed reports, one of which said: "Many Germans believe that all the Germans who remained in East Prussia were raped by soldiers of the Red Army."

There were numerous examples of gang rapes "of both minors and old women".

Marshall Rokossovsky issued order # 006 with the aim of directing "the feeling of hatred towards the enemy on the battlefield." It got nowhere. There have been several arbitrary attempts to restore order. The commander of one of the rifle regiments allegedly "personally shot the lieutenant, who was lining up his soldiers in front of a German woman who had been knocked to the ground." But in most cases, either the officers themselves participated in the atrocities or the lack of discipline among drunken soldiers armed with machine guns made it impossible to restore order.

Calls to avenge the Homeland, attacked by the Wehrmacht, were understood as permission to be cruel. Even young women, soldiers and paramedics, were not opposed. A 21-year-old girl from the Agranenko reconnaissance detachment said: "Our soldiers behave with the Germans, especially with German women, absolutely right." To some, this seemed curious. For example, some German women remember that Soviet women watched as they were raped and laughed. But some were deeply shocked by what they saw in Germany. Natalia Gesse, a close friend of the scientist Andrei Sakharov, was a war correspondent. She later recalled: "Russian soldiers raped all German women between the ages of 8 and 80. It was an army of rapists."

Booze, including dangerous chemicals stolen from laboratories, played a significant role in this violence. It seems that Soviet soldiers could attack a woman only after getting drunk for courage. But at the same time, they too often drank to such a state that they could not complete intercourse and used bottles - some of the victims were disfigured in this way.

The topic of mass atrocities of the Red Army in Germany was banned in Russia for so long that even now veterans deny that they took place. Only a few spoke about it openly, but without any regrets. The commander of the tank unit recalled: "They all raised their skirts and lay down on the bed." He even boasted that "two million of our children were born in Germany."

The ability of Soviet officers to convince themselves that most of the victims were either pleased or agreed that this was a fair price for the Germans' actions in Russia is amazing. A Soviet major told an English journalist at the time: "Our comrades were so hungry for female affection that they often raped sixty, seventy, and even eighty, to their sheer surprise, if not to say pleasure."

One can only outline the psychological contradictions. When the raped residents of Konigsberg begged their tormentors to kill them, the Red Army men considered themselves insulted. They answered: "Russian soldiers do not shoot women. Only Germans do this." The Red Army has convinced itself that, since it has assumed the role of liberating Europe from fascism, its soldiers have every right to behave as they please.

A sense of superiority and humiliation characterized the behavior of most of the soldiers towards women in East Prussia. The victims not only paid for the crimes of the Wehrmacht, but also symbolized the atavistic object of aggression - as old as the war itself. As historian and feminist Susan Brownmiller has noted, rape, as a conqueror's right, is directed "against the women of the enemy" to emphasize victory. True, after the initial frenzy of January 1945, sadism became less and less common. When the Red Army reached Berlin 3 months later, the soldiers were already viewing German women through the prism of the usual "victor's right". The feeling of superiority certainly survived, but it was, perhaps, an indirect consequence of the humiliation that the soldiers themselves endured from their commanders and the Soviet leadership as a whole.

Several other factors also played a role. Sexual freedom was widely discussed in the 1920s within the Communist Party, but in the next decade, Stalin did everything to make Soviet society virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with the puritanical views of the Soviet people - the fact is that love and sex did not fit into the concept of "deindividualization" of the individual. Natural desires had to be suppressed. Freud was banned, divorce and adultery were frowned upon by the CCP. Homosexuality has become a criminal offense. The new doctrine completely prohibited sex education. In art, the image of a woman's breasts, even covered with clothes, was considered the height of eroticism: it had to be covered by a work overalls. The regime demanded that any expression of passion be sublimated into love for the party and for comrade Stalin personally.

