Soviet war crimes

From 1917 to 1991, a multitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity were carried out by the Soviet Union or any of its Soviet republics, including the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and its armed forces. They include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the country's secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the direct orders of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet policy of Red Terror as a means to justify executions and political repression. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.
A significant number of these incidents occurred in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe before, during, and in the aftermath of World War II, involving summary executions and the mass murder of prisoners of war, such as in the Katyn massacre and mass rape by troops of the Red Army in territories they occupied.
In the 1990s and 2000s, war crimes trials held in the Baltic states led to the prosecution of some Russians, mostly in absentia, for crimes against humanity committed during or shortly after World War II, including killings or deportations of civilians. Today, the Russian government engages in historical negationism. Russian media refers to the Soviet crimes against humanity and war crimes as a "Western myth". In Russian history textbooks, the atrocities are either altered to portray the Soviets positively or omitted entirely. In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself a war crime fugitive since 2023, while acknowledging the "horrors of Stalinism", criticized the "excessive demonization of Stalin" by "Russia's enemies".
The Soviet Union did not recognize Imperial Russia's signing of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 as binding, and as a result, it refused to recognize them until 1955. This created a situation in which war crimes by the Soviet armed forces could be justified, and also gave Nazi Germany a legal cover for the atrocities it committed against Soviet prisoners of war.
In March 1918, over a thousand residents of Blagoveshchensk fell victim to the Red Guards, who seized the city after the mutiny of Ataman I. M. Gamov. As reported in 1922 by the prominent Chekist I. P. Pavlunovsky:
The press in the spring of 1919 reported on terrorist actions in Blagoveshchensk under the Reds:
I. I. Zhukovsky-Zhuk, a well-known Far Eastern Socialist-Revolutionaries-Maximalist, wrote:
At the beginning of April 1920, the former head of Kolchak's government, P. V. Volgodsky, met in Shanghai with two officers who had escaped from the Red Terror in Vladivostok, who said that there, despite the coalition socialist government of A. S. Medvedev, "the Bolsheviks were actually at work there," arresting and, after almost obligatory torture, killing Whites:
The partisan detachment of the Red Army under Nestor Kalandarishvili participated in the capture of Chita and the elimination of the so-called "Semyonov jam", during which his detachment habitually attacked the Buryats population, which actively supported the Whites. For example, in the Fall of 1920 the Khamnigan-Buryat Khoshun of Aginsky Aimag was brutally defeated by partisans: three of its somons were completely deserted, in the other two less than 200 out of 6000 inhabitants remained. The rest fled to Mongolia, but many of them were killed and their corpses were left unburied in March 1921. More than 70 bodies, mostly monks, women, and children, were found in and around Byrtsin datsan. In late 1920, Kalandarishvili's unit not only robbed the local population, but also raped Buryat women and girls. The command of the 5th Army of the Eastern Front — which was advancing on Chita — accused the former guerrillas of undermining the Soviet power, because the criminal situation in the ranks of Kalandarishvili's unit constantly threatened the peaceful population. However, the military authorities did not sanction Kalandarishvili. (At that time, Nestor Kalandarishvili's position had been strengthened by Lenin.)
The movement of about two thousand troops of Yakov Ivanovich Tryapitsyn and Nina Lebedeva-Kiyashko down the Amur River was accompanied by the almost complete extermination of rural intellectuals (for revolutionary "passivity") and anyone who looked like a town "bourgeois"; priests were drowned in ice-holes, or taken prisoner. Even those who voluntarily went to the partisans were shot.
One of Tryapitsyn's assistants, Ivan Lapta (Yakov Rogozin), organized a Red Army detachment that "raided villages and camps, robbed and killed people,". They killed those who did not give up gold at the Limursk mines, and looted the Amgun gold mines and surrounding villages. Lapta's detachments, together with the Tryapitsyns Zavarzin, Bitsenko, Dyldin, Otsevilli, and Sasov, killed hundreds of Lower Amurians even before the occupation of the regional center.
In Tryapitsyn's detachment, there were about 200 Chinese and the same number of Koreans recruited from the gold mines of the Taiga (the latter were commanded by Ilya Pak), to whom the ataman gave a generous cash advance, promising gold from the mines, and many Russian women. Partisan chiefs were appointed by the most determined and cruel personalities, who kept the units in submission by giving them the right to plunder and kill.
In 1920, Soviet Russia and Japan discussed a buffer state in the Russian Far East. Recognizing that Kolchak's government had collapsed, the Japanese agreed to allow the Red Army to enter Vladivostok in late January 1920. With so many foreign troops stationed in Primorye, the Bolsheviks were forced to accept the socialist zemstvo. At the same time Tryapitsyn besieged, and after an artillery bombardment at the end of February, captured Nikolaevsk-on-Amur where a Japanese battalion of 350 men and about the same number of White garrisons were stationed. There were no roads to it before the ice drift, so the defenders of the almost 20,000-strong city could rely only on their own forces. The Red Army entered the area after promising the Japanese and White garrisons that it would not commit atrocities. The Red Army signed a pact with the Japanese garrison on 28 February 1920, promising to abide by the agreement. Nevertheless, the Red Army immediately began looting and killing.
The Red guerrilla forces entered the city after agreeing to a peace with the Japanese garrison, but once inside they ignored the agreement and killed residents. The Red guerrilla forces arrested and executed civilians sympathetic to the White Movement, even wealthy civilians. Since then, Red guerrilla units have provoked the Japanese garrison. The Red guerrillas gave the Japanese garrison an ultimatum to disarm. The Japanese garrison refused the ultimatum. This led to the armed conflict on 12 March. The Japanese realized that they were dealing with a Red Army that did not recognize any agreements, and that Tryapitsyn wanted to provoke the Japanese into action with this ultimatum. When the Red Army gave the Japanese garrison an ultimatum to disarm, Major Ishikawa — the Japanese garrison commander — refused. He launched a preemptive strike on 13 March. Tryapitsyn received two wounds in the surprise attack but was able to organize a resistance, and after a fierce battle, the Japanese garrison was crushed in numbers. The consul and all the staff died in the consulate set on fire by the guerrillas. Tryapitsyn's unit exterminated Jewish children and women during the purge. Children were killed along with their mothers, and women were raped before being executed. The guerrillas deliberately killed children as an unnecessary burden. Members of the Jewish community were taken by steamboat to the Amur River and drowned, young and old. The executions were carried out by specially designated squads of Russian Red Army partisans, Koreans and Chinese loyal to Tryapitsyn. Every night they went to the prison and killed a certain number of victims according to a list.
Tryapitsyn's unit retreated only after laying waste to the entire city, setting fire to wooden buildings and blowing up stone structures. In the last days of May and the first days of June 1920, on the orders of Tryapitsyn's headquarters, himself and a group of people close to him, the town of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur was blown up and burned, the surrounding fishing grounds along the coast were burned, the inhabitants of the town were killed according to the censorship of "trustworthiness" and social affiliation; surviving Japanese, who were kept as prisoners, as well as Red Army partisans who did not agree with Tryapitsyn's actions. As a result of the evacuation of part of the population to the taiga, almost all children under the age of 5 died. The remaining population of the city retreated together, and they were taken out of the city by force. The survivors were forcibly taken away by Red Army through the taiga to the middle Amur (to Red Army partisans hearth - the so-called "red island"). Desolate ashes were left in the place of Nikolaevsk. The Red Army massacred thousands of Russians.
The Red Army carried out a mass extermination of the officers and soldiers of Pyotr Wrangel's army and the civilians who remained in the Crimea in late 1920 and the first half of 1921.
After the seizure of the Crimea on 21 November 1920, the Chekists created the so-called Crimean Strike Group at the Special Department of the VChK of the South-Western Front, which united a number of security officers headed by the deputy head of the department E. G. Evdokimov. The Chekists often did not open real investigative cases, but limited themselves to arrests and selection of questionnaires. The questionnaires were used to “judge” by troikas, which resulted in a single case for dozens and hundreds of those shot. A significant part of those arrested — among whom were often women and teenagers — were shot at once, the rest sent to concentration camps and exiled.
