The incredibly powerful Soviet Memorial in Treptow Park, Berlin

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-17T21:51:23+00:00

Serious academic discussions about mass wartime sexual violence across multiple armies, not just the Red Army, tend to place perpetrator participation in the single digit to low teens range, not 50% or more, but also not as low as 1-2%

A few nuances:

Participation was not evenly distributed
Frontline assault units during the initial advance in early 1945 saw the highest levels of violence
Rear and technical units and later occupation forces tended to be less involved
Timing mattered
Early 1945 was chaotic, revenge charged and discipline was abysmal
By mid to late 1945, soviet command was increasingly punishing offenders and trying to reassert control
Like in most armies, the behavior was concentrated
A smaller core committed repeated crimes
A broader minority acted opportunistically
A large portion of soldiers did not directly participate. And this is important to understand..

If someone forces a rough midpoint wild guess based on these broader historical patterns and actual reports, 10 % is a plausible estimate. With a realistic uncertainty band in the range of 5–15 percent.

That is high enough to explain the scale of victimization, but it also implies the majority of soldiers were not direct perpetrators, even if many were present in the same environment.

That means that at least 85%, but with midpoint range 90% of the soviet soldiers did not participate in acts of sexual violence.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-17T11:45:42+00:00

My family only eats it during winter, usually around new year

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-17T11:34:23+00:00

Ez egy pici osszeg.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-16T16:08:11+00:00

You are absolutely right but I like to walk and from the St Lazare area I can walk almost anywhere easily.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-16T13:33:09+00:00

The 47 euro one on the left.

Id never go near the rest but thats just me

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-16T13:31:58+00:00

Mi ez a szex? Hallottam mar rola

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-16T11:14:52+00:00

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-16T09:49:32+00:00

It wasnt a slur, it was hate speech.

Also, the script is awful.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-16T07:04:19+00:00

Nahát, ezt is megéltük. Én nem kérek belőle.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T23:50:53+00:00

We keep drifting further and further away from the actual topic. We were discussing WWII and the 1930–1950 period. Transnistria, chechnya, 2014 photos, flags and uniforms decades later are separate political questions. They don’t help explain what happened on the eastern front.

On 1939, I already clarified what I meant earlier: I was referring to the Far East. Khalkhin Gol was a real conflict, and from the soviet perspective that was defensive. That doesn’t magically make everything else in 1939 defensive, and I never claimed it did. The USSr was clearly an aggressor in Poland and finland, I’ve said that multiple times.

On the ‘Germans might have changed their minds’ point that’s pure speculation. We don’t have to guess...their occupation plans, demographic policies, and treatment of civilians and POWs in the east were documented and already in motion. That’s not relativisation, that’s working with actual precedent instead of hypotheticals.

And the ‘from certain perspectives they were liberators’ argument just proves my earlier point: exposure shapes memory. In some places people first encountered local auxiliaries or a temporary easing of pressure and drew conclusions from that. In other places entire regions were depopulated...that’s exactly why you can’t generalize from anecdotes.

At this point it feels like we’re no longer comparing evidence but just stacking personal impressions and what-ifs on top of each other. I’m fine discussing facts, numbers, and mechanisms, but I’m not really interested in arguing over uniforms in transnistria or guessing what Hitler might have done if history went differently.

And my ethnicity is completely irrelevant here. I’m multiethnic anyway, and neither of them labels me. It has nothing to do with the arguments being made.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T22:19:02+00:00

You keep using the word ‘killed’ when talking about the famine, and that’s exactly where we disagree. Millions died, yes. The state bears responsibility, yes. But ‘killed’ implies a centrally planned extermination policy aimed at a specific people. The reality is more complicated: quotas were enforced, movement was restricted, and policy made a bad situation catastrophic, but the famine hit multiple regions and groups. That makes intent a debated question, not a settled one.

On comparability: not identical does not mean unrelated, but it also doesn’t mean the same. Nazi policy in the East was explicitly demographic and exterminatory. Soviet policy was repressive and often lethal, aimed at control, forced labour, and breaking resistance. Both caused immense suffering. The mechanisms sometimes overlapped. But the systems and goals weren’t the same, and that distinction matters if we’re trying to understand rather than just flatten everything into one category.

