Hell of an honor
Excerpt from the novel “God Steals Unnoticed”
To the 85th anniversary of the birth of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya
Our
benches stand in hell, opposite a miserable sky, full of unbearable
people, disgusting sycophants, gathered in circles that we usually do
not attend; vulgar, miserable, petty, low, vile, they sing flattering
carols in falsetto.
In hell both lofty poetry and words full of
primordial power can be heard. In order not to fall into doubt, not to
succumb to weakness, we must believe in hell, but this should also force
us to make a firm decision: not to retreat, not to humiliate ourselves,
to faithfully follow the dictates of our noble heart and not to enter
into an agreement with a ruthless tyrant.
“Hello,
dear comrade Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya! Please make sure that Nadya does
not marry Igor Petrovich, he is disgusting. Nadya is only five years
older than me, and she thinks that she is the smartest, she imagined.
And I give an honest pioneer, that if you help me, I will embroider your
portrait for the red corner, I swear to my mother. And that in
mathematics I said a hooligan word, I didn’t know that it was hooligan,
it was Lalka and Tanya who talked me into it.
And that
Tanya and I were looking at her brother Mitya’s pussy, I didn’t want to
look at it, she came up with it. Aleftina Lachina, 7B.” Nadya did marry
Igor even after the January events 1 I went with him to Gorky, and it
served me right, why I let my friends persuade me and smoked half a
cigarette with them in the school toilet. Even the day before, I
couldn’t think that this would happen, the day when I placed a letter at
the foot of the monument to the twenty-six Baku commissars.
I
couldn’t think of a better place, it was far from the monument to Zoya,
although the commissars were also far from her, everyone was far from
her, I knew this for sure in those thirteen years, and in the previous
twelve I already knew it, and at eleven I knew it too .
Let
a sophisticated historian explain why in the Union, where it was
difficult to surprise with heroism, Zoya was somehow special, and at the
same time let him explain why she was special to me, because it’s me,
I’m the best in the whole country (and therefore in the world) knew
everything that happened, starting from October 26, 1941, when she,
yesterday’s schoolgirl, future writer and philologist (which forever
remained the future), appeared at the city committee and demanded to be
included in the saboteur detachment, but they didn’t want to take her,
“too fragile and beautiful for a saboteur,” the NKVD officer wrote down,
but she insisted, and they took her, and from the Colosseum cinema,
together with others in a covered truck, she went to military unit No.
9903.
Because the cinema was the Colosseum, in my
childhood imagination it was Roman, where giant cats were tearing up the
comrades-in-arms of Spartacus, about whom I had read then in some
Italian novel; Only in the Colosseum, full of the hot breath of African
cats and the smell of gladiator blood, could my heroine come to her
death.
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For
some reason, it seemed to me that it was death, that everything was
known in advance and unshakable, and the red flag over the Reichstag in
1945, and that Zoya went to great lengths to become a legend, because
she deserved it, otherwise it would be couldn't. I would be offended by
the thought that she could have stayed alive and just been a good
person, she deserved better. And more happened. I remembered it by
heart: Zoya received the task of setting fire to the village of
Petrishchevo, where the Germans were stationed, and she managed to burn
down three houses and escape from pursuit, but as a conscientious person
she decided to complete the task to the end and, after waiting out the
turmoil in the forest, she returned, although the danger had doubled,
and was captured.
There was probably something
unconsciously cruel in my attitude towards the captive, I didn’t feel
sorry for her, I didn’t dare to feel sorry for her, she was above that,
you could feel sorry for a simple person, but here is a saint, a hero
who could not die immediately and painlessly, she deserved more, and
more came in full. They beat her and asked what was going on in Moscow,
and whether it was true that Stalin had fled, and she answered: “Stalin
is on duty,” but she didn’t say anything else, about her comrades in
arms and so on, she didn’t even say her real name, she was tortured,
they took her around in the cold in underwear and barefoot, achieved
nothing and hanged her, but on the scaffold she turned to the people
(then there were people, not a crowd), while the Germans stood in a
circle, photographed her, and said that there was nothing to be afraid
of the Germans, they They themselves are afraid of us, and that we will
win, and she kept saying, then the box was knocked out from under her
feet,she grabbed the rope, but they hit her hand, and she hung, and
throughout December 1941 she swung in a noose, showered with snow, then a
group of drunken fascists on the night of New Year tore off her
clothes, cut her up and stabbed her with daggers and cut off her
breasts, New Year's Eve, the villagers buried her, and then our people
came, dug up her body, and her face turned out to be calm, as if
sleeping, like Lermontov’s Tamara in a coffin (and the thirteenth stanza
of “The Demon” for me was always about Zoya), and she became a legend,
although I thought that she was born a legend, born to become one, to
make a fairy tale come true, and I was dying of envy, white, snow-white,
white-foamed envy, that there was no war, everything was fine and no
one would subject me to torture and execution, because I too I can be a
person, damn this is a bright future, where there is no way to become
Kosmodemyanskaya, and even when I was accepted into the pioneers and we
went to take pictures at the eternal flame of the twenty-six commissars,
it seems I was already thinking about it. I was also terribly irritated
by my own cheeks, their major bulges; they were (and remain) somehow
not romantically cheerful.
