Were Red Army Soldiers Really “Liberators” in WWII?
Violence, rapes, and deportations in 1944–45 Czechoslovakia tell a different story.
For many fans of today’s Russia and yesterday’s USSR, it’s just never wrong to celebrate the Red Army for its liberating power, as it was unleashed during World War II. One of the side effects of Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine has been the return of certain theories of communist propaganda about the heroism of Soviet soldiers, seen as unstoppable defenders of freedom and opponents of nazism, the ultimate evil. In today’s storytelling, as it originates in Moscow, the Ukrainians are the Nazis, and the Russian army is the great and unstoppable liberating force that the whole world should admire.
But propaganda is lying today as it was lying 80 years ago. History, with a capital “H”, could hardly serve the propaganda of any specific nation or ideology. And History certainly recognizes Stalin’s USSR as having made a decisive contribution to the defeat of Nazism in Europe, but clearly refuses its role as a “liberating force” at the geopolitical level. For how can one define “liberating” an army (and the entire bureaucratic apparatus behind it) that violently oppressed civilians, with rape, destruction, summary executions, and deportations that would have left as indelible a mark as that of the defeated Nazis?
The story…