It is believed that Yefim Yevdokimov and his “expedition” of hundreds of special agents killed at least twelve thousand people. This figure is recorded in Yevdokimov's presentation to the Order of the Red Banner, where it was noted that under his leadership "...were shot up to 12 thousand people, including up to 30 governors, more than 150 generals, more than 300 colonels, several hundred counter-intelligence spies...".
In addition to the workers of special and transportation departments, in the extermination of Crimeans actively participated in the Chekists of territorial bodies - the VChK Polpresidency in the Crimea, Crimean Cheka, city and county Cheka. Meanwhile, the short-lived head of the Crimean Cheka (in the spring of 1921) M.M. Vikhman wrote twenty years later about his personal merits:
and the extermination of at least three thousand Crimeans by the Red partisans. However, the terror provoked not only armed resistance from part of the population, but also the indignation of many local communists, who actively complained to the central authorities. In this context, in June 1921, the Plenipotentiary Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the RSFSR People's Commissariat for Crimean Affairs began its work on the peninsula. M.H. Sultan-Galiev, a member of the Commission and the Board of the RSFSR People's Commissariat, reported:
Wartime sexual violence in the Russian Civil War had a cultural component. Traditionally, a conquering warrior had the right to rape the defeated. As a European historian ,wrote, "the raids of the Cossacks in 1815, who chopped men with sabers and raped women, remain legendary in France to this day”.
In Babel's story “My First Goose” Budyonovets said about the mores of the red cavalry: “A man of the highest distinction - from him here the soul out. And if you spoil a lady, the cleanest lady, then you will get affection from the fighters...”.
In September 1920, in a letter to Lenin, commissioner N. Narimanov described the atrocities of the Red Army in Azerbaijan: “We receive amazing reports from the localities. It comes to open rape of girls and women...”.
In places of war captive women became a valuable commodity. One of the prominent Bolsheviks wrote in a personal letter from Uryankhai (Uyuk village) at the end of December, 1921: “Now. we are evacuating Bakich's gang to Siberia. There are many women for whom I, as the ‘head’ of the region, have demands, but I myself have not acquired a single one, although my official position requires me to have a whole harem.”
Irregular units were characterized by an increased propensity to violence of all kinds during the civil war. Some ethnographic peculiarities of the Trans-Ural peasants also contributed to the rampant sexual crime. It is known that in the Siberian village among young people there was an ancient custom of gang rape of girls. Lack of respect for women, promiscuity of morals combined with class hatred bore their fruits. During the guerrilla years, mass rape was ubiquitous. The rebels, who considered all women their legitimate prey, raped the wives of priests, civil servants, officers and merchants, nuns, teachers, but occasionally they willingly pounced on peasant women from neighboring villages.
In June 1919, in the village of Kolyon, Mariinsk uyezd, P.K. Lubkov's partisans gang-raped a teacher who went mad from the shock. Partisan gangs often took women into sexual slavery under the guise of hostages; after being abused, the unfortunate women were usually killed. The first mass murders of women by the Reds date back to the spring and summer of 1918 in Semirechye. In the Altai villages in the summer of 1918, the fighters of P.F. Sukhov's detachment not only robbed and massacred prisoners, but also kidnapped the wives and daughters of priests: "In Voznesenskoye the wife of the local priest was subjected to heinous violence and taken away by a gang...In Butyrskoye the same gangs took away the priest and his adult daughter. Leader of the detachment in Kuznetsk uyezd, Tomsk province. T.F. Putilov in May 1919 directly told the victims of the raid on a remote camp that he would take one of them with him "as a beautiful young woman". The partisans of the Amur region, among whom there were many Chinese, Koreans, Magyars and Caucasians, often took women with them when they attacked villages.
During the pogrom of the Barnaul Bogoroditse-Kazan nunnery by partisans in late 1919. “Many nuns were killed and raped”; some of them managed to escape. A well-known memoirist, describing the discovery of numerous remains of tortured Whites on the bank of one of the tributaries of the Yenisei in the spring of 1920, noted: “...We came across the corpse of a tortured woman, from the first glance at which it was clear what the unfortunate had to endure before a blessed bullet put an end to the abuse.”
The former Altai partisan mentioned several episodes of group violence by I.Y. Tretiak's division in Biysk uyezd dating back to the second half of 1919: “The partisan regiments stayed in [village] Smolenskoye for about ten days and left again for Altaysk... After their departure there were more than a dozen ruined maidens and pregnant women...” When partisans in December 1919 once again captured the village of Charyshskaya, “hundreds of girls became women, and women became unwilling traitors to their husbands”. The objectivity of V.N. Shvetsov's memories is confirmed by documents. Cossacks of the Biysk line, complaining to the revcoms, in February 1920 claimed that in Cossack settlements partisans committed a lot of rapes, girls and women had to hide, “all kinds of venereal and other diseases developed”. On 30 December 1919, the Commissar of Justice of the Altgubrevkom noted that “the units standing in the village of Antonievskaya were committing violence against Cossack girls” and demanded that Nachdiv F.I. Arkhipov should bring the perpetrators to the court of tribunal, and the commanders of the units should be put on trial for inaction. This order was sabotaged.
The fighters of the West Siberian Peasant Red Army also abused women and committed rape. In the fall of 1919, during the capture of the Aul station, partisans raped women. During the partisan occupation of the Rubtsovka railway station, the company commander of the 2nd regiment, Syropyatov, raped and shot the wife of a railway worker, Filimonov.
The mass rape in Kuznetsk, Tomsk province, in December 1919 was reported in a Chekist information bulletin. Rogovtsy broke into houses, kidnapped women and girls, and used them for "brutal pleasure", including in their headquarters. Partisan memoirs contain the names of some of the victims: "The 18-year-old schoolteacher Inna P., daughter of one of the popes burned in the cathedral, was summoned to the headquarters 'on urgent business' and raped there. She fell ill with a nervous disorder. A 19-year-old girl, Polasukhina, was raped in her apartment. The girl almost went mad and soon died of shock. The 52-year-old widow of a prison official, Sycheva, was also raped in her apartment".
Mass rapes were characterized by the adventures of Y. Tryapitsyn's detachments (Sakhalin region), whose headquarters became the centers of mass rapes. Tryapitsyn's unit in the captured village, accustomed to wartime rape, violated human rights. Tryapitsyn's unit in the captured village of Susanino herded all the girls into one room and raped them, then tried to burn their victims alive, but were repelled by other Red Army partisans.
Red Army partisans often raped minors, often killing them afterwards. The opera singer Vera Davydova survived Tryapitsyn's unit at the age of 14 and told Nikolaev local historian V.I. Yuzefov that after the evacuation she was immediately seized by a group of Red Army partisans, forcibly separated from her parents, for allegedly sending her to the "headquarters." Her mother's screams attracted one of the Red Army partisan leaders, who recognized her as his former teacher and intervened. Tryapitsyn's unit also sexually assaulted women during their hasty escape from Nikolaevsk-on-Amur. N.D. Kolesnikova recalled: "It was forbidden for girls from the age of 16 to leave Nikolaevsk with their families. They had to go through the taiga together with the Red Army partisans. Luckily for me, I was only 13 years old."
The pogrom in Nikolaevsk-on-Amur and the subsequent Tryapitsyn's unit atrocities led not only to rape but also to the murder of young women and girls. In the summer of 1920, many corpses, mostly women and children, were fished out of the Amgun River: "Women, children, and rarely men—with cut ears, noses, severed fingers, and slashed and stabbed bayonet wounds." One of the acts drawn up in the village of Udinskoye in early July 1920 recorded the discovery of the body of Mozgunova, a girl of 15–17 years of age, with eight dagger wounds in the chest area.
