War crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet Union
Soviet war crimes
Katyn massacre 1943 exhumation.[1] Photo by International Red Cross delegation
1919 to 1991
Foreign territory
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Poland
Finland
Hungary
Russia
Ukraine (German-occupation)
Afghanistan
China (Manchukuo)
Japan
Czechoslovakia
Georgia
Belarus
Romania
Germany
Spain
Yugoslavia
From 1919 to 1991, a multitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity were carried out by the Soviet Union and its armed forces. They include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the country's secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the direct orders of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet policy of Red Terror as a means to justify executions and political repression. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.[2]
A significant number of these incidents occurred in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe recently before, and during, the aftermath of World War II, involving summary executions and the mass murder of prisoners of war, such as in the Katyn massacre and mass rape by troops of the Red Army in territories they occupied.
In the 1990s and 2000s, war crimes trials held in the Baltic states led to the prosecution of some Russians, mostly in absentia, for crimes against humanity committed during or shortly after World War II, including killings or deportations of civilians. Today, the Russian government engages in historical negationism.[3] Russian media refers to the Soviet crimes against humanity and war crimes as a "Western myth".[4] In Russian history textbooks, the atrocities are either altered to portray the Soviets positively or omitted entirely.[5] In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself a war crime fugitive since 2023, while acknowledging the "horrors of Stalinism", criticized the "excessive demonization of Stalin" by "Russia's enemies".[6]
^Szonert-Binienda, Maria (2012). "Was Katyn a Genocide?" (PDF). Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law. 44 (3). scholarlycommons.law.case.edu: 633–717. Retrieved 18 June 2017.
^Statiev, Alexander (2010). The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands. Cambridge University Press. p. 277. ISBN 978-0-521-76833-7.
^"How Putin Manipulates Russians Using Revisionist History", Forbes, 14 May 2014
^Lucy Ash (1 May 2016), "The rape of Berlin", BBC News, retrieved 15 October 2018
^Ola Cichowlas (8 May 2017), How Russian Kids Are Taught World War II, The Moscow Times, retrieved 14 October 2018
^David Filipov (26 June 2017), "For Russians, Stalin is the 'most outstanding' figure in world history, followed by Putin", The Washington Post, retrieved 7 August 2017
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