Soviet war crimes  

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The war crimes which were perpetrated by the Soviet Union and its armed forces from 1919 to 1991 include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the NKVD, including acts which were committed by the NKVD's Internal Troops. In some cases, these acts were committed upon the orders of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet Government's policy of Red Terror. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.

A significant number of these incidents occurred in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe before, during and in the aftermath of World War II, involving summary executions and the mass murder of prisoners of war, such as in the Katyn massacre and mass rape by troops of the Red Army in territories they occupied.

When the Allied Powers of World War II founded the post-war International Military Tribunal to examine war crimes committed during the conflict by Nazi Germany, with officials from the Soviet Union taking an active part in the judicial processes, there was no examination of Allied Forces' actions and no charges were ever brought against its troops, because they were also an undefeated power which then held Europe under military occupation, marring the historical authority of the Tribunal's activity as being, in part, victor's justice.

Today, the Russian government engages in historical negationism. in Russian history textbooks, the atrocities are either altered to portray the Soviets positively or omitted entirely. In a June 2017 interview, Russian president Vladimir Putin acknowledged the "horrors of Stalinism", but he also criticized the "excessive demonization of Stalin" by "Russia's enemies".

See also

• Russian war crimes
• United States war crimes
• Allied war crimes during World War II
• Destruction battalions
• Evacuation of East Prussia
• Forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union
• German war crimes
• Italian war crimes
• Japanese POWs in the Soviet Union
• Japanese war crimes
• List of Soviet Union perpetrated war crimes
• Mass graves in the Soviet Union
• Mass operations of the NKVD
• Nemmersdorf massacre
• NKVD prisoner massacres
• Operation Frühlingserwachen
• Population transfer in the Soviet Union
• Red Terror
• Soviet occupation
• War crimes and atrocities of the Waffen-SS
• War crimes of the Wehrmacht
• Crimes against humanity under communist regimes
• Mass killings under communist regimes
• Anti-communist mass killings