THE STEPPE BARBARIANS RIDE AGAIN

Well. That was a helluva wakeup this morning. Turn on the TV and there is Jonathan Capehart telling people they might not want to watch the video he’s about to show. And he was right. Which is why I’m not going to link any of that here. But feel free to google them - it’s not hard. But don’t do so while your stomach is full.

Yesterday, Ukrainian soldiers recaptured the areas around Kyiv that had been taken by the Russian army early in the invasion. The Ukrainians found mined homes, executed civilians, and, in the city of Bucha near Kyiv, a mass grave of nearly 280 civilians, in addition to corpses on the streets, many executed with their hands bound behind them. In the town of Trostyanets, the Russians defecated in the rooms of the police station and on a dead civilian outside.

“Hardened as we are by Russian atrocities, reports coming in from liberated towns around Kyiv document acts of horrifying, inhuman cruelty and evil… corpses left on streets of civilians with hands tied behind back, many shot in head.” — Historian Simon Schama

As tempting as averting one’s eyes might be, we need to pay attention to to this, to what it means. This morning, the prime minister of Estonia compared Russian war crimes to the mass killings by Soviet and Nazi regimes: “This is not a battlefield. It’s a crime scene.”

Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin wrote recently:

“Russia is a remarkable civilization: in the arts, music, literature, dance, film. In every sphere, it’s a profound, remarkable place—a whole civilization, more than just a country. At the same time, Russia feels that it has a ‘special place’ in the world, a special mission. It’s Eastern Orthodox, not Western. And it wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. It’s always in a struggle to live up to these aspirations, but it can’t, because the West has always been more powerful.”

Anne Appelbaum wrote:

“Everyone who now calls for Zelensky to make ‘territorial concessions' in exchange for a cease fire should remember what this will actually mean: tens or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will die. Verified photographs of the brutal mass murder of Ukrainian civilians are a reminder that the Russian army is not just seeking to conquer Ukraine, it is seeking to eliminate Ukrainians. We now know that in territories even briefly occupied by Russian troops there was rape, looting, random killings, assaults on schools and hospitals. This is what the Red Army did in central Europe in 1944-45, and apparently nothing has changed.”

The Biden Administration is considering intensifying their sanctions campaign against Russia as evidence emerges of the apparent execution of civilians.

Reports of the civilian massacres in Bucha have already led to swift international condemnation and claims of war crimes from world leaders, as well as pledges to escalate the West’s economic measures against Russia. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called the discovery “brutality against civilians we haven’t seen in Europe for decades.”

The Biden administration could impose sanctions on sectors of the Russian economy not hit so far, including mining, transportation and additional areas of the Russian financial sector. The world continues to buy billions of dollars worth of Russian oil and gas.

I’d like to think this really is an inflection point in the world’s view of the Putin regime AND the country it rules. Those Russian soldiers didn’t have NKVD Commissars aiming pistols at them with the threat of death if they didn’t carry out the crimes. They did it voluntarily.

Days after Russia invaded Ukraine, lunatic pro-Russia conspiracy theorist Paul Craig Roberts was complaining about his hero Putin treating Ukraine too leniently. “I do think the chance of a wider war would be far less if the Kremlin had committed all of the invasion forces and used whatever conventional weapons necessary regardless of civilian casualties to quickly end the war, while refusing to be delayed and distracted by negotiations and Western bleating. Having made a decisive decision, the Russians needed to demonstrate decisive military action.”

The years of memes, articles, and social media posts from MAGAworld complaining about how the American armed forces are “feminized” in comparison to the macho Russian military is proof that Roberts isn’t an outlier.

There are two kinds of people in the United States: those who think POW-killer Eddie Gallagher is an American hero and those who believe the Navy SEALs who turned him in are the real heroes. Gallagher was not only pardoned by Trump, he got a trip to Mar-a-Lago out of it.

No military anywhere in the world has completely clean hands. It’s not hard to remember the Sand Creek Massacre, Wounded Knee, and General Jacob Dever’s proclamation he had turned the island of Panay into a “howling wilderness” during the Philippine Insurrection. There’s always My Lai. That said, there’s a reason why, whenever you watch a World War II documentary, the German civilians, surrendering soldiers and deposed Nazi leaders are always desperately fleeing West. There’s a reason why the “founding myth” of my wife’s Lithuanian refugee family’s voyage to America begins with a story about her mother - who spoke fluent German - convincing an SS officer that they were “Volksdeutsch” and should be evacuated to Germany in February 1945.

That reason is the age-old story of the Steppe Barbarians. Events like Bucha aren’t new in Russia or Eastern Europe, and the nationality of the perpetrators is always the same.

The stories of rape by the soldiers of the Red Army in Eastern Europe when they surged out of the USSR into states they considered “complicit” with Germany never were widely told in the United States, and haven’t been for a very long time.

It’s time to remember those stories. Anthony Beevor wrote about it in depth in his book about the fall of Berlin.

