Crimes Against Women Under Communism: An Evidence Based Study

What does the record show about crimes against women under communism? We reviewed court judgments, UN inquiries, state archives, official statistics and peer-reviewed studies on about 20 communist states and movements and three Indian states with elected Left governments. Three patterns recur. Armies under communist command committed mass rape, worst in 1944-45, when the most-cited estimate for Germany alone is 1.9 million victims¹, a figure historians dispute. States used women's bodies as policy, through Romania's abortion ban, which killed almost ten thousand women², and China's birth quotas.

Detention systems from Soviet Ukraine to North Korea exposed women to rape with near-total impunity, and in Tibet, Cambodia and Colombia the control of women's sexual lives was itself an instrument of rule. In West Bengal, records tie ruling-party supporters to rapes.

What are we asking about crimes against women under communism?

The question is simple to state and hard to answer well: what crimes against women were committed, ordered, enabled or covered up by governments and movements that called themselves communist, in the years of revolution and in the decades after, and how strong is the evidence for each? By crimes against women we mean rape and other sexual violence, forced marriage, forced abortion and sterilisation, the punishment of women for the acts of their husbands, abduction, trafficking, and the deaths of women caused by state policy on reproduction.

The question matters because the record is fought over. Some people treat any figure that reflects badly on communist states as Cold War propaganda. Others repeat large numbers that turn out, when traced, to rest on a single guess. Both habits do harm to the women concerned, whose experiences deserve to be counted carefully or not at all. This post tries to do the first: to set out what is established, what is estimated and what is only alleged, and to say which is which.

Which states and movements are included?

We include every state ruled by a communist party for a sustained period where we could find documented evidence: the Soviet Union and the armies under its command, the European people's republics, China (including Tibet and Xinjiang), Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, Cuba, Ethiopia under the Derg, Afghanistan under the People's Democratic Party, Mozambique, Angola and Nicaragua. We also include Nepal, where a Maoist party fought a ten-year insurgency and later led governments, and three Indian states where communist parties won elections: West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala.

These are very different cases. A one-party state that runs labour camps and an elected state government inside a federal democracy cannot be judged by the same test. We keep them apart throughout. For the revolutionary states the main question is what the state and its forces did. For the Indian states, where police and courts answer to a national constitution, the question is whether crimes against women were different under Left governments than under the parties that came before and after them.

How do we sort the evidence?

We sort every finding into one of four kinds:

1. Acts by state forces or party members: soldiers, police, guards, cadres.
2. State policies that harmed women by design: abortion bans, birth quotas, sterilisation incentives, the punishment of wives and families.
3. Crimes by others that the state tolerated, failed to stop or covered up.
4. General crime recorded in a society while a communist party governed it, which may or may not have anything to do with the party.

The fourth kind is the weakest. A rise in recorded rape under a given government can mean more rape, more reporting, a new legal definition or a change in how police record cases. We treat such numbers with the most caution.

We also grade sources. A court judgment or a UN commission of inquiry, which hears witnesses and weighs evidence, carries more weight than a newspaper report. State archives published by historians carry weight because the regime itself produced them. Survey data carry weight when the sample is large and representative. Testimony gathered by human rights groups is often the only evidence available from closed states, and we use it, but we say when a finding rests on it alone.

What did we expect to find?

We set down two working claims before writing, and a test for each. The first claim: that communist governments produced patterns of crimes against women that were directed by the state, not merely tolerated. We would call it supported if, in several unrelated states, a court, a UN body or the regime's own records showed a policy or order that caused the harm. We would call it unsupported if the documented cases were mostly individual crimes without a policy behind them.

The second claim, for India: that elected Left governments in West Bengal, Tripura and Kerala presided over more crimes against women than the parties that governed those states before or after them. We would call it supported if recorded crimes and survey measures were consistently worse under the Left than under its successors in the same state, after allowing for national trends. We would call it unsupported if the differences ran in both directions or could be explained by reporting.

What have earlier studies found?

Most research looks at one country at a time. Historians of the Second World War have argued for decades about how many German women Soviet soldiers raped; the German parliament's research service reviewed the estimates in 2021 and concluded that no definitive number is possible because almost no statistics exist.¹ Demographers studying China and India have estimated how many women are missing from those populations because of sex selection and excess female mortality.³

The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia convicted the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders of forced marriage and rape within forced marriage as crimes against humanity.⁴ The UN Commission of Inquiry on North Korea found forced abortion, infanticide and rape in detention to be crimes against humanity.⁵

What is missing is a single account that sets these findings side by side, states the strength of each, and compares them with what armies and governments of other kinds did. That is what this post attempts. It does not attempt a single global count, which the evidence cannot support.

Which records did we use?

No single dataset covers this subject, so we assembled one from six kinds of record, opened and checked one by one. The table lists them with an example of each and what each can and cannot tell us.

For the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the main sources are Soviet orders and reports published from the archives after 1991, Soviet Gulag statistics compiled by the historian Viktor Zemskov,⁸ Pavel Polian's archival study of forced migrations,¹⁰ a 2021 review of rape estimates by the German Bundestag's research service,¹ a Czech ombudsman's 2005 investigation of sterilisations,¹¹ and a 1993 reproductive health survey of Romania (https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/8248) run with the US Centers for Disease Control.²

For China the main sources are official family planning statistics reported in peer-reviewed work,¹²¹³ demographic estimates of missing women,³ the UN human rights office's 2022 assessment of Xinjiang (https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/2022-08-31/22-08-31-final-assesment.pdf),¹⁴ the Chinese government's own white paper in reply,¹⁵ and archival research on the Mao era. For North Korea the main source is the 2014 report of the UN Commission of Inquiry (https://www.michaelkirby.com.au/images/stories/pdf/COI_DPRK_REPORT.pdf), which drew on public hearings and confidential interviews with escapees,⁵ with later UN and Human Rights Watch reports.¹⁶¹⁷

For Cambodia the main source is the Case 002/02 judgment of the Extraordinary Chambers (https://www.eccc.gov.kh/sites/default/files/documents/courtdoc/%5Bdate-in-tz%5D/20181217%20Summary%20of%20Judgement%20Case%20002-02%20ENG_FINAL%20FOR%20PUBLICATION.pdf), supported by survey work among survivors.¹⁸ For the other states we relied mainly on UN, Inter-American and court records, and on Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch where nothing else exists.

For India we used the National Crime Records Bureau's annual Crime in India reports, the bureau's district-level table of crimes against women for 2001 to 2012,⁶ and three rounds of the National Family Health Survey, a household survey that asks women directly about violence.¹⁹²⁰

How complete is the record?

Very uneven. For some subjects the evidence is strong because a court or the regime itself counted: the Khmer Rouge marriage policy, Romania's abortion deaths, China's sterilisation totals, the number of wives Stalin's police arrested. For others the best figures are extrapolations from a few hospital records or a small survey, and we say so. For some countries we found almost nothing that meets our standard, notably Bulgaria, Mongolia, South Yemen, Benin and the Republic of the Congo, and we do not fill the gap with guesses.

Indian data are fuller but bring their own problems. NCRB counts are counts of cases registered by police. Most violence against women in India is never reported to the police at all: in the 2005-06 health survey, only 0.56% of women who had experienced physical or sexual violence reported it to the police²¹. So a state with more registered crime may have more crime, or may simply have police stations that write more of it down.

How did we decide what counts?

Step one: for each country we listed every specific harm to women that appeared in at least one source we could open: a law, an order, a court finding, a statistic or a documented case. We discarded any claim that we could trace only to an unsourced web page, a social-media post or a single advocacy pamphlet.

Step two: we graded each item by the strongest source supporting it. Grade A means a court finding, a UN or regional commission finding, or the regime's own document. Grade B means official statistics or peer-reviewed research. Grade C means a credible human rights report or press investigation with named witnesses. Grade D means an allegation that has never been tested and that we report only to say it exists. We state the grade in the synthesis table at the end of the findings.

Step three: for every number that is disputed we looked for at least two independent estimates and report the range, the method behind each, and who made it. Where only one estimate exists we say so.

Step four: we classified each harm by who did it and why, using the four kinds set out above: acts by state forces, harm by state policy, crimes the state tolerated, and general crime.

Step five: we looked for comparisons. A finding that the Red Army raped on a mass scale means more when set beside what other armies did in the same war. A finding that China has millions of missing women means more beside India, which has a similar problem without a communist government. Each comparison is sourced.

How did we handle the Indian data?

India's crime statistics changed in two ways that matter. Until 2011 the bureau published rates per 100,000 people; from 2012 it published rates per 100,000 women, which roughly doubles the number for the same count. And in 2013 Parliament broadened the legal definition of rape and created new offences of sexual harassment, stalking and voyeurism²², so counts before and after 2013 are not like for like.

We therefore compare states with India in the same year, never with themselves across a definition change, and we report counts for the Left years (2001 to 2011 in West Bengal) as counts, not rates. For 2001 to 2012 the bureau's district table gives seven offence heads under the Indian Penal Code: rape, kidnapping and abduction of women, dowry deaths, assault and insult to modesty, cruelty by husband or relatives, and importation of girls. We add those seven. The sum is lower than the bureau's full total, which also includes offences under special laws.

To check recorded crime against something less sensitive to police behaviour, we use the National Family Health Survey, which asks a sample of women in every state whether their husbands have hit them or forced sex on them. Survey answers have their own biases, but they do not depend on a woman walking into a police station.

How did we handle disputed numbers?

Three rules. We never quote the largest number on its own. We say how each estimate was built. And where an estimate is an extrapolation from a small base, such as hospital records multiplied up to a whole country, we say that too.

Take the rapes in Germany in 1945 as an example. The most-quoted figure, 1.9 million, comes from Gerhard Reichling and was published by Helke Sander and Barbara Johr in 1992; the Bundestag's researchers note it has been repeated many times without new calculation.¹ The historian Miriam Gebhardt built a different estimate from records of children born to occupation soldiers and reached 860,000 victims of all occupying armies, Soviet and Western, between 1944 and 1955.¹ Both rest on chains of assumptions. We report both and do not pick one.

What happened to women in the Russian revolution and civil war?

The first communist state was born in a civil war of extreme brutality, and sexual violence was part of it on every side. The most careful recent study, by the historian Thomas Chopard, examined the pogroms against Jews in Ukraine between 1917 and 1922. He found that the scale and systematic use of rape was greatest among the anti-Bolshevik forces, especially the White armies, but that Red Army soldiers raped too; in Uman, he records, they stripped men and women and raped them almost in the street.²³

Chopard also deals with one of the most repeated stories of the period: a decree on the "socialisation of women", supposedly issued by local Bolsheviks, that made women common property. The decree is a recognised fake circulated by the Whites. Yet, he writes, the rumours did not come from nowhere: they were fed by reports of mass rapes by Red troops.²³ At the same time, the new Soviet state put on paper some of the most advanced protections for women in the world. In November 1920 it made abortion legal and free in Soviet hospitals²⁴.

How did Stalin's police punish women for their husbands?

The clearest case of a crime against women by deliberate order in the Soviet record is the treatment of the wives of men arrested as enemies of the people. On 15 August 1937 the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, signed Operational Order No. 00486. It instructed police across the country to begin repressing the wives of "traitors to the motherland"²⁵ and to send them to camps for at least five to eight years. The women had committed no offence: the order punished them for their marriages. The order also dealt with their children.

Nursing infants were to go to the camps with their mothers and then to children's homes. Children aged three to fifteen were to be placed in orphanages, and children over fifteen judged "socially dangerous" were to be sent before the NKVD's Special Board.²⁵ Fourteen months later, Yezhov and his successor Lavrentiy Beria reported to Stalin on the result. On incomplete data, more than 18,000 wives had been repressed²⁶, more than 3,000 of them in Moscow and about 1,500 in Leningrad. Stalin wrote one word on the report: "Correct".²⁶

Stalin wrote one word on the report: "Correct".

How many women passed through the Gulag?

Women were always a minority in Soviet camps, but a large one at times, and their share rose sharply during the Second World War. The historian Viktor Zemskov, using the Gulag administration's own statistics, found that women were 5.9% of camp prisoners at the start of 1934, 7.6% in 1941 and 24% at the start of 1945, when 168,634 women were held in the camps⁸. In the labour colonies, where shorter sentences were served, women made up 38% of prisoners in 1945. On 1 April 1954, a year after Stalin's death, 177,544 women were still held.⁸

Some of those women were pregnant or gave birth in captivity. Zemskov's tables show 6,779 pregnant women and 14,630 children under their mothers' care in the camps and colonies at the start of 1947, rising to 35,505 children by 1953. The death rate in the camps' homes for prisoners' infants was 409 per 1,000 children in 1947⁸; it fell year by year to 46 per 1,000 in 1953.⁸

The statistics do not say how many of the pregnancies resulted from rape by guards or other prisoners, or how many were consensual; the published figures do not record it.

What did the 1936 abortion ban do?

In June 1936, as part of a drive to raise the birth rate, the Soviet government reversed its 1920 decree and banned abortion. Doctors who performed one faced one to two years in prison; women who had one faced public censure and then a fine for a repeat offence.²⁷ The historian Lewis Siegelbaum reports that registered abortions fell from about 1.9 million in 1935 to 570,000 in 1937 and then rose again to 755,000 in 1939, with the true number probably much higher as women turned to illegal operations.

Infant mortality, according to the health commissar, rose from 146 to 162 per 1,000 between 1935 and 1938.²⁷ We found no verified count of women who died from illegal abortions in the USSR between 1936 and 1955, when abortion was legalised again. That is a gap in the record, not evidence that there were none. The comparison with Romania after 1966, where the deaths were counted, suggests the toll could have been substantial.

What does the Beria case show?