The Soviets reportedly deployed mustard gas bombs during the 1934 Soviet invasion of Xinjiang, many civilians were also killed by conventional bombs dropped by Soviet and aligned during the invasion.
The early Soviet leaders publicly denounced antisemitism, efforts were made by Soviet authorities to contain anti-Jewish bigotry notably during the Russian Civil War, and soldiers were punished whenever the Red Army units perpetrated pogroms, as well as during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1919–1920 at Baranovichi. Only a small number of pogroms were attributed to the Red Army, with the majority of the 'collectively violent' acts in the period having been committed by anti-communist and nationalist forces.
The pogroms were condemned by the Red Army high command and guilty units were disarmed, while individual pogromists were court-martialed and faced execution. Although pogroms by Ukrainian units of the Red Army still occurred even after this, Jews regarded the Red Army as the only force which was willing to protect them. It is estimated that 3,450 Jews or 2.3 percent of the Jewish victims killed during the Russian Civil War were murdered by the Bolshevik forces. In comparison, according to the Morgenthau Report, a total of about 300 Jews died in all incidents involving Polish responsibility. However, as William Korey wrote: "Anti-Jewish discrimination had become an integral part of Soviet state policy ever since the late thirties.", as the new Stalin government moved to fight against perceived "Jewish infiltration" in the country, as well as growing conspiracies of "Jewish collaboration with the west and the Bourgeoisie".
On 6 February 1922, the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission) secret police was replaced by the State Political Administration or OGPU, a section of the NKVD. The declared function of the NKVD was to protect the state security of the Soviet Union, which was accomplished by the large scale political persecution of "class enemies". The Red Army often gave support to the NKVD in the implementation of political repressions. As an internal security force and a prison guard contingent of the Gulag, the Internal Troops repressed political dissidents and engaged in war crimes during periods of military hostilities throughout Soviet history. They were specifically responsible for maintaining the political regime in the Gulag and conducting mass deportations and forced resettlement. The latter targeted a number of ethnic groups that the Soviet authorities presumed to be hostile to its policies and likely to collaborate with the enemy, including Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and Koreans.
War crimes by Soviet armed forces against civilians and prisoners of war in the territories occupied by the USSR between 1939 and 1941 in regions including Western Ukraine, the Baltic states and Bessarabia in Romania, along with war crimes in 1944–1945, have been ongoing issues within these countries. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a more systematic, locally controlled discussion of these events has taken place.
Targets of Soviet atrocities included both collaborators with Germany after 1941 and the members of anti-communist resistance movements such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in Ukraine, the Forest Brothers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the Polish Armia Krajowa. The NKVD also conducted the Katyn massacre, summarily executing over 20,000 Polish military officer prisoners and intelligentsia in April and May 1940.
Under the German-Soviet Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union on 6 August 1940 and renamed the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Estonian standing army was broken up, and its officers executed or deported. In 1941, some 34,000 Estonians were drafted into the Red Army, of whom less than 30% survived the war. No more than half of those men were used for military service. The rest were sent to labour battalions where around 12,000 died, mainly in the early months of the war. After it became clear that the German invasion of Estonia would be successful, political prisoners who could not be evacuated were executed by the NKVD, so that they would not be able to make contact with the Nazi government. More than 300,000 citizens of Estonia, almost a third of the population at the time, were affected by deportations, arrests, execution and other acts of repression. As a result of the Soviet occupation, Estonia lost at least 200,000 people or 20% of its population to repression, exodus and war.
Soviet political repressions in Estonia were met by an armed resistance by the Forest Brothers, composed of former conscripts into the German military, Omakaitse militia and volunteers in the Finnish Infantry Regiment 200 who fought a guerrilla war, which was not completely suppressed until the late 1950s. In addition to the expected human and material losses suffered due to the fighting, over time this conflict led to the deportation of tens of thousands of people, along with hundreds of political prisoners and thousands of civilians died.
On 14 June 1941, and the following two days, 9,254 to 10,861 people, mostly urban residents, of them over 5,000 women and over 2,500 children under 16, 439 Jews (more than 10% of the Estonian Jewish population) were deported, mostly to Kirov Oblast, Novosibirsk Oblast or prisons. Deportations were predominantly to Siberia and Kazakhstan by means of railroad cattle cars, without prior announcement, while the deported were given a few night hours at best to pack their belongings and separated from their families, usually also sent to the east. The procedure was established by the Serov Instructions. Estonians in Leningrad Oblast had already been subject to deportation since 1935.
In 1941, to implement Stalin's scorched earth policy, destruction battalions were formed in the western regions of the Soviet Union. In Estonia, they killed thousands of people including many women and children, and burned down dozens of villages, schools and public buildings. Many atrocities were committed by these forces, such as the case of a school boy named Tullio Lindsaar, who had all of the bones in his hands broken for hoisting the flag of Estonia before being bayoneted to death, or Mauricius Parts, son of Estonian War of Independence veteran Karl Parts, who was killed after being doused in acid, just six weeks after the imprisonment of his father by Soviet occupation forces (who would later also be executed by Soviet forces while in prison). In August 1941, all residents of the village of Viru-Kabala were killed including a two-year-old child and a six-day-old infant, the battalions also occasionally burned people alive, according to survivors of the massacres. A partisan war broke out in response to the atrocities of the destruction battalions, with tens of thousands of men forming the Forest Brothers to protect the local population from these battalions; in general, the destruction battalions murdered ~1,850 people in Estonia, almost all of them partisans or unarmed civilians.
Another example of the destruction battalions' actions is the Kautla massacre, where twenty civilians were murdered and tens of farms and houses looted, burned down or destroyed, with many of the people killed after being tortured and beaten by Soviet troops. The low toll of human deaths in comparison with the number of burned farms is due to the Erna long-range reconnaissance group breaking the Red Army blockade on the area, allowing many civilians to escape.
On 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, in which Latvia was included in the Soviet sphere of influence. On 17 June 1940, Latvia was occupied by the Red Army. The Kārlis Ulmanis government was removed, and rigged elections were held on 21 June 1940 with only the Communist Latvian Working People's Bloc allowed to participate, "electing" the rubber stamp People's Parliament which made resolution to join the Soviet Union, with the resolution having already been drawn up in Moscow prior the election. Latvia was officially annexed by the Soviet Union on 5 August, and on 25 August all people in Latvia were declared citizens of the Soviet Union. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was closed isolating Latvia from the rest of the world.
In the 1941 June deportation, tens of thousands of Latvians, including whole families with women, children and old people, were taken from their homes, loaded onto freight trains and taken to Gulag correctional labour camps or forced settlements in Siberia by the Soviet occupation regime on the orders of high authorities in Moscow. Prior to the deportation, the People's Commissariat established operational groups who performed arrests, and search and seizure of property. Arrests took place in all parts in Latvia including rural areas.
Lithuania and the other Baltic States, fell victim to the secret addendum to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Germany, signed in August 1939. First Lithuania was invaded by the Red Army on 15 June 1940, and then the Soviet Union annexed it on 3 August 1940. The annexation resulted in mass terror, the denial of civil liberties, the destruction of the economic system and the suppression of Lithuanian culture. Between 1940 and 1941, thousands of Lithuanians were arrested and hundreds of political prisoners were arbitrarily executed. More than 17,000 people were deported to Siberia in June 1941. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviet political apparatus was either destroyed or retreated east. Lithuania was then occupied by Nazi Germany for a little over three years. In 1944, the Soviet Union reoccupied Lithuania. Following World War II and the subsequent suppression of the Lithuanian Forest Brothers, the Soviet authorities executed thousands of resistance fighters and civilians, whom they accused of helping them. Some 300,000 Lithuanians were deported or sentenced to terms in prison camps on political grounds. Lithuania lost an estimated nearly 780,000 citizens in the Soviet occupation. Of these, around 440,000 were war refugees.
The estimated death toll in Soviet prisons and camps between 1944 and 1953 was at least 14,000. The estimated death toll among deportees between 1945 and 1958 was 20,000, including 5,000 children.