The Red Army men, mostly poorly educated, were characterized by complete ignorance of sex issues and a rude attitude towards women. Thus, the attempts of the Soviet state to suppress the libido of its citizens led to what one Russian writer called "barracks erotica", which was significantly more primitive and cruel than any of the most violent pornography. All this was mixed with the influence of modern propaganda, which deprives man of his essence, and atavistic primitive impulses indicated by fear and suffering.

Writer Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent for the advancing Red Army, soon discovered that the victims of rape were not only Germans. Among them were Polish women, as well as young Russians, Ukrainian women and Belarusians who ended up in Germany as a displaced labor force. He noted: "The liberated Soviet women often complain that our soldiers are raping them. One girl said to me in tears:" It was an old man, older than my father. "

The rape of Soviet women nullifies attempts to explain the behavior of the Red Army as revenge for German atrocities on the territory of the Soviet Union. On March 29, 1945, the Central Committee of the Komsomol notified Malenkov of a report from the 1st Ukrainian Front. General Tsygankov reported: "On the night of February 24, a group of 35 soldiers and the commander of their battalion entered the women's hostel in the village of Gryutenberg and raped everyone."

In Berlin, despite Goebbels' propaganda, many women were simply unprepared for the horrors of Russian revenge. Many have tried to convince themselves that although the danger must be great in the countryside, mass rape cannot take place in the city in full view.

In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunda, the abbess of the nunnery that housed the orphanage and maternity hospital. The officers and soldiers behaved impeccably. They even warned that reinforcements were following them. Their prediction came true: nuns, girls, old women, pregnant women and those who had just given birth were all raped without pity.

Within a few days, it became a custom among the soldiers to choose their victims by shining torches in their faces. The very process of choice, instead of indiscriminate violence, indicates a certain change. By this time, Soviet soldiers began to view German women not as responsible for the crimes of the Wehrmacht, but as spoils of war.

Rape is often defined as violence that has little to do with sexual desire itself. But this definition is from the point of view of the victims. To understand a crime, you need to see it from the point of view of the aggressor, especially in the later stages, when “just” rape has replaced the endless rampage of January and February.

Many women were forced to "surrender" to one soldier in the hope that he would protect them from others. Magda Wieland, a 24-year-old actress, tried to hide in a closet, but was pulled out of there by a young soldier from Central Asia. He was so turned on by the opportunity to make love to a beautiful young blonde that he came ahead of time. Magda tried to explain to him that she agreed to become his girlfriend if he protected her from other Russian soldiers, but he told his comrades about her, and one soldier raped her. Ellen Goetz, Magda's Jewish friend, was also raped. When the Germans tried to explain to the Russians that she was Jewish and that she was persecuted, they received in response: "Frau ist Frau" ( A woman is a woman - approx. per.).

The women soon learned to hide during their evening hunting hours. Young daughters were hidden in attics for several days. Mothers went out to fetch water only in the early morning, so as not to fall under the arm of Soviet soldiers sleeping off after drinking. Sometimes the greatest danger came from neighbors, who gave away the places where the girls were hiding, thus trying to save their own daughters. Old Berliners still remember screaming at night. It was impossible not to hear them, since all the windows were smashed.

Between 95,000 and 130,000 women were rape victims, according to two city hospitals. One doctor estimated that out of 100,000 people who were raped, about 10,000 later died, mostly by committing suicide. The death rate among the 1.4 million raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia was even higher. Although at least 2 million German women have been raped, a significant proportion, if not most, have been gang raped.

If anyone tried to protect a woman from a Soviet rapist, it was either a father trying to protect his daughter, or a son trying to protect his mother. "13-year-old Dieter Sahl," neighbors wrote in a letter shortly after the event.

After the second stage, when women offered themselves to one soldier to protect themselves from the rest, the next stage - post-war famine - as Suzanne Brownmiller noted, "a thin line separating military rape from military prostitution." Ursula von Kardorf notes that shortly after the surrender of Berlin, the city was filled with women trading themselves for food or an alternative currency, cigarettes. Helke Sander, a German filmmaker who has thoroughly researched this issue, writes of "a mixture of outright violence, blackmail, calculation and real affection."

