title: Super Bowl XX

text: This was the first year that the NFL itself implemented the pregame entertainment. The pregame entertainment show began after the players left the field and ended with kick-off. Lesslee Fitzmorris created and directed the show. To celebrate the 20th Super Bowl game, the Most Valuable Players of the previous Super Bowls were featured during the pregame festivities. The number one song of the year coupled with video plays from each Super Bowl accompanied the presentation of each player. Performers formed the score of each championship game. The show concluded with the question of who would be the next Super Bowl Champions. This would start a tradition occurring every ten years (in Super Bowls XXX, XL and 50) in which past Super Bowl MVPs would be honored before the game.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: After trumpeter Wynton Marsalis performed the national anthem, Bart Starr, MVP of Super Bowl I and Super Bowl II, tossed the coin.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: The performance event group Up with People performed during the halftime show titled "Beat of the Future". Up with People dancers portrayed various scenes into the future. This was the last Super Bowl to feature Up with People as a halftime show, though they later performed in the Super Bowl XXV pregame show. The halftime show was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (the first observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day had been held the previous Monday).


title: Super Bowl XX

text: The Patriots took the then-quickest lead in Super Bowl history after linebacker Larry McGrew recovered a fumble from Walter Payton at the Chicago 19-yard line on the second play of the game (the Bears themselves would break this record in Super Bowl XLI when Devin Hester ran back the opening kickoff for a touchdown). Bears quarterback Jim McMahon took responsibility for this fumble after the game, saying he had called the wrong play. This set up Tony Franklin's 36-yard field goal 1:19 into the first quarter after three incomplete passes by Tony Eason (during the first of those three, starting tight end Lin Dawson went down with torn ligaments in his knee). "I looked up at the message board", said Chicago linebacker Mike Singletary, "and it said that 15 of the 19 teams that scored first won the game. I thought, yeah, but none of those 15 had ever played the Bears." Chicago struck back with a 7-play, 59-yard drive, featuring a 43-yard pass completion from McMahon to wide receiver Willie Gault, to set up a field goal from Kevin Butler, tying the score at 3–3.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: After both teams traded punts, Richard Dent and linebacker Wilber Marshall shared a sack on Eason, forcing a fumble that lineman Dan Hampton recovered on the Patriots 13-yard line. Chicago then drove to the 3-yard line, but had to settle for another field goal from Butler after rookie defensive lineman William "The Refrigerator" Perry was tackled (and technically sacked) for a 1-yard loss while trying to throw his first NFL pass on a halfback option play. On the Patriots' ensuing drive, Dent forced running back Craig James to fumble, which was recovered by Singletary at the 13-yard line. Two plays later, Bears fullback Matt Suhey scored on an 11-yard touchdown run to increase the lead to 13–3.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: New England took the ensuing kickoff and ran one play before the first quarter ended, which resulted in positive yardage for the first time in the game (a 3-yard run by James).


title: Super Bowl XX

text: After an incomplete pass and a 4-yard loss, the Patriots had to send in punter Rich Camarillo again, and receiver Keith Ortego returned the ball 12 yards to the 41-yard line. The Bears subsequently drove 59 yards in 10 plays, featuring a 24-yard reception by Suhey, to score on McMahon's 2-yard touchdown run to increase their lead, 20–3. After the ensuing kickoff, New England lost 13 yards in 3 plays and had to punt again, but got the ball back with great field position when defensive back Raymond Clayborn recovered a fumble from Suhey at their own 46-yard line. On the punt, Ortego forgot what the play call was for the punt return, and the ensuing chaos resulted in him being penalized for running after a fair catch and teammate Leslie Frazier suffering a knee injury, which ended his career.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: Patriots head coach Raymond Berry then replaced Eason with Steve Grogan, who had spent the previous week hoping he would have the opportunity to step onto the NFL's biggest stage. "I probably won't get a chance", he had told reporters a few days before the game. "I just hope I can figure out some way to get on the field. I could come in on the punt-block team and stand behind the line and wave my arms, or something." But on his first drive, Grogan could only lead them to the 37-yard line, and they decided to punt rather than risk a 55-yard field goal attempt. The Bears then marched 72 yards in 11 plays, moving the ball inside the Patriots' 10-yard line. New England kept them out of the end zone, but Butler kicked his third field goal on the last play of the half to give Chicago a 23–3 halftime lead.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: The end of the first half was controversial. With 21 seconds left, McMahon scrambled to the Patriots' 3-yard line and was stopped inbounds. With the clock ticking down, players from both teams were fighting, and the Bears were forced to snap the ball before the officials formally put it back into play, allowing McMahon to throw the ball out of bounds and stop the clock with three seconds left. The Bears were penalized five yards for delay of game, but according to NFL rules, 10 seconds should have also been run off the clock during such a deliberate clock-stopping attempt in the final two minutes of a half. In addition, a flag should have been thrown for fighting (also according to NFL rules). This would have likely resulted in offsetting penalties, which would still allow for a field goal attempt. Meanwhile, the non-call on the illegal snap was promptly acknowledged by the officials and reported by NBC sportscasters during halftime, but the resulting three points were not taken away from the Bears (because of this instance, the NFL instructed officials to strictly enforce the 10-second run-off rule at the start of the 1986 season).