During the restoration of Lithuanian independence in 1990 and 1991, the Soviet army killed 13 people in Vilnius during the January Events.
In September 1939, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland and occupied it in accordance with the secret protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviets later forcefully occupied the Baltic States and parts of Romania, including Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina.
German historian Thomas Urban writes that the Soviet policy towards the people who fell under their control in occupied areas was harsh, showing strong elements of ethnic cleansing. The NKVD task forces followed the Red Army to remove 'hostile elements' from the conquered territories in what was known as the 'revolution by hanging'. Polish historian, Prof. Tomasz Strzembosz, has noted parallels between the Nazi Einsatzgruppen and these Soviet units. Many civilians tried to escape from the Soviet NKVD round-ups; those who failed were taken into custody and afterwards they were deported to Siberia and vanished in the Gulags.
Torture was used on a wide scale in various prisons, especially in those prisons that were located in small towns. Prisoners were scalded with boiling water in Bobrka; in Przemyślany, people's noses, ears, and fingers were cut off and their eyes were also put out; in Czortków, the breasts of female inmates were cut off; and in Drohobycz, victims were bound together with barbed wire. Similar atrocities occurred in Sambor, Stanisławów, Stryj, and Złoczów. According to historian, Prof. Jan T. Gross:
According to sociologist, Prof. Tadeusz Piotrowski, during the years from 1939 to 1941, nearly 1.5 million persons (including both local inhabitants and refugees from German-occupied Poland) were deported from the Soviet-controlled areas of former eastern Poland deep into the Soviet Union, of whom 58.0% were Poles, 19.4% Jews and the remainder other ethnic nationalities. Only a small number of these deportees returned to their homes after the war, when their homelands were annexed by the Soviet Union. According to American professor Carroll Quigley, at least one third of the 320,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by the Red Army in 1939 were murdered.
It's estimated that between 10,000-35,000 prisoners were killed either in prisons or on prison trail to the Soviet Union in the few days after the 22 June 1941 German attack on the Soviets (prisons: Brygidki, Złoczów, Dubno, Drohobycz, and so on).
In Poland, German Nazi atrocities ended by 1945, but they were replaced by Soviet oppression with the advance of Red Army forces. Soviet soldiers often engaged in plunder, rape and other crimes against the Poles, causing the population to fear and hate the regime.
Soldiers of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) were persecuted and imprisoned by Soviet forces as a matter of course. Most victims were deported to the gulags in the Donetsk region. In 1945 alone, the number of members of the Polish Underground State who were deported to Siberia and various labor camps in the Soviet Union reached 50,000. Units of the Red Army carried out campaigns against Polish partisans and civilians. During the Augustów chase in 1945, more than 2,000 Poles were captured and about 600 of them are presumed to have died in Soviet custody. It was a common Soviet practice to accuse their victims of being fascists in order to justify their death sentences. The perversion of this Soviet tactic lay in the fact that practically all of the accused had in reality been fighting against the forces of Nazi Germany since September 1939. At that time the Soviets were still collaborating with Nazi Germany for more than 20 months before Operation Barbarossa started. Precisely therefore these kinds of Poles were judged capable of resisting the Soviets, in the same way that they had resisted the Nazis. After the War, a more elaborate appearance of justice was given under the jurisdiction of the Polish People's Republic orchestrated by the Soviets in the form of mock trials. These were organized after victims had been arrested under false charges by the NKVD or other Soviet controlled security organisations such as the Ministry of Public Security. At least 6,000 political death sentences were issued, and the majority of them were carried out. It is estimated that over 20,000 people died in Soviet prisons . Famous examples include Witold Pilecki or Emil August Fieldorf.
The attitude of Soviet servicemen towards ethnic Poles was better than their attitude towards the Germans, but it was not entirely better. The scale of rape of Polish women in 1945 led to a pandemic of sexually transmitted diseases. Although the total number of victims remains a matter of guessing, the Polish state archives and statistics of the Ministry of Health indicate that it might have exceeded 100,000. In Kraków, the Soviet entry into the city was accompanied by mass rapes of Polish women and girls, as well as the plunder of private property by Red Army soldiers. This behavior reached such a scale that even Polish Communists installed by the Soviet Union composed a letter of protest to Joseph Stalin himself, while church Masses were held in expectation of a Soviet withdrawal.
The Red Army was also involved in mass-scale looting in liberated territories.
Between 1941 and 1944, Soviet partisan units conducted raids deep inside Finnish territory, attacking villages and other civilian targets. In November 2006, photographs showing Soviet atrocities were declassified by the Finnish authorities. These include images of slain women and children. The partisans usually executed their military and civilian prisoners after a minor interrogation.
Around 3,500 Finnish prisoners of war, of whom five were women, were captured by the Red Army. Their mortality rate is estimated to have been about 40 percent. The most common causes of death were hunger, cold and oppressive transportation.
By 1939 the Ingrian Finnish population had decreased to about 50,000, which was about 43% of 1928 population figures, and the Ingrian Finn national district was abolished., Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Leningrad Blockade, in early 1942 all 20,000 Ingrian Finns remaining in Soviet-controlled territory were deported to Siberia. Most of the Ingrian Finns together with Votes and Izhorians living in German-occupied territory were evacuated to Finland in 1943–1944. Finland was forced to return the evacuees per the Moscow Armistice. Soviet authorities did not allow the 55,733 people who had been handed over to settle back in Ingria, and instead deported them to central regions of Russia. The main regions of Ingrian Finns forced settlement were the interior areas of Siberia, Central Russia, and Tajikistan.
Deportations, summary executions of political prisoners and the burning of foodstocks and villages took place when the Red Army retreated before the advancing Axis forces in 1941. In the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, and Bessarabia, the NKVD and attached units of the Red Army massacred prisoners and political opponents before fleeing from the advancing Axis forces.
The prosecution of Greeks in the USSR was gradual: at first the authorities shut down the Greek schools, cultural centres, and publishing houses. Then, in 1942, 1944 and 1949, the NKVD indiscriminately arrested all Greek men 16 years old or older. All Greeks who were wealthy or self-employed professionals were sought for prosecution first. This affected mostly Pontic Greeks and other Minorities in the Krasnodar Krai and along the Black Sea coast. By one estimate, around 50,000 Greeks were deported.
On 25 September 1956, MVD Order N 0402 was adopted and defined the removal of restrictions towards the deported peoples in the special settlements. Afterward, the Soviet Greeks started returning to their homes, or emigrating towards Greece.
During the Kalmyk deportations of 1943, codenamed Operation Ulussy (Операция "Улусы"), the deportation of most people of the Kalmyk nationality (as well as Russian women married to Kalmyks, but not Kalmyk women married to people of other nationalities) in the Soviet Union (USSR), around half of all (97–98,000) Kalmyk people deported to Siberia died before being allowed to return home in 1957.
After the retreat of the Wehrmacht from Crimea, the NKVD deported around 200,000 Crimean Tatars from the peninsula on 18 May 1944. 109,956 of them died, which represents 46% of the entire Crimean Tatar population.
In 1943 and 1944, the Soviet government accused several entire ethnic groups of Axis collaboration. As a punishment, several entire ethnic groups were deported, mostly to Central Asia and Siberia into labor camps.
On 23 February 1944, Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the NKVD, ordered the deportation of the entire Chechen and Ingush population of the Checheno-Ingush ASSR by freight trains to remote areas of the Soviet Union (such as Siberia, the Urals and Central Asia). The operation was called "Chechevitsa" (Operation Lentil), (its first two syllables pointing at its intended targets), and is often referred to by Chechens as the "Aardakh" (the Exodus). The operation was started following complaints by the NKVD of "low level of discipline, prevalence of banditry and terrorism, disloyalty of the Chechens to the Communist party" and alleged "collaboration with the occupying German forces", citing an alleged confession of a German agent where he supposedly claimed that the German forces had "major support among the Ingush". The Chechen-Ingush Republic was never occupied by the German army, but the repressions were officially justified by "an armed resistance to Soviet power", although the charges of local collaboration with the Nazis were never subsequently proven in any Soviet court.