The fourth stage was the strange form of cohabitation of the officers of the Red Army with the German "occupation wives". Soviet officials went berserk when several Soviet officers deserted from the army when it was time to return home to stay with their German mistresses.

Even if the feminist definition of rape as a purely violent act seems simplistic, there is no justification for male complacency. The events of 1945 clearly show us how subtle a touch of civilization can be if there is no fear of retaliation. They also remind us that there is a dark side to male sexuality that we would rather not be reminded of.

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Special archive InoSMI.Ru

("The Daily Telegraph", UK)

("The Daily Telegraph", UK)

InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign mass media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial board.

Military rape is not always just an individual act of aggression by an individual or many men against an individual woman. Why do soldiers everywhere rape the "women of the enemy"? To blame everything on "biology" and "animal lust for sex and violence" is to simplify the picture and turn a blind eye to the political economy of war rape. It is a political and social phenomenon, and mass rape is recognized as one of the instruments of warfare.

Women are especially vulnerable during wars. Openly talking about the mass rape during the Second World War began only recently. The 2016 UN report compiled information on sexual violence during hostilities in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Libya, Mali, South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and other countries. This issue is also relevant in relation to women who are subjected to violence in regions affected by the war in Ukraine.

Sexual violence in the eastern regions of Ukraine is not used for strategic or tactical purposes, according to a report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. These practices were used as a means of torture and ill-treatment with the aim of punishment, humiliation or forced confession. In addition, sexual violence is used to force people deprived of their liberty to surrender their property rights or comply with other demands of the perpetrator in exchange for security or release.

Sexual violence as a means of torture occurs against both women and men.

In most of the documented cases, sexual violence was carried out in the form of beatings, trauma to the genitals with electric shocks, rape and threats of rape, and forced nakedness. Some of the cases linked to armed conflict could amount to war crimes, the report says.

What is "military culture" and how is it related to the legitimization of mass rape? What happens to the surviving women and what are the effects of mass rape on the community?

Military culture and "women of the enemy"

Madeleine Morris, an expert on international humanitarian law at Duke Law School, in a study of rape during the war, concluded that the very specificity of military training creates the preconditions for encouraging violence against women.

The set of characteristics of Morris military training is called military culture. The key properties of military culture that make violence the norm are deindividualization, hypermasculinity, and the specificity of attitudes towards sexuality and women.

Deindividualization Morris explains how depriving a person of individuality. Deindividualized soldiers believe in the existence of a community, solidify themselves up to the point of willingness to give their lives for each other, stop doubting what they are fighting for and for whom. Successful participation in an armed conflict requires well-trained people who take the war seriously and are ready to fight to the last.

Deindividuation is characterized by the creation of strong bonds within the group that generate a high degree of mutual support and solidarity. This, however, is accompanied by the possibility of the most harsh actions in relation to others, strangers, those who are perceived as the enemy of the community.

With the same passion with which the soldiers are ready to defend "their women", they can mock the "women of the enemy", because there are no "just people", but there are "ours" and "strangers", and the gap between them is huge.

A high degree of solidarity and mutual support, as well as hatred of the enemy, are products of deindividualization, making a huge contribution to the legitimization of mass rape during armed conflicts.

Hypermasculinity- this is what creates a "real man in war". It is around masculinity that an identity common to all members of the group is built. Morris stresses: “The soldier's world is characterized by a stereotypical masculinity. His language is foul language, he professes direct and crude sexuality, his masculinity is his weapon, a means of measuring competence, ability to fight and self-confidence. "

In military culture, sex is understood as a man's exploitation of a woman, aggression and domination. In the discourse of hypermasculinity, a woman is the focus of qualities that are considered a manifestation of weakness and inferiority, which means that women are perceived as flawed and inferior people.