Although the main thing is
that she was not fat, she would not have dared, she immediately lost
weight: it was not fitting for a hero, a martyr to be fat. To the
martyr. Now it is clear what was holy - martyrdom. How I despised all
these ancient and medieval martyrs for the faith, from classical
painting and grandfather’s books, printed with the letter “yat”. Having
suffered for the allotted time, they received a ticket to heaven and
left there without delay.
Several hours of torture for
eternal bliss is magnificent courage, it shakes the hearts of millions.
I am a heartless person. At the place of execution, well-fed,
pink-bottomed angels with wreaths of roses flew up to them, apparently
in case the passion-bearer lost heart.
More serious
interferences in the course of events also occurred: severed heads grew
back to the body, instruments of torture, defying the laws of physics,
broke in the hands of the executioners. I also remember a certain Saint
Inessa, from an album of Spanish paintings: she was undressed in public,
but her hair miraculously grew back to her toes and covered interesting
places, and onlookers broke off. A good topic for an advertising
phrase: “Ascetics of the faith are not in danger of baldness.” My great
martyr was not lured with a ticket to heaven, a priestly angel did not
fly up with a bouquet, the gallows did not collapse and the rope did not
break. Everything is according to the laws of physics, as taught in
school. Frankly. When they stripped me for the flogging, the hair did
not grow back. And the cut off breast did not come back. But the main
thing is that there is no paradise, no crap - I would be sick if Zoya
was fearless from waiting for heaven, smelling flowers from her angelic
fleshy hands. There are no miracles, there is no immortality - I firmly
believed in this, and therefore I wrote her a letter to heaven asking
her not to let Nadya marry Igor, and Zoya would have done this if I had
not smoked half a cigarette the next day. She is a real heroine, she did
not need immortality, which does not exist, therefore she is immortal
and can work miracles. There was iron childish logic, which my
grown-upMy crusted mind is unable to comprehend, maybe I will still grow
into it. Even at the age of fourteen I understood all this. And when I
was fifteen, people howled around about the afterlife and the new
martyred priests killed by the security officers in the twenties. I
don’t know a damn thing about history, maybe someone was really killed
there for nothing, but I was disgusted by the fact that these murdered
people were now smelling the flowers of paradise. This was some kind of
vague thorn in me - these are unimportant saints, I know higher ones,
but now for some reason it is customary to praise these over there. Is
there something wrong. And one more thing: after all, Zoya’s
grandfather, a priest, rector of the temple, was executed in the
twenties for fighting Soviet power, and every second in her family was a
priest, and she thought that because of this they would not take her as
a saboteur, they would not trust her, and she went through the offices,
and achieved being sent to the front to fight for the Soviet country.
How
can we respect people like her grandfather, because they were opponents
of the system that gave birth to Zoya, Vera Voloshina and Masha
Golovotyukova. It was also not clear why they began to scold Pavlik
Morozov, because Zoya was the same Pavlik in relation to her relatives,
she included Pavlik entirely, I then already began to understand: she
included all the best people of the Union, all their virtues, each of
they are only a particle of it, and therefore here, in my country, it
was special; but everything that was said now about history essentially
went against it, and not understanding a damn thing about anything, I
only saw that something bad, nasty was happening.
