By David K. Shipler
As the
Red Army swept westward into Germany toward the end of World War II, Russian
soldiers wantonly burned villages; looted homes, committed rape, and murdered
elderly women and other civilians in cold blood. Soviet Major Lev Kopelev, a German-speaking
scholar of German literature assigned to the army’s Political Administration to
propagandize the enemy, reported the crimes up the chain of command. He argued
vehemently against the impulsive executions. He drew his pistol once and stood
between a young girl and two Russian tank soldiers who were bent on raping her.
He
saved her, but not himself. Repeated calls for restraint made him a suspect,
not a hero. “You engaged in propaganda of bourgeois humanism, of pity for the
enemy,” said his interrogator. “You spent your time rescuing Germans and
weakening the morale of our own troops; you engaged in agitation against vengeance
and hatred—sacred hatred of the enemy.”
Major Kopelev was expelled from the
Communist Party, arrested, tried, and sent to the GULAG for nine years. He
tells the story in his 1977 memoir, To Be Preserved Forever, whose title
comes from the official order stamped on secret police dossiers that are never to
be destroyed.
I have been thinking about him in these terrible days of Russian crimes in Ukraine. Russia’s troops are doing pretty much what their predecessors did back then, as we’ve learned after they’ve retreated from towns near Kyiv. I wonder if there is a Lev Kopelev among them and, if so, what will happen to him.