Lavrentiy Beria, head of the secret police from 1938 and one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union, was arrested by his colleagues after Stalin's death in 1953. At the Central Committee plenum that July, a party official read out the testimony of Sarkisov, the head of Beria's bodyguard. Sarkisov said that a schoolgirl and other women had become pregnant by Beria, that two had been given abortions, and that he had kept a list of the women on Beria's orders, of which one copy survived with 25 to 27 names.²⁸

The hall, the stenogram records, laughed. The record supports sexual exploitation of women by one of the most powerful officials in the state, with the state's security apparatus arranging it. It does not support the much larger numbers, in the hundreds, that later writers have attached to Beria; we found no document giving them.²⁸ Beria's prosecution was also a political act by rivals, which is a reason for some caution about the detail.

What did the Red Army do in Yugoslavia, Romania and Hungary?

As the Red Army fought its way west in 1944 and 1945, its soldiers committed rape on a mass scale, and the first protests came from communist allies. Milovan Djilas, a leader of Tito's partisans, recorded that the Yugoslav authorities collected complaints of 121 rapes, a number of them with murder, and 1,204 cases of looting with assault²⁹, even though the Red Army crossed only the north-eastern corner of the country.²⁹ Tito's biographer Vladimir Dedijer gave a figure of 1,219 rapes.³⁰ Djilas raised the matter with Soviet commanders and was rebuffed. Later, at a dinner in the Kremlin, Stalin answered him directly.

Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?

— Stalin to Milovan Djilas, as recorded in Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (1962)

In Romania, then changing sides, local authorities recorded 231 rapes in Arad county in three weeks of September and October 1944 and 213 in Iasi county in ten days.³⁰ For Hungary, where the siege of Budapest lasted into February 1945, estimates range widely: the historian Andrea Peto estimated 50,000 to 200,000 rapes from medical and abortion records; Krisztian Ungvary has written that in many towns 10-15% of women were raped; Attila Horvath has put the figure as high as about 800,000.³⁰ The historian Vojin Majstorovic, who collected these estimates, himself argues that the Red Army showed relative restraint in Yugoslavia compared with enemy territory.³⁰

How many women were raped in Germany, Austria and Poland in 1945?

Nobody knows precisely. The German Bundestag's research service, reviewing the literature in 2021, concluded that no definitive answer is possible because almost no statistical material exists, and that all the figures are rough extrapolations resting on assumptions.¹ For Berlin the estimates are relatively consistent. Helke Sander and Barbara Johr, working from the records of the Charite hospital, estimated 94,450 to 131,000 victims, with a mean of about 110,000. Gerhard Reichling put the Berlin figure at at least 100,000.¹

The historian Antony Beevor, citing the city's two main hospitals, gives 95,000 to 130,000, and reports one doctor's estimate that about 10,000 of the roughly 100,000 Berlin victims died, mostly by suicide.³¹ For Germany as a whole, Reichling's estimate of 1.9 million, of whom 1.4 million were in the eastern territories and during the flight west and 500,000 in the later Soviet zone, is the most quoted; Beevor writes of at least two million.¹³¹

Miriam Gebhardt's lower estimate of 860,000 covers all occupying armies from 1944 to 1955, and her own breakdown attributes a substantial share to Western soldiers; she calls that breakdown speculative.¹

In Austria, the historian Barbara Stelzl-Marx estimates about 240,000 rapes in Vienna and Lower Austria combined, about 20,000 in Burgenland and about 10,000 in Styria.³² In Poland, which the Red Army was liberating from German occupation, the historians Joanna Ostrowska and Marcin Zaremba found 268 rapes recorded in the village of Debska Kuznia alone by the end of June 1945, and a March 1945 report from Olsztyn stating that almost no woman had been spared. Whether the Polish total approached 100,000 they leave, in their words, to conjecture.³³

Soviet soldiers also raped women of their own side. Beevor cites the war correspondent Vasily Grossman's notes that Soviet women freed from German forced labour complained of being raped by their liberators.³¹ And in Manchuria in 1945, where the Red Army invaded in August, leaders of one group of Japanese settlers, the Kurokawa group, handed 15 unmarried young women to Soviet soldiers in exchange for food and protection; the survivors spoke publicly only from 2013.³⁴ We found no reliable estimate of how many women Soviet soldiers raped in Manchuria or northern Korea.

Was the rape ordered?

We found no document ordering Soviet soldiers to rape, and historians who have worked in the archives do not claim one exists. What the record shows is tolerance from the top. Djilas's complaint was dismissed by the Soviet general he raised it with as an insult to the Red Army, and Stalin's reply was an excuse.²⁹ This matters for the first of our working claims. Mass rape by the Red Army is established beyond reasonable doubt, and the leadership's response encouraged it.

But it falls into our third category, crimes the state tolerated, more than the first. It also has to be set beside what other armies did. The Bundestag review notes that sexual violence by German troops in the occupied Soviet Union was "no exception", although no estimate of its scale exists.¹ Gebhardt's work suggests Western soldiers raped many more German women than was long assumed.¹ The evidence shows mass rape by Soviet soldiers on a very large scale; it does not show that such crimes were unique to them.

Why were ethnic German women deported to the USSR?

Alongside the rapes came a less well known crime aimed partly at women by design. On 16 December 1944 the Soviet State Defence Committee ordered the mobilisation for labour in the USSR of all able-bodied ethnic Germans in Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia: men aged 17 to 45 and women aged 18 to 30¹⁰. The upper age for women was lower than for men, so the order swept up young women in particular. Soviet records show that 112,480 people were interned, of whom 51,105 were women¹⁰.

In Yugoslavia women were about two-thirds of those taken. Mortality among the deportees was 19.2%.¹⁰ A study of the deportations from Romania found that mothers of infants were supposed to be exempt but that the rule was not respected, and estimated that 10,000 to 20,000 of the deportees from Romania died.³⁵

The deportations did not stop with the war. In March 1949, in Operation Priboi, the Soviet authorities deported 94,779 people from the Baltic republics, of whom 41,987 were women and 27,084 children; in July the same year they deported 35,796 people from Moldova, 14,033 of them women.¹⁰ These were whole families, deported because of their class or their politics, and women and children were the majority.

Do Soviet population figures show "missing women"?

No, and it is worth saying so plainly because the claim circulates. The 1959 Soviet census showed 18.43 million more women than men among people born between 1889 and 1928, and only 641 men for every 1,000 women aged 30 to 69.³⁶ Those are missing men, killed overwhelmingly in the war. The Soviet population data cannot be used as evidence of crimes against women.

What did Romania's abortion ban cost women?

Of all the state policies in this review, Romania's Decree 770 has the clearest and best-counted toll. Issued by Nicolae Ceausescu's government on 1 October 1966, its first article was blunt: termination of pregnancy is prohibited³⁷. Abortion was allowed only to save the woman's life, for hereditary disease or serious disability, for women over 45, for women who had already borne and were raising four children, and after rape or incest. Every other abortion was a crime.³⁷ Women did not stop having abortions. They had them illegally, often in dangerous conditions, and many died.

A national reproductive health survey carried out with the US Centers for Disease Control after the regime fell found that almost ten thousand women died during the period 1966-1989² as a result. In the 1980s Romania's maternal mortality averaged 150 deaths per 100,000 live births, and 80-85% of those deaths were due to illegal abortion. The abortion-related death rate was eight times its level before 1966.² A study in the American Journal of Public Health called it the highest maternal mortality rate in Europe.³⁸

The state enforced the ban through women's bodies. Gynaecologists examined women at their workplaces, every four months in factories, and recorded pregnancies; hospitals had to report women admitted after botched abortions, and some doctors were jailed.³⁹ After the ban was lifted in December 1989, maternal mortality fell to 60 per 100,000 by 1992.² The children born under the policy bore part of the cost. Romania's institute for investigating communist crimes has found that more than 300,000 children were placed in state institutions between 1954 and 1989 and that more than 15,000 died in them.⁴⁰

Human Rights Watch counted more than 100,000 children in institutions in 1990, in a system built to cope with the results of the coercive birth policy.⁴¹

Did other Eastern Bloc states police pregnancy?

Hungary did, for a shorter time. Under the government of Matyas Rakosi, a 1953 decision made it compulsory to report and register every pregnancy so the state could track its outcome. Convictions for procuring abortion rose from 447 in 1950 to 1,538 in 1953, and 123 people were sentenced to five to ten years. Trials were often staged to humiliate pregnant women in public, many of them mothers of several children. Hungary liberalised abortion in June 1956.⁴²

What were East Germany's closed venereal wards?

From the 1960s until 1989, the German Democratic Republic ran closed wards for venereal disease in about ten cities, including Berlin, Halle, Leipzig, Dresden and Rostock. Girls and women could be committed there by the police or youth authorities, often not because they were ill but because they were labelled "vagrants".⁴³⁴⁴ The numbers are recorded. In 1968 alone, 2,763 girls and women aged 12 to 72 were committed, and 72% of them were completely healthy⁴³.

They were held for up to 12 weeks and examined gynaecologically every day; according to the medical historian Florian Steger, they were released only after thirty negative smears.⁴³ In the Leipzig-Thonberg ward, a study of 1,474 patient files from 1961 to 1990 found that only 29% of those committed actually had a venereal disease; 52% had been committed for "vagrancy", more than half of them minors, and the average age was 19.5.⁴⁴ Committals for "vagrancy" had no legal basis, and since 2016 German courts have ruled committals to the Halle and Leipzig wards unlawful.⁴⁴

In March 2026 the German parliament's commissioner for victims of the communist regime held a hearing on the wards. It heard that tens of thousands of girls and young women had been committed, about 5,000 in Halle alone, and heard one former inmate, committed at 15, testify that inmates had been raped one after another.⁴⁵ That is a single witness's account and has not yet been corroborated in the published record; we report it as testimony. East Germany also held women political prisoners.

Hoheneck castle in Saxony was the state's central women's prison from 1950 to 1989; about 24,000 women were held there, about 8,000 of them for political reasons⁴⁶, in overcrowded cells averaging about 14 degrees, with forced labour and Stasi informants among staff and inmates.⁴⁶ A federally funded study published in 2026 found that about 11% of some 95,000 adoptions in the GDR involved excessive harshness by youth welfare authorities, but no systematic political programme of forced adoption.⁴⁷ We note it because the claim of mass forced adoption is often made; the evidence does not support it in that form.

Were Roma women sterilised in Czechoslovakia?

Yes, and in this case the democratic successor states have investigated, apologised and, in the Czech Republic, paid compensation. In 1973 Czechoslovakia introduced a one-off cash benefit for women who agreed to be sterilised, and a 1988 decree raised it to up to 10,000 crowns plus goods. Regional reports from the 1970s, found by the Czech ombudsman in the archives, spoke openly of curbing the birth rate to avoid what one called the undesirable growth of Gypsy families.¹¹

The ombudsman, Otakar Motejl, examined 87 complaints and concluded in 2005 that free and informed consent was missing in every case he examined. Before 1990, Romani women were persuaded, with a tacit approval and support from the management¹¹ of hospitals and social services, and the cash benefit was the main motivation in a number of cases.¹¹ He found no official instruction to reduce the Roma population, but held the state responsible for tolerating and encouraging the practice. The practice did not end with communism.

In 2021 the Czech parliament passed a law paying 300,000 crowns to people unlawfully sterilised between 1966 and 2012; by February 2025 more than 2,300 people had applied and 1,581 claims had been decided, 581 of them rejected.⁴⁸ In Slovakia, a 2003 study interviewed more than 230 Romani women and found more than 140 who had been coercively or forcibly sterilised, about 30 of them under the communist-era incentive scheme and the rest after 1989.⁴⁹

In 2021 the Slovak government apologised, naming 1966 to 1989 as the main period and linking it to state policy on the size of the Roma population.⁵⁰

What happened to women in Albania and Czechoslovakia's show trials?

Albania under Enver Hoxha interned the families of political opponents, so that women, children and old people were punished for the acts of their relatives, as Stalin's wives order had done. At the Tepelena camp, which operated from 1949 to 1954, about 1,500 families were held; Albania's state security archive records the number of children in the camp falling from 460 in January 1950 to 164 in December 1950, during a typhus epidemic.⁵¹ Women were also among the victims of the political trials of the late 1940s and 1950s.

In Czechoslovakia, the politician Milada Horakova was hanged on 27 June 1950 after a show trial prepared with Soviet advisers; the verdict was annulled in 1968 and she was fully rehabilitated after 1989.⁵²

1. 1918-1922Rape by Red Army soldiers during the civil war, alongside larger-scale rape by White forcesSource 23 (opens the source in a new tab)
2. 1920Soviet Russia legalises abortionSource 24 (opens the source in a new tab)
3. 1936USSR bans abortionSource 27 (opens the source in a new tab)
4. 1937NKVD Order 00486 orders the repression of wives of "traitors"Source 25 (opens the source in a new tab)
5. 1938Yezhov and Beria report more than 18,000 wives repressedSource 26 (opens the source in a new tab)
6. 1944-1945Mass rape by Soviet soldiers in Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Austria and GermanySource 1 (opens the source in a new tab)
7. December 1944Order to deport ethnic German women aged 18-30 and men aged 17-45 for labourSource 10 (opens the source in a new tab)
8. 1945Women reach 24% of Gulag camp prisoners and 38% of colony prisonersSource 8 (opens the source in a new tab)
9. 1949Baltic deportation: 41,987 of 94,779 deportees are womenSource 10 (opens the source in a new tab)
10. 1950Milada Horakova executed in PragueSource 52 (opens the source in a new tab)
11. 1953Hungary makes pregnancy registration compulsory; abortion convictions peakSource 42 (opens the source in a new tab)
12. 1955USSR legalises abortion againSource 27 (opens the source in a new tab)
13. 1966Romania's Decree 770 bans abortionSource 37 (opens the source in a new tab)
14. 19682,763 girls and women committed to East Germany's closed venereal wardsSource 43 (opens the source in a new tab)
15. 1973Czechoslovakia introduces cash payments for sterilisationSource 11 (opens the source in a new tab)
16. 1989Romania lifts the abortion ban after almost ten thousand deathsSource 2 (opens the source in a new tab)

What did the Chinese revolution change for women?

