What stunned most of those who read their stories was the
apparent pervasiveness of sexual violence in the Soviet Union and its
persistence in post-Soviet societies – along with the cowardice or indifference
of people who witnessed them. Those women revealed an important truth: sexual
violence was an integral part of the Soviet social experiment. The often nasty
responses they got were, to quote Oscar Wilde, “Caliban’s enraged reaction to
seeing his own face in the mirror.”
Highly advanced societies tend to be highly complex. In
modern open societies like the United States there is a bewildering variety of
social strata, classes, subclasses, groups and subgroups that are very
difficult to fit into some kind of neat social or economic classification.
Since the technological revolution took place a couple of decades ago,
dramatically altering the character of the global economy, social groups
further multiplied, diversified and splintered, the balance between them
becoming more and more delicate. Those groups are characterized by their role
in the economic system, their ability to produce value, their relationship with
other groups and with the state, and so on..
This complexity is what constitutes advanced civilization,
but it is not what Karl Marx expected. His division of capitalist society into
two classes based on their relationship with the means of production, which he
developed in the middle of the 19th century, was already a gross simplification
at the time. In fact, Marx understood this and proposed that a more advanced
capitalist society would move toward greater purity, splitting into a handful
of the rich and a mass of the dispossessed. However, the opposite proved true
and by the end of World War I Marx’s class-based analysis became a total
abstraction.
Nevertheless, Russian Bolsheviks pressed ahead with
building simplified one-class society based on Marxist dogma. They summarily
nationalized the means of production and turned the entire population into a
homogenous single class with no possessions except the clothes on their
backs.
In short, the first thing they did was to destroy
bourgeois civilization. They admitted that freely and promised to create their
own, proletarian civilization, but for the moment the bourgeois civilization
was the only one that existed. By destroying it, they returned the former
Russian Empire to a kind of state of nature.
In other words, they stripped away a complex system of
checks and balances that existed between social groups and sexes in a civilized
society, turning citizens into a herd – an system of keeping domestic animals
which makes sheep produce wool, milk and meat and maintain headcount in a way
that is most convenient for the farmer.
Curiously, proletarians in the Roman Empire meant people
who had no property, paid no taxes and were exempted from military service.
Their only contribution to the state was to copulate and have children – not
unlike the sheep, in fact.
Simplification and homogenization informed all aspects of
Soviet society. Art was turned into visual propaganda, while writers became
“engineers of human souls.” Culture and the arts became tools to encourage the
sheep to do what the masters wanted them to do with greater enthusiasm.
Language, too, was declared a means of production, allowing the proletarian
sheep to be a bit more efficient than actual ones.
Important, the Bolsheviks promulgated the end of the
age-old exploitation of women and gave women equal rights on paper. But of
course making sure that those rights were real required institutions of
civilization – which was what the Bolsheviks had set out to destroy.
In societies without institutions of civilization keeping
human sheep in order – making sure they didn’t run away or stopped doing what
they are supposed to do – required fear and subjugation, not rights. Violence
was good at producing fear, but sexual violence was even better.
Sexual violence permeated Soviet society. At the top was
Stalin’s male harem, known as the Politburo, which was a model of Soviet
society in miniature. Stalin made its members entertain him on a nightly basis,
played homoerotic games with them and, once they no longer satisfied him,
changed them over on a whim. Nokia Khrushchev, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov et al. may have
been the feared Soviet nabobs whose names were borne by countless cities,
factories and collective farms, but in reality they were just so many sheep
that had to be dominated and subjugated – and then sent to the slaughterhouse.
Another model of sexual subjugation was provided by
Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s henchman responsible for building and running the
repressive apparatus for much of the dictator’s era. Beria would select a young
married woman, usually at random after seeing an attractive face in the crowd, pack her husband off to the Gulag and ensconce her in an apartment of some
previously arrested “enemies of the people.” This kind of sexual violence is a
variation on the common feature of primitive societies, in which husbands are
forced to watch the rape of their wives in a kind of ritual of emasculation.
Rape was replicated throughout Soviet society and existed
just below its false surface. Wives and daughters of “enemies of the people”
were raped during interrogations, locked up in cells with career criminals and
used as sex slaves by camp administration and guards. The victory of over
Hitler had to be sealed with a wholesale gang rape of civilian population
everywhere the Red Army set foot. We know that it was done in Poland, Hungary
and, of course, the German Reich, but apparently women on liberated Soviet
territories were not spared, either. Moreover, most of the rapes seemed to have
been perpetrated not by the forward fighting units but by those who came later.
This smacks of policy, not “heat-of-battle” excesses.
Gang rape is a key element of Vladimir Sorokin’s dystopian
novel “The Day of the Oprichnik”. When an official fall out of favor with the
Sovereign, his secret police execute him, destroy his property and ritually
gang rape his wife.
As he has done in many of his works, Sorokin displays an uncanny
understanding of the nature of the Soviet state. Rape statistics are
notoriously unreliable but what could be found suggests that in the USSR in the
1980s over half of all rapes were gang rapes. This compares to around 20% in
the United States. Nearly 80% of gang rapes in the Soviet Union were committed
by underage rapists (age 18 or younger).
These statistics are confirmed by anecdotal evidence.
Growing up in Moscow, I sometimes heard tales by older low-level thugs about
their participation in gang rapes. I personally knew three separate groups of
hoodlums in different neighborhood of the city – including several teenagers
from tenements around my schoolyard, located a stone’s throw away from the
infamous Lubyanka prison – who were convicted and jailed for gang rape.
I would argue that gang rape is a quintessential Soviet
crime. It represents violence against women, sexual violence and submission of
both men and women to the will of the collective. It may sound paradoxical, but
women have traditionally been more courageous than men in standing up to the
inhuman, savage aspects of the Soviet system. They had to be put in their
place.
And yes, gang rape is an act of sexual violence against
men. For young men it is a kind of rite of passage, of being tarred by the same
collective guilt. Refusal to participate means putting yourself above the
collective and asserting your individuality – hence refusal to be associated
with the herd. That was, in the eyes of Soviet society, a much worse crime than
merely gang-raping a woman.
This mentality is the root of many characteristics or
post-Soviet societies – the cowardice, the closing of the ranks and the hatred
of those who dare stand up for their own moral principles. An object lesson in
this mentality has just been presented by the case of long jumper Darya
Klishina who, alone among Russian track-and-field athletes, had not been
implicated in the doping scandal and was therefore allowed to compete in Rio de
Janeiro next month. Note that once again it was a woman who found courage to
resist the pressure of the collective, for which she has been branded a traitor
and abused in Russian social media – a kind of collective ritual gang rape of a
rebel.