And
then, that is, around the same time, when American films were still a
novelty, somewhere at a party they showed a film about Christ, creepy in
the meticulousness with which his dying torments were presented. The
director was a Hollywood Jew, apparently that’s why the Roman soldiers
looked like SS men, the director presented them as German mercenaries,
they cackled and exchanged words reminiscent of modern German. But not
only this was from the story with Zoya, here almost all the details
coincided literally, take eyewitnesses of Zoya’s interrogations and the
biblical tradition: Jesus asks for a drink, and a sponge soaked in
vinegar is brought to his mouth, and here it is: “She asked my husband
for a drink. We asked: “Can I?” They said: “No,” and one of them,
instead of water, raised a burning kerosene lamp without glass to his
chin.”and achieved being sent to the front to fight for the Soviet
country.
How can we respect people like her
grandfather, because they were opponents of the system that gave birth
to Zoya, Vera Voloshina and Masha Golovotyukova. It was also not clear
why they began to scold Pavlik Morozov, because Zoya was the same Pavlik
in relation to her relatives, she included Pavlik entirely, I then
already began to understand: she included all the best people of the
Union, all their virtues, each of they are only a particle of it, and
therefore here, in my country, it was special; but everything that was
said now about history essentially went against it, and not
understanding a damn thing about anything, I only saw that something
bad, nasty was happening.
And then, that is, around
the same time, when American films were still a novelty, somewhere at a
party they showed a film about Christ, creepy in the meticulousness with
which his dying torments were presented. The director was a Hollywood
Jew, apparently that’s why the Roman soldiers looked like SS men, the
director presented them as German mercenaries, they cackled and
exchanged words reminiscent of modern German. But not only this was from
the story with Zoya, here almost all the details coincided literally,
take eyewitnesses of Zoya’s interrogations and the biblical tradition:
Jesus asks for a drink, and a sponge soaked in vinegar is brought to his
mouth, and here it is: “She asked my husband for a drink. We asked:
“Can I?” They said: “No,” and one of them, instead of water, raised a
burning kerosene lamp without glass to his chin.”and achieved being sent
to the front to fight for the Soviet country.
How can
we respect people like her grandfather, because they were opponents of
the system that gave birth to Zoya, Vera Voloshina and Masha
Golovotyukova. It was also not clear why they began to scold Pavlik
Morozov, because Zoya was the same Pavlik in relation to her relatives,
she included Pavlik entirely, I then already began to understand: she
included all the best people of the Union, all their virtues, each of
they are only a particle of it, and therefore here, in my country, it
was special; but everything that was said now about history essentially
went against it, and not understanding a damn thing about anything, I
only saw that something bad, nasty was happening.
And
then, that is, around the same time, when American films were still a
novelty, somewhere at a party they showed a film about Christ, creepy in
the meticulousness with which his dying torments were presented. The
director was a Hollywood Jew, apparently that’s why the Roman soldiers
looked like SS men, the director presented them as German mercenaries,
they cackled and exchanged words reminiscent of modern German.
But
not only this was from the story with Zoya, here almost all the details
coincided literally, take eyewitnesses of Zoya’s interrogations and the
biblical tradition: Jesus asks for a drink, and a sponge soaked in
vinegar is brought to his mouth, and here it is: “She asked my husband
for a drink. We asked: “Can I?” They said: “No,” and one of them,
instead of water, raised a burning kerosene lamp without glass to his
chin.” 2 or this legendary Roman centurion, who took pity on Christ,
so it was: “... they assigned someone else to her. He was more
conscientious and took the pillow and blanket from me and put her to
bed.
After lying down for a while, she asked him to
untie her hands in German, and he untied her hands,” the whole film was
based on the events of November 28-29, 1941, and even those details that
are not in the Bible, the director somehow guessed, his German-speaking
legionnaires constantly laughed during the execution, and so it was:
“And those who flogged laughed during the flogging,” and again: “The
Germans came running, about a hundred and fifty, looked and laughed,”
“...and again hundreds of Germans came (this It was in the morning, at
eight o'clock). They laughed. She was silent, looked at them,” and for
some reason all this was shown about Jesus, whose existence is not
confirmed by any independent source, and everyone believed in it and
called him God, and if so, then the day of torment was a short moment in
his eternal divine invulnerability, and apparently for this everyone
who watched the film pitied him terribly, and no one wanted to remember
that all this was not two thousand, but fifty years ago, not with a
thirty-three-year-old man, but an eighteen-year-old girl, and she did
not cry in the Garden of Gethsemane, I didn’t scream at the front,
saying why did you leave me, but said that we would win.