Any account of China has to begin with what the revolution promised women, because the promise was real. The Marriage Law of 1 May 1950, one of the new state's first major laws, abolished the feudal marriage system and prohibited bigamy, concubinage, child betrothal and interference with the remarriage of widows⁵³. It set minimum marriage ages of 20 for men and 18 for women and allowed divorce at the request of either party.⁵³ In 1951 alone, about 410,000 divorce cases were filed.⁵⁴

The economist Amartya Sen, in the same 1990 essay in which he first counted China's missing women, credited pre-reform China with considerable attention to reducing inequality between men and women, with female life expectancy overtaking male.⁵⁵ Women's participation in paid work stayed among the highest in the world: the World Bank's modelled estimate is 73.1% in 1990, falling to 59.7% by 2020.⁹ The transition was also violent. An official estimate from the early 1950s put deaths linked to marital disputes at 70,000 to 80,000 a year in the two years after the Marriage Law.⁵⁴

Those deaths were mostly not caused by the state; they are a reminder that the harms women suffered in this period came from families and villages as well as from cadres.

What happened to women in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution?

In the famine of 1958 to 1962, which the historian Frank Dikotter estimates killed at least 45 million people, local cadres held power of life and death over food. Dikotter's archival research, as summarised by the historian Roderick MacFarquhar, found that women were raped by cadres, that in some factories women were made to work naked, and that teams hauled back hundreds of women a month from Inner Mongolia.⁵⁶ These findings come from Party archives Dikotter consulted; we have checked them through the review rather than the book's pages.

The Cultural Revolution brought mass killing in parts of the countryside, and sexual violence with it. The historian Song Yongyi studied secret archives compiled by the Guangxi Party committee in the 1980s to investigate the massacres there in 1967 and 1968. They contain 225 fully documented cases of rape, gang rape and sexual abuse⁵⁷; Song estimates there were more than a thousand female victims. Of the tens of thousands of killers, only ten were formally executed, three of them for rape and murder.⁵⁷

In Daoxian county in Hunan in 1967, the journalist Tan Hecheng documented the mass killing of people classed as class enemies. Women survivors, he found, were forced to marry the men who had killed their husbands and children, and gang rapes took place during the killings.⁵⁸

What happened to the sent-down girls?

From 1968 the state sent millions of urban young people to the countryside to "learn from the peasants". Many were teenage girls, sent far from their families and placed under the authority of village cadres. The historian Michel Bonnin, whose history of the movement is the standard account, found that the young people were defenceless against mistreatment by local cadres, including the widespread rape of female youth.⁵⁹ The problem reached Mao himself in 1973 through a letter from Li Qinglin, and the leadership launched a campaign against the persecution of sent-down youth.⁵⁹⁶⁰

Local records give a sense of scale. Provincial gazetteers compiled by Chinese historians record 2,528 cases of persecution of sent-down youth in Anhui between 1974 and 1978, of which 2,408 involved young women⁶⁰; offenders included 593 basic-level cadres and 385 state officials. Zhejiang recorded 2,557 cases involving young women from 1973, with 669 cadres among the offenders.⁶⁰ Not every case was rape: the historians Emily Honig and Xiaojian Zhao have argued that the 1973 campaign also recast consensual relationships between young women and rural men as crimes.⁶⁰

A national figure of more than 23,000 cases by 1973, about 70% of them sexual, circulates widely; we could not check it against its original source and leave it out of our tables.

How coercive was China's birth planning?

China's birth control campaigns involved hundreds of millions of procedures on women's bodies. They began not with the one-child policy of 1980 but in the early 1970s. Official statistics show IUD insertions rising from 6.17 million in 1971 to 13.95 million in 1973, female sterilisations from 1.74 million to 2.95 million, and abortions from 3.91 million to 5.11 million.¹² The peak came in 1983, in a national campaign that Li Mei and Quanbao Jiang describe as combining reward, persuasion and coercion.¹³

The sociologists Martin Whyte, Wang Feng and Yong Cai, who reject several common myths about the policy, call 1983 a particularly dreadful year: 14.4 million abortions, 20.7 million sterilisations and 17.8 million IUD insertions¹², in a year with about 21 million births. Wang, Cai and Gu Baochang add that the sterilisations were predominantly of women and that a large proportion of these procedures were involuntary⁶¹.

A large proportion of these procedures were involuntary.

Over four decades the totals are very large. Health ministry data reported in 2013 counted 336 million abortions and 196 million sterilisations since 1971.⁶² Not all were coerced; many women chose them. But the system set quotas, fined families that exceeded them and rewarded officials who met them, and its own officials admitted abuses when they became public.

In 2005, after the blind activist Chen Guangcheng collected testimony from women in Linyi, Shandong, who had been forced into late abortions and sterilisations, a national family planning spokesman said local officials had violated the law; Chen himself was seized by police in Beijing.⁶³ In 2012, Feng Jianmei, about seven months pregnant, was forced to abort in Shaanxi when her family could not pay a 40,000-yuan fine; officials apologised and three were suspended.⁶⁴ In 2014 the UN committee on discrimination against women said it was concerned that forced abortion and sterilisation persisted.⁶⁵

How many women are missing in China?

In 1990 Amartya Sen estimated that about 50 million women were missing from China's population, compared with what normal ratios of women to men would predict.⁵⁵ Later work refined the figure. The demographers John Bongaarts and Christophe Guilmoto estimate that missing females in China rose from 27.2 million in 1970 to 62.3 million in 2010, 9.5% of the female population³, through higher death rates among girls and, from the 1980s, sex-selective abortion.³

The sex ratio at birth tells the same story. Normal populations have 103 to 107 boys born for every 100 girls. China's ratio was 108.5 in 1982, peaked at about 121 and was 111.3 at the 2020 census.⁶⁶ Li Mei and Quanbao Jiang estimate that about 30 million female foetuses were aborted for sex selection between 1980 and 2020.¹³ Missing women are not a communist phenomenon as such. Bongaarts and Guilmoto find that China and India together account for 84% of the world's missing women, and India has never had a communist national government.³

Son preference long predates 1949. What China's birth limits did, according to the UN committee, was combine with son preference to produce sex-selective abortion, forced abortion and the infanticide of girls on a large scale.⁶⁵

Are women abducted and trafficked in China?

Yes, and the state has acknowledged it, while also suppressing information about it. The trade in women sold as brides is driven partly by the shortage of women that birth limits and sex selection produced. In one 2009 campaign, the Ministry of Public Security reported rescuing 3,851 abducted women and 2,169 children in eight months.⁶⁷ The most notorious recent case came to light in 2022, when a video showed a woman chained by the neck in a shed in Fengxian county, Jiangsu. Local officials first denied she had been trafficked.

A provincial investigation then found she had been sold three times in 1998, and 17 officials were punished, including the county Party secretary.⁶⁸ Brides are also trafficked into China from neighbouring countries. Human Rights Watch interviewed 37 women and girls from Myanmar's Kachin state who had been sold to Chinese families for US$3,000 to 13,000, locked up and raped to make them pregnant; some who escaped to Chinese police were jailed for immigration offences.⁶⁹

The US State Department reports that brokers arrange forced or fraudulent marriages of women from across Asia and Africa for fees of up to US$30,000, links the demand to the legacy of the one-child policy, and notes that China's Ministry of Public Security has not published its anti-trafficking figures for seven years.⁷⁰

What happened to women in China's labour camps?

Until 2013 China ran a system of re-education through labour, in which police could detain people for up to several years without trial. The UN's special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, visited in 2005. Of the torture allegations his office had sent to China since 2000, covering more than 1,160 people, 66% concerned Falun Gong practitioners and 8% sex workers; former detainees of Beijing's women's labour camp called its intensive training section the "Intensive Torture Section".⁷¹

Amnesty International's interviews with women held at the Masanjia women's camp in Liaoning described beatings with electric batons and sleep deprivation. Amnesty also recorded the case of Tang Hui, a mother sent to a labour camp in 2012 for demanding harsher punishment of the men who had abducted, raped and prostituted her 11-year-old daughter.⁷² Her case shows a pattern that recurs across this review: a woman punished by the state for seeking justice for a crime against a girl.

What happened to women in Tibet?

The International Commission of Jurists, in a 1997 study, found that Tibetan women, and especially nuns detained for political protest, suffered gender-specific torture, including rape using electric cattle-prods⁷³. Birth limits in Tibet were enforced through fines, abortions and sterilisations; by 1990 about 3% of the Tibet Autonomous Region's 600,000 women of childbearing age had been sterilised.⁷³ The same report cites field research by anthropologists who found no coercion among nomads but clear coercion in the Lhasa area, a reminder that enforcement varied.⁷³

What has happened to Uyghur women in Xinjiang?

The evidence on Xinjiang is recent, contested by the Chinese government, and in parts strong. Three findings stand out. First, birth rates. Chinese official statistics, accepted by the UN human rights office, show that Xinjiang's birth rate fell from 15.88 per 1,000 people in 2017 to 8.14 in 2019, below the national rate of 10.48; in the mainly Uyghur prefectures of Hotan and Kashgar it fell by more than half in two years.¹⁴

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, working county by county, found the fall was steepest where the population was most indigenous, and called it proportionally the steepest two-year fall anywhere in UN data since 1950.⁷⁴

Second, sterilisation. In 2018 Xinjiang recorded 243 sterilisations per 100,000 people, against 32.1 nationally¹⁴, a reversal from 2010-15, when the region's rate had been far below the national one.⁷⁵ Budget documents analysed by the researcher Adrian Zenz show plans for 2019 to sterilise 14% and 34% of married women of childbearing age in two Uyghur areas.⁷⁵ The UN human rights office found credible indications of violations of reproductive rights through the coercive enforcement of family planning policies since 2017¹⁴.

An AP investigation found that in a leaked list of detainees from Karakax county, 149 of 484 were held for having too many children.⁷⁶ Third, sexual violence in detention. The UN office interviewed 40 people, 26 of whom had been held in or worked in the camps. It found allegations of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape mainly affecting women, credible, though it could not judge how widespread they were.¹⁴

The BBC published the account of Tursunay Ziawudun, who said she had been gang-raped three times in a camp; the BBC checked her documents but said her account could not be verified completely.⁷⁷ A non-governmental tribunal chaired by the British lawyer Geoffrey Nice concluded in 2021 that rape and sexual violence in the penal system were widespread and that measures to prevent births amounted to genocide, a finding it said it would have preferred not to make.⁷⁸

Some figures used against China are also overstated. Zenz's claim that 80% of China's new IUDs in 2018 were fitted in Xinjiang uses net placements, after removals; on the gross count, Xinjiang's 328,475 placements were 8.7% of the national total, as Chinese state media pointed out.⁷⁹⁷⁵ The fall in births and the rise in sterilisations, however, come from China's own statistics, and the UN office treated them as reliable.¹⁴

What has North Korea done to women?

North Korea is the hardest case to document, because it admits no independent observers, and the clearest in what has been found. In 2014 a UN Commission of Inquiry, chaired by the Australian judge Michael Kirby, concluded that the North Korean state had committed crimes against humanity, including rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence⁵ and persecution on grounds of gender. North Korea rejected the inquiry outright.⁵ The commission's findings on women fall into four groups. The first concerns women sent back from China.

Many North Koreans, most of them women, cross the border to find food or work; when Chinese police catch them they are returned. The commission found that repatriated women who are pregnant are regularly subjected to forced abortions, and babies born to repatriated women are often killed⁵, motivated by racist attitudes towards children who may have Chinese fathers.⁵

A later UN report, based on interviews with more than 100 women forcibly returned and detained between 2009 and 2019, found that all had been body-searched by state security staff, and recorded rape by guards, beatings intended to cause abortion, and the killing of a newborn in a holding centre in 2012.¹⁶ The second concerns the prison camps. In the political prison camps, the commission found, rape is common, and pregnant victims face forced abortion or execution; in ordinary prisons guards rape prisoners with impunity.⁵

The third concerns ordinary life. Human Rights Watch interviewed 106 North Koreans, most of them women, and found that sexual violence by police, prison guards and market officials is so common that it has come to be accepted as part of ordinary life¹⁷, with near-total impunity. North Korea told the UN it recorded nine rape convictions in 2008, seven in 2011 and five in 2015.¹⁷ The fourth concerns trafficking.

The commission found that a large percentage of women who cross into China alone are trafficked into forced marriage, concubinage or prostitution, usually sold at least twice, and that about 20,000 children born to North Korean women live in China.⁵ A study by the Korea Future Initiative of 45 survivors estimated that about 60% of North Korean women and girls in China had been trafficked into the sex trade, sold for as little as about US$4 for sex and US$146 as a wife; this is a single organisation's estimate.⁸⁰

The share of women among North Koreans who eventually reach South Korea reflects this flight. Women were 12% of arrivals before 1999 and 72.3% of all arrivals since records began, rising to 89% in 2024 and 2025.⁸¹

Did North Korea kidnap foreign women?

Yes, and here the evidence is unusually firm, because the North Korean state admitted part of it. In 2002 North Korea's leader acknowledged to Japan's prime minister that North Korean agents had abducted Japanese citizens. Japan now recognises 17 of its nationals as abducted in 12 incidents; five returned in October 2002. At least nine of the 17 are women, among them Megumi Yokota, taken in 1977. North Korea says she died, but DNA tests on remains it handed over matched someone else.⁸²

The UN commission found that women abducted from Europe, the Middle East and Asia were subjected to forced marriages: four Lebanese women were lured to North Korea in 1978, and two were given as wives to American army deserters; a Thai woman, Anocha Panjoy, was abducted from Macao in 1978; and a Romanian woman, Doina Bumbea, was lured to Pyongyang and given as a wife to another deserter.⁵

This is state abduction of foreign women for forced marriage, documented by a UN inquiry, and there is no comparable case among the other states in this review.

