The Atrocities Behind the Thousands of Soviet Corpses in Shenyang Snowdrifts

Mr. Dong Wenqi, who was the mayor of Shenyang after the victory of the war, mentioned in his oral history that in 1946, he ordered the restoration of order in all aspects of Shenyang. When the relevant personnel were removing roadside garbage, they found more than a thousand corpses of Soviet troops. According to Dong Wenqi, the corpses were killed and buried in the snow when the Soviet troops broke into people’s houses to rape and rob them. The bodies were found only after the snow melted. These discovered bodies were then burned at the river.

Why did the Soviets send troops to northeast China?

Soviet troops went to Northeast China

As the European theater advanced in 1945, it was a matter of time before Germany was defeated. In order to speed up the demise of the Japanese, at the Yalta Conference held in February of that year, the U.S., Soviet Union, and Britain held tentative talks on the Soviet troop deployment to northeast China and signed the Yalta Agreement, which betrayed China’s sovereignty and interests. in July, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill held another secret meeting in Potsdam, located 30 kilometers southwest of the German capital Berlin. The meeting discussed the Potsdam Proclamation for the Surrender of Japan, which was signed by the United States, China and Britain, while the Soviet Union participated in the Potsdam Proclamation only on August 8, when it declared a state of war with Japan.

At 00:10 on August 9, the Soviet Red Army launched a surprise attack on the Japanese Kwantung Army from the east, west and north, across the Sino-Soviet and Sino-Mongolian borders on a front of more than 4,000 kilometers. At that time, the Japanese commander Yamada Ezo was still enjoying a Japanese song and dance performance. It was early in the morning that the order for full-scale combat was given. The Soviet army did not meet much resistance and soon occupied many cities in the northeast, and on the 15th, the Japanese emperor announced the surrender.

Soviet atrocities of rape of women

After entering Northeast China, the Soviet army was corrupt. In his oral history, Mr. Dong Wenqi said that after collecting information from various sources, he confirmed that the Soviet army committed the following atrocities in the Northeast, the first of which was raping women. The Soviets raped Japanese women, then Korean women, and then Chinese women in the major cities in the northeast, so that young Japanese, Korean, and Chinese women did not dare to go out with their heads shaved and wearing men’s clothes, and the doors and windows of major stores were closed to prevent the Soviets from breaking in.

For the number of women raped by the Soviet army, Mr. Dong Wenqi had sent someone to conduct a secret survey in Shenyang in order to prepare for the Soviet army to ask for compensation. Although it was a secret survey, but most of the good women do not want to disclose, only more than two thousand people fill out a form to report the name and address, rape time and place, immediately reported by the municipal government to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But until the fall of the Northeast, no compensation was forthcoming. This makes Mr. Dong Wenqi deeply regretful.

Imagine, if there were at least 2,000 women raped in Shenyang alone, how many were there in the entire Eastern provinces?

As for the rape of Chinese women by Soviet troops, Taiwanese writer Lung Ying-tai in his book “The Great River Sea 1949” also recorded some details of the rape of Chinese women by Soviet troops provided by those in the know: “That winter, Hsu Chang-qing, a 21-year-old Taipei native, went to the Shenyang railway station to see off his friend, and as soon as he turned around, he saw this scene: a large square in front of the Shenyang station, and our Now (Taipei) the square in front of the Presidential Palace is similar. When I was going back, I saw a woman in the square, holding two children and carrying another one on her back, and a bigger one with a straw mat, five people in total. Seven or eight Soviet soldiers surrounded them and raped the mother first and then the children, in full view of everyone. The child on the woman’s back had been untied and was bawling. After the Soviet soldiers finished bullying them, they told them to lie down neatly and machine-gunned them to death …… What Xu Changqing stumbled upon may well have been what happened to the Japanese women and children in the northeast at the time, but the Chinese themselves, lived in equal fear.”