All
subsequent religious propaganda died out for me at once - all these
legends about Christian and Muslim fighters and martyrs for the faith
turned out to be a weak shadow of Soviet history, some kind of
unsuccessful alteration of the biographies of Soviet saints, and whoever
really wanted a crucified one, I reminded Sergeant Yuri Smirnov 3 ,
but the believers didn't like it. Although Russian history was often
recalled: every month they scolded Stalin more and more often, and I
didn’t understand a damn thing about modern history, who was lying and
who wasn’t, I only remembered that the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, up to
his neck in business, personally took up Zoya’s case and ordered the
capture and execute the officers of the regiment that killed her, and
they were caught and hanged, and it was hard to listen to the eloquent
and important guys who smoothly proved that he was evil, but I, although
reluctantly, believed them - the guys spoke very smoothly and smartly,
only one the detail struck me - I remember it firmly.
Journalists
laughed that Stalin wore warm thick socks in any weather, because he
had to freeze as a child. The Nazis drove Zoya barefoot through the
snow, and if she had survived, she would probably have wrapped her feet
in any weather. That means they would laugh at her too. That is, the
idea that Zoya could be ridiculed could not have entered my
sixteen-year-old head at all, but according to the logic of the
greyhound writers, it turned out that way. The entire subsequent
anti-Stalin campaign died for me overnight. I was reluctant to read and
watch all these articles and programs; one thing was clear - some kind
of bastard had come to power. Which is funny when people get cold feet.
And then, when I was seventeen, the smooth guy writer Zhopis appeared in
the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty, that is, Zhovpis or Zhovpus, but I
remember him as Zhopis 4 . And he said that there were no Germans at all
in the village of Petrishchevo. Then in the same newspaper, a well-fed
doctor of medical sciences said that Zoya was schizophrenic, that is,
that she was suspected of schizophrenia, and it turned out that she was
crazy, Zoya, who knew Russian classical literature by heart and Goethe
in the original, recited the latter at the level of a professional
reader , who at the age of seventeen amazed A. Gaidar with her
intelligence, was crazy, and everyone understood that way, because
people who had already become a crowd, people, were accustomed to
understand everything only in a vile or obscene sense, and almost no one
was interested in what exactly schizophrenia They suspected, but it
turned out that she was not there, but that there was overwork from
intensive study and binge reading, that the Germans were in Petrishchevo
and you can ask eyewitnesses from local residents about this - nothing
could be explained, it was Zoya on the scaffold who was addressing the
people, the people, and I argued with the cattle, the people, then I
limited myself to the intellectuals, but it turned out that the
intelligentsia, Russian and Azerbaijani, became the cattle first and
most willingly of all. It was all this, that there was an unexpected,
sickening amount of scum, that somehow slowed me down, temporarily
dulled the sensations. And you also had to eat, in democracy, eating
became a problem for many, and I now think that it is difficult for a
hungry person to maintain ideals, but it became difficult for those who
had them to eat, and the money went precisely to those who did not have
ideals anyway, which is probably why the latter are so it disappeared
quickly, and I’m thinking: maybe it was intended that way, I don’t know,
I never understood politics. And everything broke down and died -
romance, faith in the best - when, immediately after the collapse of the
Union, I learned about books where they laughed at the heroes, and at
Zoya too. No meanness was surprising anymore: anything can happen in
life, there are no rules or justice.
Everyone
understood this in their own way in the 90s, and so did I, and I wasn’t
surprised by anything else. There wasn’t even any indignation left, and
why it wasn’t left became clear a few years later, when I came across a
quote from Machiavelli, they say, if a ruler wants to do something mean
and so that the people don’t get indignant, do the mean thing
immeasurably, then there won’t even be any strength for indignation, and
then do whatever you want, people will take everything for granted -
well, that’s what they did. Everything in me temporarily died down, that
is, I used to think that childhood had died in me, but it turned out
that it had died down, as if in a half-asleep I perceived crumbs of
information about the saint of my childhood.
