While the Red Army’s advance into Germany in 1944/45 has received the lion’s share of the attention in both historiography and popular consciousness, Soviet offensives also pushed into other European regions in the latter stages of the war. Vojin Majstorović’s study of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts shifts the focus to the south, as it examines the Soviet conquests of Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria. He also expands the archival base for investigating Soviet operations by examining Yugoslavian and Soviet sources, making particularly effective use of NKVD files. The result is a nuanced and detailed analysis of the Red Army’s interactions with European civilians. Majstorović convincingly argues that while Soviet soldiers committed numerous crimes throughout the region, countries that actively participated in Germany’s war of extermination, such as Romania, Hungary, and Austria, were subjected to considerably more violent behavior than neutral or Allied countries like Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. He also shows that such crimes did not constitute a centralized policy directed by Moscow but rather demonstrated both the Kremlin and army’s mixed messaging, as well as the general inability and unwillingness of the Red Army to effectively police itself during the war.
Soviet behavior resulted from several interlocking issues. First, ferocious combat and a callous Soviet leadership resulted in the brutalization of Soviet troops. During the twelve months preceding the advance into Europe, the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts suffered nearly 1.3 million losses. To make good such horrific casualties, the Red Army simply conscripted men from the liberated territories and fed them into battle with minimal training. The “Soviet leadership’s greater indifference to the suffering of ordinary soldiers” (27) ensured that poorly trained men died on the battlefield in great numbers.
The Red Army consequently suffered discipline problems that dwarfed those of other European armies. A total of 1.5 million Red Army men were classified as draft dodgers, stragglers, and deserters and some 180,000 defected to Axis forces. To create cohesion within the ranks, the Soviets utilized both “negative”—a murderous military justice system that claimed the lives of some 130,000–150,000 soldiers—and “positive” approaches. The latter centered on what Majstorović terms “hate” propaganda. Designed to motivate Soviet soldiers to avenge Axis crimes, such propaganda only reinforced the lived experiences of the troops, who had either personally suffered under German occupation or whose family members were murdered, starved, or forced into slave labor. The 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts were thus filled with men both difficult to discipline and primed to avenge the crimes committed by the Germans and their allies in the Soviet Union.
Second, as Majstorović makes clear, the Kremlin issued conflicting signals to the troops. Winning the war as quickly as possible and exploiting the conquered territories to supplement the ravaged Soviet economy took clear precedence over the treatment of European civilians. A systematic reparations policy extracted a tremendous amount of material from the occupied lands. Romania, for example, delivered more than 202,000 cattle, 220,000 sheep, nearly 89,000 tons of grain, and 48 billion lei worth of other goods from September 1944 to March 1945. In combination with the hate propaganda that effectively dehumanized Axis enemies, Soviet soldiers felt empowered by the army to confiscate goods with impunity in the occupied territories.
In contrast, Moscow also focused on establishing friendly regimes as soon as possible in the region, and this proved difficult when the Red Army terrorized the civilian population. The most difficult group to control was stragglers and deserters. The army and Soviet state established a series of disciplinary institutions, ranging from military tribunals and the army’s counterintelligence organ SMERSH to NKVD armies and military command posts, to snuff out marauding soldiers in the rear. Officers up and down the hierarchies of both the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts promulgated numerous directives to their troops in an attempt to rein in their behavior; as Majstorović writes, “the Soviet command issued orders in the Soviet Union that were concrete, easy to enforce, and acknowledged the harm that the Red Army was inflicting on the civilian population” (109). Unfortunately for European civilians, discipline proved difficult to maintain.
Majstorović identifies Red Army officers as the largest obstacle to an effective disciplinary system. Many officers simply ignored the plight of civilians, especially in enemy countries. Others feared that reporting crimes would lead to charges of slandering the army, which could result in their expulsion from the ranks. Corruption also played an important role; according to Majstorović, “officers’ behavior was scarcely better than that of frontline soldiers” (125). The Red Army officer corps’ actions thus reflected the contradictions within the Soviet Union’s approach to the occupied territories: the official line from Moscow and the behavior of officers served as partial causes of the troops’ behavior while the regime and army simultaneously tried to limit their excesses.
The efficacy of hate propaganda, heavy fighting against Romania and especially Hungary in 1944/45, and the furious Soviet extraction of resources all led the Red Army to behave brutally in former Axis countries. In contrast, Red Army behavior in Yugoslavia and Bulgaria was considerably more muted. According to Majstorović, this was due to a feeling of Slavic fraternity reflected in the civilian population’s warm welcome of the Red Army, the active cooperation of Yugoslav partisans and Soviet soldiers in fighting the Germans, and a Communist leadership in Yugoslavia that consistently complained to Moscow about Red Army depredations.
The one constant of Soviet behavior in Europe was rape. Majstorović puts this crime into the traditional conceptions of gender that predominated in the Red Army. Depending on circumstance, the troops viewed women as either in need of protection or as the rightful spoils of war. Even the service of some 900,000 Soviet women in uniform did little to change these views. Once again, the rank and file received very contradictory messages from their leadership, as officers used their power to both protect women from other men and to force them to carry out sexual acts. With such views toward Soviet women, subsequent Red Army conduct toward European women becomes much easier to understand.
Stalin’s statement “what is so awful in his having fun with a woman” (194) reflected the general belief within the Red Army that rape was a trivial issue. With the army implicitly condoning such actions, the Red Army soldier saw himself as entitled to women, especially in countries where propaganda reduced the population to immoral degenerates. This proved particularly the case in Hungary, where such characterizations provided a “silent justification of rape” (199) for Soviet servicemen. While Majstorović places Red Army conduct into the larger context of sexual violence during the Second World War, demonstrating that its actions did not significantly differ from those of the American, German, or Japanese forces, he also notes that the scale of Red Army rape was considerably larger than those of contemporary armies.
Majstorović has made a real contribution to Red Army historiography. He has provided compelling explanations for why the Red Army behaved in such a violent way and his focus on Southeastern and Central Europe demonstrates that Soviet behavior was not uniform across the region. He also convincingly shows that the terror that accompanied the Red Army to the Danube was not the result of a centrally directed war policy but rather a result of Moscow’s mixed messages and an army that was never able to adequately control its officers or men.