What about Mongolia?

We found little documentation of crimes against women by the Mongolian People's Republic beyond its reproductive policy. Socialist Mongolia restricted abortion for decades; it was legalised on request only in 1989, after the regime collapsed.⁸³ We found no study that examines what happened to women in the purges of 1937 to 1939.

What did the Khmer Rouge do to women?

In Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and caused the deaths of about 1.9 million people⁸⁴. When Phnom Penh was evacuated in April 1975, at least two million people were driven out, including the sick from hospitals, pregnant women and women who had just given birth.⁸⁵ The regime's treatment of women had a distinctive feature that a court has examined in detail: forced marriage.

In 2018 the Trial Chamber of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia found a nationwide policy, carried out by cadres at every level, under which the Party replaced parents in choosing spouses, forced couples to marry and to have sex⁴, with militiamen watching to make sure the marriages were consummated. People who refused were re-educated or threatened with punishment or death.

The court convicted the two surviving senior leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, of the crime against humanity of other inhumane acts through forced marriage and through rape within forced marriage, and sentenced them to life.⁴ The convictions were upheld on appeal in 2022.⁸⁶ The trial judgment found that husbands who reported their wives for refusing to consummate the marriage exposed them to punishment by cadres, including rape, and that the evidence showed women assaulted by husbands, not the reverse.⁸⁶ How many people were forced to marry is not known.

A 2014 study of 106 survivors found that 70.2% had refused at least once, yet 97.2% were eventually married and 97% said the marriage was not their choice; the penalties for refusing included threats, beatings, rape, sexual slavery and death.¹⁸ The same study notes that prevalence has never been measured, and cites one rough extrapolation of up to 210,000 women forced to marry.¹⁸ We report that figure as an extrapolation, not a count.

Rape outside marriage was a different matter in law. The court's closing order held that official Khmer Rouge policy was to prevent rape and punish rapists, so senior leaders were not charged with rape outside forced marriage.⁸⁷ The legal scholar Theresa de Langis has argued that the regime's moral code, which punished all sex outside state-approved marriage, in practice punished victims as harshly as perpetrators or more so, and that perpetrators were rarely punished, which silenced women.⁸⁷

Research by the Cambodian Defenders Project found that all perpetrators reported to it were Khmer Rouge cadres, that gang rape and mass rape occurred especially before executions, and that ethnic Vietnamese women were targeted more often.⁸⁸ A 1993 survey of 993 adults in border camps found that 17% reported rape or sexual abuse during the Khmer Rouge years.⁸⁹ A comparison with the death toll puts this in context. The demographer Patrick Heuveline estimates that two-thirds of the Khmer Rouge regime's excess deaths, and more than 80% of its violent deaths, were men.⁸⁴ Women were less likely to be killed. What they suffered was gendered in a different way: through marriage, sex and pregnancy.

What happened to women in Vietnam and Laos?

After the communist victory in 1975, Vietnam held people associated with the former southern government in re-education camps without charge or trial. Officials told Amnesty International in December 1979 that 40,000 had passed through the camps, of whom 26,000 were still held.⁹⁰ Amnesty's report contains no findings on sexual violence against women detainees, and we found no primary source that documents it. That absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but we do not fill it. The best-known sexual violence associated with Vietnam in this period was not committed by the Vietnamese state.

Women fleeing by boat were attacked at sea by Thai fishermen acting as pirates. Citing the UN refugee agency, TIME reported in 1981 that women had been raped on 81% of the refugee boats reaching Thailand in the first nine months of the year.⁹¹ We include it as context for why women fled, not as a crime of the regime. Vietnam's state did detain women for sex work.

From 1993, many of the country's drug detention centres doubled as centres for detaining sex workers, who were held and made to work; about 309,000 people passed through the centres between 2000 and 2010. In 2003 the Party secretary of Ho Chi Minh City set a goal of putting all the city's sex workers into centres by 2004.⁹² Today trafficking is the main documented harm.

Vietnam identified 500 trafficking victims in 2024, 310 of them female; traffickers lure women and girls, particularly from the Hmong minority, to China for forced marriages that often involve sex trafficking or forced labour.⁹³ Vietnam also has missing girls: its 2019 census recorded 111.5 boys born for every 100 girls, implying about 45,900 missing female births a year.⁹⁴

In Laos, Amnesty International reported in 2007 that young Hmong women captured in the jungle had been separated from their families and subjected to slavery-like treatment, including repeated rapes by police; one woman described being held for about a year at a police post in sexual servitude. Amnesty said the evidence was not enough to establish a pattern and knew of no investigation.⁹⁵

Laos identified 168 trafficking victims in 2023, of whom 145 were girls trafficked for sex, and the US State Department, which downgraded Laos to its lowest tier in 2025, cites endemic corruption and official complicity.⁹⁶

What has Cuba done to women?

Cuba's revolution brought real gains for women in education. Illiteracy among Cubans over ten fell from 23.6% in 1959 to 3.9% in 1961 after the literacy campaign, according to a UNESCO report.⁹⁷ Cuba's record on women's rights in custody is harder to establish, because the government does not admit the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights or UN rapporteurs, so most of the evidence comes from Cuban human rights groups and is relayed, not tested, by international bodies. With that caveat, the pattern the groups record is consistent.

The Ladies in White, a movement of wives and mothers of political prisoners, have been detained again and again. The Inter-American Commission, relaying their figures, recorded more than 1,600 summary arbitrary detentions of Ladies in White in January to October 2016⁹⁸, with mothers held together with their children for up to 24 hours, and reports of beatings. Another monitoring group counted 7,995 politically motivated detentions in the first nine months of 2016, most of them of women.⁹⁸

In 2025 the commission, again relaying civil society figures, reported 122 women held for political reasons in August and at least 77 women arbitrarily detained in the first half of the year; women reported mistreatment, harassment and violence, including sexual violence, and forced labour.⁹⁹ The NGO Prisoners Defenders counted 1,197 political prisoners at the end of 2025, of whom 128 were women.¹⁰⁰ Cuba has also detained women for prostitution.

In 1999 Human Rights Watch reported a new 300-place facility next to Valle Grande prison apparently used to hold the increasing numbers of women accused of prostitution, under laws that allowed detention for "dangerousness" without any crime.¹⁰¹ The third issue is Cuba's export of doctors and nurses. In 2019 two UN special rapporteurs wrote to the Cuban government setting out allegations that women doctors on overseas missions had suffered sexual harassment and that conditions could amount to forced labour; these were allegations, not findings.¹⁰²

The US State Department, which ranks Cuba in its lowest tier, finds a government policy or pattern of forced labour in the missions, with about 26,000 medical workers abroad in early 2025 and the state keeping 75-95% of their pay.¹⁰³ That assessment comes from a government in long conflict with Cuba's, and readers should weigh it accordingly.

What happened to women in Ethiopia's Red Terror?

Ethiopia's military government, the Derg, declared itself Marxist-Leninist in the 1970s and in 1977-78 waged a campaign against its opponents known as the Red Terror. Africa Watch called it one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by the state ever seen in Africa, with deaths well in excess of 10,000, and Amnesty International estimated 30,000 political detainees in the capital by the end of 1977.¹⁰⁴ Two court records establish sexual abuse of women detainees.

In the United States, three Ethiopian women sued Kelbessa Negewo, a former district official, for what they had suffered in his custody; the courts found that they had been questioned, beaten, threatened and ordered to undress, and awarded each $500,000 in damages, a judgment upheld on appeal in 1996.¹⁰⁵ In Ethiopia, the special prosecutor's charges against 55 senior officials of the regime, including the former leader Mengistu Haile Mariam, included rape among other crimes; the Federal High Court convicted all but one in 2006.¹⁰⁶

Mengistu, tried in his absence, was sentenced to death on appeal in 2008 and lives in Zimbabwe.¹⁰⁷ The same Africa Watch report documents rape and abduction of women by Derg soldiers in Eritrea, Tigray and the Ogaden during the regime's wars, and rapes by insurgents too.¹⁰⁴

What happened in Afghanistan under the communist government?

The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan seized power in 1978, and the Soviet Union invaded in 1979 to support it. A UN mapping report on crimes in Afghanistan from 1978 to 2001, drafted around 2005 and published only in 2024, found that women arrested by KhAD, the government's secret police, were tortured like men and sometimes subjected to rape and sexual abuse, though this did not appear to be common or systematic¹⁰⁸.

It cites the UN special rapporteur, who in 1985 listed rape among KhAD's methods of torture and recorded a witness who saw a woman eight months pregnant raped in front of her husband at the Interior Ministry in March 1980.¹⁰⁸ The same report found that rape by Soviet soldiers occurred but was not systematic. It also records that after the communist government fell in 1992, mujahideen factions committed mass rape.¹⁰⁸ In the UN report, the most widespread sexual violence in Afghanistan came after the communist government fell, not under it.

What happened in Mozambique and Angola?

After independence in 1975, Mozambique's ruling Frelimo party, which adopted Marxism-Leninism, sent people it considered undesirable to re-education camps. The historian Benedito Machava estimates that about 100,000 people passed through the camps by 1992, about half of them in the 1983-88 Operation Production. He notes the unchecked sexual life of the camps, particularly for female detainees, and that pregnancy was in some cases a death sentence.¹⁰⁹

In Angola, after a failed coup attempt in May 1977, the ruling MPLA's political police carried out executions without trial that ran into 1978; Amnesty International reported that those killed included members of the women's detachment, and could not estimate the total.¹¹⁰

Did Nepal's Maoists commit sexual violence?

Nepal's Communist Party (Maoist) fought an insurgency from 1996 to 2006 and then led several governments. The UN human rights office's 2012 report on the conflict catalogued more than a hundred cases of sexual violence. Of these, 12 list Maoist personnel as alleged perpetrators¹¹¹; the rest were attributed to the state's security forces, then under the monarchy and the parliamentary government. More than a third of victims were girls. The report found Maoist sexual violence more opportunistic and committed by individuals.¹¹¹

Human Rights Watch documented seven cases of sexual violence by Maoists, including rape within the movement's own ranks and the rape of a woman abducted in 2004.¹¹² In Nepal, then, the communist movement committed sexual violence, but the state forces fighting it committed far more. Nepal also has a large trafficking problem: its human rights commission estimated up to 35,000 people trafficked in 2018-19, 15,000 of them women.¹¹³ We found no evidence linking that to Maoist rule rather than to poverty and migration, and do not attribute it.

What has Daniel Ortega's government done to women in Nicaragua?

Nicaragua's Sandinista front governed as a revolutionary party in the 1980s and returned to power under Daniel Ortega in 2007. Since the protests of April 2018, a UN group of experts has found that the police, the prison service and pro-government armed groups have systematically committed acts amounting to torture, including rape and other forms of sexual violence¹¹⁴, including threats of rape, forced nudity and electric shocks to the genitals. It documented 14 long-term enforced disappearances, two of them of women.¹¹⁴ The most serious allegation against Ortega himself has never been tested.

In 1998 his stepdaughter, Zoilamerica Narvaez, filed criminal charges accusing him of sexual abuse, rape and sexual harassment; he was protected by parliamentary immunity, and the Inter-American Commission declared her petition admissible without judging the merits. She later withdrew it and the case was closed.¹¹⁵ We record the allegation and that it was never adjudicated.

What happened to women in India's Left-ruled states?

India is the one country in this review where communist parties have won power repeatedly in free elections and then lost it. The Left Front led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) governed West Bengal for 34 years, from 1977 to 2011. A Left Front governed Tripura from 1978 to 1988 and again from 1993 to 2018. In Kerala, where a communist government was first elected in 1957, the Left Democratic Front has alternated in power with the Congress-led United Democratic Front, and governed from 2016.

These governments ran the police and the state administration, but not the courts, the criminal law or the national statistics office. So the question here is not whether a party state committed crimes, but whether Left governments presided over more crimes against women, or protected the perpetrators more, than the parties before and after them. We look at three kinds of evidence: recorded crime, survey data, and specific cases established in court or by credible inquiry.

Did recorded crimes against women rise under the Left Front in West Bengal?

Yes, very fast. Using the crime bureau's district table, the seven main offences against women recorded in West Bengal rose from 6,533 in 2001 to 26,014 in 2010 and 28,919 in 2011⁶, the year the Left Front lost power, a rise of 4.4 times in a decade. Most of the increase was in one offence, cruelty by a husband or his relatives under section 498A of the Penal Code, which rose from 3,859 to 19,772 and made up about two-thirds of the total.⁶

Two things argue against reading this as a simple rise in violence under the Left. The first is that the pattern continued under the Trinamool Congress, which took over in 2011. In 2020 West Bengal recorded cruelty by husbands or relatives at 41.7 cases per 100,000 women, against 17.0 for India⁷, and its overall rate of recorded crimes against women stayed between about 64 and 76 per 100,000 women from 2017 to 2024.¹¹⁶

The state's high count of domestic cruelty cases looks like a feature of how cases are registered in West Bengal, persisting across governments. The second is that recorded rape in West Bengal was below the national rate in the years we can compare: 2.4 per 100,000 women in 2020 against 4.3 for India.⁷ A state where women report domestic cruelty more and rape less than elsewhere is telling us at least as much about reporting as about crime.

Was Tripura's record worse under the Left?

On recorded crime, at one point, yes. In 2011, under the Left Front, Tripura had the highest rate of recorded crimes against women of any Indian state: 37 per 100,000 people, against a national 18.9¹¹⁷. Its rate fell after the BJP took power in 2018, from 54.5 per 100,000 women in 2019 to 34.8 in 2024.¹¹⁶ The data cannot tell us whether that fall reflects less crime, less reporting or different recording. The household survey points the same way as the crime data for the Left years.