“In the winter of 1945, Yu Heng was also in Changchun, and what he saw was that ‘wherever Soviet troops went, women were raped, things were removed, houses were set on fire,’ and women, both Chinese and Japanese, cut their hair and wore men’s clothes, or they dared not go out into the streets. The so-called ‘liberators’ were in fact a horrible rabble, but the people did not dare to speak of it, and the people had to go to his monument in the square, line up, take off their hats, and pay their respects ……”

Material Plundering of Soviet Army Atrocities

Mr. Dong Wenqi in his oral history also mentioned several other atrocities of the Soviet army, that is, the great plundering of the Northeast.

First, the plundering of materials. In the late War of Resistance, Japan planned to fight a duel with the U.S. Army in the homeland and intended to move Emperor Hirohito to the Northeast, so it stored military supplies and industrial raw materials in the Northeast mainland, enough for one year. After the Soviet army occupied the northeast, it was about to plunder various warehouses of materials and transport them back to Russia.

Second, robbing banks. After the Soviet army occupied the northeast, in addition to issuing two billion yuan of uncashed Red Army tickets, they also openly robbed public and private banks of cash and gold and foreign currency, of which only the pseudo-Manchu Central Bank was raided to the tune of seven billion yuan.

Third, the demolition of factories. After the Soviets took control of the northeast, they immediately deployed more than 3,000 technicians to forcibly demolish and relocate factories, and within a few months, the industrial essence of the northeast was lost. The total value of the loss was about 1.23 billion U.S. dollars, with about 60 percent of electricity, 80 percent of coal, 80 percent of steel, 75 percent of railroads, 68 percent of machinery, 50 percent of chemicals, 54 percent of cement, 50 percent of fibers, and 30 percent of telecommunications.

Fourth, the issue of Red Army tickets. When the Soviet army entered the Northeast, it issued Red Army tickets with the army and forced the people to use them. According to a later survey, the amount of Red Army tickets issued amounted to more than two billion yuan. The Soviets used the Red Army Tickets to buy the people’s property, and under the guise of buying and selling, they carried out scavenging, thus exploiting and squeezing the people’s savings for years under the gun of the Soviets, crying out for hunger and cold.

The material plundering of the northeast by the Soviet troops hit the heavy industries of the northeast hard and caused hardship to the people. The greed and shamelessness of the Soviet Communist Party was also evident.

Soviet military discipline was corrupted for a reason

It is not surprising that such Soviet troops were hated by the Chinese and killed. Behind the killing of more than a thousand Soviet soldiers by the Shenyang people, there must have been more than a thousand atrocities.

In the book “Japan’s line, China’s more” published in 2010, it was revealed that according to Guo Jia Zhou Jianzhang of Dehui County, Jilin Province, a Soviet soldier raped a local woman, and the people were so outraged that they killed him. As a result, the Soviet army was annoyed, and they brought in artillery to shell Guojiatun, and the people ran away in fear.

The first reports of the Soviet army’s poor discipline were in the telegrams sent by the first units of the Eighth Route Army into the northeast to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. The troops of the Eighth Route Army in Shenyang called the Central Committee to report that the Soviet troops were “in rags and their discipline is very bad” and offered to intervene with the Soviets, but the Soviets argued that they were motivated by their hatred of fascism. The question is, were the Chinese people they robbed and raped fascists? And even if they hated Japanese fascists, would their bestial acts be permitted?

Mr. Dong Wenqi had questioned the Soviet commander Covdung, who was stationed in Shenyang, about this. He said, “When the Soviet Union decided to march into the Northeast, it expected strong resistance from the Japanese Kwantung Army, so it made the young prisoners in the Siberian concentration camps into an army and used them as pioneers.

So that’s how it was! So some of the Soviet troops who entered northeast China were outlaws!

Conclusion

The reason for this is that without the help of the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party would not have been able to quickly occupy the Northeast and use it as a base to win the civil war. History shows that the biggest gifts from the Soviets to the Chinese Communist Party were: 100,000 guns, thousands of artillery pieces and countless ammunition, cloth and grain for the Japanese army; 200,000 Manchukuo troops.

More importantly, when did the Chinese Communist Party, which shared the Soviet Union’s belief in the violent ideas of Marxism-Leninism, ever care about the lives of the common people?