[haku]

Originally Posted by la aurora

Of course its 'their right' to tell people that lived there for 80+ years to pack their things and go 'home' but it's really doesn't sound as an example of modern european democracy for me. Some of those people lived there for even longer but lost papers, majority didn't come their voluntary after WWII. Don't you find it unhuman to discriminate them for whatever reason?

Well, personally, i think Latvia and Estonia should have granted citizenship to ethnic Russian residents (if desired, i don't know if many of those ethnic Russians would want to renounce Russian citizenship) in 2004 when they became EU members. I'm guessing they were afraid of being overwhelmed by such a large Russian population, but once in the EU, half a million Russians do not really pose a threat in a block of 500 million Europeans.
That being said, each EU state is free to define its own citizenship rules (within EU regulations).


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A BBC article about the various fates of Soviet memorials in Eastern Europe.


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Another account of the mass rapes commited by the Red Army in Eastern Europe, from this book.

Sadly, it was the weak and defenseless, the villagers and townspeople of Eastern Germany, who first felt the impact of the Soviet army. Pumped up with Zhukov's rhetoric, Soviet soldiers unleashed a campaign of terror in the Eastern German lands of Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia that was barbaric even by the standards of an already ghastly war. Not only were Germans abused, terrorized, and driven off their land, but they were murdered in large numbers, and women in particular were made into targets of abuse. German women were raped in unimaginable numbers, then often killed or left to die from their wounds. Some women's bodies were found raped, mutilated, and nailed to barn doors. Hundreds of thousands of women have given testimony to the rapes they endured at the hands of the Russians; historian Norman Naimark has estimated that as many as 2 million may have been sexually assaulted. Worse, most women were victims of repeated rapings; some were raped as many as sixty to seventy times.

With cruel irony, this outburst of violence seemed to confirm the wartime fulminations of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, that the Russians were inhuman beasts. One member of an anti-Nazi cell in Berlin, a woman named Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, has left a vivid account of the sense of shock and fear that these assaults left upon German people. Writing in her diary on 6 May 1945, she observed:

These days have become dangerous to many. Panic prevails in the city. Dismay and terror. Wherever we go, there is pillaging, looting, violence. With unrestrained sexual lust our conqueror's army has flung itself upon the women of Berlin.

We visit Hannelore Thiele, Heike's friend and classmate. She sits huddled on her couch. "One ought to kill oneself," she moans. "This is no way to live." She covers her face with her hands and starts to cry. It is terrible to see her swollen eyes, terrible to look at her disfigured features.

"Was it really that bad?" I ask.

She looks at me pitifully. "Seven," she says. "Seven in a row. Like animals."

Inge Zaun lives in Klein-Machnow. She is eighteen years old and didn't know anything about love. Now she knows everything. Over and over again, sixty times.

"How can you defend yourself?" she says impassively, almost indifferently. "When they pound at the door and fire their guns senselessly. Each night a new one, each night others. The first time when they took me and forced my father to watch, I thought I would die."

..."They rape our daughters, they rape our wives," the men lament. "Not just once, but six times, ten times and twenty times." There is no other talk in the city. No other thought either. Suicide is in the air ...

"Honor lost, all lost," a bewildered father says and hands a rope to his daughter who has been raped twelve times. Obediently she goes and hangs herself from the nearest window sash.

For a generation of Germans, then, the spring of 1945 would forever be linked with the image of a grime-encrusted, battle-scarred Russian soldier, boots on, forcing himself upon a German woman.

Reading this helps to understand how some people and countries can find Soviet memorials offensive. A memorial to the raped women of WWII should probably be built somewhere actually.