In the 2005-06 National Family Health Survey, 19% of ever-married women in both West Bengal and Tripura reported sexual violence by their husbands, against 8% in India²⁰, and 40% of women in Tripura reported physical violence, against 31% nationally.²⁰ Both states were then governed by the Left Front. By the 2015-16 survey, sexual violence had fallen to 9% in both.²⁰

In the 2019-20 survey, the share of women reporting any physical or sexual violence by a husband was 27.0% in West Bengal (then under the Trinamool Congress) and 20.7% in Tripura (then under the BJP), down from 33.1% and 28.1% in 2015-16, and 9.9% in Kerala.¹⁹ The national figure was about 29%.¹¹⁸

Which rapes are linked to the Left parties in West Bengal?

The statistics above describe whole populations. The cases below are different: in each, members or supporters of the CPI(M), or police under the Left Front government, are found by a court, named in an official record or a credible inquiry, or credibly alleged to have committed sexual violence, or the party responded by disputing the women's accounts. We do not name survivors; Indian law forbids it. The table sets out each case with the basis for the party link and what became of it.

1. 1979Police firing at Marichjhapi kills 36 refugees during a government blockadeSource 120 (opens the source in a new tab)
2. 1990Bantala: three women health officials attacked; police and government call them child-liftersSource 121 (opens the source in a new tab)
3. 1990Birati: the CPI(M) women's wing publicly questions the victims' characterSource 122 (opens the source in a new tab)
4. February 2003Dhantala: six women raped; seven of 22 men arrested are CPI(M) supportersSource 123 (opens the source in a new tab)
5. December 2006Singur: CBI charges the local CPI(M) secretary with arranging the assailantsSource 124 (opens the source in a new tab)
6. March 2007Nandigram: High Court records rapes; compensation orderedSource 119 (opens the source in a new tab)
7. 13 November 2007Chief Minister says the people who suffered at Nandigram were paid back in their own coinSource 125 (opens the source in a new tab)
8. 4 December 2007He says he should not have said soSource 126 (opens the source in a new tab)
9. 2008Singur: life sentences for murder and conspiracySource 127 (opens the source in a new tab)
10. 2009Dhantala: four convicted, local CPI(M) leaders acquittedSource 128 (opens the source in a new tab)
11. 2012New government withdraws the appeal against Nandigram compensationSource 129 (opens the source in a new tab)

Nandigram, 2007

In early 2007 villagers in Nandigram barricaded their land against acquisition, and the area became a battleground between them and armed supporters of the ruling party. On 14 March the police went in. The petition before the Calcutta High Court, summarised in its judgment, stated that the police were accompanied by at least 300 CPI(M) cadres and that three women were raped that evening; when the CBI raided a brickfield nearby it recovered arms, CPI(M) receipts and red flags, and all ten men found there were said to belong to the CPI(M).¹¹⁹

The court found that criminal acts of violence including arson, rape and murder were rampant¹¹⁹, held the police firing wholly unconstitutional, and ordered the state to pay 200,000 rupees to each rape victim identified in the pleadings.¹¹⁹ The Left Front government appealed against the order to the Supreme Court; it was the next government that withdrew the appeal in 2012 and agreed to pay.¹²⁹

Amnesty International, which sent a delegation after the ruling party retook the area in November 2007, reported that in January and March at least 20 women were sexually assaulted by armed supporters of the ruling CPI-M¹³⁰. Officials and villagers named groups of armed CPI-M supporters as the perpetrators of the November attacks; police had registered five rape cases, naming the accused, and at the time of Amnesty's visit none of the named men had been arrested. One woman told Amnesty's researchers: "They raped my daughters in front of me and then they raped me."¹³⁰

The police figures were inconsistent. The CRPF's deputy inspector general gave Amnesty the five FIRs above, three of them filed after the November violence, while the Nandigram police station said only two complaints had been filed. None of the men named in the FIRs had been arrested at the time.¹³⁰

In one case reported to Amnesty, a woman said she and her two daughters, aged 16 and 14, were raped at Satengabari in the first days of November 2007. The daughters were still missing when Amnesty visited. The police officer in charge told its delegation there was news that they had joined a circus at Howrah, and Amnesty recorded no verification of it.¹³⁰ A citizens' team found women in several villages threatened with attack at night, with men telling them: We'll come back at night - light your lamps and wait for us with open doors¹³¹.¹³¹

An NGO platform's inquiry, released in September 2007 by a former state Land Reforms Secretary, counted among the women at Nandigram on 14 March 274 physically tortured, 46 whose modesty had been violated, 17 sexually tortured and 11 raped¹³².¹³² That is an NGO's count, not a court or official finding.

A citizens' tribunal chaired by a former chief justice of Sikkim found a disturbingly large number of incidents of sexual violence by both police and armed ruling-party cadres.¹³³ The state's women's commission, by contrast, visited one survivor in hospital and declared there was no evidence of rape, one member remarking that the woman had borne several children, although the local police chief and the hospital superintendent had confirmed evidence of rape.¹³⁴ We found no conviction in any of the Nandigram rape cases.

The tribunal also recorded that two women who said they had been raped were not examined for rape for 72 to 80 hours, and that a mother and daughter named CPI(M) cadres.¹³³ A women's-group team reported in 2015 that only 3 of 16 rape survivors it traced had received the Rs 2 lakh compensation the High Court ordered; that is an NGO's claim, not an official count.¹³⁵ The cases have not closed. In January 2026 the CBI arrested a witness in a 2007 Nandigram gang-rape case after 19 years; Bengali outlets disagreed over how many of the accused are alive, and the Trinamool Congress and the BJP traded accusations over the arrest.¹³⁶¹³⁷ A Bengali retrospective of 2026 records that protesters alleged CPI(M) cadres entered the villages in disguise alongside the police on 14 March 2007, and that rape allegations were made against them.¹³⁸ We could not find the accused in these cases named, or their 2007 party, in any source.

The ruling party's reaction came from the top. On 13 November 2007, after the CPI(M)'s cadres had retaken the villages, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee told reporters in Kolkata that the people who suffered were paid back in their own coin¹²⁵. He asked whether they had been peaceful people, and said they had for months attacked, harassed and evicted CPI(M) supporters.¹²⁵

the people who suffered were paid back in their own coin

Human Rights Watch, which reports the phrase as paid back in the same coin, says the remark helped fuel the violence of that November.¹³⁹ On 4 December, at a press conference in New Delhi, the Chief Minister said of it: I should have not said so. The statement has drawn so much criticism.¹²⁶ The remark was about the recapture of Nandigram as a whole; none of the reports we found shows him speaking about the rape allegations. The same weeks produced part of the sexual violence on record: according to the CRPF officer who spoke to Amnesty, three of the five rape cases registered at Nandigram were filed after the November violence.¹³⁰ It was not about the Singur case below.

The party's formal line was denial. A Central Committee statement of 3 April 2007 spoke of allegations and charges fabricated and purveyed about sexual assaults on women in Nandigram, and said a woman from a CPI(M) sympathiser's family had been gang-raped on 3 March by its opponents.¹⁴⁰ A commentary in Mainstream reported the state hospital's superintendent as saying a medical board found the woman in a separate rape case of 18 April 2008 had not been raped, while its author argued that rape is a legal conclusion and not a medical one.¹⁴¹

Singur, 2006

At Singur, where land was being acquired for a car factory, the burnt body of a young woman active in the farmers' protest was found in December 2006 inside the fenced factory site. The CBI's charge sheet stated that Suhrid Dutta, the CPI(M)'s zonal secretary for Singur, had arranged four assailants to carry out the killing, and that the assailants raped and murdered her¹²⁴.

In 2008 a fast-track court sentenced Dutta and a co-accused to life imprisonment for murder and conspiracy; the court called it a personal vendetta rather than a political murder, and the reports of the verdict do not mention a finding of rape.¹²⁷ The High Court granted both men bail in 2009 pending appeal.¹⁴²

The case was contested from the first day. The Asian Human Rights Commission reported on 18 December 2006 that the young woman's undergarments had been removed and that it was believed she had been raped and then set on fire to cover up the crime. It alleged that the police at first refused her father's written complaint.¹⁴³ The CBI took over, and in 2007 it arrested the CPI(M) supporter Debu Malik, who was reported to have confessed in a Delhi court after a narco-analysis test, and then the party's Singur secretary.¹⁴⁴ The party's state secretary, Biman Bose, called the case fabricated, and the party described Debu Malik as a supporter and not a member.¹⁴⁵

The party defended its secretary. On 28 June 2007, after Suhrid Dutta's arrest, Jyoti Basu said the party would defend him and that CBI officials are also human beings who may be under pressure.¹⁴⁶ Dutta died in November 2023, and we found no appeal outcome.¹⁴⁷ Tapasi Malik's father, Manoranjan Malik, said in 2024, in Bengali, that the CPI(M) had killed his daughter; that is a father's statement, not a finding.¹⁴⁸

Other Singur women accused the police, not the party. After the police action of 2 December 2006, in which villagers including women were arrested, a national human rights confederation said that female arrestees at Chandannagar police station had been manhandled, beaten, molested and sexually abused by male policemen, and a citizens' committee of historians and lawyers reported that women protesters were beaten by male policemen who used filthy language.¹⁴⁹ Medha Patkar, who was arrested that day, said the same to the magistrate and in a report published in February 2007.¹⁵⁰ These are statements by rights groups, not court or official findings, and we found no FIR, chargesheet or verdict for any of them.

We looked for more, and the record is thin. We found one individually documented rape case at Singur, that of Tapasi Malik, and no second case with a complaint, chargesheet or court finding. We found no count of rapes at Singur, and no report by the National Commission for Women, the state women's commission or the NHRC on sexual violence there. We also found no report of women missing from Singur. A figure that circulates, of eleven women raped, belongs to Nandigram: it comes from an NGO platform's report of September 2007 on 14 March at Nandigram, and has sometimes been wrongly attributed to Singur.¹³² Bengali-language press, which we could not search in depth, may hold more.

Dhantala, 2003

On the night of 5 to 6 February 2003, two buses carrying wedding parties were stopped in Nadia district; passengers were robbed, a driver was killed and six women were raped. The Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, told the state Assembly that of 22 men arrested, seven were CPI(M) supporters¹²³, six were Trinamool Congress supporters and one a Congress supporter.¹²³ In Parliament, the opposition leader Mamata Banerjee said the women had been gang-raped by ruling-party cadres and that the police had registered a complaint only after 18 days.¹⁵¹

In 2009 a fast-track court convicted four men of dacoity with murder, one of them also of rape, and acquitted 17 others, among them a former CPI(M) zonal committee member and a former village council head.¹²⁸

Bantala, 1990

On 30 May 1990, three women officials of the state health department, returning from an immunisation inspection, were stopped at Bantala on the edge of Calcutta and sexually assaulted; one of them died, and so did their driver. The police and the state government at first put out the story that the women were suspected child-lifters.¹²¹

Later accounts describe the attackers as party men and Bantala as a party stronghold, and report that six accused were eventually sentenced to life imprisonment; we could not locate the court record to confirm the sentences or any party membership.¹²¹¹⁵² A remark widely attributed to the Chief Minister, Jyoti Basu, that such things happen, circulates in several wordings that we could not trace to a contemporary record, so we do not quote it.

Birati, 1990

In July 1990 women living in railway-side huts at Birati, north of Calcutta, were raped. The response drew more attention than the crime. The CPI(M) weekly People's Democracy printed a statement by the general secretary of the party's West Bengal women's organisation saying that the victims lived in unauthorised hutments, that local women were involved in foul professions¹²², and that one was the mistress of a notorious anti-social.¹²² The historian Tanika Sarkar and others criticised the statement in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1991, and the CPI(M) leader Brinda Karat replied there.¹⁵³

Marichjhapi, 1979

In the Left Front's second year in office, the government blockaded refugees from Bangladesh who had settled on Marichjhapi island in the Sundarbans and then evicted them by force. On 31 January 1979 the police opened fire and killed 36 people¹²⁰; no official or politician was ever charged.¹²⁰ The political scientist Ross Mallick, quoting a 1982 account, wrote that the police began to rape the helpless young women at random, and argued that the CPI(M) state committee and cabinet were morally and perhaps legally culpable for rape and mass murder.¹⁵⁴

Survivors interviewed for the 2019 oral history Blood Island said women were afraid to go out for fear of being raped by police and that women were taken away.¹⁵⁵ No inquiry has examined these accounts, and we report them as allegations.

Across these cases the official response followed a pattern. At Bantala the victims were called child-lifters; at Birati the party's own women's organisation questioned their morals; at Nandigram the women's commission found no evidence of rape where doctors had found it, and the government appealed to the Supreme Court against the High Court order that included compensation for the rape victims. In none of the cases above could we confirm from a court record that a party leader was convicted of rape.

At Bantala the victims were called child-lifters; at Birati the party's own women's organisation questioned their morals

What other cases were reported across West Bengal under the Left Front?

Beyond the cases above, the Bengali and national press and rights groups reported others. Most are weaker. The original Anandabazar Patrika and Telegraph reports are blocked to automated access and we could not read them, so several cases reach us through writers who cited them, and for most we found no court record. The table gives each case with its grade: B for credible reporting of charges, C for an allegation reported by one side or a secondary source.

