Debunking the "mysterious Russian soul" once and for all: It's not Pushkin and Pavlova, it's Putinism's practice of mass rape and war crimes
It was May 2022 when psychiatric and gynecological teams first began visiting the liberated regions of Kyiv and Kherson oblasts. Even just three months post-full-scale invasion, mass cases of war crime rape were ubiquitous. Primary targets were women and teenage girls; the mean age was fifteen. But survivors were also identified in men, the elderly, even children and toddlers. By autumn 2022, the first UN commission report on mass Russian conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) crimes was released, detailing how "women have been gang-raped, men castrated, children sexually abused, and civilians forced to parade naked in the streets".
Often, the plethora of undeniable evidence comes not just from the Ukrainian capturing of war crimes; frequently, Russians record their own atrocities. Since 2022, there have been instances of Russian soldiers filming sexual assaults of children, in part to create content for child pornography sites and make money. In one case of an infant raped on video, the Russian soldier-offenders were active in sharing the videos in Telegram groups.
In 2022, numerous phone calls were intercepted between Russian soldiers and wives and girlfriends about raping Ukrainian women. Roman Bykovsky and wife Olga Bykovska went viral on one such call, in which the wife laughingly encouraged her husband to rape Ukrainian women as long as he used a condom.
From the first year of the war into the second and third, the greatest site of sexual war crimes has moved from civilian young women to male POWs. One of the favorite "games" of the occupying Russians has involved spinning the wheel of the field telephone then making a call, electrocuting the prisoner connected to its wire. It has varied genital electrocution, known as "Zelensky’s Call", with anal electrocution, known as "Biden’s Call".
Another common thread in accounts of CRSV is a consistent level of Russian cruelty via sociopathic enjoyment while committing sexual torture. As one psychologist explained, many former POWs report of their sexual assaults hearing the abusing soldier get a call from commanders, saying "okay, come back now, stop with the fun". Such sadism is also in line with that of early 2022, when the world was horrified by graffiti found in homes recently occupied by Russians in liberated Kharkiv oblast. On inner walls was scribbled the lines, "It’s not considered a war crime if you had fun".
I first became involved with writing about mass rape in Ukraine due to my background as both academic and journalist. I hold a doctorate as a feminist cultural historian, with specialisation on women in abusive systems. Beginning in February 2022 with Russia’s full-scale invasion, I began writing for The Kyiv Post – with an international focus on women, art and culture, protest, embassies, and diplomacy. Covering everything from anti-rape art and performance protests at Russian embassy gates to body-painted protesters at the Cannes Film Festival, I wrote the first piece to document the emerging global protest phenomenon around Russian rape war crimes in summer 2022: "Stop Raping Us".
In 2024, I was asked to contribute one of the first chapters of international scholarly writing on Russia’s use of CRSV in Ukraine. In the chapter, I maintained an academic focus on data, media analysis, and the international response.
That left plenty of leftover research about Russian culture, sociology, mass psychology, and history. What I wanted to get to the bottom of was a burning question: what precisely is wrong with Russia and Russians, that this is habitually and continuously the way they conduct wars and occupations? Where do we have to look – not to the nonsensical "mysterious Russian soul", or to Pushkin, Tolstoy, and the ballet, but to the dark heart of Russia – to get at the pathologies that make the most perverse mass rape war crimes commonplace?
To begin with national identity, start with the persona of the dictator. Within this sort of psycho-political reading, we can situate Putin in line with his worldview. Russian political life – both traditionally and in this current iteration – is marked by use of machismo, force, and brutality; the state itself is designed to be ruthless and cruel.
Indeed there is a direct link between Russia’s behavior, Putin’s rhetoric, and the concept of rape culture itself. As Bonnie Stabile has noted, "those who enact state violence also often employ rape rhetoric". Slavoj Zizek drew attention for some time pre-February 2022 to Putin’s use of specifically sexually violent language to refer to Ukraine. Two weeks before the full-scale invasion, Putin appeared at a press conference in which he made a joke in reference to a 1970s Russian song about rape – "Whether you like it or don’t like it, bear with it, my beauty".
Fast forward to autumn 2022: a pattern was already beginning to emerge around toxic masculinity, abuse, failure, and the widespread use of CRSV. In Estonian playwright and documenter of Soviet crimes Sofi Oksanen’s estimation, one part of the answer was simple: the Russian Army lacks professional combat skills. "Committing rape needs no fighting techniques. A soldier capable of such atrocities reflects… a whole ecosystem of violence behind such an act".