I once
found out that thousands of children wrote letters with requests to Zoya
and many took them to her monument, then I was overwhelmed with pride
for her: she was not the only miracle worker for me. There was also a
painful blow (although everything died down, but the pain was dull), an
article caught my eye about some top model, originally from Osino-Gai,
Zoya’s small homeland, who sometimes came to visit her fellow countrymen
from abroad, and students of the same schools, where they wrote letters
to Zoya, now wrote to the long-legged millionaire scammer, and
enthusiastically greeted her on the threshold of the school at the bust
of the heroine; I also found out details about the past that were not
disclosed in the Union, and I’m gladthat I didn’t know this in
childhood, it wouldn’t have fit into my head, now anything fits into my
head - that Zoya was beaten not only by the Germans, but also by some of
their own, the women whose houses she burned, burned, in order to drive
out those who were holed up enemies and defeat them, but they thought
only about themselves and, together with the fascists, beat her. For
some reason, it was then that I again remembered the films (now I
already knew several of them) about Christ, about these passions of his,
I again remembered all the poignancy of these coincidences, now doubly
poignant for me because ancient myths became even more popular, and the
living legend was remembered and knew less and less. And then everything
exploded. Everything died down at once. I came across a TV show by
chance at dinner, and it turned out to be normal, I didn’t have to
switch, I miraculously ran into it, the chances were no greater than
encountering a rude word in Soviet literature; I got this chance.
Documentary film about Zoya. I knew all the facts by heart; at the age
of eleven I knew them by heart. But they got there differently. When the
villagers dug a hole in the frozen ground and buried the hanged woman,
and no one in the country knew about her yet, military correspondent
Pyotr Lidov heard the story of an old peasant man near Moscow, Tarasov,
saying that in Petrishchevo the Nazis executed a young girl “they hang
her, but she speaks a speech” , and Lidov couldn’t believe his ears:
“how ... speech?”, “And so,” muttered the old man, “they’re already
hanging, but she keeps talking and talking.” And Lidov was shocked by
this story, and he decided to find out everything, and he found out, and
Zoya became a legend. It was only then that I somehow suddenly realized
that Zoya didn’t even know that she would become a legend, a saint for
millions, she thought: they’ll kill her and that’s it, but it could have
happened, you never know the nameless heroes, and this didn’t shake her
determination at all, and every minute in captivity she behaved as if
millions were already looking at her, and this is her holiness, and I’m
rubbish - all the last years I thought that the time was not right, the
time of heroes had passed, I need to think about what to eat, and I’m
already good because I keep her image in my mind, and her situation was
no better, she was just Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, and I have no excuses.
And for the first time, in the twenty-sixth year of my life, I realized
that she was a human being, she blew her nose and itched like me, and
probably wanted to live and not be a posthumous hero, but I kept her in
the goddesses and didn’t even feel sorry for her, and for the first time
, in the twenty-sixth year of my life, at the end of the program, I
cried about Zoya, because now I wanted her not to die. At that very
moment I realized that she would now be higher for me than in childhood,
because she was not born a legend, she blew her nose and itched, but
she took it and became a legend, a fairy tale, she became my goddess.
And I also saw footage of students from her school running past her bust
towards the slutty model, and it really dawned on me that Zoya was not
for everyone, although she thought that she was for everyone, she was
for a few, and I might not get into their number. But it still made me
feel better that I had changed my mind about it all. Because all the
doubts of recent years have decayed and crumbled: Zoya alone is enough
to be for the Soviet Union.Dostoevsky wrote somewhere that if Christ
were on one side, and the truth was on the other, he would follow
Christ. Even between the truth and Zoya, I would choose Zoya. And having
seen enough and listened to religious people, I now know what hell is:
it is where there is no crap, false righteous people who accepted
torment for the sake of heavenly grub; and only holy atheists will meet
me there, well, yes, they will, they won’t take me anywhere else, and
having passed through the ranks with Zina Portnova, Yuri Smirnov, Imant
Sudmalis and Tatyana Solomakha 5 , I will appear before Zoya, the
mistress of heroes, she will shower me with contempt as the worst, and
will punish me to stand somewhere in the back. It's okay, it's not a
joke. The main thing is no bullshit.
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Rape by Russian soldiers in Ukraine is the latest example of a despicable wartime crime that spans the globe
Rape by Russian soldiers in Ukraine is the latest example of a despicable wartime crime that spans the globe
Shocking images from Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine revealed what many suspected, that Russian soldiers were apparently committing war crimes. An image of dead naked women under a blanket on the road photographed by Mikhail Palinchak 12½ miles (20 kilometers) outside of Kyiv was tweeted by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine on April 2. A Human Rights Watch report released the next day and a Guardian story by Bethan McKernan the day after that asserted that Russian soldiers used rape as a deliberate tactic of war.
Such tactics have been called “gendercide” by scholars who study gender and war.
As an expert on rape during ethnic conflict, I know that – like so many other conflicts – wartime gender-based violence has a variety of motivations. They include punishment, torture, extraction of information and the intent to destroy the morale of the other side.