The 2000 Alipore case comes from Amnesty,¹⁵⁶ the 1993 Nadia case from a Mainstream commentary,¹⁵⁷ and the 2008 Nandigram rapes from a report by the World Organisation Against Torture, which presumed the perpetrators were CPI(M) members or allied militias and found no police investigation.¹⁵⁸ The Sonamukhi account is an activist report of July 2010 that blames the joint forces,¹⁵⁹ and a later letter from a Maoist-aligned committee names a CPI(M) armed cadre and says the Chief Minister denied any rape in the Assembly.¹⁶⁰

Ghoksadanga, 2003

The Ghoksadanga case is the best documented. On 22 February 2003 a woman in the village was allegedly gang-raped, and police registered cases under the sections for house trespass and gang rape against a number of men, among them, according to the writer Soma Marik citing Ananda Bazar Patrika, two CPI(M) members and four party activists.¹²³ The woman was herself a member of the CPI(M)'s women's front. A left-critical report says six CPI(M) activists, including a local leader described as an asset for the party, were arrested after much delay.¹⁶¹

The party's reaction is part of the record. Marik reports that the party's state secretary, Anil Biswas, said the woman was of questionable character, that a minister said the principal accused had been falsely implicated, and that Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said character could never be a precondition in a case of rape.¹²³ A local blog reports that all six men were convicted on 22 March 2005 and sentenced to ten years, that a High Court bench upheld it in 2007, and that the Governor sanctioned Rs 50,000 relief; it cites no court record, so we treat those details as unconfirmed.¹⁶²

Custody, the harmads and the party's handling

Amnesty International reported in 2001 that women in West Bengal were vulnerable to torture and ill-treatment including rape in police custody. It recorded the report of a 19-year-old mute girl raped by two constables in a police van in September 2000, and noted that the state human rights commission had received 95 complaints of rape, molestation and other indignity to women in 1998-99 without separating those against the police.¹⁵⁶

In 2010 Open magazine quoted an unnamed senior police officer in West Midnapore saying that a number of the armed cadres known as harmads have serious charges like murder and rape pending against them; no case is named.¹⁶³ An all-India fact-finding team in April 2009 found that police were present on several occasions when the harmads committed murders and that women were subjected to atrocities, though its report does not mention rape.¹⁶⁴ The accounts of rape by harmads and joint forces in the Jhargram area in 2010 come from activist sources, and we found no police, court or commission record for them.¹⁵⁹

Scholars have described the party's handling in similar terms. A footnote in a volume of Subaltern Studies says the Left Front government distinguished itself at the time of the Bantala and Birati rapes by very similar evasions¹⁶⁵.¹⁶⁵ The journalist Monobina Gupta writes that CPI(M) members, often district-level leaders, were involved in incidents of rape and murder, and that the party answered the allegations as part of a political conspiracy; at the Dhantala trial she reports that about 90% of 158 witnesses turned hostile.¹⁶⁶

Not every case points one way. Several 2003 cases involve victims who belonged to the CPI(M) or its Left Front partners, and at Dangapara the party's own zonal secretary said its arrested workers had tarnished its image.¹²³ We found no conviction of a CPI(M) leader for rape that we could confirm from a court record.

What about Tripura and Kerala under the Left?

In Tripura we found no rape case under Left Front rule with a court or official finding against party members. The best-documented case involves a CPI(M) legislator, Manoranjan Acharjee, who was expelled by the party after an internal inquiry, resigned his seat and was arrested in January 2016 on a charge of molesting a minor girl; he denied it, and we found no trial outcome.¹⁶⁷ Kerala's Left governments have no record comparable to Nandigram, but several cases under the government of 2016 onward involve party members or failures by the state.

In 2017 two Dalit sisters, aged 13 and 9, were found hanged in Walayar, seven weeks apart. Two of the accused were members of the local CPI(M) unit, one of them a president of a unit of the party's youth wing.¹⁶⁸ The accused were acquitted in 2019; the girls' mother accused the party of protecting them, which the party denied.¹⁶⁹ In 2021 the Kerala High Court set the acquittals aside and ordered a retrial, calling the initial investigation utterly disgusting¹⁷⁰ and saying the trials had been lowered to the level of mock trials.¹⁷⁰

Other cases involve party office-holders. In Wadakkanchery, a CPI(M) municipal councillor accused of a 2014 gang rape was suspended in 2016, and the party's district secretary publicly named the survivor.¹⁷¹ In Vadakara in 2021, a CPI(M) branch secretary and a leader of the party's youth wing were arrested on a woman party worker's complaint of rape and expelled.¹⁷²

In 2018 a woman youth-wing worker accused a CPI(M) legislator of sexual harassment; a party commission, not the police, examined the complaint, found only that he had spoken improperly on the phone, and suspended him for six months.¹⁷³ In 2025 a special investigation team charged the CPI(M) legislator and actor M. Mukesh with a sexual assault in 2010; he denies it, and the party kept him in his seat.¹⁷⁴ We found no conviction of a CPI(M) member for rape in Kerala.

In 2017 an actor was sexually assaulted, a crime for which six men were convicted in 2025.¹⁷⁵ A committee under Justice K. Hema, set up by the state government, examined sexual harassment in the Malayalam film industry and reported on 31 December 2019. The government did not act on it; in 2024 a special bench of the High Court asked why the state government had been inactive or silent from 31.12.2019¹⁷⁶, and ordered the full report handed to a special investigation team.¹⁷⁶

In 2025 the state told the court that all 35 cases arising from the report had been dropped because no victim came forward.¹⁷⁷ Recorded crimes against women in Kerala rose sharply under the Left government, from 55.1 per 100,000 women in 2020 to 86.1 in 2023, well above the national rate.¹¹⁶ Yet Kerala had the lowest rate of spousal violence of the three states in the 2019-20 survey, at 9.9%.¹⁹

Part of the explanation is likely that women in Kerala report crimes more readily and the police register them more often; research elsewhere in India has found that more women in local government raise recorded crime against women through greater reporting rather than greater incidence¹⁷⁸. The latest survey, for 2023-24, as reported in the press, does show spousal violence in Kerala rising to 17.7% from 9.8%, while it fell nationally.¹¹⁸

Were things different after the Left lost power?

Not in any way the data can show. Under the Trinamool Congress, which governed West Bengal from 2011, the state saw some of India's most notorious crimes against women: the Park Street gang rape in Kolkata in 2012, for which three men were convicted in 2015;¹⁷⁹ the rape and murder of a student at Kamduni in 2013;¹⁸⁰ the allegations of rape and sexual exploitation by associates of a local Trinamool leader at Sandeshkhali, which the Calcutta High Court ordered the CBI to investigate in 2024;¹⁸¹ and the rape and murder of a trainee doctor at RG Kar Medical College in 2024.¹⁸²

Sandeshkhali in particular resembles Nandigram: a ruling party's local strongmen accused of sexual violence, and a court turning to a national agency because it did not trust the state police. The data on missing and trafficked women also come mostly from after the Left. Between 2019 and 2021, 156,905 women and 36,606 girls were reported missing in West Bengal¹⁸³, out of about 1.06 million women and 251,000 girls across India. In 2016 West Bengal recorded 3,579 of India's 8,132 human trafficking cases, about 44%.¹⁸⁴

We found no comparable state-level figures for the Left Front years, so we cannot say whether these problems grew or shrank when government changed. One measure of missing girls does cover the Left years and favours the Left states. In the 2011 census, the child sex ratio, girls per 1,000 boys aged under seven, was 956 in West Bengal, 964 in Kerala and 957 in Tripura, all well above the national figure of 919.¹⁸⁵ Whatever drove sex-selective abortion in India was weaker in these three states.

What does this mean for our second claim?

Our second working claim was that Left governments in these three states presided over more crimes against women than the parties before and after them. On the statistics, the answer is mixed. Some measures look worse under the Left: spousal sexual violence in West Bengal and Tripura in 2005-06 was more than twice the national rate, and Tripura had India's highest rate of recorded crime against women in 2011. Others look better: the child sex ratio, and recorded rape below the national average.

The parties that replaced the Left in West Bengal inherited the same patterns and produced grave cases of their own. The case record shows what statistics cannot. Over three decades in West Bengal, from Marichjhapi to Nandigram, women were raped in the course of the ruling party's political and land conflicts, by its supporters or by police acting for its government, and the party and state repeatedly responded by doubting the women, resisting compensation, or leaving the accused unconvicted.

What the Indian cases do show is a danger that is not confined to the Left: when local party workers act as enforcers, as at Nandigram under the Left and Sandeshkhali under its successor, women in villages that oppose them are exposed to sexual violence, and the courts have turned to a national agency because the state police were not trusted to investigate.

Was rape used as a political weapon under communism?

The earlier sections describe harms that came from laws, quotas and prisons. This one asks a narrower and darker question: where did sexual violence serve a political purpose, whether by order, by design, or because those in power let it happen and punished almost no one? The evidence below comes from the regimes' own files where they exist, from courts and UN inquiries, and from survivors where nothing else survives.

We sort every case into one of three kinds. Ordered or built into policy: a written instruction, a rule, or a system that required it. Tolerated: soldiers or cadres acted on their own, the leadership knew, and punishment was rare or absent. Custodial: the victims were in the hands of the state's guards and interrogators, who raped with impunity.

The question needs one caution, which the political scientist Elisabeth Wood puts plainly: many Marxist-Leninist armed groups commit heavy violence against civilians but rarely engage in sexual violence as such.¹⁸⁶ The record bears that out in some places. It also shows how often, once communist power was established over a town, a village, a camp or a prison, women there were exposed to rape by the people holding it. The cases follow by region and period.

What do the Soviet files themselves say about the rapes of 1945?

Some of the best evidence comes from Soviet documents written at the time. On 17 March 1945 the NKVD's representative with the army group in East Prussia sent Beria a top-secret report. It said that Germans were claiming that every German woman left in the Red Army's rear had been raped¹⁸⁷, and that suicides among Germans, especially women, were becoming more widespread.

It quoted a woman who said that on 3 February twelve soldiers had raped her one after another in a courtyard, and a witness who described soldiers raping all the women, underage girls and old women in a flat on the night of 12 February.¹⁸⁷ Antony Beevor, who read the NKVD files, writes that reports of this kind went to Beria and Stalin with tick marks showing they had been read.¹⁸⁸

How the leadership responded

The leadership's own response is on the record, and it came late and was narrow. Stavka Directive No. 11072 of 20 April 1945 ordered better treatment of the German population. The historian Vadim Birstein notes that it went only to the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts, the fronts advancing on Berlin; he says no similar order reached the fronts that had been fighting in East Prussia since January.¹⁸⁹

The military prosecutor of the 1st Belorussian Front reported on 2 May that shootings and looting had fallen sharply after the directive, but that violence against women still occurs¹⁹⁰. He named three rape cases from the last week of April that had gone to tribunal. Marshal Zhukov's handwritten resolution of 4 May ordered the removal of unfit commandants.¹⁹⁰

The argument over the count

Russian historians who defend the army's record rely on the registered count. The prosecutor's follow-up report of 5 May 1945 recorded 124 crimes in seven armies of about 908,000 men between 22 April and 5 May, 72 of them rapes of German women¹⁹¹; the historian Elena Senyavskaya argues the rapes were excesses that were strictly suppressed, and says 4,148 officers were convicted by tribunals in early 1945 for outrages against civilians, though she gives no archival citation for that figure.¹⁹¹ A registered count measures what was reported and prosecuted.

Polish archives show how far the two can diverge: in Torun the prosecutor recorded about 500 rapes by Red Army soldiers between March and August 1945, while the provincial militia recorded only two in the district for February to May.¹⁹² The wartime tribunal files that would show how many soldiers were actually tried remain classified, and in 2019 the Russian embassy in Bucharest cited the registered figure to dismiss the estimate of two million.¹⁸⁸¹⁹³

Senyavskaya's own footnote concedes that the frequently quoted order of 19 January 1945 that rapists be shot appears in no published order collection and could not be found in the army archive, so we do not rely on it.¹⁹¹

1. 17 March 1945NKVD plenipotentiary Tkachenko reports to Beria on rapes and suicides in East PrussiaSource 187 (opens the source in a new tab)
2. 14 April 1945Pravda attacks Ehrenburg; the US ambassador reports it as authoritative Soviet policySource 194 (opens the source in a new tab)
3. 20 April 1945Stavka Directive 11072 orders better treatment of Germans, sent to two frontsSource 189 (opens the source in a new tab)
4. 2 May 1945Front prosecutor reports that violence against women still occursSource 190 (opens the source in a new tab)
5. 4 May 1945Zhukov orders unfit commandants removedSource 190 (opens the source in a new tab)
6. 5 May 1945Prosecutor's follow-up: 72 rapes registered across seven armies in 14 daysSource 191 (opens the source in a new tab)

The historian Norman Naimark, whose archival study of the Soviet zone of Germany is the standard work, concludes according to a scholarly review that Soviet occupation authorities and senior officials were unable or unwilling to stop the rapes, that there is evidence Stalin condoned the practice in general, and that the rapes destroyed any legitimacy the German Communist Party might have had.¹⁹⁵ Beevor, for his part, found that the leaflet urging soldiers to break the racial pride of German women, long attributed to the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, was a Nazi invention.

He still faults the violence of Ehrenburg's wartime propaganda, and the state's own turn against Ehrenburg in April 1945, when Pravda attacked him in what the US ambassador called an authoritative expression of Soviet policy, shows the leadership changing its line in April 1945.¹⁹⁶¹⁹⁴

Other victims

The victims were not only Germans. The war correspondent Vasily Grossman recorded in his notebooks that liberated Soviet girls complained that their own soldiers raped them.³¹ Beevor reports a Soviet account that more than a hundred women and girls freed from Nazi camps at Bunzlau, held without guards, were raped at night by soldiers who entered the camp; one of the victims is quoted saying that now the Soviet soldiers treat us worse than the Germans did.¹⁸⁸

What happened in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia?

