A complaint lodged concerning a case of rape, and papers relating to the enquiry which followed (Soviet Lithuania, 1959)

A complaint lodged concerning a case of rape, and papers relating to the enquiry which followed (Soviet Lithuania, 1959) On 10 June 1959, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union received a communication from a Lithuanian woman, Elena Spirgeviien, also signed by one of her daughters and her son, protesting against the posthumous award of the title of Hero of the Soviet Union to Alfonsas eponis, a Soviet partisan who had died in 1944 during a Gestapo operation. According to Elena Spirgeviien, this man did not deserve the title: he had belonged to a criminal gang which had raped her, murdered her sister, and attempted to rape, then killed, her daughter, Elena Spirgeviit. These events, still controversial today, demonstrate the complexity of the situation in Lithuania and similar territories occupied by the German army during the Second World War, where Soviet partisans waged a long guerrilla war until the arrival of the Red Army. It also shows the different ways in which both victims and party officials refer to rape, situating it within the whole range of violent acts suffered during the war (looting, murders etc.)

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