title: Super Bowl XX

text: The Bears had dominated New England in the first half, holding them to 21 offensive plays (only four of which resulted in positive yardage), −19 total offensive yards, two pass completions, one first down, and 3 points. While Eason was in the game, the totals were six possessions, one play of positive yardage out of 15 plays, no first downs, 3 points, 3 punts, 2 turnovers, no pass completions, and -36 yards of total offense. Meanwhile, Chicago gained 236 yards and scored 23 points themselves.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: After the Patriots received the second-half kickoff, they managed to get one first down, but then had to punt after Grogan was sacked twice. Camarillo, who punted four times in the first half, managed to pin the Bears back at their own 4-yard line with a then-Super Bowl record 62-yard punt. But the Patriots' defense still had no ability to stop Chicago's offense. On their very first play, McMahon faked a handoff to Payton, then threw a 60-yard completion to Gault. Eight plays later, McMahon finished the Super Bowl-record 96-yard drive with a 1-yard touchdown run to increase the Bears' lead to 30–3. On New England's second drive of the quarter, Chicago cornerback Reggie Phillips (who replaced Frazier) intercepted a pass from Grogan and returned it 28 yards for a touchdown to increase the lead to 37–3.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: On the second play of their ensuing possession, the Patriots turned the ball over again, when receiver Cedric Jones lost a fumble after catching a 19-yard pass from Grogan, and Wilber Marshall returned the fumble 13 yards to New England's 37-yard line. A few plays later, McMahon's 27-yard completion to receiver Dennis Gentry moved the ball to the 1-yard line, setting up perhaps the most memorable moment of the game. William "The Refrigerator" Perry was brought on to score on offense, as he had done twice in the regular season. His touchdown (while running over Patriots linebacker Larry McGrew in the process) made the score 44–3. The Bears' 21 points in the third quarter is still a record for the most points scored in that period, and their 41-point lead remains the record for widest margin after three quarters in a Super Bowl.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: Perry's surprise touchdown cost Las Vegas sports books hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses from prop bets.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: The Patriots finally scored a touchdown early in the fourth quarter, advancing the ball 76 yards in 12 plays and scoring on an 8-yard fourth-down pass from Grogan to receiver Irving Fryar. But the Bears' defense dominated New England for the rest of the game, forcing another fumble, another interception, and defensive lineman Henry Waechter's sack on Grogan in the end zone for a safety to make the final score 46–10.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: One oddity in the Bears' victory was that Walter Payton had a relatively poor performance running the ball and never scored a touchdown in Super Bowl XX, his only Super Bowl appearance during his Hall of Fame career. Many people including Mike Ditka have claimed that the reason for this was due to the fact that the Patriots' defensive scheme was centered on stopping Payton. Although Payton was ultimately the Bears' leading rusher during the game, the Patriots' defense held him to only 61 yards on 22 carries, with his longest run being only 7 yards. He was given several opportunities to score near the goal line, but New England stopped him every time before he reached the end zone (such as his 2-yard loss from the New England 3-yard line a few plays before Butler's second field goal, and his 2-yard run from the 4-yard line right before McMahon's first rushing touchdown). Thus, Chicago head coach Mike Ditka opted to go for other plays to counter the Patriots' defense. Ditka has since stated that his biggest regret of his career was not creating a scoring opportunity for Payton during the game.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: McMahon, who completed 12 out of 20 passes for 256 yards, became the first quarterback in a Super Bowl to score 2 rushing touchdowns. Bears receiver Willie Gault finished the game with 129 receiving yards on just 4 receptions, an average of 32.3 yards per catch. He also returned 4 kickoffs for 49 yards. Suhey had 11 carries for 52 yards and a touchdown, and caught a pass for 24 yards. Singletary tied a Super Bowl record with 2 fumble recoveries.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: Eason became the first Super Bowl starting quarterback to fail to complete a pass, going 0 for 6 attempts. Grogan completed 17 out of 30 passes for 177 yards and 1 touchdown, with 2 interceptions. Although fullback Tony Collins was the Patriots' leading rusher, he was limited to just 4 yards on 3 carries, and caught 2 passes for 19 yards. New England receiver Stephen Starring returned 7 kickoffs for 153 yards and caught 2 passes for 39 yards. The Patriots, as a team, only recorded 123 total offensive yards, the second-lowest total in Super Bowl history.


