Belarus is thriving because it preserves the Lenin monuments. That’s the conclusion reached by communist lawmaker Sergei Klishyevich, Minsk Communist Party chief Yuri Kruglik, and political analyst Vadim Yelfimov during a discussion marking the 155th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolutionary leader’s birth. The program, titled “Red Day on the Calendar,” aired April 22, 2025, on Radio Minsk and the Minsk-News agency’s YouTube channel. Poland, on the other hand, has descended into perversion when it comes to monuments, according to Kruglik:
“A few years ago, I came across something about the kinds of monuments they started putting up in Poland — a drunk Soviet soldier raping a pregnant Polish woman. I looked into it on purpose — and sure enough, they had put one up.”
The communist told only part of the story. In the Polish city of Gdansk, a student from the Academy of Fine Arts created that plaster sculpture. In October 2013, he installed it on Victory Avenue, next to a monument honoring tank crews who died fighting for the city in 1945. Later, the artist explained that he wanted to draw attention to the issue of mass rapes of women by Soviet soldiers during the war — both in Germany and in Poland. According to the sculptor, his goal wasn’t to spread hatred but to reflect the tragedy of war through art in the spirit of socialist realism. The student had not coordinated the installation with local authorities. The sculpture stood for only a few hours before it was removed following a call from an outraged local resident.
The topic of sexual violence against women during the liberation of Eastern Europe from the Nazis began to be openly discussed after 1989, when the first countries in the region started leaving the socialist bloc and the public gained access to archives. The exact number of victims is unknown, but researchers believe it may have been in the millions. The Russian side acknowledges that Red Army soldiers committed such crimes but denies they were widespread, arguing that offenders faced execution or prison.
German researchers on the subject have noted that women suffered not only at the hands of Soviet troops but also from Western allies, though less frequently.
