Russia

Russia

==Stalin used his great power to expand Russia into Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and parts of Romania during the war and committed awful crimes against them before working many of these prisoners to death in his labor camps. ==

The NKVD was the Soviets intelligence and had a vast network abroad that not only spied on enemies but carried out interior affairs. They were comparable to Germanys SS troops. They carried out purges in Poland and the Baltics gathering prisoners and putting them to work. In Germany they gathered prisoners that opposed them and deported them to labor camps in Siberia. They executed anyone that they suspected was a spy within the country. They also executed anyone that was trying to avoid fighting in the military that was able to fight. They also had the job of killing any of their soldiers that tried to flee the battlefield.

How this relates to the thesis is during world war two countries gathered prisoners with their army or secret police force and put them into labor camps as a form of cruelty to the people.



During the war when the Soviets took over a country the NKVD under Beria’s rule integrated this country into the Soviet Union. The job of the NKVD was to manipulate elections to make it look like the majority had popular support for communist rule. The agents of the NKVD also arrested, interrogated, tortured, deported, or murdered local citizens that opposed the Soviet rule. And estimated 1.5 million poles were sent to Russian labor camps. Four percent of Estonians, two percent of Latvians and Lithuanians were also sent to these labor camps called the Gulags.

Russia in March 1940, in Russia there were 53 separate camps and 423 labor colonies in the USSR that prisoners were sent to. None of these camps were ever proven just for the purpose of executing people but it didn’t matter anyway because there were extremely harsh conditions and very hard labor where people were worked to death.

 On the eve of World War II the combined total of labor camps and colonies was more than 1.6 million. Other estimates show between 1.2 and 1.5 million.

How this relates to the thesis is the Russians controlled every part of their prisoners life and blamed not only the minority of their countries and the people that opposed communism but also blamed the people of other countries for their problems and sent them to the same camps as well.  Hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens during this time were taken from their annexed land, regardless of their ethnic origin and were sent to the Gulag camps.

 The total number of sentences for political and anti-state crimes in the USSR from 1939-1941 was said to be 211,106 though hundreds of thousands more prisoners were worked to death at Gulag camps.

During the war the labor camps populations declined sharply due to the fast rise in mortality. This happened in 1942-1943. This was because they did not have enough food to feed all these prisoners and the work load was the same so they were even more likely to die fast. These works camps were also extremely cold during the winter. In the winter of 1941 a quarter of the Gulags population dies of starvation. From 1941-1943 516,841 prisoners died in the prison camps.

In relation to the thesis the Russians took out all their anger and problems on the enemies they dominated and their was no control of this in the army so the soldiers could do whatever they want. The Russian army was extremely cruel to their enemy and controlled the course of a lot of these peoples lives.

On August 6, 1940 the Soviet Union illegally annexed Estonia. 34,000 Estonians were immediately sent to fight in Russia's red army. Many of these men were not even used in the war and perished in the early months of the war in Gulag labor camps. Once the Russians realized that this invasion of Estonia would be successful all the political prisoners that could not be evacuated were executed by the NKVD. Tens of thousands of Estonians were deported to Soviet labor camps in Russia and Serbia. 20% of Estonia's population perished during World War two due to the Russians. This happened in all the countries the Soviets took over during World War two this is just a specific example. This happened on a wider scale during

The Soviet's burned down many towns and cities during the war of the countries they were invading. This was all part of Stalin's scorched earth policy which says that the easiest way for victory is burning down anything the enemy might find useful later. The Soviet armies were very extreme about this policy burning down whole towns and burning people alive.

The soviets tortured many civilians during the war as well cutting off multiple body parts, burning people's eyes and other methods of torture to try and find out information about the enemy.

Following the Soviets capture of Berlin in 1945 Soviet soldiers raped over a million people from Germany. This happened in many other countries Russia was fighting in as well and millions of people were raped by the Soviet army.

Fleeing before the advancing Red Army, large numbers of the inhabitants of the German provinces of East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania died during the evacuations, some from cold and starvation, some during combat operations. A significant percentage of this death toll, however, occurred when people evacuating encountered units of the Red Army. Civilians were run over by tanks, shot, or otherwise murdered.

According to figures of the NKVD secret service, 3,127,380 German prisoners were registered by Soviet forces and were sent to the Soviet Union to be used as forced labor. Of those, 474,967 were reported to have died in Soviet captivity.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/648813/World-War-II/53552/Invasion-of-the-Soviet-Union-1941 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1080493/Stalins-army-rapists-The-brutal-war-crime-Russia-Germany-tried-ignore.html http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/world/us-covered-up-soviet-war-crime-in-ww2-290779.html