NKVD troops went systematically from house to house to collect individuals, the inhabitants were rounded up and imprisoned in Studebaker US6 trucks, before being packed into unheated and uninsulated freight cars, with the locals being given only about 15 to 30 minutes to pack for the surprise transfer. According to a correspondence dated 3 March 1944, at least 19,000 officers and 100,000 NKVD soldiers from all over the USSR were sent to implement this operation. The plan envisaged that 300,000 people were to be deported from the lowland in the first three days, while the remaining 150,000 people living in the mountain regions would be deported by the next days; some 500 people were also deported by mistake, even though they were not Chechens or Ingush. Through the initial deportations, ~478,479 people were forcibly resettled in the Aardakh: 387,229 Chechens and 91,250 Ingush; in May 1944, Beria issued a directive ordering the NKVD to browse the entire USSR in search for any remaining members of these ethnic groups, as a result, an additional 4,146 Chechens and Ingush were found in Dagestan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Krasnodar, Rostov and Astrakhan, with the total number of deportees being reported by the NKVD as around 493,269 by May and ~496,460 by July. They were loaded onto 180 special trains, about 40 to 45 persons into each freight car, each family was allowed to carry up to 500 kg of personal belongings on the trip, Some 40% to 50% of the deportees were children.; 333,739 people were evicted, of which 176,950 were sent to trains already on the first day of the operation, with Beriya reporting that there were only about six "cases of resistance", while 842 were "subject to isolation" and another 94,741 were removed from their homes by 11 PM, Much of the livestock owned by locals was later sent to kolkhozes in Ukrainian SSR, Stavropol Krai, Voronezh and Orel Oblasts, many of these animals perished from exhaustion during the following months.
The people were transported in cattle trains that were not appropriate for human transfer, lacking electricity, heating or running water. The exiles inside endured many epidemics (such as typhus), which lead to deaths from infections or hunger, survivors recall that the wagons were so full of people that there was barely any space to move inside them, and that the deportees were given food only sporadically during the transit and were not told where they would be taken to. The wagons did not even stop for bathroom breaks, with the passengers being forced to make holes in the floor to relieve themselves. The transit to Central Asia lasted for almost a month, with the special trains traveling almost 2,000 miles to reach their destinations. 239,768 Chechens and 78,479 Ingush were sent to the Kazakh SSR, whereas 70,089 Chechens and 2,278 Ingush arrived in Kirgiz SSR. Smaller numbers of the remaining deportees were sent to Uzbek SSR, Russian SFSR and Tajik SSR, the deportees arrived at the regions without shelter or food, and were in many occasions taken to special settlements, where all prisoners aged 16–45 would be forced to work in mines, farms, factories or construction in return for food stamps (with the threat of severe punishment if non-compliant), as well as report monthly to the NKVD office at the camp. Those that attempted to escape would be sent to gulags, and the children of the prisoners would inherit their "exile" status. Malnutrition (caused by the negligence of the authorities to provide food for the prisoners), alongside exhaustion (from overworking) and mistreatment from Soviet forces led to high death rates among the local population. Many deported children were beaten by the local guards for "disobedience", and many families were left without proper housing: only 5,000 out of the 31,000 families in Kirgiz SSR were provided with housing, with one district having prepared only 18 apartments for over 900 families, the Chechen and Ingush children also had to attend school in the local language, not their own.
On many occasions, resistance was met with slaughter, and in one such instance, in the aul of Khaibakh, about 700 people were locked in a barn and burned to death by NKVD General Mikheil Gveshiani, who was praised for this and promised a medal by Beria. Many people from remote villages were executed per Beria's verbal order that any Chechen or Ingush deemed 'untransportable should be liquidated' on the spot. This meant that those deemed too old or weak were to either be shot or left to starve in their beds alone. The soldiers would also sometimes rob from the empty homes. Those who resisted, protested or "walked too slow" were shot on the spot; in one incident, NKVD soldiers climbed up the Moysty mountain and found 60 villagers there, even though their commander ordered the soldiers to shoot the villagers, many soldiers instead fired in the air, the commander then ordered many of these soldiers to join the villagers while another platoon fired at all of them.
Lavrentiy Beria arrived in Nalchik on 2 March 1944, and in the early morning of 8 March 1944, two days earlier than planned, Balkar's population was ordered to get ready to leave their homes. The entire operation lasted about two hours, with the entire Balkar population of the region being evicted. Around 17,000 NKVD troops and 4,000 local agents participated in this operation. By 9 March, 37,713 Balkars were deported in 14 train convoys, they arrived at their destinations in the Kazakh and Kyrgiz socialist republics and by 23 March.
Official Soviet documents reveal that 562 people died during the deportation. Many more died during the harsh years in exile and in labor camps: in total, it is estimated that 7,600 Balkars died as a consequence of the deportation, amounting to 19.82 percent of their entire ethnic group.
According to historian Norman Naimark, statements in Soviet military newspapers and the orders of the Soviet high command were jointly responsible for the excesses of the Red Army. Propaganda proclaimed that the Red Army had entered Germany as an avenger to punish all Germans.
Some historians dispute this, referring to an order issued on 19 January 1945, which required the prevention of mistreatment of civilians. An order of the military council of the 1st Belorussian Front, signed by Marshal Rokossovsky, ordered the shooting of looters and rapists at the scene of the crime. An order issued by Stavka on 20 April 1945 said that there was a need to maintain good relations with German civilians in order to decrease resistance and bring a quicker end to hostilities.
On several occasions during World War II, Soviet soldiers set fire to buildings, villages, or parts of cities, and they used deadly force against locals who attempted to put out the fires. Most Red Army atrocities took place only in what was regarded as hostile territory, however, there were several massacres committed in Poland, e.g. the Przyszowice massacre. Soldiers of the Red Army, together with members of the NKVD, frequently looted German transport trains in Poland in 1944 and 1945.
For the Germans, the organized evacuation of civilians before the advancing Red Army was delayed by the Nazi government, so as not to demoralize the troops, who were by now fighting in their own country. Nazi propaganda—originally meant to stiffen civil resistance by describing in gory and embellished detail Red Army atrocities such as the Nemmersdorf massacre—often backfired and created panic. Whenever possible, as soon as the Wehrmacht retreated, local civilians began to flee westward on their own initiative.
Fleeing before the advancing Red Army, large numbers of the inhabitants of the German provinces of East Prussia, Silesia, and Pomerania died during the evacuations, some from cold and starvation, some during combat operations. A significant percentage of this death toll, however, occurred when evacuation columns encountered units of the Red Army. Civilians were run over by tanks, shot, or otherwise murdered. Women and young girls were raped and left to die.
In addition, fighter bombers of the Soviet air force flew bombing and strafing missions that targeted columns of refugees.
Although mass executions of civilians by the Red Army were seldom publicly reported, there is a known incident, Treuenbrietzen massacre. During the first occupation of the town by the Red Army, on 21 April or 22 a higher Soviet officer was shot. After that the Wehrmacht briefly returned. After the second occupation of the town, Red Army soldiers rounded up the civilians and shot the adult men in a nearby forest. The official estimate is between 30 and 166 civilian victims. Some German sources claimed about 1,000 victims, but this must be rejected on the basis on the actual number of town residents.
The first mayor of the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, Walter Kilian, appointed by the Soviets after the war ended, reported extensive looting by Red Army soldiers in the area: "Individuals, department stores, shops, apartments ... all were robbed blind."
In the Soviet occupation zone, members of the SED reported to Stalin that looting and rape by Soviet soldiers could result in a negative reaction by the German population towards the Soviet Union and the future of socialism in East Germany. Stalin is said to have angrily reacted: "I shall not tolerate anybody dragging the honour of the Red Army through the mud."
Accordingly, all evidence—such as reports, photos and other documents of looting, rape, the burning down of farms and villages by the Red Army—was deleted from all archives in the future GDR.
