I've read multiple sources (one being Antony Beevor's 'Berlin') of the Russian advance towards Germany and how that once a town had been liberated/conquered by the red army then many accounts of rape occur. Mostly towards German women but occasionally even Russian women.
I ask as there was a photo posted in r/oldschoolcool of a female Russian sniper, who was killed while fighting in East Prussia, and it got me thinking of the stories that i had read.
It is probably unnecessary given the nature of the question but it bears mentioning anyways: The following post contains discussion of sexual violence
I have now written several answers on sexual violence and WWII, most notably here, here, here, and here while /u/kieslowskifan has written about the Red Army in Germany here.
As for this specific question, according to most of the scholarship I have read, it is impossible to answer in the negative or affirmative, though from the general historical context, the answer is likely yes, female soldiers of the Red Army did experience sexual violence, most likely both from the Germans both in case of capture as well as before their service as well as from other Red Army soldiers.
In the first linked post, I talk about the methodological and source problems concerning the issue of sexual violence and WWII, most notably the tiny amount of rapes that is reported, the issue of consent in the historical context, and research perspective and bias. And it is the latter of these factors that is very pertinent to this question.
Sexual violence has a social stigma attached to it, which lead to victims being extremely reluctant to discuss the subject, and is at the same time a highly charged topic, as in both for conquered and conqueror the idea of "taking" conquered women is a common and highly emotional trope in relation to ideas of masculinity and related factors. This has in no small parts influenced both prominent post-war narratives of sexual violence in occupied Germany as well as influenced decades of historical research conducted almost exclusively by male historians who often relegated the subject of sexual to footnotes.
The first issue to be kept in mind here is that when reading sources like Beevor who prominently discusses this subject is that for all of Beevor's and others work, in the words of Atina Grossman, "reliable data is hard to come by". As she points out in a review of the book BeFreier and Befreite by Helke Sander and Barbara Johr:
But hard - or even soft - facts are hard to come by and unreliable. It has been suggested that perhaps one out of every three of about one and a half million women in Berlin at the end of the war were raped - many but certainly not all during the notorious week of "mass rapes," from April 24 to May 5, 1945, as the Soviets finally secured Berlin. The numbers cited for Berlin vary wildly; from 20,000 to 100,000,to almost one million,with the actual number of rapes higher because many women were attacked repeatedly. Sander and her collaborator, Barbara Johr speak, perhaps conservatively, of about 110,000 women raped,many more than once,of whom up to 10,000 died in the aftermath. At the same time- and despite their virtual fetishization of statistical clarity - they announce on the basis of Hochrechnungen (projections or estimations) that 1.9 million German women altogether were raped at the end of the war by Red Army soldiers.
Beevor, who posits similar numbers, also works on the basis of statistical projections. The obvious problem with this is that these statistical projections are based on data that is itself shaky and that it is difficult to extrapolate a total and reliable number from one set of data. This means that ultimately the number of 1,8 to 1,9 million rapes in post-war Germany committed by the Soviets is a number that could either be too high or much too low – it is simply not really possible to say. All we can say is that what evidence we have draws a picture of a very prevalent practice of sexual violence committed by Red Army soldiers.
At the same time, the sources we draw this conclusion from are not without their own bias in the sense that sexual violence committed by the Red Army against Germans has received much stronger attention than sexual violence in other contexts in WWII, including sexual violence committed by the Red Army against other victims.
Discussing the issue of rape and racialized narrative in Germany after liberation, Heide Fehrenbach in her book Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America, she writes:
[A]lthough Soviet soldiers did not always distinguish between privileged Aryan women and persecuted ethnic minorities in perpetrating rape as they moved westward into Germany, West German chroniclers most certainly did, when it came to representing [sic] mass rape by Soviet troops. As a result, although Jewish women and other Displaced Persons were subject to "rape and sexual assault by their liberators", this [sic] form of racialized violence did not enter the annals of post-war German history. It remains both undocumented and uncommemorated by West Germany historians, media, and the state. Thus the victims depicted as deserving public sympathy and recognition were only some of those affected by actual rape.
These victims, who in the eyes of those writing about them are deserving of commemoration are, as she points out, white, non-Jewish, German women "implicitly embodying the Aryan ethnonational ideal", especially when the perpetrators fitted the category of "the other". Fehrenbach is quite adept in showing that the German post-war authorities were working under very strong perceptions when it came to sexual violence. She cites e.g. the files of the Stuttgart police force in the 1940s, which introduced special categories of marking perpetrators in their files as either "colored Americans", "colonized French" (including all of them, from Algeria to Indonesia), "Russian", "Displaced Person" and "other", the latter one being the catch all term for perpetrators of sexual violence that did not fit these categories. Working with those files, she shows that these categories are not justified by statistics as in there was no prevalence of the four specified categories over the catch-all category for white Germans, US Soldiers, French soldiers and so forth, which shows that the perception of sexual violence by those who were in charged of persecuting and stopping it, did indeed privilege certain narratives – that of white, German women being brutalized by people the Nazis had seen as inferior – over others like that of German women being raped by German men.
This is also the reason for why this specific question is based on current scholarship so hard to impossible to answer: What we know about sexual violence during and after WWII is highly influenced by what kind of sources we have and those sources are heavily colored by certain narratives, including the one mentioned above. This narrative excludes not only non-"Aryan" victims of sexual violence like Jewish survivors or Displaced Persons but also female soldiers of the Red Army. They simply are not mentioned in the pertinent accounts produced mostly by observers and very seldom by a small number of victims themselves.
A similar issue that hardly ever comes up in popular treatments of the subject is also the issue of sexual violence female soldiers of the Red Army suffered on the hands of Germans in the role of captor during the war. Researching sexual violence on the Eastern Front, Pascale R. Bos in her article "Feminists Interpreting the Politics of Wartime Rape: Berlin, 1945"; Yugoslavia, 1992–1993 Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2006, vol. 31, no. 4, p.996-1025 cites a German survey from 1942 in which the Wehrmacht estimates that 750,000 babies had already been born from contact between German soldiers and Russian women. This is a conservative estimate and covers only the time frame up to 1942. While not all of these might have come from rape it shows how endemic the problem was. Together with Wendy Jo Gertjejanssen and her PhD thesis Victims, Heroes, Survivors. Sexual Violence on the Eastern Front during World War II, University of Minnesota 2004, the estimation of war time rapes and other incidents of sexual violence inflicted by the Germans in the Soviet Union is somewhere between 2 and 3 million. This lead to historian Nina Tumarkin writing in her book The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, that the Germans in the east “tortured and murdered civilians at the slightest pretext. As for rape–there was no need for any pretext.” The minuscule number of rape cases that found themselves in front of courts – because of sleeping with an inferior race – were dismissed in the vast majority of cases.
In the end all we can say is that reviewing this context, it is likely that such cases occurred. How frequent as well as how they were handled awaits further research in order to be answerable.
Sources aside those mentioned:
Heide Fehrenbach: Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America.
Atina Grossmann: Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany.
William I. Hitchcock: The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe.
Helke Sander and Barbara Johr: BeFreier and Befreite.
Nina Tumarkin: The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia
While /u/commiespaceinvader has some great info here, I would also link you to this answer I just finished up which addresses this topic with more of a focus on within the Red Army itself.