In a situation where masculinity builds up as non-femininity (one of the most powerful insults for a man is “behaving like a woman,” etc.), women personify those others, through the dominance of which the man / soldier asserts his masculinity.

In a war, raping "non-human women", and even those belonging to the enemy, is not only acceptable, but also an obligatory practice. The same men who love their wives and daughters and are exemplary family men and citizens in peacetime, in war, are capable of the most cruel acts against the "women of the enemy."

The political economy of war rape

What are the socioeconomic consequences of rape of women in war zones?

In a number of traditional societies, where patriarchal foundations are strong, a raped woman is expelled from the community due to the “shame” she has experienced. A woman is deprived of access to land and material resources, because the main owners are her father, brother, husband, son. In much of Africa, children born as a result of rape will never be able to become part of the community, like their mothers.

In the case of a non-international armed conflict, rape is a productive economic method of warfare, it gives access to a woman's property: after the rape, the rapist remains in the house and uses everything that belonged to the family of the raped woman.

Sometimes military rape is deliberately carried out in such a way that as many people as possible, belonging to the same community as the woman, see it. In such cases, rape is not so much an act of an individual woman as of an entire community, especially men. By raping the "woman of the enemy", the military symbolically rapes the entire community, demonstrating power and strength.

Combatants can use sexual violence to alienate female child-rearing labor. Rape makes it impossible for a woman to raise children in her own community due to her “taint”. It is not uncommon for women to be intentionally injured so that they can no longer physically become pregnant. In some communities, the only way to wash away the shame of violence is by killing a raped woman.

Shoot vaginas

In Naomi Wolf's book Vagina: A New History of Female Sexuality, one of the main theses is that the importance of the vagina in a woman's life is underestimated, and we ourselves have no idea how important it is in our body. The fact is that through the pelvic nerve, the vagina has a significant effect on the processes in the brain.

The integrity and "contentment" of the vagina is directly related to the vitality of a woman, the ability to rejoice, have fun, achieve goals and create.

All claims to its authors. No matter how you feel about the Bosnians and their religion, only moral monsters can justify sexual abuse of children, especially since the abuse was committed against Christians in the same way. The argument "all parties to the conflict have committed crimes" will not work, because: 1) it is directly stated that the preponderance was on the side of the Serbian bandit formations; 2) after the violence against your relatives, try to console yourself that violence is everywhere in the whole world.


During the Bosnian War, etc. "Bosnian genocide", all ethnic groups and parties to the conflict were involved in the rape, but the vast majority the rapes were committed by the Bosnian Serb Army Republika Srpska(ARS) and Serbian paramilitaries who used rape of civilians as a tool terror as part of its ethnic cleansing program. The UN and various international organizations differ in the number of victims, estimating their number at 12,000 - 50,000.

Litigation in the case member Army of the Republika Srpska Dragoluba Kunaracha was the first case in the world jurisprudence that man was convicted of using rape as a weapon of war. Extensive media coverage of the atrocities of Serbian gangs and military forces against the Bosnian women and children, entailed international condemnation of the Serb forces.

After the collapse of Yugoslavia due to the growth of interethnic tensions, Serbian propaganda actively fanned hysteria about the participation of a small number of Bosnians in the Ustasha movement in 1940, and also suggested that Bosnian Muslims are racially different from Serbs, have Turkish blood, although in fact DNA research shows that that Serbs and Bosnians are about the same at the level of genes.

Even before the conflict began, Bosnians in eastern Bosnia had already begun to be fired, harassed and restricted in freedom of movement. At the start of the war, Serb forces targeted the Bosnian civilian population. As their cities and villages were seized, the military, police, gangs and sometimes even Serb residents continued these attacks. Bosnian houses and apartments were looted or destroyed to the ground, the civilian population was driven away, some of them were brutally tortured or killed. Men and women were separated separately and then taken to concentration camps.

