Stalins Soldaten in Österreich - Stelzl-Marx, Barbara 1971- (Böhlau, 2012)
As Soviet troops first set foot on Austrian territory on March 29, 1945 near Klostermarienberg, they found themselves in a hostile, perplexing and largely unknown world. The Austrians by no means greeted their Eastern "liberators from the fascist yoke" with open arms. Given the first encounters with the Austrian population a variety of stereotypes developed, supporting images of the enemy and the other. Soviet propaganda together with the war experiences anchored these ideas deep into the sub-conscious. However, also ideas of the West that had been aroused by film and literature were now confronted with reality.The Red Army's glorious and triumphant end of WWII was followed by their ten-year long occupation of Austria, where hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers and officers, their wives and children and also civil occupational personnel were linked to Austria for many months and sometimes even years.