Poland

The rapes were not confined to enemy territory, and the satellite regimes that followed hid the evidence. In Pomerania, Remigiusz Lawniczak of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance reconstructed the record from archives. Besides the Torun figures, the militia counted 104 rapes in the Chojnice district between February and May 1945, and a welfare committee there reported 300 to 400 pregnant women whose pregnancies came from rape. The rapes fell away almost completely by October 1945, after the troops moved out. Rape was a forbidden subject under communist censorship until 1989.¹⁹²

The Polish communist authorities' own handling of the victims shows what they valued. In May 1945 the Justice Minister authorised the Polish Red Cross to carry out abortions for rape victims, and a commission in Katowice handled 46 cases in seven weeks. By October the authorities had told doctors in a secret appeal to show considerable restraint, citing demographic needs.¹⁹⁷

Hungary

In Hungary, where the siege of Budapest lasted into February 1945, the historian James Mark estimates that about 50,000 women were raped in the capital, the most of any Central or East European capital after Berlin, and Andrea Peto, working from medical records of venereal disease, puts the Budapest figure between 50,000 and 200,000.¹⁹⁸¹⁹⁹ On 14 February 1945 the Budapest National Committee allowed free legal abortion, and a woman's written statement that she had been raped automatically produced a permit.¹⁹⁹ The subject was then suppressed under communism.¹⁹⁸

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia shows both the camps of 1945 and the invasion of 1968. At the Hanke internment camp in Moravska Ostrava, a parliamentary commission found in November 1947 that a Czech woman and possibly interned German women had been raped, and recommended prosecuting five guards. A report two days later stated that all but one were members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party; three were then quietly expelled from the party, and an amnesty law made prosecution unlikely.²⁰⁰

When Warsaw Pact troops invaded in August 1968, Czechoslovak police statistics recorded 13 rapes and 4 cases of sexual abuse by the occupiers by the end of the year, some at gunpoint, with the real figure very probably many times higher, since most reported victims were girls under twenty whose parents had reported the crime.²⁰¹

What happened in the camps of Yugoslavia and in northern Korea and Manchuria?

After the Partisans took power in Yugoslavia in 1944, a decision of the local communist leadership placed ethnic Germans in camps, where about 50,000 died according to the expellee organisations' count. The evidence on sexual violence there is memoirs, not archives, and we state it as such: the memoirs of Danube Swabian women describe rape beginning with the Soviet arrival in the Banat in October 1944 and becoming a daily occurrence in camps run by the Partisans, used as punishment for women who left to find food.²⁰² No count exists.

Soviet forces entered Manchuria in August 1945 and northern Korea the same month. Frank Dikotter's history of the Chinese revolution, citing a US historian, says Red Army troops in Shenyang were let loose for three days of rape and pillage.²⁰³ The leaders of one Japanese settler community, the Kurokawa group, handed fifteen unmarried young women to Soviet soldiers in exchange for food and safe passage, as described above.³⁴ In northern Korea, Soviet commandants kept their own statistics of soldiers' immoral behaviour, including armed robbery and rape, but the published research gives no totals.²⁰⁴

One historian, citing Andrei Lankov's study of the Soviet occupation, writes that looting, theft, rape and murder by Soviet soldiers were common, especially early in the occupation; we could not open Lankov's book to check the page.²⁰⁵ Soviet archives on these regions have not been opened to the point where a count is possible.

Did the Soviet security services use rape as a method in Western Ukraine?

Here the evidence points beyond tolerance. The historian Jeffrey Burds, who worked in the Ukrainian and Russian party and security archives, found a Party Control report of August 1946 recording that the MVD chief of the Gliniany district in Lviv province had raped a detainee during interrogation in February 1946, and at least four other girls arrested without cause.²⁰⁶ In July 1948 an MGB special group, a unit of the secret police disguised as insurgents, abducted and gang-raped a young woman in Rivne province.

Burds reads such acts as deliberate, part of a policy of disorganising the insurgency, and writes that they were a tactical weapon that used women's bodies in a wider conflict.²⁰⁶

The best source on that case is a Soviet one. In February 1949 the military prosecutor of the MVD troops in Ukraine, Colonel Kosharsky, sent a top-secret memorandum to Nikita Khrushchev on grave violations of Soviet legality by the special groups. It describes the young woman beaten, hung upside down, sexually assaulted with a stick and then gang-raped by the group.

The prosecutor concluded that the groups' actions had a bandit, anti-Soviet character, and he added that most such incidents were never investigated and that some perpetrators were arrested only months later or were released by their superiors.²⁰⁷

Did the Chinese Communist Party tolerate rape in land reform?

During land reform from 1946 to 1953, peasants and party work teams seized landlords' property in public "struggle" sessions. The best eyewitness account is by William Hinton, an American who sympathised with the Party and lived in the village of Long Bow in Shanxi province. He recorded that a militiaman and party member raped a landlord's daughter, that militiamen took women who were "struggle objects" whether they were willing or not, and that seventeen cases of "rascal behavior" were charged against cadres in a single village, some of them out-and-out rape. The victims were almost invariably the wives and daughters-in-law of dispossessed landlords and rich peasants.²⁰⁸ Hinton quotes the rapist's justification:

Bastard landlords, they took our women, why shouldn't we take theirs?

— Reported by William Hinton, Fanshen (1966), ch. 23, quoting a militiaman and party member

The punishment in the village was apologies only; Hinton records that no form of restitution was possible.²⁰⁸ The historian Brian DeMare, in the most recent history of the land reform, found that the Party never explicitly endorsed attacks on landlord women but that for some newly empowered men they were another form of property to take from class enemies. A work-team cadre reported activists dividing not just landlords' fields but their wives and daughters; when he tried to stop it, he was himself struggled against and disarmed.²⁰⁹

DeMare believes the full scale is unknowable, and concludes that it seems sadly reasonable to assume that sexual assault was as common as the killing of class enemies, which he puts at up to two million deaths; this is an inference, not a count.²⁰⁹ Dikotter, quoting an internal investigation from about 1951, adds that in Yidu, Shandong, entire families were put under surveillance and some of their daughters were raped, with similar examples too numerous to be enumerated.²⁰³

How did the People's Liberation Army treat women in Tibet?

In 1960 the International Commission of Jurists published the findings of its Legal Inquiry Committee on Tibet, based on testimony from refugees in India. The Committee concluded that the right to life had been violated by acts of murder, rape and arbitrary imprisonment, and that marriage had been made non-voluntary by forcing monks and lamas to marry.²¹⁰

Refugee testimony in the report includes a woman gang-raped at home in 1954 by three PLA soldiers and a civilian, and a woman of about 22 raped in 1956 by at least seven men of a ten-soldier group, held for about a year, and then forced to marry a Chinese civilian.²¹⁰ The Committee also noted that most Tibetan witnesses had heard nothing of Tibetan women being raped by either side during the fighting.²¹⁰

Coerced sex as policy

The more striking finding concerns policy. The Committee heard that monks were threatened with deportation unless they had sex with an assigned woman, that a girl was offered a sum for each monk she persuaded, that the monks of one monastery were ordered to live with girls under threat of death, and that an old lama who resisted was accused in public, made to kneel on stones and thorns and beaten, and died.

The Committee read the purpose as being to break the monks of their religious ties and to discredit them in the eyes of lay believers.²¹⁰ In 1962 the Panchen Lama put the practice in writing to the Chinese leadership. During the "democratic reform" of monasteries, he wrote, work teams compelled monks to return to lay life, going so far as lining up monks on one side and nuns and secular women on the other and forcing each to choose a partner.²¹¹

lining up monks on one side and nuns and secular women on the other and forcing each to choose a partner

A petition from that source is not the testimony of an opponent; it is an internal document, and it describes coerced pairing of religious people as a work-team method.

In custody

Sexual violence against Tibetan women in custody continued. The Tibet Justice Center, relying on interviews with Tibetan monitors, reported about 295 women political prisoners in autumn 1998, about 250 of them in Drapchi prison and 88.4% of them nuns, and testimony of electric cattle prods inserted into the vagina and rectum.²¹² A Tibet Information Network study reported by the Baltimore Sun found that five Drapchi nuns had taken their own lives after beatings and cattle-prod shocks, with electric batons applied to tongues, ears and genitalia.²¹³

How is sexual violence used as control in North Korea?

North Korea is the clearest modern case of sexual violence built into a custodial system. The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, a Seoul organisation that records escapee testimony, had documented 586 cases of sexual violence against women as of December 2022; 270 of them, 46%, took place inside detention facilities²¹⁴. The organisation calls it a structural sex crime. Officers trade sentence reductions for sex and threaten additional sentences if a woman refuses, and any resulting pregnancy is aborted to protect the perpetrator.²¹⁴ The cases come from non-random interviews and are counts of documented cases, not a measure of prevalence.

The UN's special rapporteur on North Korea reported in 2023 that women detainees are subjected to sexual violence by state officials, invasive cavity searches and forced abortions, that guards are almost exclusively men, and that the criminal code sets the penalty for rape at up to five years while men in positions of authority act with total impunity.²¹⁵

The Korea Institute for National Unification gives an example from a South Korean government study of escapee accounts: in 2019 a soldier who raped a civilian in Sonchon County received seven months in a labour-training camp, against a statutory minimum of five years, and when a superior rapes a female soldier it is the victim who is transferred or discharged.

The same study says women in construction "shock troops" are constantly raped, and quotes a woman sexually assaulted by a guard at a police holding centre in 2016 who was told it did not count as sexual assault because she was dead there and a dead person cannot say she is assaulted.²¹⁶

In September 2025 the UN human rights office, in its ten-year update after the Commission of Inquiry, reported from more than 300 interviews that market women faced threats of detention, fines, bribes and sexual violence, that cavity searches of repatriated women continued, and that authorities demanded sexual favours in exchange for better food and less demanding jobs²¹⁷.²¹⁷ Among the documented violations by the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Social Security, the Seoul database counts 145 cases of sexual violence and 117 forced abortions.²¹⁸

What happened in the Khmer Rouge's prisons and among minorities?

In Cambodia the courts have examined forced marriage in detail, as described earlier, and rape in custody only partly. At S-21, the Phnom Penh prison, the Trial Chamber found proven that an interrogator inserted a stick into a female detainee's vagina during interrogation; the prison's commandant, Duch, reassigned the man and took no other sanction.²¹⁹ The court held a second alleged rape not proved to the required standard, and the judgement lists one proven instance of rape among the torture methods used at the prison.²¹⁹

The most detailed survivor evidence concerns minorities. A 2014 study by the Cambodian Defenders Project interviewed 105 Cham, Vietnamese, Khmer Krom and other minority survivors with a questionnaire, not a random sample. About two-thirds had directly experienced sexual violence, mostly forced marriage; 67% were ordered to marry; and there were 56 witness reports of rape, nearly half of them mass rape, in which the victims were usually executed afterwards. All identified rapists were Khmer Rouge cadres except one civilian.²²⁰

What did Vietnam's re-education camps and Ethiopia's Derg do?

Between 200,000 and 250,000 people were sent to re-education camps in Vietnam after 1975. The historian Hoang Minh Vu, drawing on camp memoirs, notes many accounts of corruption and even sexual predation by guards, but most inmates were men and we found no source documenting rape of women detainees in Vietnamese camps.²²¹ In Ethiopia the evidence is richer. Africa Watch, in its 1991 history of the Derg's wars, records rape as an instrument of the army's counterinsurgency in Eritrea and Tigray.

Eritrean relief figures, which the author says roughly match independent estimates, say that between January and June 1980 soldiers raped at least 110 women while detaining 1,475 rural people and executing 240; a 1987 Leeds team recorded 200 women raped by soldiers since the start of 1986.¹⁰⁴

More striking is a system. In garrison towns the army practised what the report calls de facto conscription of women: at Tessenei in Eritrea several hundred women in 1978-84 were recruited as aides, whose main purpose was as sexual servants¹⁰⁴; they were not volunteers. In the Ogaden in 1987, after a round-up of about 8,000 villagers, 23 young women were kept for the soldiers' sexual gratification; women dragged from resettlement trucks at Humera were raped; and refugees from the villagization of Harerghe described systematic rape of women by militia.¹⁰⁴

A journalist's refugee testimony about the joint Ethiopian-Cuban advance on Jijiga in March 1978 says that at first the women were saved so that they could be raped, and then they were killed.¹⁰⁴ Some of the figures come from the Eritrean liberation movement's relief wing, which was a party to the war.

What did Soviet and Afghan government forces do in Afghanistan?

The evidence for Afghanistan is held in UN and Helsinki Watch records of the 1980s. Women arrested by the communist government's secret police, KhAD, were raped as a method of torture. The UN's special rapporteur, Felix Ermacora, heard from a former security-police officer who listed raping women, introducing objects into the vagina, and electric shocks to women's breasts among the methods, and who named the torturers; he also recorded women raped in the presence of their families, including a man killed for trying to stop a soldier raping his daughter.²²²

A Kabul University student told Helsinki Watch that interrogators at the Sedarat centre in 1981 threatened to bring her sister and rape her, and that Soviet advisers organised the interrogations.²²³

In the countryside, Ermacora recorded that in reprisal operations in Laghman province in March 1985, in which about 1,000 civilians were allegedly killed in twelve villages, women were raped and some of them summarily executed.²²⁴ Helsinki Watch in 1985 received a number of reports of rapes by Soviet soldiers during searches and massacres, among them rapes during searches in Kunduz and Laghman provinces and tank crews who abducted girls in Kabul between 1981 and 1984, some found dead days later.

It called the evidence sketchy and judged that rape was generally not part of the systematic massacres but reflected an undisciplined and unrestrained occupation army.²²⁵ No count exists. The UN's mapping report, as noted above, rated rape by KhAD as neither common nor systematic, so we report the Afghan record as repeated rape in custody and during village sweeps, without a showing of order.¹⁰⁸

Did communist insurgencies use sexual violence?

Insurgent communist movements show a different pattern: rules against rape on paper, and control over women's reproduction in practice.

Peru

In Peru, the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission attributed about 11% of rapes it registered to the subversive groups, mostly the Shining Path.

