A POLISH art student provoked a hiccup in the often difficult relations between his nation and Russia last week. Jerzy Bohdan Szumczyk, 26, a student at Gdansk's Fine Arts Academy, placed a sculpture called "Komm, Frau" (Come, Woman), depicting a Red Army soldier raping a pregnant German woman while holding her hair and putting a gun to her head, on a street in the city then known as Danzig—next to a communist-era memorial to Soviet Union troops that defeated Nazi forces in 1945.

The 300 kilo sculpture was installed overnight. It only remained in place for a few hours as police removed it following a complaint. The event made national news and provoked an angry response from Russia’s ambassador to Poland.

“I am deeply outraged by a prank of a Gdansk Fine Arts Academy student whose pseudo-art desecrated the memory of 600,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the fight for Poland’s freedom and independence,” wrote Alexander Alekseev, the Russian envoy. Russian MP Franc Klincewicz said he would demand an apology from the artist.

In 1939 the free city of Danzig was home to Germans and a Polish minority. It became the Polish city of Gdansk when its German population was expelled or fled at the end of the war. Mr Szumczyk made the sculpture after reading about rapes committed against women in the city by advancing Red Army troops.

Dorota Karas, writing in Gazeta Wyborcza, a leading Polish daily, said Gdansk city records estimate that up to 40% of the women living in Danzig were raped. “At a certain moment I felt that I had to get this topic that took place in Gdansk out of my system,” Mr Szumczyk told the Gazeta. “This topic scares me. I deliberately showed a soldier and a woman in the aesthetics of socialist realism. I wanted it to be in this style. I know that the work is vulgar but such is our history,” he said.

Prosecutors in the city began an investigation but dropped the case after they decided the student had not incited hatred on ethnic grounds nor desecrated a public space dedicated to historical memory. They added police are yet to determine whether Mr Szumczyk committed a misdemeanor for an alleged ‘tasteless incident’.

Antoni Pawlak, spokesman for Gdansk’s mayor said the rape of women by soldiers was one of many subjects that have been swept under the carpet in Polish history. “However I am surprised by the ambassador’s reaction. Similar artistic expressions take place all over the world; it shouldn’t be an event of international importance. It would be different if City Hall decided to erect such a monument,” he said.

Marcin Wojciechowski, a spokesman of Poland’s foreign office., tweeted: “I’m sorry about the incident of the statue of the Soviet soldiers in Gdansk. It’s a pseudo-artistic action. It will not influence relations between Poland and Russia”. It wasn’t only Soviet troops that brutally raped women as the Red Army and the western Allies fought their way into Germany in 1944-45; American, British, Canadian and French soldiers did so too.

Even so, according to Anthony Beevor, a British historian, the brutality against women from the Soviets was on a different scale. Writing in the Guardian in 2002, Mr Beevor said at least 2m German women are thought to have been raped, with 1.4m victims in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone. In Berlin, one doctor deduced that out of approximately 100,000 women raped in the city, some 10,000 died as a result, mostly from suicide.

Many Russian historians dispute these claims saying the figures are based on faulty methodology and unreliable sources.