The Red Army forces that advanced into East Prussia in January 1945 were an extraordinary mixture of modern and medieval: tank troops in padded black helmets, Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle. The variety of character among the soldiers was as great as their military equipment. There were idealistic, austere communists and members of the intelligentsia, and there were freebooters who drank and raped quite shamelessly. Playwright Zakhar Agranenko who served as an officer of marine infantry, wrote in his diary of what he witnessed in East Prussia: "Red Army soldiers don't believe in 'individual liaisons' with German women. Nine, ten, twelve men at a time - they rape them on a collective basis."

Back in Moscow, Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB, the organization that carried out the Great Purges) and dictator Josef Stalin knew all about what was going on from a number of detailed reports. One stated: "many Germans declare that all German women in East Prussia who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers... girls under 18 and old women included".

Marshal Rokossovsky attempted to direct "the feelings of hatred at fighting the enemy on the battlefield" by issuing order No 006 prohibiting such activity. The order had little effect. The commander of one rifle division is said to have "personally shot a lieutenant who was lining up a group of his men before a German woman spreadeagled on the ground". But too many officers were involved themselves, while the lack of discipline made it too dangerous to restore order over drunken soldiers armed with submachine guns.

Even many young women Red Army soldiers and medical staff did not disapprove. " Several German women recorded how Soviet servicewomen watched and laughed when they were raped. Some women were deeply shaken by what they witnessed. Natalya Gesse, a Sopviet war correspondent who was later a close friend of Andrei Sakharov recalled: "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists."

When gang-raped women in Königsberg begged their attackers afterwards to put them out of their misery, the Red Army men appear to have felt insulted. "Russian soldiers do not shoot women. Only German soldiers do that." The Red Army managed to convince itself that because it had assumed the moral mission to liberate Europe from fascism it could behave as it liked, both personally and politically. The subject of mass rape by the Red Army in Germany was so repressed in Russia veterans refused to acknowledge what really happened in the years after the war; those who were willing to speak about it were mostly those who justified it.

By the time the Red Army reached Berlin three months later, soldiers regarded German women more as a casual right of conquest. The sense of domination certainly continued, but this was perhaps partly an indirect product of the humiliations which they themselves had suffered at the hands of their commanders and the Soviet authorities as a whole.

Novelist Vasily Grossman, a war correspondent attached to the Red Army, discovered rape victims were not just Germans. Polish women and young Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian women who had been sent back to Germany by the Wehrmacht for slave labour were also targeted. The rape of Soviet women and girls seriously undermines Russian attempts to justify Red Army action as revenge for German brutality in the Soviet Union.

In Berlin, many women were simply not prepared for the shock of Russian revenge, however much horror propaganda they had heard from Goebbels. Many told themselves that, although the danger must be great out in the countryside, mass rapes could hardly take place in the city in front of everybody.

In Dahlem, Soviet officers visited Sister Kunigunde, mother superior of Haus Dahlem, a maternity clinic and orphanage. The officers and men behaved impeccably. In fact, the officers even warned Sister Kunigunde about the second-line troops following. When those troops arrived, nuns, young girls, old women, pregnant women and mothers who had just given birth were all raped without pity.

Women soon learned to disappear during the "hunting hours" of the evening. Young daughters were hidden in storage lofts for days on end. Mothers emerged to fetch water only in the early morning when Soviet soldiers were sleeping off the alcohol from the night before. Sometimes the greatest danger came from one mother giving away the hiding place of other girls in a desperate bid to save her own daughter. Berliners remember the screams every night. It was impossible not to hear them because all the windows had been blown in.

Estimates of rape victims from the city's two main hospitals ranged from 95,000 to 130,000. One doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide. The death rate was thought to have been much higher among the 1.4 million estimated victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. Altogether at least two million German women are thought to have been raped, and a substantial minority, if not a majority, appear to have suffered multiple rape.

Beevor concluded: “If anything, the events of 1945 reveal how thin the veneer of civilisation can be when there is little fear of retribution. It also suggests a much darker side to male sexuality than we might care to admit.”

Soviet society under Stalin became explicitly anti-sexual by the 1930s. Homosexuality was recriminalized and sex education was made illegal. This has not changed since in the majority of Russia outside the major cities where “educated” Russians have adopted Western belief. Most Russian “progressive intellectuals” still do not want to believe the disconnect between the cities and rural Russia, where the majority of the conscripts in the Russian Army have traditionally come from. If anything, it has intensified as the ultra-conservative Russian Orthodox Church returned to a position of authority in society under Putin. If these young men have heard anything about the Red Army in 1945, the stories they heard were celebrations of defeating the “Nazi” enemy - the very enemy the leader of their country tells them today that they must destroy.

I really wish there was no reason to bring up this history. I have Russian friends who would be appalled if I sent this information to them. But it turns out that the “dark” Russia that has long been the “bogeyman” of Eastern European nightmares is still with us, called forth by the grandson of Stalin’s cook.

The “Steppe Barbarians” indeed ride again.

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