A suburb of Sarajevo, Grbavica, where one of these violence camps was located.

The number of women and girls affected is estimated at between 12,000 and 50,000, with most Bosnian women raped by the Bosnian Serbs. Serbs organized "rape camps" where women were systematically abused, and the survivors were released only if they were pregnant with Serbs. Mass and public rape in front of the village or neighbors was also not uncommon.

On October 6, 1992, the UN Security Council established a Commission of Experts chaired by M. Cherif Bassiouni. According to the commission's findings, it was clear that rape was used systematically by Serb forces and had the support of commanders and local authorities. The commission also reported that some of the perpetrators admitted to being ordered to rape. Others argued that the use of rape was a tactic to ensure that the Bosnian population did not return to the area. The attackers told their victims that they had to carry the child of the attacker's ethnicity, and the pregnant women were kept in detention until it was too late to terminate the pregnancy. The victims were threatened that they would be hunted down and killed if they reported what had happened.

A team of European Community researchers, including Simone Weil and Anne Warburton, reached a similar conclusion in their 1993 report. that rape, committed Bosnian Serbs, was not a side effect of the conflict, but was part systematic the policy of ethnic cleansing and "committed with the deliberate intent to demoralize and terrorize communities, driving them out of their home regions and demonstrating the strength of the Serb invaders."

Serbian forces set up rape camps such as in Keraterm, Vilina Vlas, Manyach, Omarska, Trnopolje, Uzamnica and Voino. In May 1992, Serbian peasants from Snagovo, Zvornik surrounded and captured the village of Liple and turned it into a concentration camp. Four hundred people were imprisoned in several houses, and there they were raped, tortured and killed.

In the five months between the spring and summer of 1992, between 5,000 and 7,000 Bosnians and Croats were in inhuman conditions at Omarska. In the concentration camp, rape, sexual assault and torture of men and women were common. One newspaper described the events there as "a scene of orgies, murder, mutilation, beatings and rape." Rape and murder and physical assault were common. In the Trnopolje camp, an unknown number of women and girls were raped by Serb soldiers, police officers and camp guards. In the Uzamnica camp, one of the witnesses in the case of Oliver Krsmanovic, accused of committing crimes related to the Vysehradskaya massacres, claimed that the detained men were forced into violence against women.

Correctional camps were established in the Serb-controlled city of Foča. At the time, it was home to one of the city's most famous rape sites, the "Karaman House", where Bosnian women, including minors as young as 12, were repeatedly raped. During the trial of Dragoljub Kunarach and his accomplices, the conditions of these camps were described as "monstrously unsanitary", and the head of the police of the city of Foce, Dragan Gagovic, was identified as one of those who would like to visit these camps, where he selected the women captured on the street and then raped them.

The women and girls selected by Kunarach or his men were taken to a Serbian military base and raped. In other cases, girls were detained and held in various places for extended periods of time in sexual slavery. Radomir Kovacs, who was also convicted by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), personally kept four girls in his apartment, abusing three of them many times to rape, while allowing his friends to rape one of the girls. Before selling them, Kovacs loaned two of them to other Serb soldiers, who had been using them for more than three weeks.

In the early 1990s, calls began for legal action to stop the genocide that had taken place in Bosnia.The ICTY has set a precedent that military rape is a form of torture.By 2011, he had indicted 161 people from all ethnic groups for war crimes and heard testimony from over 4,000 witnesses.In 1993, the ICTY defined rape as a crime against humanity, and also defined rape, sexual slavery and sexual violence as international crimes that are regarded as torture and genocide.

ICTY judges confirmed during the trial of Dragoljub Kunarac, Radomir Kovacs and Milorad Krnojelac that rape was used by the Bosnian Serb military forces as a “tool of terror”.Kunarats was sentenced to 28 years in prison for the rape, torture and enslavement of women.Kovacs, who raped a 12-year-old child and then sold her into slavery, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and Krnojelac received up to 15 years.The ICTY stated that "a hell of an orgy and executions took place in various camps throughout Bosnia."