Atrocities appear to be more prevalent in wars when the goal is to terrorize the population and demobilize people so that they will flee in great numbers. In the type of conflict known as an ethnic war, the goal of acquiring and securing territory leads to the most barbarous tactics being used, aimed at reducing the other side’s willingness to fight by using excessive cruelty, torture, terror, displacement and even genocide. Wartime rape functions as part of this strategy.
When wartime rape is a deliberate strategy, as it was in Bosnia, Kosovo or Bangladesh, even the most horrifying acts and atrocities committed during war were supported at the highest levels of decision-making. As U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on April 5, 2022, “What we’ve seen in Bucha is not the random act of a rogue unit, this is a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities.”
Wartime rape does not only target women and girls. It might also target boys and men – something the victims are extremely hesitant to report because of societal norms.
However, not every war features the deliberate use of wartime sexual violence. The mere existence of variation means that what can be unleashed by the dogs of war can also be controlled or prohibited.
Not random violence
The variation in whether or not rape occurs in war means that these acts are not random. They don’t happen because men are individually unable to control their urges.
Descriptions are beginning to emerge about what happened in Ukraine. McKernan’s story in The Guardian reported that in the wake of Russian troop withdrawal from areas surrounding Kyiv, “women and girls have come forward to tell the police, media and human rights organisations of atrocities they have suffered at the hands of Russian soldiers.” “Gang-rapes, assaults taking place at gunpoint, and rapes committed in front of children are among the grim testimonies collected by investigators,” McKernan wrote.
I have studied the subject of rape during ethnic conflict for over 20 years. Rape as a strategy of war has the effect of undermining the cohesiveness of a community by attacking its very foundation – the women. This is because in many societies rape victims are re-victimized by their own communities, where they are blamed for having been raped.
I believe that the Ukraine conflict is an ethnic war. One of the primary goals of ethnic war is the destruction or deconstruction of culture, and not necessarily just the military defeat of the enemy’s army. The deconstruction of culture is achieved through injuring and destroying human beings. For feminist scholars Elaine Scarry and Ruth Seifert, women are the standard bearers of the society who perpetuate the culture and, therefore, are among war’s first targets.
Historically wartime rape was misconceived as an unintended and unavoidable consequence of war, following from the fact that soldiers were violent, and women – perceived as chattel and property for centuries – were part of the rewards of victory.
Even during the Rwandan genocide, rape was perceived as an unintentional consequence of war: “Rape has long been characterized and dismissed by the military and political leaders as a private crime or the unfortunate behavior of a renegade soldier,” according to a 1996 Human Rights Watch report.
Delay in acknowledging rape’s role
With the prevailing attitude that rape is a natural part of war, it’s not surprising that the Genocide Convention of 1948, which criminalized certain violations after World War II, failed to include rape as a war crime, even though both the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals referred to it.
It wasn’t until 2008 that the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 1820, stating that rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, or one of the contributing factors when determining whether genocide has been committed.
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Part of what led to such a long delay in acknowledging rape’s role in war was the “mischaracterization of rape as a crime against honor, and not as a crime against the physical integrity of the victim,” as Human Rights Watch staffers Dorothy Q. Thomas and Regan E. Ralph have written.
The use of rape during war might [reconfigure identities], changing how people and communities see themselves and especially whether they reject the children born of rape or embrace them as members of their community.
‘I’m not a beauty for you’
As a tactic to subdue and control a population in Ukraine, rape may be less likely to achieve the intended results and have Ukrainians flee and never return.
There are several explanations for why this is the case. First, Ukrainians have been able to fend off Russian military advances, and the war has not lasted for months or years – so far. Second, women have been crucial to the Ukrainian resistance and play key roles in Ukrainian military and government. And third, because of the evolution of international law to designate rape as a potential war crime, there is now precedent in the prosecutions of Ratko Mladic, Slobodan Milosevic, Jean-Pierre Bemba and Jean-Paul Akayesu for war crimes and rape that may serve as a deterrent.
Putin described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in sexual terms, quoting a Soviet-era punk group’s lyrics about rape and necrophilia: “You sleep my beauty, you’re going to have to put up with it anyway.”
The answer to that shocking statement, The Economist reports, has shown up in Lviv, Ukraine. That’s where you can “see posters of a woman in Ukrainian folk costumes pushing a gun into Putin’s mouth.”
“I’m not a beauty for you,” the woman says.