A number of other forces or influences were at work. Sexual freedom had been a subject for lively debate within Communist party circles during the 1920s, but during the following decade, Stalin ensured that Soviet society depicted itself as virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with genuine puritanism: it was because love and sex did not fit in with dogma designed to "deindividualise" the individual. Human urges and emotions had to be suppressed. Freud's work was banned, divorce and adultery were matters for strong party disapproval. Criminal sanctions against homosexuality were reintroduced. The new doctrine extended even to the complete suppression of sex education. In graphic art, the clothed outline of a woman's breasts was regarded as dangerously erotic. They had to be disguised under boiler suits. The regime clearly wanted any form of desire to be converted into love for the party and above all for Comrade Stalin.
Most ill-educated Red Army soldiers suffered from sexual ignorance and utterly unenlightened attitudes towards women. So the Soviet state's attempts to suppress the libido of its people created what one Russian writer described as a sort of "barracks eroticism" which was far more primitive and violent than "the most sordid foreign pornography". All this was combined with the dehumanising influence of modern propaganda and the atavistic, warring impulses of men marked by fear and suffering.
The novelist Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent attached to the invading Red Army, soon discovered that rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women also suffered. So did young Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women who had been sent back to Germany by the Wehrmacht for slave labour. "Liberated Soviet girls quite often complain that our soldiers rape them," he noted. "One girl said to me in tears: 'He was an old man, older than my father'."
Yes, you’re repeating progressive propaganda from the Guardian and liberals tend to do. I, on the other hand, have read about this issue extensively both from scholars and from first-hand accounts and most of the rapes were committed not by frontline troops, but by units of Communist Political commissars and Mongols who never seemed to show up until the fighting was done. Which leads me and others to believe that it was an organized system of political mass rape rather than the BS the Guardian put out.
I almost forgot to mention, johnyboy - JUST IN THIS WEEK: the author of this article has a book about Stalin that’s been banned in UKRAINE of all places.
So Ukraine doesn’t like him. Guess you’re with the Ukrainians on this one!
He cited a passage that purportedly said “Ukrainian nationalists were tasked with shooting the children” in order to “spare the feelings of SS Sonderkommando,” a reference to forced work units made up of death-camp prisoner
https://www.rferl.org/a/beevor-historian-ukraine-ban-stalingrad/28980932.html