We are all accustomed to considering the representatives of this people as naive and peaceful inhabitants of the Far North. They say that throughout their history the Chukchi grazed herds of deer in permafrost conditions, hunted walruses, and as entertainment they beat tambourines together.

The anecdotal image of a simpleton who always utters the word "however" is so far from reality that it is really shocking. Meanwhile, there are many unexpected turns in the history of the Chukchi, and their way of life and customs still cause controversy among ethnographers. How are the representatives of this people so different from other inhabitants of the tundra?

Call themselves real people

The Chukchi are the only people whose mythology openly justifies nationalism. The fact is that their ethnonym comes from the word "chauchu", which in the language of the aborigines of the north means the owner of a large number of deer (rich man). This word was heard from them by the Russian colonialists. But this is not the self-name of the people.

"Luoravetlany" - this is how the Chukchi call themselves, which translates as "real people". They always treated the neighboring peoples arrogantly, and considered themselves to be the special chosen ones of the gods. Evenks, Yakuts, Koryaks, Eskimos in their myths Luoravetlans called those whom the gods created for slave labor.

According to the 2010 All-Russian Population Census, the total number of Chukchi is only 15 thousand 908 people. And although this people was never numerous, skillful and formidable warriors in difficult conditions managed to conquer vast territories from the Indigirka River in the west to the Bering Sea in the east. Their land area is comparable to the territory of Kazakhstan.

Paint their faces with blood

The Chukchi are divided into two groups. Some are engaged in reindeer herding (nomadic pastoralists), others hunt sea animals, for the most part, they hunt walruses, since they live on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. But these are the main occupations. Reindeer breeders are also engaged in fishing, they hunt Arctic foxes and other fur-bearing animals of the tundra.

After a successful hunt, the Chukchi paint their faces with the blood of a killed animal, while depicting the sign of their ancestral totem. Then these people make a ritual sacrifice to the spirits.

Fought with the Eskimos

The Chukchi have always been skillful warriors. Imagine how much courage it takes to go out into the ocean on a boat and attack walruses? However, not only animals became victims of representatives of this people. They often made predatory trips to the Eskimos, crossing the Bering Strait in neighboring North America in their boats made of wood and walrus skins.

Skillful warriors brought from military campaigns not only stolen goods, but also slaves, giving preference to young women.

It is interesting that in 1947 the Chukchi once again decided to go to war with the Eskimos, then only by a miracle they managed to avoid an international conflict between the USSR and the USA, because the representatives of both peoples were officially citizens of two superpowers.

Robbed the Koryaks

In their history, the Chukchi have managed to pretty much annoy not only the Eskimos. So, they often attacked the Koryaks, taking away their reindeer. It is known that from 1725 to 1773 the invaders appropriated about 240 thousand (!) Heads of foreign livestock. In fact, the Chukchi took up reindeer husbandry after robbing their neighbors, many of whom had to hunt for food.

Sneaking up to the Koryak settlement in the night, the invaders pierced their yarangas with spears, trying to immediately kill all the owners of the herd before they woke up.

Tattoos in honor of slain enemies

The Chukchi covered their bodies with tattoos dedicated to the killed enemies. After the victory, the warrior applied as many points to the back of the wrist of his right hand as he sent opponents to the next world. On the account of some experienced fighters there were so many defeated enemies that the dots merged into a line running from wrist to elbow.

They preferred death to captivity

Chukchi women always carried knives with them. They needed sharp blades not only in everyday life, but also in case of suicide. Since the captive people automatically became slaves, the Chukchi preferred death to such a life. Having learned about the victory of the enemy (for example, the Koryaks who came to take revenge), the mothers first killed their children, and then themselves. As a rule, they threw themselves with their chests on knives or spears.