It found that the Shining Path was responsible for forced abortion, forced unions and sexual servitude, and it recorded a former recruit's testimony that the group permitted three rapes of a woman but on the fourth buried the rapist, and that rules against rape were for the rank and file, not for the commanders. Women in the Shining Path's "army" were forced to abort, one commander forcing a 13-year-old to abort up to four times. The Commission nonetheless concluded that the testimonies did not support calling subversive sexual violence a systematic or generalised practice.²²⁶

Among the Ashaninka people of the Peruvian jungle, specialists estimate that about 5,000 of 55,000 were held captive by the Shining Path and about 6,000 died; the Commission described its "popular committees" as a kind of concentration camp.²²⁷

Colombia

In Colombia, the national memory centre found that the FARC strictly regulated its fighters' sexual and reproductive lives and massively applied contraceptives to girls and women on entry; the FARC Secretariat confirmed in January 2016 that contraception was obligatory.²²⁸ The Truth Commission found that some FARC blocs imposed abortion on women combatants, that sexual violence was used to reward combatants, and that in some cases commanders planned it, took part or knew and did nothing, until it became an accepted practice. A former combatant quotes commanders saying an abortion is like removing a thorn.²²⁹

The recruitment of girls fed the system: of 16,238 children documented as recruited in Colombia between 1990 and 2017, 12,038 were recruited by the FARC, and girls under 15 made up 15.9% of recruits, with adolescent girls under 18 another 30.3%.²³⁰

The national memory centre counts guerrillas as responsible for 31.5% of 15,076 victims of sexual violence, without a separate FARC figure, and the special peace tribunal's case on sexual violence presumes the FARC responsible for 2,051 of 35,178 victims; it has also opened a subcase on sexual and reproductive violence inside the FARC's own ranks.²²⁸²³¹

The Philippines and India

Smaller cases fill out the picture. The UN verified that the Philippines' New People's Army abducted two 15-year-old girls in 2022-23 and that one was raped in captivity by a member.²³² Scholars of India's Maoist insurgency write that sexual and gender-based violence and discrimination within the movement undermine its commitment to gender justice.²³³

What does the record show when taken together?

The cases fall into a pattern. Where communist power was consolidated, in a conquered town, a village undergoing land reform, a camp, a prison or a garrison, women under that power were exposed to sexual violence by its agents, and the system around them could rarely be made to answer for it. Often, as at Hanke or in Ukraine, party and security-service structures shielded the perpetrators.

At times, as in Tibet, Cambodia, North Korea and the insurgent movements of Peru and Colombia, the sexual control of women was itself an instrument of the movement's rule, written into rules or practised as policy. Where the regimes' own officials recorded the crimes, in the front prosecutor's reports in Germany, the Party Control report on a police chief and Kosharsky's memorandum in Ukraine, the crimes were known to the leadership and were not stopped.

What patterns run across the evidence?

Set side by side, the cases fall into five patterns. The table summarises the main findings, who was responsible, and how strong the evidence is, using the grades described in the method: A for a court, UN commission or the regime's own records, B for official statistics or peer-reviewed research, C for credible human rights or press reports, D for untested allegations.

1. 1920Soviet Russia legalises abortionSource 24 (opens the source in a new tab)
2. 1936USSR bans abortionSource 27 (opens the source in a new tab)
3. 1937NKVD Order 00486 orders the repression of wives of traitorsSource 25 (opens the source in a new tab)
4. 1944-45Mass rape by Soviet soldiers across EuropeSource 1 (opens the source in a new tab)
5. 1950China's Marriage Law outlaws concubinage and child betrothalSource 53 (opens the source in a new tab)
6. 1960ICJ reports rape and forced marriage of monks in TibetSource 210 (opens the source in a new tab)
7. 1966Romania bans abortionSource 37 (opens the source in a new tab)
8. 1971-83China's birth-planning campaigns peak at 20.7 million sterilisationsSource 12 (opens the source in a new tab)
9. 1975-79Khmer Rouge forced marriageSource 4 (opens the source in a new tab)
10. 1985UN rapporteur reports rapes by Soviet and Afghan forcesSource 224 (opens the source in a new tab)
11. 2007Rapes at Nandigram, West BengalSource 119 (opens the source in a new tab)
12. 2014UN Commission of Inquiry on North KoreaSource 5 (opens the source in a new tab)
13. 2017Xinjiang birth rates begin to collapseSource 14 (opens the source in a new tab)
14. 2018Cambodian court convicts for forced marriage and rape within itSource 4 (opens the source in a new tab)
15. 2025UN human rights office reports on North Korea ten years onSource 217 (opens the source in a new tab)

Reproductive control by decree

The most distinctive pattern is the state's direct control over whether women bore children. Romania banned abortion and policed pregnancy in the workplace; the Soviet Union and Hungary did the same for shorter periods; China and later Xinjiang imposed quotas enforced with sterilisation, IUDs and abortion; Czechoslovakia paid Roma women to be sterilised; North Korea forces abortion on women returned from China. The direction varied: some states forced women to give birth, others forced them not to.

What these policies share is that the state, not the woman, decided, and the decision was written down. That is why the evidence for them is among the strongest in this review.

Collective punishment of women for men's acts

Stalin's order on the wives of traitors and Albania's internment of opponents' families at Tepelena both punished women for their relationships to men. This pattern also leaves documents, because it was policy.

Sexual violence in detention with impunity

From the Gulag to Xinjiang, North Korea's camps, Ethiopia's Red Terror prisons, Afghanistan's secret police and Nicaragua's prisons, women held by the state were exposed to rape by guards and interrogators. Where the state has fallen or been investigated, courts and UN bodies have confirmed it. Where the state still rules, the evidence is testimony that the state denies.

Rape as a weapon of rule

The study above sorts the evidence into three kinds. Some sexual violence was ordered or built into the system: the coerced pairing of monks and nuns in Tibet, Khmer Rouge forced marriage, forced abortion in North Korean custody, and the forced abortion and contraception of women fighters in the Shining Path and the FARC. Much more was tolerated by leaderships who knew from their own reports, as with the Red Army in 1945, land reform cadres in China, the Derg's garrison towns and the communist guards at Hanke. And a great deal was custodial, in prisons and interrogation rooms from Western Ukraine to Kabul to Pyongyang, with almost no one punished.

Mass rape by armies

The Red Army's rapes in 1944-45 are the largest single episode of sexual violence in this review. No order to rape has been found, but the leadership's response is on record: a Soviet general dismissed Yugoslav complaints as an insult to the Red Army, and Stalin answered them with an excuse.²⁹ They belong to a wider history of wartime rape in which other armies, including the German army that invaded the Soviet Union and, on a smaller scale, the Western Allies, took part.¹

Trafficking and missing women where women became scarce

China's birth limits, combined with old son preference, produced tens of millions of missing women and a market in trafficked brides drawing on Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and North Korea. Vietnam has the same problem at a smaller scale. These are harms produced by a combination of policy and social practice, and India shows that the second can produce them without the first.³

Punishing those who spoke up

Across the record, the state turned on the people who exposed crimes against women. China seized Chen Guangcheng after he documented forced abortions in Linyi,⁶³ and sent Tang Hui to a labour camp for demanding justice for her raped and prostituted daughter.⁷² Officials in Fengxian first denied that the chained woman had been trafficked.⁶⁸ Cuba detained the Ladies in White more than 1,600 times in ten months of 2016.⁹⁸

Impunity was the norm: of the tens of thousands of killers in Guangxi's Cultural Revolution massacres, ten were executed,⁵⁷ and North Korea reported five rape convictions in all of 2015.¹⁷

Does the evidence support our first claim?

Our first working claim was that communist governments produced patterns of crimes against women directed by the state, not merely tolerated. The evidence supports it. In at least seven states in Europe and Asia, a court, a UN body or the regime's own documents shows a policy or order that caused the harm: the NKVD order on wives in the USSR, the deportation decree of 1944, Romania's Decree 770, East Germany's venereal ward system, Czechoslovakia's sterilisation payments, Cambodia's forced marriage policy found by the ECCC, and North Korea's treatment of repatriated women found by the UN commission.

China's birth quota system, with its own statistics on sterilisation, belongs on the same list. Not every crime was ordered. The 1945 rapes, the abuse of sent-down girls and the sexual violence in the Cultural Revolution killings were committed by soldiers and cadres acting without a written order, and communist armies were not the only ones to rape in war. But the line between ordered and tolerated is thinner than it looks.

In each of these cases the perpetrators were the state's own agents, the leadership knew, and punishment was rare: Stalin excused the Red Army, Guangxi executed ten killers out of tens of thousands, and the campaign against abuse of sent-down youth came only after a letter reached Mao in 1973.²⁹⁵⁷⁵⁹

Why did communist states produce these patterns?

The record points to a structural explanation. Each of the state-directed harms above required three things: a government that claimed authority over private life, including marriage and reproduction; a security apparatus that answered to the party rather than to courts; and no free press or independent courts through which women could complain. Where those conditions held, policies that harmed women could be written and enforced without challenge, and agents who abused women could expect impunity. These were not accidents of particular leaders.

Every state in this review ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party had all three, because one-party rule, a police answerable to the party and a party-controlled press were how those states were built, from the Soviet Union in the 1920s to North Korea today. The economists F. A. Hayek (https://therealigned.com/thinker/f-a-hayek) and Ludwig von Mises (https://therealigned.com/thinker/ludwig-von-mises) made the general argument that concentrating economic power in the state concentrates power over individuals; this review offers one body of evidence on what that can mean for women.

Written protections did not save women once the party held unchecked power. The Soviet state legalised abortion in 1920 and banned it again in 1936, when the leadership wanted more births.²⁴²⁷ China's 1950 Marriage Law freed women from forced marriage and concubinage,⁵³ and the same state later carried out 20.7 million sterilisations in a single year.⁶¹ The rights existed at the party's pleasure, and the party withdrew them when its goals changed.

China's later turn to markets, examined in our case study of China's 1978 economic reform (https://therealigned.com/case/china-1978-economic-reform), changed the economy but not the birth quota system, which continued for decades. India's elected Left governments are the control case. Their supporters committed rapes in political and land conflicts, at Nandigram, Dhantala and Singur, and the party's response often disparaged the victims; but because they faced independent courts, a free press and elections they could lose, they could not write such harms into law, and courts could order national investigators in. What turned communist parties' power into state-directed crimes against women was the one-party state they built wherever they could.

What could mislead in this review?

The first limitation is that the evidence is strongest where regimes fell and opened their archives, and weakest where they still rule. We know a great deal about the Soviet Union, East Germany and Romania because their successors published the records. We know less about China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cuba, where the governments that committed the acts still control the evidence. A shorter list of documented crimes for a country can mean fewer crimes or less access. Readers should not rank countries by how much appears here.

The second is that many of the largest numbers are estimates built on chains of assumptions. The Red Army rape figures for Germany, Hungary and Austria, the forced marriage figure for Cambodia and the share of North Korean women trafficked in China all rest on extrapolation from limited data. We have reported the method and range for each, but a reader should treat them as orders of size.

The third is that testimony from closed states cannot be fully verified. The UN commission on North Korea, the UN office's Xinjiang assessment and Human Rights Watch all relied mainly on interviews with people who had left. They used careful methods, but they could not visit the places concerned, and the governments involved reject their findings. We have reported those rejections.

The fourth is that recorded crime in India measures reporting as much as crime. Fewer than one woman in a hundred who suffered violence in the 2005-06 survey told the police. Changes in recorded crime between parties and years may reflect changes in police practice, in the law, or in women's willingness to come forward, more than changes in violence.

The fifth is coverage. We could not open the full texts of several important books, including Gail Kligman's study of Romania, Michel Bonnin's history of the sent-down youth and Frank Dikotter's history of the Great Leap famine, and relied on articles and reviews that summarise them. We found little or no documented evidence for Bulgaria, Mongolia, South Yemen, Benin and the Republic of the Congo.

Bengali-language newspapers such as Anandabazar Patrika, Ei Samay and the Telegraph block automated reading, so several Indian cases reach us only through writers who cited them. Some well-known Indian cases, including rapes at Marichjhapi in 1979 and the Bantala verdict of the 1990s, could not be confirmed in court records and are reported as allegations or with that caveat.

The sixth is what we could not find. We found no verifiable source for sexual violence by North Korean or Chinese troops in the Korean War, no documented rape by Viet Cong or North Vietnamese forces, and little on Mongolia, Laos, Bulgaria, South Yemen, Benin or the Baltic republics. Sources for the Red Army's conduct in Manchuria and northern Korea give no counts, and the Soviet wartime tribunal files remain classified. We leave these gaps open instead of filling them with unsourced claims.

The seventh is comparison. We set communist cases beside the conduct of other armies and governments where the sources allowed, but this is not a systematic comparison of all regimes. A full answer to whether communist states were worse for women than other dictatorships of the same era would need a study of right-wing military governments, colonial regimes and absolute monarchies on the same terms. We have not done that, and our findings should not be read as if we had.

Eighth, nothing here proves that communism as an idea causes crimes against women. The patterns we describe are the record of particular states and parties. Where the same patterns appear in non-communist states, as with missing women in India or wartime rape by other armies, that is evidence that the causes lie at least partly in power, war and social practice rather than in ideology alone.

Conflicts of interest

The Realigned has no commercial relationship with any government, party, court, UN body or human rights organisation whose work is cited here, and no funding tied to this research. The analysis was done by The Realigned. Our wider coverage includes economists critical of central planning; we have tried to report the evidence for and against each finding as its sources state it, including the positions of the governments concerned.

The short version

Communist governments did serious harm to women in many countries, and in many cases it was written into policy. Stalin's police jailed wives for their husbands' supposed crimes. The Red Army raped very large numbers of women in 1945, though how many is uncertain. Romania banned abortion, and almost ten thousand women died. East Germany locked healthy girls in venereal wards. Czechoslovakia paid Roma women to be sterilised. China enforced birth quotas with hundreds of millions of abortions and sterilisations, some of them forced, and tens of millions of women are missing from its population.

The Khmer Rouge forced people to marry, and North Korea forces abortions on women sent back from China. Courts and UN bodies have confirmed many of these acts. Some of these crimes, such as rape in war, also happened under other kinds of regime; what stands out in the communist record is how often the harm was written into law and policy.

In West Bengal under the Left Front, women were raped by ruling-party supporters or police in conflicts from Marichjhapi to Nandigram, and the party often answered by doubting the victims, though the state's overall crime statistics are mixed.