Poland does not press charges against artist over sculpture of Soviet rapist

Polish prosecutors said Thursday they would not charge an art student who enraged Russia by installing a sculpture of a Soviet soldier raping a pregnant woman in the Baltic port city of Gdansk. “In the sculptor’s conduct, we saw no signs of inciting racial or national hatred or desecrating a public place used to commemorate a historic event,” Gdansk prosecutors said in a statement. But they said art student Jerzy Bohdan Szumczyk, 26, could face fines for his unauthorized art exhibition after police investigations conclude. Szumczyk installed the life-size sculpture from Saturday night into Sunday next to a communist-era monument honoring the Red Army for chasing Nazi troops from the city in 1945. Historians say Soviet soldiers raped numerous women during the liberation, but there are no statistics. “I wanted to show the tragedy of women and the horrors of war,” Szumczyk told AFP on Wednesday. The sculpture was on display for just a few hours before police removed it following a tip-off from a local resident. But the Russian ambassador in Warsaw got wind of the sculpture and condemned it on the embassy website as “vulgar” and “openly blasphemous.” “I am deeply outraged by the prank of a student at the Gdansk Academy of Arts, whose pseudo-art desecrated the memory of 600,000 Soviet soldiers who died fighting for Poland’s freedom and independence,” Ambassador Alexander Alexeyev said on Tuesday. Szumczyk said his work was “an expression of pacifism and a signal for peace” that was not specifically aimed at the Red Army monument. Such monuments regularly provoke anger in Poland, as they depict not only the city’s liberation from the Nazis, but also Moscow’s 50-year rule over Poland, during which dozens of Poles were killed. The situation is particularly sensitive in Gdansk, which was part of Germany until the end of World War I, when it became a free city with a predominantly German population. At the beginning of World War II, it was occupied by Nazi Germany. Most of the women raped by Soviet soldiers in March and April 1945 were Germans, as well as Poles and Russians who had been deported there by the Nazis to work in factories. Western historians have long written about the atrocities, but in Russia the subject has never been widely discussed and remains largely taboo. It is believed that Stalin and his military commanders ignored reports of abuses.