Leonid Rabichev, a prominent Soviet painter and poet, was born in 1923 in Moscow. At this time, his father worked as a customs officer, while studying at the evening department of Moscow State University. He was an ideological communist, who had joined the Party back in 1917, while taking part in the establishment of Soviet rule in the city of Saratov on the Volga. In 1918, he was expelled from the Party for an administrative misdemeanor, put on trial, and sentenced to death. He spent some time on death row, but was pardoned and released in 1919. He then moved to Moscow and, according to Jewish tradition, married his late brother's widow and adopted her son Viktor, who was several years Leonid's senior. Leonid’s mother, another communist true believer, had received no education. However, Leonid would recall her as an excellent homemaker, who took good care of the children.
In 1931, Leonid began to attend school. As a child, he was interested in literature, history, and archeology. After finishing school, he enrolled in the Institute of Law and joined a literary club, where he learned to compose poetry. He quickly realized that law was not his true vocation – but, by then, it was too late to switch, since the Soviet-German War broke out in June 1941. During the first months of the war, Rabichev and his fellow students were part of a team that produced pictures and posters with propaganda poems. He was responsible for creating both the pictures and the verse. In October 1941, as German troops approached Moscow, he and his family were evacuated to Ufa (a city in Bashkiria, beyond the Urals). From there, Rabichev was drafted into the Red Army in 1942.
That same year, Rabichev graduated from a military academy, becoming a lieutenant and a platoon commander in the Signal Corps in December. He went on to fight on the Central, 3rd Belorussian, and 1st Ukrainian Fronts, and took part in the liberation of several German-occupied Soviet cities (Rzhev, Smolensk, Orsha, Minsk, and Grodno). He later saw action in East Prussia, Silesia, and Czechoslovakia. In the course of the war, he was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class, and the Order of the Red Star.
In his book of memoirs The War Will Excuse Everything (2005), Rabichev describes the mass rapes and other war crimes committed by the Red Army in East Prussia in the spring of 1945. His highly emotional account draws on his firsthand observations of Soviet atrocities against the German civilian population, especially the mass sexual violence against women. The book pins most of the blame for these crimes on the Red Army high command, and particularly on General Ivan Chernyakhovsky, who led the troops fighting in East Prussia. In Rabichev's view, the extent of the violence largely depended on the decisions of the individual commander. According to the book, when Marshal Ivan Konev's army entered Silesia, he ordered the execution of forty soldiers caught raping, thereby putting a stop to the rapes and killings of civilians.
After the end of the war, in 1946-1947, Rabichev was a member of the literary association of Moscow University, which was led by the outstanding poet Mikhail Zenkevich. Rabichev was invited to give a reading of his poetry at a literary soiree held at the Writers' Union and in the Communist Auditorium of Moscow State University – a venue that was typically reserved for the most distinguished poets. In 1951, he graduated from the Arts Department of the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. He went on to work in the field of book graphics and applied art. In 1952, he married a fellow art student named Viktoria Shumilina, and two years later their son Fyodor was born.
In 1962, Rabichev took part in the “New Reality” exhibition at the Moscow Manege, which became notorious because of the speech made there by Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviet leader promised to “bury” the West and called for the banning of works that failed to adhere to the strictures of the Communist Party, according to which Soviet art was to be straightforward and realistic, and appeal to workers and peasants. While touring the Manege, Khrushchev shouted obscenities at the artists, promised to deport them, and ordered the exhibition closed. This was one of the signs of the end of Khrushchev’s “thaw” — a period of relative liberalization of Soviet political and cultural life, which had reversed some of the repressive policies of the Stalin era.
Rabichev managed to organize many personal exhibitions, and he also took part in international group exhibitions in Berlin, Paris, Montreal, Cambridge, Warsaw, and Spain. Nowadays, his paintings and graphic works are held in museums and private collections in Russia and many other countries. He was also a poet, essayist, and novelist, publishing a total of sixteen poetry collections and six prose books in his lifetime.
Leonid Rabichev died in Moscow in 2017, aged ninety-four.
Related Resources
Rabichev’s memoirs about the war crimes committed by the Red Army in East Prussia in the spring of 1945
Enlightenment comes unexpectedly. It is no game or self-assertion; it comes from very different spheres; it is repentance. Like a splinter, it is lodged not just within me, but within my entire generation – and, possibly, within humanity as a whole. It is a particular instance, a fragment of the criminal century, and one cannot live a dignified life with this crime – any more than one can live with the dekulakization of the 1930s, the Gulag, the deaths of tens of millions of innocents, or the occupation of Poland in 1939. One cannot die a dignified death without this repentance. I was a platoon commander; I felt sick, trying to adopt the role of an outside observer. But my soldiers stood in those horrible, criminal lines; they laughed, when they ought to have been burning with shame, seeing as they were actually committing crimes against humanity.
Leonid Rabichev, The War Will Excuse Everything (Moscow, 2008), p. 204.