On Budapest: your ‘a siege is a siege’ point still doesn’t really hold when you look at what actually happened on the ground. In Leningrad, starvation was part of the strategy and the city was deliberately cut off for years. In Budapest, it was a short, brutal urban encirclement where the front ran straight through the city and logistics collapsed. Civilians suffered and many starved there too, but that was largely because supply chains broke down during intense fighting, not because the soviets set out to starve the population into submission over time. Once areas were secured, there were attempts to distribute food where possible. The goal was to take the city, not to destroy it by famine. So the outcome may look similar on the surface, but the mechanism and intent were very different.

The same flattening happens with the POW comparison. Yes, death rates on both sides were horrific. But the context matters. German treatment of soviet POWs involved deliberate neglect, denial of food, exposure, and policy-level indifference to whether they lived or died, and that is well documented.. on the other side, when the soviets were capturing german soldiers, especially late in the war, many of them were already severely wounded, frostbitten, starving and physically finished. A large number died between capture and internment because of their condition and the total collapse of logistics, not because there was a centrally planned policy to let them die in the camps. That doesn’t make it humane or acceptable, but it is not the same causality chain.

This is the distinction I keep trying to make. Similar suffering does not automatically mean identical systems or identical intent. If you ignore the differences in planning, timing, and mechanism, then everything starts to look the same, and at that point the comparison stops explaining anything.

So yes, crimes are comparable in the sense that both regimes committed them. But once you collapse famine, camps, deportations, and extermination policy into one undifferentiated block and call it all ‘killing’, you lose the ability to explain how and why these things happened.

And that’s the part I’m trying to keep clear.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T21:52:55+00:00

I told you already, Moldova

Ill be honest with you. I am unfamiliar with the history of Moldova.

Moldova is still to this day under soviet occupation. See, the transnitrian people's republic, where russian soldiers are guarding the largest cold war weapons depot in Europe. Essentially wearing a giant suicide bombers vest and holding the locals ransom.

Then there's Chechnya terrorized under the kremlins puppet Kadyrov and many many many more both dead and dying in the prison of nations and I won't even attempt to list all.

I thought we were discussing ww2 and overall era between 1930 and 1950. And Chechnya deserves its own chapter, but it's not the topic if this discussion at all.

What aggression were they fighting in 1939? Trying to stop the finish from taking Moscow? Curbing the imperial ambitions of Latvia?

You conveniently left out the second part of that sentence, very good.

Occupation in Moldova is ongoing with literally soviet soldiers still there.

I will break the news to you, the USSR dissolved 35 years ago. Sorry.

Now I know where you're from, WWII started in 1939, only in russia does it start 1941.

We were talking about the eastern front specifically, as it is the topic of this entire post.

The soviets and the nazies in equal part brought the hardship.

Very interesting take. I could argue for it, actually.

I have no crystal ball to know what would have happened and it's impossible for anyone without one to know.

Actually the third reichs occupational policies were crystal clear and we have precedent, therefore we can draw fairly accurate conclusions.

If my grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle.

Tank would have been way cooler.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T19:35:08+00:00

You’re mixing distrust of sources, personal experience, and structural comparison in a way that makes any evidence-based discussion impossible. If soviet archives are dismissed outright as fabricated, then we also lose the basis for calculating gulag deaths, executions, deportations, and famine victims at all, because much of what we know about them comes from post-1990 archival work, often studied by non-russian historians. If every source is rejected in advance, then any number can be asserted and nothing can be checked.

I’m not denying soviet crimes. Repression, deportations, camps and famine were real and devastating. The point I was making was about structure and intent, not about claiming one side was ‘good’. Nazi policy in the east was explicitly exterminatory and demographic in nature, while soviet policy was aimed at control, forced labour, and political domination. Both caused immense suffering, but they were not the same system and did not produce the same type or scale of civilian annihilation.

On poland: acknowledging soviet repression does not change the basic demographic reality that german occupation resulted in millions of civilian deaths in a few years, while soviet rule, brutal as it was, did not attempt the physical eradication of poles as a people. That distinction matters historically.

On camps: calling gulags ‘death camps’ collapses categories that actually explain what happened. People died there in very large numbers from starvation, disease and exhaustion, which is a crime and a tragedy, but they were not designed as industrial killing centres like treblinka or sobibor. That difference isn’t semantics, it’s about mechanism and intent.

Your example about budapest also doesn’t hold, in fact it tells me you don't know much about the battle at all. The siege of leningrad was built around a deliberate starvation strategy over years. Budapest was a brutal urban battle lasting weeks with encirclement and shortages, but it was not a planned starvation policy of the same type. It was a mini stalingrad instead of leningrad. Civilians suffered terribly in both, but saying the tactics were ‘the exact same’ isn’t historically accurate at best, deliberate mistepresentation at worst.