The defeated warriors lying on the battlefield asked their opponents to die. Moreover, they did it in an indifferent tone. The only wish was - not to delay.

Won the war with Russia

The Chukchi are the only people of the Far North who fought with the Russian Empire and won. The first colonizers of those places were the Cossacks, led by Ataman Semyon Dezhnev. In 1652 they built the Anadyr prison. Other adventurers followed them to the lands of the Arctic. The militant northerners did not want to peacefully coexist with the Russians, much less pay taxes to the imperial treasury.

The war began in 1727 and lasted over 30 years. Heavy fighting in difficult conditions, partisan sabotage, cunning ambushes, as well as mass suicides of Chukchi women and children - all this made the Russian troops falter. In 1763, the army units of the empire were forced to leave the Anadyr prison.

Soon the ships of the British and French appeared off the coast of Chukotka. There was a real danger that these lands would be captured by old opponents, having managed to reach an agreement with the local population without a fight. Empress Catherine II decided to act more diplomatically. She provided the Chukchi with tax benefits, and literally showered their rulers with gold. The Russian residents of the Kolyma Territory were ordered, "... so that they do not irritate the Chukchee in any way, on pain, otherwise, of responsibility under a military court."

This peaceful approach proved to be much more effective than a military operation. In 1778, the Chukchi, encouraged by the authorities of the empire, accepted Russian citizenship.

Smeared arrows with poison

The Chukchi were very good at their bows. They smeared the arrowheads with poison, even a slight wound doomed the victim to a slow, painful and inevitable death.

Tambourines covered with human skin

The Chukchi fought to the sound of tambourines covered not with reindeer (as is customary), but with human skin. Such music terrified enemies. Russian soldiers and officers who fought with the natives of the north spoke about this. The colonialists explained their defeat in the war by the special cruelty of the representatives of this people.

Warriors knew how to fly

During hand-to-hand combat, the Chukchi flew across the battlefield, landing behind enemy lines. How did they jump 20-40 meters and then fight? Scientists still do not know the answer to this question. Probably, skilled warriors used special devices like trampolines. This technique often made it possible to win victories, because the opponents did not understand how to resist him.

Owned by slaves

The Chukchi owned slaves until the 40s of the twentieth century. Poor women and men were often sold for debt. They did dirty and hard work, like the captured Eskimos, Koryaks, Evenks, Yakuts.

Swapped wives

The Chukchi entered into so-called group marriages. They included several ordinary monogamous families. Men could exchange wives. This form of social relations was an additional guarantee of survival in the harsh conditions of permafrost. If one of the participants in such an alliance died in the hunt, then there was someone to take care of his widow and children.

Humor people

The Chukchi could live, find shelter and food, if they had the ability to make people laugh. People's humorists moved from camp to camp, amusing everyone with their jokes. They were respected and appreciated for their talent.

Invented diapers

The Chukchi were the first to invent the prototype of modern diapers. They used a layer of moss with reindeer hair as an absorbent material. The newborn was dressed in a kind of overalls, changing an impromptu diaper several times a day. Living in the harsh north forced people to be creative.

Gender change by order of spirits

Chukchi shamans could change sex at the direction of the spirits. The man began to wear women's clothes and behave accordingly, sometimes he literally got married. But the shaman, on the contrary, adopted the style of behavior of the stronger sex. Such reincarnation, according to the Chukchi beliefs, was sometimes demanded from their servants by spirits.

The old people died voluntarily

Chukchi old people, not wanting to be a burden for their children, often agreed to voluntary death. The famous writer-ethnographer Vladimir Bogoraz (1865-1936) in his book "Chukchi" noted that the reason for the emergence of such a custom was not at all a bad attitude towards the elderly, but the difficult living conditions and lack of food.

The seriously ill Chukchi often chose voluntary death. As a rule, such people were killed by strangulation by the next of kin.