A study published by the German government in 1974 estimated the number of German civilian victims of crimes during expulsion of Germans after World War II between 1945 and 1948 to be over 600,000, with about 400,000 deaths in the areas east of Oder and Neisse (ca. 120,000 in acts of direct violence, mostly by Soviet troops but also by Poles, 60,000 in Polish and 40,000 in Soviet concentration camps or prisons mostly from hunger and disease, and 200,000 deaths among civilian deportees to forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union), 130,000 in Czechoslovakia (thereof 100,000 in camps) and 80,000 in Yugoslavia (thereof 15,000 to 20,000 from violence outside of and in camps and 59,000 deaths from hunger and disease in camps). These figures do not include up to 125,000 civilian deaths in the Battle of Berlin. About 22,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed during the fighting in Berlin only.
As Allied troops entered and occupied German territory during the later stages of World War II, mass rapes of women took place both in connection with combat operations and during the subsequent occupation of Germany. Scholars agree that the majority of the rapes were committed by Soviet occupation troops. Western estimates of the traceable number of rape victims range from two hundred thousand to two million. Following the Winter Offensive of 1945, mass rape by Soviet males occurred in all major cities taken by the Red Army. Women were gang raped by as many as several dozen soldiers during the occupation of Poland. In some cases victims who did not hide in the basements all day were raped up to 15 times. According to historian Antony Beevor, following the Red Army's capture of Berlin in 1945, Soviet troops raped German women and girls as young as eight years old.
The explanation of "revenge" is disputed by Beevor, at least with regard to the mass rapes. Beevor has written that Red Army soldiers also raped Soviet and Polish women liberated from concentration camps, and he contends that this undermines the revenge explanation, they were often committed by rear echelon units.
According to Norman Naimark, after the summer of 1945, Soviet soldiers caught raping civilians usually received punishments ranging from arrest to execution. However, Naimark contends that the rapes continued until the winter of 1947–48, when Soviet occupation authorities finally confined troops to strictly guarded posts and camps. Naimark concluded that "The social psychology of women and men in the Soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of occupation, through the founding of the GDR in the fall of 1949, until, one could argue, the present."
According to Richard Overy, the Russians refused to acknowledge Soviet war crimes, partly "because they felt that much of it was justified vengeance against an enemy who committed much worse, and partly it was because they were writing the victors' history."
According to researcher and author Krisztián Ungváry, some 38,000 civilians were killed during the Siege of Budapest: about 13,000 from military action and 25,000 from starvation, disease and other causes. Included in the latter figure are about 15,000 Jews, largely victims of executions by Nazi SS and Arrow Cross Party death squads. Ungváry writes that when the Soviets finally claimed victory, they initiated an orgy of violence, including the wholesale theft of anything they could lay their hands on, random executions and mass rape. Estimates of the number of rape victims vary from 5,000 to 200,000. According to Norman Naimark, Hungarian girls were kidnapped and taken to Red Army quarters, where they were imprisoned, repeatedly raped and sometimes murdered.
Even embassy staff from neutral countries were captured and raped, as was documented when Soviet soldiers attacked the Swedish legation in Germany.
A report by the Swiss legation in Budapest describes the Red Army's entry into the city:
According to historian James Mark, memories and opinions of the Red Army in Hungary are mixed.
The Soviet Union also committed war crimes in Romania or against Romanians from the beginning of the occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in 1940 all the way to the German invasion in 1941, and later from the expulsion of the Germans in the region until 1958. One example was the Fântâna Albă massacre, in which 44–3,000 Romanians were killed by the Soviet Border Troops and the NKVD while attempting to escape to Romania. Such event has been referred to as the "Romanian Katyn".
Another infamous massacre committed by Soviet troops was the Lunca massacre, where Soviet border troops opened fire against several Romanian civilians attempting to escape into Romania, killing 600 of them, only 57 managed to escape, with another 44 being arrested and tried as "members of a counter-revolutionary organization", 12 of them were sentenced to death, with the rest being sentenced to 10 years forced labour and 5 years loss of civil rights, the family members of those arrested and shot would later be arrested and sent to Siberia and Central Asia
During the occupation, the Soviet government and army deported thousands of Romanian civilians from the occupied regions into "special settlements". According to a secret Soviet Ministry of Interior report dated December 1965, 46,000 people were deported from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic for the period 1940−1953.
Religious persecution was also widespread, the Soviet government sought to exterminate all forms of organized religion in its occupied territories, often persecuting the Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish churches, the Soviet political police arrested numerous priests, with others being arrested and interrogated by the Soviet NKVD itself, then deported to the interior of the USSR, and killed.
Thousands of Transylvanian Saxons would later be deported from 1944 to 1949 under Soviet occupation, with hundreds or even thousands dying on their way to camps in Siberia and Central Asia before being able to come back to their home country.
According to Yugoslav politician Milovan Djilas, at least 121 cases of rape were documented, 111 of which also involved murder. A total of 1,204 cases of looting with assault were also documented. Djilas described these figures as, "hardly insignificant if it is borne in mind that the Red Army crossed only the northeastern corner of Yugoslavia". This caused concern to the Yugoslav communist partisans, who feared that stories of crimes committed by their Soviet allies would weaken their standing among the population.
Djilas writes that in response, Yugoslav partisan leader Joseph Broz Tito summoned the chief of the Soviet military mission, General Korneev, and formally protested. Despite having been invited "as a comrade", Korneev exploded at them for offering "such insinuations" against the Red Army. Djilas, who was present at the meeting, spoke up and explained the British Army had never engaged in "such excesses" while liberating the other regions of Yugoslavia. General Korneev responded by screaming, "I protest most sharply at this insult given to the Red Army by comparing it with the armies of capitalist countries."
The meeting with Korneev not only "ended without results", it also caused Stalin to personally attack Djilas during his next visit to the Kremlin. In tears, Stalin denounced "the Yugoslav Army and how it was administered." He then "spoke agitatedly about the sufferings of the Red Army and the horrors that it was forced to endure while it was fighting through thousands of kilometers of devastated country." Stalin climaxed with the words, "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 received so well! And an Army which did not spare its blood for you! Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can't he 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?"
According to Djilas, the Soviet refusal to address protests against Red Army war crimes in Yugoslavia enraged Tito's government and it was a contributing factor in Yugoslavia's subsequent exit from the Soviet Bloc.
Slovak communist leader Vlado Clementis complained to Marshal Ivan Konev about the behavior of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia. Konev's response was to claim it was done mainly by Red Army deserters.
During the invasion of Manchuria, Soviet and Mongolian soldiers attacked and raped Japanese civilians, often encouraged by the local Chinese population who were resentful of Japanese rule. The local Chinese population sometimes even joined in these attacks against the Japanese population with the Soviet soldiers. In one famous example, during the Gegenmiao massacre, Soviet soldiers, encouraged by the local Chinese population, raped and massacred over one thousand Japanese women and children. Property of the Japanese were also looted by the Soviet soldiers and Chinese. Many Japanese women married themselves to local Manchurian men to protect themselves from persecution by Soviet soldiers. These Japanese women mostly married Chinese men and became known as "stranded war wives" (zanryu fujin).
Following the invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria), the Soviets laid claim to valuable Japanese materials and industrial equipment in the region. A foreigner witnessed Soviet troops, formerly stationed in Berlin, who were allowed by the Soviet military to go at the city "for three days of rape and pillage." Most of Mukden was gone. Convict soldiers were then used to replace them; it was testified that they "stole everything in sight, broke up bathtubs and toilets with hammers, pulled electric-light wiring out of the plaster, built fires on the floor and either burned down the house or at least a big hole in the floor, and in general behaved completely like savages."