title: Super Bowl XX

text: Sources: NFL.com Super Bowl XX, USA Today Super Bowl XX Play by Play, Super Bowl XX Play Finder Chi, Super Bowl XX Play Finder NE


title: Super Bowl XX

text: The following records were set in Super Bowl XX, according to the official NFL.com boxscore and the Pro-Football-Reference.com game summary.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Joseph Michael Straczynski (; born July 17, 1954) is an American filmmaker and comic book writer. He is the founder of Synthetic Worlds Ltd. and Studio JMS and is best known as the creator of the science fiction television series "Babylon 5" (1993–1998) and its spinoff "Crusade" (1999), as well as the series "Jeremiah" (2002–2004) and "Sense8" (2015–2018). He is also the executor of the estate of Harlan Ellison.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski wrote the psychological drama film "Changeling" (2008) and was co-writer on the martial arts thriller "Ninja Assassin" (2009), was one of the key writers for (and had a cameo in) Marvel's "Thor" (2011), as well as the horror film "" (2012), and the apocalyptic horror film "World War Z" (2013).


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: From 2001 to 2007, Straczynski wrote Marvel Comics' "The Amazing Spider-Man", followed by runs on "Thor" and "Fantastic Four". He is also the author of the "" trilogy of graphic novels, and he has written "Superman", "Wonder Woman", and "Before Watchmen" for DC Comics. Straczynski is the creator and writer of several original comic book series such as "Rising Stars", "Midnight Nation", "Dream Police", and "Ten Grand" through Joe's Comics.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: A prolific writer across a variety of media and former journalist, Straczynski is the author of the autobiography "Becoming Superman" (2019) for HarperVoyager, the novel "Together We Will Go" (2021) for Simon & Schuster, and "Becoming a Writer, Staying a Writer" (2021) for Benbella Books. In 2020 he was also named Head of the Creative Council for the comics publishing company Artists, Writers and Artisans.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski is a long-time participant in Usenet and other early computer networks, interacting with fans through various online forums (including GEnie, CompuServe, and America Online) since 1984. He is credited as being the first TV producer to directly engage with fans on the Internet and to allow viewer viewpoints to influence the look and feel of his show (see "Babylon 5"s use of the Internet). Two prominent areas where he had a presence were GEnie and the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and is the son of Charles Straczynski, a manual laborer, and Evelyn Straczynski (née Pate). He was raised in Newark, New Jersey; Kankakee, Illinois; Dallas, Texas; Chula Vista, California, where he graduated from high school; and San Diego, California. Straczynski's family religion was Catholic, and he has Polish ancestry. His grandparents lived in the area which today belongs to Belarus and fled to America from the Russian Revolution; his father was born in the United States and has lived in Poland, Germany and Russia.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski is a graduate of Southwestern College and San Diego State University (SDSU), having earned an AA and later an honorary degree from Southwestern, where he was mentored by Professor Bill Virchis, and a BA with a double major in psychology and sociology (with minors in philosophy and literature) from San Diego State. While at SDSU, he wrote for the student newspaper, "The Daily Aztec" at times penning so many articles that the paper was jokingly referred to as the "Daily Joe".


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski met Kathryn M. Drennan while they were both at SDSU. They moved to Los Angeles in 1981 (where he still resides), married in 1983, separated in 1999, and they were divorced in 2001. Sometime after his separation from Drennan, Straczynski entered into a relationship with Patricia Tallman, whom he had met when she was acting in his 1990s series "Babylon 5". She served as CEO and executive producer of Studio JMS in partnership with him; both their relationship and partnership ended in 2013.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski began writing plays, having several produced at Southwestern College and San Diego State University before publishing his adaptation of "Snow White" with Performance Publishing. Several other plays were produced around San Diego, including "The Apprenticeship" for the Marquis Public Theater. During the late 1970s, Straczynski also became the on-air entertainment reviewer for KSDO-FM and wrote several radio plays before being hired as a scriptwriter for the radio drama "Alien Worlds". He also produced his first television project in San Diego, "Marty Sprinkle" for KPBS-TV as well as worked on the XETV-TV project "Disasterpiece Theatre". He worked as a journalist for the "Los Angeles Times" as a special San Diego correspondent and also worked for "San Diego Magazine" and "The San Diego Reader," and wrote for the "Los Angeles Herald-Examiner", the "Los Angeles Reader, TV-Cable Week," and ""People"" magazine"." Straczynski wrote "The Complete Book of Scriptwriting" for "Writer's Digest." Published in 1982, the book is often used as a text in introductory screenwriting courses, and is now in its third edition.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: He and Kathryn M. Drennan, whom he met at San Diego State, moved to Los Angeles on April 1, 1981. They married in 1983 and separated in 2002. He spent five years from 1987 to 1992 co-hosting the "Hour 25" radio talk show on KPFK-FM Los Angeles with Larry DiTillio. During his tenure, he interviewed John Carpenter, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison and other writers, producers, actors and directors. In 2000, Straczynski returned to radio drama with "The City of Dreams" for scifi.com. Straczynski is the author of three horror novels—"Demon Night", "Othersyde", and "Tribulations"—and nearly twenty short stories, many of which are collected in two compilations—"Tales from the New Twilight Zone" and "Straczynski Unplugged".


