Example research essay topic: Red Army Faction Terrorists Or Freedom Part 1 - 1,568 words

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Red Army Faction: Terrorists or Freedom Fighters More than fifty years have passed after the World War II was over, but we can still hear a lot of debates taking place on different issues. One of the hottest debates involves the occurrences of terrorist acts conducted by the Soviet Red Army against the civil citizens and government on the territory of the conquered Germany at the end of war and in the postwar period. The issue is really a controversial one, because the Second World War was the most horrible of all the previous ones, and had the rate of human casualties much higher than in all the other wars in aggregate. Soviet soldiers were always regarded to be as saviors, but numerous facts indicating the great number of crimes committed by them stress a lot of ambiguity in the minds of all those who had a close relation to that war. The Red Army was recruited exclusively from among workers and peasants and immediately faced the problem of creating a competent and reliable officers corps.

Trotsky met this problem by mobilizing former officers of the imperial army. Up to 1921 about 50, 000 such officers served in the Red Army and with but few exceptions remained loyal to the Soviet regime. Political advisers called commissars were attached to all army units to watch over the reliability of officers and to carry out political propaganda among the troops. As the Russian Civil War continued, the short-term officers training schools began to turn out young officers who were regarded as more reliable politically. In 1946 the word Red was removed from the name of the armed forces. Thus, a Soviet soldier, hitherto known as a krasnoarmeyets (Red Army man), was subsequently called simply a ryadovoy (ranker).

Discipline in the Soviet forces was always strict and punishments severe; during World War II, penal battalions were given suicidal tasks. In 1960, however, new regulations were introduced making discipline, and certainly punishments, less severe. Officers were to use more persuasion and were charged with developing their troops political consciousness, thus ending the dual control of military commanders and political commissars. The era of the revolutionary Red Army ended in fact as well as in name. A great number of books have been written about World War II and specifically, about what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War (1941 - 1945) waged by the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. However, this topic is far from exhausted: the deeper one delves, the more unexpected discoveries one makes, the more frank revelations one comes across, and the more acute issues arise.

This is quite explicable as the importance of an event grows more evident only when it has become a part of the past. Hollywood and the establishment media amuse us endlessly with war crimes stories from World War II. Almost always, it's the inhuman Nazis oppressing Jews. That's only one appalling aspect of the war and has been thoroughly explored. We should not disregard, however, that there were other crimes, by other perpetrators. Among these were the purposeful extensive rapes and brutalities inflicted by the Soviet Armies on Germans civilians, but also on Poles and others, even recently freed inmates of the Nazi internment camps.

With all due respect to the soviet soldiers, many of which really were heroes and made an irreplaceable contribution to the liberation of Europe, there are too many evidence that the crimes were really committed, and the number of the crimes was horrifying. The heaviest and common crime among the soldiers was rape. Most of military historians never stress the issue of the war rape, the practice of which has been accepted since the dawn of our history. The brutal conduct of the Red Army at the time of the war is vividly described by the famous British historical writer Anthony Beevor in his book Berlin: The Downfall, 1945.

In an interview he said, that the controversy stems in part from Russia's failure to come to terms with its Soviet totalitarian past. Germany, the wars loser, has long dealt with its Nazi crimes. Germany really started to face up to the horrors of its past after it had an economic miracle, he said. "Russia hasn't had an economic miracle yet and it will take quite a long time even after it does before it starts to see things less in terms of the heroism of the Great Patriotic War. When youre economically humiliated you hang on to that moment of great pride even more so and refuse to contemplate any dark side to it. Alongside the rape of an estimated two million German women, more than half of them gang-raped, by Soviet soldiers, Beevor's research shows thousands of Ukrainian and Polish women were raped as the Red Army advanced westwards to end Hitlers reign.

By the time the Red Army reached Berlin, rape had evolved into treating women as carnal booty, Beevor said. "For me, the most striking or horrific discovery from a Russian point of view was that Soviet troops raped young Russian and Ukrainian women, because that undermines any justification of Red Army behavior on the grounds of revenge, he added. Josef Stalin deployed 2. 5 million troops, 7, 500 aircraft, 6, 250 tanks and 41, 600 guns in the Battle of Berlin. The war victory - at a staggering cost of 27 million dead - is perhaps the only part of Soviet history that all Russians see with pride. Their May 9 Victory Day anniversary of the end of the war remains a major national holiday. Beevor received many letters from German rape victims saying they were glad their story was being told at last. All of them say in relief: None of us dared tell our story because we didn't think anyone would believe us.

You " ve now told the story. That was extremely encouraging, he said. He said it was German men who had suppressed the subject. For them the worst humiliation was that their wives had been raped and they simply could not talk about it, they forbade their wives from talking about it and it became a taboo. Beevor says the story of the rapes, while important, has attracted more attention than he would have hoped. Nearly 80, 000 Russian soldiers died and more than a quarter of a million were wounded in the fight for Berlin.

He said it was vital to understand the suffering of Russian soldiers at the hands of both the Germans and their own commanders. The last chapters are among the saddest - that those people who survived the war thinking they were going to go back and be treated as heroes then found life was very hard to fit into. German women have come forward after 50 years to speak of their appalling treatment at the hands of Soviet soldiers, who raped their way across Germany for four years from 1945. Their ordeal has been revealed thanks to Antony Beevor, whose book Berlin: The Downfall 1945 came out in the UK to great acclaim last month. In his book, Beevor, a Sandhurst recruit turned writer, uses previously unpublished material from Russian archives in Moscow to describe vividly the horrific suffering of an estimated two million German women and girls who were gang-raped by drunken Soviet soldiers as they made their way across the country with the aim of forcing the Nazis to retreat.

web Among the victims were women who became prominent figures, including Hannelore Kohl, wife of the former Chancellor, Helmut. Mrs. Kohl, who committed suicide last year, was raped along with her mother at the age of 12 as they failed to escape on a train bound for Dresden. Beevor's book has unleashed an emotional response from scores of victims, mainly living in Britain, and their relatives, who have contacted him to express their gratitude that the story of an entire generation is finally being told.

I was carrying out orders to bury some dead Hitler Youth boys when they found me, Martha Dowsey says gently and slowly with a heavy German accent. Six Red Army soldiers with blackened faces held me down on the ground close to the graves and raped me one by one. She repeats over and over: I'm not lying, I'm not, you must believe me. The housebound 81 -year-old is understandably nervous about telling her story, not least because it has taken decades for her to find anyone either in her adopted home of Britain or Germany who would believe her experiences of life in post-war Berlin as Stalin's troops marched in. For years the Red Army soldiers were seen as the heroes who freed Germany from the shackles of the Nazis. But for Martha, and hundreds of thousands of others, they were anything but. 'They were destructive and evil and almost ruined my life.

I never told my children - they would not have understood - and my husband knew something terrible had happened to me, but was kind enough never to ask, 's he says from her home in Clapham Common, south London. Only now has Martha Dowsey nee Schroder gathered the courage to speak, thanks to Beevor's book. The victims - considered by the Russians, Beevor says, to be 'casual rights of conquest' in return for crimes committed by the Wehrmacht in Russia - were as young as 12 and as old...

Research essay sample on Red Army Faction Terrorists Or Freedom Part 1