According to some British and American sources, the Soviets made it a policy to loot and rape civilians in Manchuria. In Harbin, the Chinese posted slogans such as "Down with Red Imperialism!" Soviet forces faced some protests by Chinese communist party leaders against the looting and rapes committed by troops in Manchuria. There were several instances where Chinese police forces in Manchuria arrested or even killed Soviet troops for various crimes, leading to some conflicts between the Soviet and Chinese authorities in Manchuria.
Japanese women in Manchukuo were repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers every day including underage girls from the families of Japanese who worked for the military and the Manchukuo rail at Beian airport and Japanese military nurses. The Russians seized Japanese civilian girls at Beian airport where there were a total of 1000 Japanese civilians, repeatedly raping 10 girls each day as recalled by Yoshida Reiko and repeatedly raped 75 Japanese nurses at the Sunwu military hospital in Manchukuo during the occupation. The Russians rejected all the pleading by the Japanese officers to stop the rapes. The Japanese were told by the Russians that they had to give their women for rape as war spoils.
Soviet soldiers raped Japanese women from a group of Japanese families that were with Yamada Tami that attempted to flee their settlements on 14 August and go to Mudanjiang. Another group of Japanese women that were with Ikeda Hiroko that on 15 August tried to flee to Harbin but returned to their settlements were raped by Soviet soldiers.
The Soviet Army committed crimes against the Japanese civilian populations and surrendered military personnel in the closing stages of World War II during the assaults on Sakhalin and Kuril Islands.
On 10 August 1945, Soviet forces carried out fierce naval bombardment and artillery strikes against civilians awaiting evacuation as well as Japanese installations in Maoka. Nearly 1,000 civilians were killed by the invading forces.
After the 15 August 1945 Gyokuon broadcast, telephone operators at the Maoka Post Office were on duty without having been evacuated. On 20 August, Soviet troops landed in Moka and 10 of the 12 female telephone operators on duty in fear of war crimes committed by Soviet troops, attempted suicide in the station, nine of which were killed. Apart from the telephone operator who committed suicide, other station employees who remained behind and those who were not on duty that day were killed by grenades and gunfire from Soviet soldiers, bringing the total number of those killed at the Maoka station to 19.
During the evacuation of the Kuriles and Karafuto, civilian convoys were attacked by Soviet submarines in the Aniva Gulf. Soviet Leninets-class submarine L-12 and L-19 sank two Japanese refugee transport ships Ogasawara Maru and Taito Maru while also damaging No.2 Shinko Maru on 22 August, 7 days after Hirohito had announced Japan's unconditional surrender. Over 2,400 civilians were killed.
During the Soviet occupation of North Korea, it was reported that Soviet soldiers committed rape against both Japanese and Korean women alike in the northern half of the Korean peninsula. Soviet soldiers also looted the property of both Japanese and Koreans living in northern Korea. The Soviets laid claim to Japanese enterprises in Manchuria and northern Korea and took valuable materials and industrial equipment.
North Korean residents initially held high hopes for the Soviet army, which had entered their territory as a liberation force, bringing an end to Japanese colonial rule. However, these expectations were quickly shattered. According to eyewitness accounts from the time, Soviet troops engaged in widespread misconduct upon their arrival, looting residents' belongings and committing acts of rape against local women, terrorizing the population. The full extent of the misconduct was revealed to Soviet experts sent to assess North Korea's economic situation in late 1945. The situation was so severe that they reported it directly to the Primorsky Military District.
A report from the Soviet military command at the end of 1945 on the political attitudes of North Korean residents highlited the widespread issue of Soviet soldiers commting rape against local women. According to the report, in September 1945, less than a month after the Soviet army entered Pyongyang, an elderly Korean resident approached the Soviet military command and made the following plea:
It was reported that the Soviet Military tolerated the rape of Japanese women residing in North Korea more than that of Korean women. At the time of the Soviet army's entry, approximately 215,000 Japanese civilians were residing in North Korea. As residents of an "occupied territory," Japanese women were openly subjected to mass rape by Soviet soldiers in broad daylight, while assaults on Korean women, considered residents of a "liberated area", were committed more discreetly, often in concealed locations or at night. This phenomenon was seen as similar to Norman Naimark's claim that, in Eastern Europe, Slavic women, such as Polish, Bulgarian, Czech, Slovak, and Serbian women, who were considered "liberated" were relatively spared from rape by Soviet troops compared to non-Slavic women, such as German and Hungarian women, who were considered "occupied."
By October 1945, the frequency and severity of misconduct by Soviet soldiers had significantly decreased, likely due to a direct order issued by Stalin on September 20, 1945, to the authorities of the Soviet 25th Army stationed in North Korea, including the commander of the Far Eastern Front. Issued about a month after the Soviet Army's entry into North Korea, the order's sixth provision stated: "The military in North Korea must strictly observe discipline, avoid harming residents, and behave courteously." As a result, stricter enforcement by the Soviet military command led to a noticeable decline in misconduct by Soviet soldiers in the following month.
Crackdowns on misconduct by Soviet soldiers reportedly intensified from early 1946, and measures taken by the Soviet military command contributed to a reduction in such incidents. Jeong Ryul, a Koryoin Soviet officer and interpreter for Ivan Chistyakov, testified that in January 1946, Stalin issued a secret directive to the Soviet Civil Administration ordering the immediate execution of soldiers who harmed the North Korean population. He stated that in Wonsan, ten Soviet soldiers charged with robbery and rape were shot, and a similar number were also executed in Hamhung. According to Bruce Cumings, a report from the United States Army Military Government in Korea stated that "by January 1946, the Soviet Union had introduced military police to enforce strict control over its soldiers." However, looting and violence by Soviet soldiers were only relatively reduced, not completely eradicated. According to a Japanese resident in Namsi, North Pyongan Province, rapes by Soviet soldiers began occurring in late October, with sexual violence against Japanese women becoming particularly severe. In response, some North Korean security forces reportedly evacuated Japanese women to the mountains or local Korean homes for protection. Soviet soldiers who had exhausted their military currency freely engaged in looting.
Officers also committed offenses and were arrested as a result. For example, between May 13 and May 25, 1946, a total of 229 Soviet soldiers were arrested in Haeju, Hwanghae Province, including six officers. Despite several official measures and arbitrary attempts to enforce discipline, misconduct, including assault, harassment, looting, and murder, by both Soviet soldiers and officers continued until the end of 1946.
Although the Soviet Union had not formally signed the Hague Convention, it declared itself bound by the convention's provisions as well as by its own "Regulations for the Treatment of PoWs". However, in practice, it often ignored the convention as well as its own rules. George Sanford wrote that Soviet public declarations and laws on the humane treatment of PoWs were "part of the Soviet 'big lie' for propaganda". One of the Soviet Union's earliest war crimes were those against Polish prisoners of war in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Poland in the 1939; it is estimated that during that conflict, approximately 2,500 Polish soldiers were murdered in various executions and reprisals for offering resistance by Soviets and Ukrainian nationalists. The most infamous of these was the Katyn massacre, a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD in April and May 1940. Though the killings took place at several places, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered.
Throughout the Second World War, the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau collected and investigated reports of crimes against the Axis POWs. According to Cuban-American writer Alfred de Zayas, "For the entire duration of the Russian campaign, reports of torture and murder of German prisoners did not cease. The War Crimes Bureau had five major sources of information: (1) captured enemy papers, especially orders, reports of operations, and propaganda leaflets; (2) intercepted radio and wireless messages; (3) testimony of Soviet prisoners of war; (4) testimony of captured Germans who had escaped; and (5) testimony of Germans who saw the corpses or mutilated bodies of executed prisoners of war. From 1941 to 1945 the Bureau compiled several thousand depositions, reports, and captured papers which, if nothing else, indicate that the killing of German prisoners of war upon capture or shortly after their interrogation was not an isolated occurrence. Documents relating to the war in France, Italy, and North Africa contain some reports on the deliberate killing of German prisoners of war, but there can be no comparison with the events on the Eastern Front."