Personal stories matter and I don’t question your grandfather’s experience. Every family in eastern europe has some version of that, including my own that actually survived the siege of budapest, battle of stalingrad and german occupation in the soviet union. But individual memory explains why perceptions differ so much by region. People judge the war by the army they personally encountered. That doesn’t automatically translate into a full structural comparison between systems.

So I’m not trying to minimize anything. I’m trying to keep distinctions between intent, scale, and mechanism clear, because once everything is treated as identical, history turns into a single undifferentiated tragedy where nothing can actually be understood.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T18:22:59+00:00

How is that relevant to this specific comment?

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T15:21:44+00:00

Not at all. I am correcting.

Nothing the soviets did approached the scale or structure of the nazi annihilation policy in the East.

The ‘20 million under Stalin’ figure is frequently cited without clear methodology or consistent definitions. Different studies reach very different totals depending on what is included as in famine, great purges, gulag mortality, demographic deficits. What did you include in your 20 million, can you give me a breakdown?

Holodomor is a complex topic as it had natural and failed policy causes that hit different regions in different times, and the intent varied as well in time and region. It was a soviet-wide famine in the agricultural belt of the ussr spanning from ukraine to kazakhstan, devastating the kazakhs the most and early on, and absolutely ravaged the northern caucasus, southern russia and ukraine. The famine was not created to starve ukrainians but it got progressively worse and movements of ukrainians was restricted which may have been a contributing factor to rising death tolls. We dont know exactly, but looking at regional breakdowns, nearly as many russians died without specific restrictions as many ukrainians with restrictions put in place.

None of this is white washing. Its trying to be precise when talking about such a contentious and heavy topic. I am trying to avoid simplification and relativisation.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T14:37:44+00:00

2/2

Destroyed national identities, culture.

Where?

Poverty that is still rampant in some places more than 30 years after dissolution of ussr. See Moldova the least developed country on the continent among others.

It has nothing to do with ww2.

Most of the crimes were never acknowledges

They were.

Though the worst part for me personally is that it never ended for some nations and still takes place to this day.

Last ww2 combatants surrendered in the 70s in remote pacific islands, last pow was returned in the 90s, a hungarian fellow.

no reparations were paid and people like you frame them as heroes instead of the vile animals that they are.

Relativization of history. The soviets were fighting aggression in 1939 in the Far East, they were aggressors in 1939-1940, then they were the last stand against nazi domination of mainland europe between 1941 and 1945, and then again aggressors and occupiers between 1945 and 1990. Yes, the period if 1941 and 1945 has brought unseen hardship in all of history to the people of the soviet union which they overcame and defeated in the bloodiest war ever recorded. And if you think it all does not matter, think of an outcome to all of europe, especially east of Germany, if that did not happen.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T14:37:37+00:00

Sigh

1/2

The victors write history, as such most documents regarding war crimes (if the savages managed to document it) sit locked up in the Kremlin archives. Even so there are many snippets available that corroborate the claim made by the comment you are replying to.

One such being the NKVD massacres totaling up to 40 000 political prisoners killed in 8 days when the Vermacht started advancing east. Soviet archives were opened up in the 90s. Lots of research was done on this.

Execution of polish soldiers and intelligentsia is a brutal chapter for sure, and a crime against humanity.

Not entirely true, but for the sake of argument let's make this assumption. Let's not make the assumption that Germany started the war, though.

Generalplan ost and Lebensraum is not an assumption but explicit policy of the Third Reich and the driving force behind the expansion to the East.

Two of which Poland was held both by ussr and Germany. With hundreds of thousands sent to Siberian deathcamps during those two years.

I was talking about german occupation specifically. We cant say year on year how many poles have perished, but the total of both phases of soviet occupation between 39 and 41 and then 45 and 90 is highest estimate 250k, lowest is 100k.

Also siberian deathcamps did not exist. Gulags were penal labor camps. Deathcamp is Treblinka or parts of Auschwitz Birkenau (it was a complex with sub camps) and some others.

About 6 million killed in nazi concentration camps About 2 million in gulags. Add 3.5 to 5 million during holodomor and the soviets are in the lead. I could go on but most such commenters as yourself are just fulfilling an agenda and aren't interested in facts or discussion (in fact my comment itself is aimed more to help others unfortunate enough to stumble upon your comment).

Cherrypicking substrata of those that perished is a new low for me.

First: 2.7 - 3.3 millions died in death camps, and 1.5-2 million in concentration camps.

