#9
From: birstein@pipeline.com (Vadim Birstein)
Subject: re 6219-Beevor/Fall of Berlin
Date: Fri, 3 May 2002

Dear David:

I’m writing you regarding an excerpt from Antony Beevor’s book “Berlin: The Downfall 1945” which appeared in “The Guardian” on May 1, 2002 (published on your web site on May 2, 2002). I am glad that atrocities of the Soviet troops in 1944-45 have finally attracted attention of the public.

However, this is not the first time that the rape and pillage on a mass scale by Soviet soldiers in the “liberated” parts of Eastern Europe and occupied Germany was described. Several years ago a detailed analysis of such atrocities was given in Norman Naimark’s book “The Russians in Germany. A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949” [1]. As for memoirs, it is emotionally difficult to read some of them, especially about East Prussia [2].

I am familiar mainly with some memoirs about events in Budapest. Practically every book written by Hungarian Holocaust survivors who witnessed the Soviet “liberation” contains descriptions of the looting, rape, and murder. The memoirs by Lars Berg, a Swedish diplomat who headed a department within the Swedish Legation in Budapest and who worked with Raoul Wallenberg, gives very impressive details [3]. What makes this particular memoir unusual is that Soviet officials confirmed at the diplomatic level one of his descriptions – the rape of a woman servant at the Swedish Legation.

I feel that Antony Beevor missed two important points in the excerpt. First, that the atrocities were ignored by the Communist Party Leader and Commander-in-Chief Josef Stalin himself. It is well known that when the Yugoslav Communists complained to Stalin about the atrocities, Stalin told one of the Yugoslavs, Milovan Djilas: “Can’t [you] 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?” Stalin held the same opinion about atrocities in East Prussia: “We lecture our soldiers too much, let them have some initiative” [4].

Second, there were some extremely courageous Soviet officers who protested against the atrocities. Such protests were almost suicidal in the environment of the Soviet army. I personally knew two of these former officers. Both were Jewish (by origin) and, of course, were not the Nazi sympathizers. They were decent human beings in inhuman circumstances. Both were accused of “slandering the Soviet Army,” convicted and spent years in the Gulag. One of them, Lev Kopelev, worked for a while as an imprisoned technical scientist with Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the secret laboratory “Marfino” [5]. Later he became a well-known dissident writer and described “Marfino” in his memoirs [6]. The second, geneticist Vladimir Efroimson, was found “guilty” of two crimes—in 1945, he reported atrocities he witnessed, and in 1947, he protested against the pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko, who was supported by the Communist Party and Stalin himself (there is more about the Efroimson case in my book “The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science” [7]).

And the last point. I hope that the attention Antony Beevor attracted by his book to the Soviet Army’s atrocities will help a wide audience of readers to understand what at present is going on in Chechnya and how arrested Chechen civilian men and women are treated by the Russian Federal Troops, especially by the secret services (see reports by Anna Politkovskaya [8] and other independent journalists on different web sites). As for myself, I cannot forget the interview given by then FSB Head Sergei Stepashin to the Russian TV in 1994. At the start of the First Chechen War he said: “We will use the experience we had acquired at the end of the WWII.” Reading the reports from Chechnya, I can only conclude that methods of the Russian secret services have improved since the end of WWII. Electrical shocks are applied to men and women of all ages, and such new methods of torture (which end in death) as injection of diesel fuel by syringe into the muscles of the victims have been invented. According to the reports, the loot and rape of women and men has become an every day practice.

I belong to the generation of Soviet kids who listened to the stories of victorious Soviet soldiers after they came back to the Soviet Union from the defeated Germany. However, I do remember hearing some veterans brag about atrocities they committed in Germany. Hopefully, the understanding of the past may eventually raise a wide international condemnation of the present behavior of grandsons of the Soviet WWII soldiers in Chechnya which is desperately needed.

Vadim Birstein,

Author of “The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science”
(Boulder (CO): Westview Press, 2001)
331 West 57th Street, #159
New York, NY 10019
birstein@pipeline.com

[1] Naimark, Norman M., The Russians in Germany. A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge (MA): The Belknap Press, 1995), pp. 69-140.

[2] Some data are available on the Internet. See, for instance, an essay “The Expulsion” by a son of a Swedish attaché in Berlin, Eric Edelstam (http://www.wordsandart.com/forums/viewtopic.php?TopicID=4)

[3] Berg, Lars G., The Book That Disappeared: What Happened in Budapest (New York: Vantage Press, 1990), pp. 55, 144-156, 160-162, 193-199.

[4] Djilas, Milovan, Conversations with Stalin, trans. Michael Petrovich (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1962), pp. 88-89, 95, 101).

[5] Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, The First Circle (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).

[6] Kopelev, Lev, Ease My Sorrow. A Memoir, trans. from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Random House, 1983).

[7] Birstein, Vadim J., The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science (Boulder (CO): Westview Press, 2001), pp. 272-276.

[8] Politkovskaya, Anna, A Dirty War. A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, trans. from the Russian and edited by John Crowfoot (London: The Harvill Press, 2001).