A Russian rape culture also emerges from the ground up—the social conditions present in everyday Russian life. From the perspective of group psychology, Russia remains a humiliation society. Teachers are known to beat students, and child abuse and overall interpersonal violence are rampant.
Many survivors have testified that Russian troops told them their rape was a "punishment". Prosecutor Anna Myktenko explained that "[i]n several villages in the south we heard witnesses and survivors say the Russian servicemen looked specifically for wives of Ukrainian soldiers, or mothers or sisters".
But it is equally easy to find the roots of widespread sexual violence of men upon other men. Looking to history leads one to dedovshchina as a Russian phenomenon. This is the bullying gang system found in prison as originated under Stalinism, then carried into Russian military and police life. Literally meaning "heritage of the grandfathers", it was the creation of a hierarchy that began with placing violent convicts in charge of political prisoners in camps – anointing a gangster "king of prisoners". In Russian prisons, officials don’t prevent rampant violence and rape it; they condone it. In seeking mercenaries to kill abroad, the Russian military thus often turns to those in prisons… "looking for men who are used to torture and rape as a part of everyday life… [and are in fact] used to doing it".
As former Ukrainian government official Anton Geraschenko explained on social media, next to a 2024 picture of Russian rapist smiling in a courtroom: "[a] clear pattern has already emerged in Russia: murderers and rapists… are not afraid of prison, because they go straight to war and then come back with honors".
Yet another inescapable factor in an invading military’s rape culture is misogynistic violence at home. "Weaponizing rape is more likely in conflicts where the aggressor comes from a country where the level of gender equality is very low or non-existent". In 2017, life became significantly more perilous for Russian women when domestic violence was reduced from a crime to an administrative offense. Between 2011 and 2019, more than 12,000 Russian women died from it. As Agata Wlodkwska has argued, the "high level of violence against Russian women is an important factor at play… it makes the use of sexual violence outside of state borders easier as a weapon of war".
Finally, to be honest about Russia’s current endemic sexual war crimes in Ukraine also means connecting the horrifying parallels of past and present. One driver is the obsession with a glorious nostalgicised past, in Putin’s creation of a cult of World War II as remade into a singular Russian Soviet triumph. Oksanen believes that "Homo putinicus only knows the necessity to return to the past and the mythology of the Great Patriotic War, which Putin’s rule has turned into a new religion and has become one of the main enabling narratives of war crimes in Ukraine".
How, specifically, would a "cult of the grandfathers" continue to drive current war crimes in 2020s Ukraine? Because vast historical evidence proves that the generation most venerated in Russia – like those who make up the "Immortal Regiment", the Red Army ancestors whose photos Russians parade with every May 9th – were also themselves mass systemic rapists.
Rape has been a Russian weapon of war for centuries, but nowhere was it more pervasive and documented than in 1945. Millions of civilian women and girls were raped fleeing the Red Army. Russian soldiers were encouraged to "enjoy their victory"; the Soviet army issued a leaflet urging soldiers to "take [enemy civilian women] as your rightful spoils". Hospital records show that 5% of children born in Berlin from the end of 1945 to beginning of 1946 had Russian fathers listed on birth certificates: "Russian" with "rape" underneath in parentheses.
Oksanen has explained: "The rape, marauding and other war crimes of the Soviet Red Army were never condemned by Russia. As Russia was never held accountable for the crimes, this culture of impunity was grounds for further crimes, and facilitated what is happening in Ukraine today… Russia has a long history soaked with the stains of war crimes; it is that history that enables repetition".
This is all, simply, a mass Russian problem. If a nation is specifically known an all-against-all bullying culture at home of men, women, and children, and for a culture of hazing and rape in their own army: why should we be surprised that when it goes next door, it employs sexual violence and torture in its military operations? When a country is sickened within its own history and ideology, it may first poison its own people. But today, it is – once again – a neighbour of Russia who is bearing the brunt of its pathologies.
To close with a powerful 2024 quote on national culpability from Lithuanian minister Gabrielius Landsbergis: "I hear about the innocence of ordinary Russians, but then…. I see ordinary Russian mothers saying goodbye to their ordinary Russian sons and wishing them success in their ordinary Russian war crimes…. Ordinary Russia is sick. Healing will be a long and arduous process that will only begin when Russia, not just Putin, is defeated".
Dr. Kerry McElroy