In a November 1941 report, the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau accused the Red Army of employing "a terror policy... against defenseless German soldiers that have fallen into its hands and against members of the German medical corps. At the same time... it has made use of the following means of camouflage: in a Red Army order that bears the approval of the Council of People's Commissars, dated 1 July 1941, the norms of international law are made public, which the Red Army in the spirit of the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare are supposed to follow... This... Russian order probably had very little distribution, and surely it has not been followed at all. Otherwise the unspeakable crimes would not have occurred."
According to the depositions, Soviet massacres of German, Italian, Spanish, and other Axis POWs were often incited by unit Commissars, who claimed to be acting under orders from Stalin and the Politburo. Other evidence cemented the War Crimes Bureau's belief that Stalin had given secret orders about the massacre of POWs.
During the winter of 1941–42, the Red Army captured approximately 10,000 German soldiers each month, but the death rate became so high that the absolute number of prisoners decreased (or was bureaucratically reduced).
Soviet sources list the deaths of 474,967 of the 2,652,672 German Armed Forces taken prisoner in the war. Dr. Rüdiger Overmans believes that it seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that additional German military personnel listed as missing actually died in Soviet custody as POWs, putting the estimates of the actual death toll of German POW in the USSR at about 1.0 million.
Soviet soldiers rarely bothered to treat wounded German POWs. A particularly infamous example took place after the Crimean city of Feodosia was briefly recaptured by Soviet forces on 29 December 1942. 160 wounded soldiers had been left in military hospitals by the retreating Wehrmacht. After the Germans retook Feodosia, it was learned that every wounded soldier had been massacred by Red Army, Navy, and NKVD personnel. Some had been shot in their hospital beds, others repeatedly bludgeoned to death, still others were found to have been thrown from hospital windows before being repeatedly drenched with freezing water until they died of hypothermia.
The Massacre of Grischino was committed by an armoured division of the Red Army in February 1943 in the eastern Ukrainian towns of Krasnoarmeyskoye, Postyschevo and Grischino. The Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle also known as WuSt (Wehrmacht criminal investigating authority), announced that among the victims were 406 soldiers of the Wehrmacht, 58 members of the Organisation Todt (including two Danish nationals), 89 Italian soldiers, 9 Romanian soldiers, 4 Hungarian soldiers, 15 German civil officials, 7 German civilian workers and 8 Ukrainian volunteers.
The places were overrun by the Soviet 4th Guards Tank Corps on the night of 10 and 11 February 1943. After the reconquest by the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking with the support of 333 Infantry Division and the 7th Panzer Division on 18 February 1943 the Wehrmacht soldiers discovered numerous deaths. Many of the bodies were horribly mutilated, ears and noses cut off and genital organs amputated and stuffed into their mouths. Breasts of some of the nurses were cut off, the women being brutally raped. A German military judge who was at the scene stated in an interview during the 1970s that he saw a female body with her legs spread-eagled and a broomstick rammed into her genitals. In the cellar of the main train station around 120 Germans were herded into a large storage room and then mowed down with machine guns.
Some German prisoners were released soon after the war. Many others, however, remained in the GULAG long after the surrender of Nazi Germany. Among the most famous German POWs to die in Soviet captivity was Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who died of injuries, sustained possibly under torture, in a concentration camp near Stalingrad in 1952. In 2009, Captain Hosenfeld was posthumously honored by the State of Israel for his role in saving Jewish lives during The Holocaust. Similar was the fate of Swedish diplomat and OSS operative Raoul Wallenberg.
According to the United Nations Report of the Special Committee on the problem of Hungary (1957): "Soviet tanks fired indiscriminately at every building from which they believed themselves to be under fire." The UN commission received numerous reports of Soviet mortar and artillery fire into inhabited quarters in the Buda section of the city, despite no return fire, and of "haphazard shooting at defenseless passers-by."
Scholars Mohammad Kakar, W. Michael Reisman and Charles Norchi believe that the Soviet Union was guilty of committing a genocide in Afghanistan. The army of the Soviet Union killed large numbers of Afghans to suppress their resistance. Up to 2 million Afghans were killed during the war, many of them by Soviet forces and their Afghan allies. In one notable incident the Soviet Army committed mass killing of civilians in the summer of 1980. One notable war crime was the Laghman massacre in April 1985 in the villages of Kas-Aziz-Khan, Charbagh, Bala Bagh, Sabzabad, Mamdrawer, Haider Khan and Pul-i-Joghi in the Laghman Province. At least 500 civilians were killed. In the Kulchabat, Bala Karz and Mushkizi massacre on 12 October 1983, the Red Army gathered 360 people at the village square and shot them, including 20 girls and over a dozen older people. The Rauzdi massacre and Padkhwab-e Shana massacre were also documented.
In order to separate the mujahideen from the local populations and eliminate their support, the Soviet army killed and drove off civilians, and used scorched earth tactics to prevent their return. They used booby traps, mines, and chemical substances throughout the country. The Soviet army indiscriminately killed combatants and noncombatants to ensure submission by the local populations. The provinces of Nangarhar, Ghazni, Lagham, Kunar, Zabul, Qandahar, Badakhshan, Lowgar, Paktia and Paktika witnessed extensive depopulation programmes by the Soviet forces. The Soviet forces abducted Afghan women in helicopters while flying in the country in search of mujahideen. In November 1980, a number of such incidents had taken place in various parts of the country, including Laghman and Kama. Soviet soldiers as well as KhAD agents kidnapped young women from the city of Kabul and the areas of Darul Aman and Khair Khana, near the Soviet garrisons, to rape them. Women who were taken and raped by soldiers were considered 'dishonoured' by their families if they returned home. Deserters from the Soviet Army in 1984 claimed that they had heard of Afghan women being raped. The rape of Afghan women by Soviet troops was common and 11.8 percent of the Soviet war criminals in Afghanistan were convicted for the offence of rape. There was an outcry against the press in the Soviet Union for depicting the Soviet "war heroes" as "murderers", "aggressors", "rapists" and "junkies".
Black January (Azerbaijani: Qara Yanvar), also known as Black Saturday or the January Massacre, was a violent crackdown in Baku on 19–20 January 1990, pursuant to a state of emergency during the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
In a resolution of 22 January 1990, the Supreme Soviet of Azerbaijan SSR declared that the decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of 19 January, used to impose emergency rule in Baku and military deployment, constituted an act of aggression. Black January is associated with the rebirth of the Azerbaijan Republic. It was one of the occasions during the glasnost and perestroika era in which the USSR used force against dissidents.
According to official estimates of Azerbaijan, 147 civilians were killed, 800 people were injured, and five people went missing.
In 1995, Latvian courts sentenced former KGB officer Alfons Noviks to life in prison for genocide due to forced deportations in the 1940s.
In 2003, August Kolk (born 1924), an Estonian national, and Petr Kislyiy (born 1921), a Russian national, were convicted of crimes against humanity by Estonian courts and each sentenced to eight years in prison. They were found guilty of deportations of Estonians in 1949. Kolk and Kislyiy lodged a complaint at the European Court of Human Rights, alleging that the Criminal Code of 1946 of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) was valid at the time, applicable also in Estonia, and that the said Code had not provided for punishment of crimes against humanity. Their appeal was rejected since the court found that Resolution 95 of the United Nations General Assembly, adopted on 11 December 1946, confirmed deportations of civilians as a crime against humanity under international law.
In 2004, Vassili Kononov, a Soviet partisan during World War II, was convicted by Supreme Court of Latvia as a war criminal for killing three women, one of whom was pregnant. He is the only former Soviet partisan convicted of crimes against humanity. The sentence was condemned by various high-ranking Russian officials.
On 27 March 2019, Lithuania convicted 67 former Soviet military and KGB officials who were given sentences of between four and 14 years for the crackdown against Lithuanian civilians in January 1991. Only two were present—Yuriy Mel, a former Soviet tank officer, and Gennady Ivanov, a former Soviet munitions officer—while the others were sentenced in absentia as they were living in Russia.
Media related to War crimes committed by the Soviet Union at Wikimedia Commons