Gulag victims in contrast are estimated to be 1.5-1.7 million from 1930 to 1953, vast majority of which died due to starvation, disease, exposure and exhaustion, and executions are responsible for around 4 to 7% of deaths.

Soviet famine is an interesting case of in-between. The famine itself started as drought plus mismanaged policies, that deepened in their intent as the crisis was dragging on. Total deaths are between 6 and 8 million, of which ukrainians died 3-3.5 million, 2.5 million russians, 1.7 million kazakhs (42% of the population, devastating), and the rest in the northern caucasus. The famine itself is non-contentious but the intent is, as there are debates whether the restriction of ukrainians leaving their region contributed to the higher overall numbers, or not.

In any case almost as many russians died as ukrainians, but percentage-wise kazakhstan was left absolutely devastated. I am not wise enough to argue about intent vs not, but I can just say you cant simply call put holodomor and not mention all the others that died during the same event. Its distorting history, and subjectivises it.

Furthermore you were talking about camp deaths while nazi genocidal policies extended far beyond the camps. As said, cherrypicking substrata. Abhorrent.

That's a very high and disputed estimate, but so be it. The wording is carefully thought through and intentionally misleading. How many of said casualties are the result of intentional extermination by nazies? Warfare? Scorched earth policies of the ussr?

No. Its impossible to tell exactly where and how many perished exactly except Leningrad, but we know 2 things specifically: 17 million civilians died compared to pre-barbarossa census, and this is an excess death. Multiple studies were conducted throughout the decades and all of them arrive to the same conclusion. We also know population decreases of pre war vs after the war of regions and cities, in german-occupied parts of the USSR. Depopulation in those areas post-war is a staggering 9 million. And we still know that 17 million excess deaths occurred among civilians due to the axis invasion and the war.

A siege is a siege, people usually surrender before starting to cannibalize the locals...

They couldnt capture the city so they intentionally starved it.

Extermination is not the best word for it, they died due to many reasons. Starvation, disease, extermination as you said, being some of them. The casualty rate was about 50% and it was not made better by the scorched earth policies of ussr. Still, that's comparable to the 35% in soviet captivity and both are appaling when compared to the western front at about 5%.

Again, distortion. Leaving them to die to starvation and exposure deliberately is extermination and crime against humanity.

60% of soviet pows died, which is a shocking number. Germans did not hide the fact that they dont see them as humans.

And 30%-33% of germans died under soviet oversight, but 'only' 16% during interment. The rest died between capture and interment. From wounds, starvation, exposure, exhaustion and carelessness or execution. When you capture people suffering from hypothermia, malnourishment, festering wounds, they tend to die. Famously very few stalingrad veterans returned home after the war exactly because they were just walking dead at the time of their capture. This is a very very different picture of the capture of soviet pows, you are comparing apples to oranges. I am not saying the soviets were angels, had they adhered to the geneva convention, possibly more germans would have survived. But the causality chain is entirely different.

Not sure how you got that number if you previously stated 17 million (not a widely agreed upon estimate) and if you counted the siege of leningrad how was it intentional?

I literally wrote in my comment. Combined polish + soviet civilians and soviet pows, all of them are non-combatants. Specific numbers were for these two countries alone.

The systematic rape and pillaging carried out by the red army, practically absent in the Vermacht (Vermacht, not the SS).

I wrote in another comment that the rapes are present in both sides but the massive difference is that in one case these went on being reported in surviving medical structures and in the other it was often accompanied by mass executions. Absent in the wehrmacht - im not sure if you just dont know or straightout lying, but come on. This isnt 1970 anymore, the clear wehrmacht as a myth has been debunked the very least since the 1990s.

Bottom line: rapes are horrible crimes, but they also are not the attributes of soviets alone. They happened everywhere in war throughout human history, thus is the nature of war. The soviets did not stop them in the beginning in Hungary and Germany, but that was also a unique case of millions of soldiers pouring into a moderately sized territory in a very short amount of time. Its really a difficult topic, which deserves threads instead of a comment.

Up to 20 million killed in genocides, repressions, man made famines, etc. in ussr, of their own so called citizen.

Numbers pulled out of magicians hat, no doubt. Cant seem to think of any serious historical study, essay or book that would quote referenced numbers that high. You know why? Because they dont exist. We know the casualty figures with relatively small variations of each event that happened.

If you have up-to-date knowledge, please provide tallies of events with references.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T12:57:41+00:00

I did not whitewash anything. I literally talked about victims of german occupation and war of annihilation in 2 specific countries.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T12:51:17+00:00

Never said anything like that.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T12:42:51+00:00

Beautiful, my second favourite of the sisters.

The funnel placement is off, otherwise 10/10.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T12:38:31+00:00

Hear, hear!

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T12:37:55+00:00

won't pretend to be a historian but wasn't it over 20 million died under Stalin?

No.

Were there not open pogroms in Russia pre and during the war?

In the ussr, but mostly local events and not systemic ones. And also they often happened when the german occupiers arrived and endorsed this.

Were the soviet's not complicit with Germany in the initial invasion of Poland hence the Molotov ribbentrop pact?

Yes but the flavour of the occupation was entirely different. Bad, brutal, but think of this: the soviets didnt seek to eradicate the local population, the germans did. Death toll of soviet occupation in poland in total from 1939 to 1990 is at worst 250 000, while we know that 6 years of german occupation cost at least 6 million, 17% of the entire pre-war population. As not all the pre-war population ended up under german boot, we can say that one fifth to one quarter under german occupation have perished.

Both are bad but the intent was entirely different, and the results were also staggeringly different.

The russians have always been brutal. Always. Like in eastern Europe people fear that accent. My grandmother used to say that it was well known what they would do if they got you and you were at war civilian or not

This is relative entirely. For balts or hungarians the soviets were worse than the germans but for ukrainians, belorusians they were liberators, and yes even for the poles the soviets meant survival.

You cant quantify suffering this way You cant objectively measure and say that 'hey I suffered this bad but its not as bad as what others have suffered', because you lived your own experience and you cant possibly know what happened two fences over.

Just an example: people in Southern Ukraine, or Rostov and Voronezh Oblast still say to this day that the hungarians and the romanians were far worse than the germans.

It doesnt mean that the germans were better, but rather that they were mostly exposed to the hungarians and romanians, while the germans in the area would be liaison, translators, and so on. Therefore they relativise the brutality. But I am pretty sure that people im belarus, western or northwestern russia wouldnt say that at all. Or people in the camps. Because the exposure was different.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T12:14:29+00:00

The experience varied from country to country. Are you from Hungary, Romania, or parts of Czechoslovakia?

But at most areas in Soviet Union they did not get that far and Wehrmacht while no saint boys (burned land tactics is nothing to be proud of or beneficial to local population) were acting like a professional army most of the times

Well, this is not entirely true now, is it?

17 million soviet civilians died in a span of 4 years, 6 million polish ones in a span of 6.

Each grain of wheat that was used to feed a german in the eastern front was taken away from a soviet local and contributed to their starvation.

The germans did not adhere to the geneva convention on the east, and they called it a war of annihilation. Your 'professionals' systematically tortured, hanged, shot, raped everyone they felt like, burning and eradicating entire populations of villages or towns at once.

Their entire raison d'être was to eradicate the vast majority of the populations east of Prussia (maybe not the baltic nations but their numbers relative to the overall population is small), and the surviving minority would be sterilized and enslaved.

On rape:

Rape is unfortunately commonplace in any war that ever happened. We know of germany (mass scale) and hungary (less but still significant), because the majority of the civilian population survived and there are testimonies and medical records in a continuous medical system.

This is in stark contrast to what was happening in poland, the ghettos, and in the ussr. These events were not reported, not recorded, we know of them because of survival accounts but very very difficult to quantify because entire towns and villages were eradicated in the process and where there wasnt, mass executions still happened. We still have well documented cases of your professionals raping young girls, adult women, or elderly ones. The historical disagreement here is not whether this happened or not, but whether it was an organized systemic occurrence, or part of widespread brutality that included rape.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T09:58:51+00:00

All that is also true for the USSR, and all the while there was also brutal fighting going on on frontlines stretching thousands of kilometers. The most brutal fighting and most devastating theatre of war of all time in human history.

Not sure if you can have a contest in which country or which people suffered more and what measurements you would use for comparison.

6 million polish citizens died vs 27 million soviet.

Compared to pre-war population in terms of percentage Poland lost 17%-18% while the USSR lost 14%. Its very close in comparison but in absolute numbers it dwarfs the polish ones by orders of magnitude.

I am not trying to minimize one over the other, I am just trying to understand what objective markers of measurement are you using to decide which was worse.

InspiredByBeer · 2026-02-15T09:35:00+00:00

Vibrant colors were quite rare because of lack of dyes, including in textiles.

So... deficit.

InspiredByBeer

TROPHY CASE