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski was a fan of the cartoon "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe". He wrote a spec script in 1984 and sent it directly to Filmation. They purchased his script, bought several others, and hired him on staff. During this time he became friends with Larry DiTillio, and when Filmation produced the He-Man spinoff "", they both worked as story editors on the show. However, when Filmation refused to give them credit on-screen, both left, finding work with DIC on "Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors".


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski and DiTillio also worked to create an animated version of "Elfquest", but that project fell through when CBS attempted to retool the show to appeal to younger audiences.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: While working on "Jayce", Straczynski was hired to come aboard the Len Janson and Chuck Menville project to adapt the movie "Ghostbusters" to an animated version called "The Real Ghostbusters". When Janson and Menville learned that there was not only a 13-episode order but a 65-episode syndication order as well, they decided that the workload was too much and that they would only work on their own scripts. DIC head Jean Chalopin asked Straczynski to take on the task of story editing the entire 78-episode block as well as writing his own scripts. After the show's successful first season, consultants were brought in to make suggestions for the show, including changing Janine to a more maternal character, giving every character a particular "job" (Peter is the funny one, Egon is the smart one, and Winston, the only black character, was to be the driver), and to add kids into the show. Straczynski left at this point, Janson and Menville resuming the story editing job for the second network season. Straczynski then began development on a show called "Spiral Zone" but left after only one script, taking his name off the series, because management drastically altered his conception of show. substituting the pseudonym "Fettes Grey" (derived from the names of the grave robbers in "The Body Snatcher")


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski also wrote for "CBS Storybreak", writing an adaptation of Evelyn Sibley Lampman's "The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek".


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: After leaving animation, Straczynski freelanced for "The Twilight Zone" writing an episode entitled ("What Are Friends For") and, for Shelley Duvall's "Nightmare Classics", adaptating "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde", which was nominated for a Writer's Guild Award.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski was then offered the position of story editor on the syndicated live-action science fiction series "Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future". Straczynski constructed a season long arc with lasting character changes and wrote a third of the scripts himself. After one season, the toy company Mattel demanded more input into the show, causing Straczynski to quit. He recommended DiTillio to take over the job as story editor for a second season, but the toy company financing fell through and that season was never produced.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Soon after, the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike began. Straczynski met Harlan Ellison during this time and later became friends with him. Straczynski is an executor of Ellison's collected works.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: After the strike ended, the producers of the new "Twilight Zone" needed to create more episodes to be able to sell the series into syndication with a complete 65-episode package. They hired Straczynski as executive story editor to fill in the remaining number of needed episodes. Straczynski wrote many of the scripts himself. In addition, one episode, "Crazy as a Soup Sandwich", was written by Ellison.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: After leaving "Twilight Zone", his agent of the time asked him to pitch for the show "Jake and the Fatman". Initially wary, Straczynski finally did and was hired on as an executive story consultant under Jeri Taylor and David Moessinger. When Taylor and Moessinger left the show, Straczynski left too as an act of solidarity.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: When Moessinger was hired as executive producer for "Murder, She Wrote", he offered Straczynski a job as co-producer. Straczynski joined "Murder" for two seasons and wrote seven produced episodes. Moessinger and Straczynski moved the protagonist, Jessica Fletcher, from the sleepy Maine town of Cabot Cove to New York City to revitalize the show. The move effectively brought the show back into the top ten from the mid-thirties where it had fallen. Straczynski made Jessica an instructor in writing and criminology, and he emphasized her role as a working writer, with all the deadlines and problems involved in that profession.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski also wrote one episode of "Walker, Texas Ranger" for Moessinger between the pilot episode for "Babylon 5" and the start of its first season.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski wrote an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" for the Showtime network, which was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award, and a "Murder, She Wrote" movie, "," which he produced.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: In late 1991, Warner Bros. contracted with Straczynski and Doug Netter as partners to produce "Babylon 5" as the flagship program for the new Prime Time Entertainment Network.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski and Netter hired many of the people from "Captain Power", as well as hiring Ellison as a consultant and DiTillio as a story editor. "Babylon 5" won two Emmy Awards, back-to-back Hugo Awards, and dozens of other awards. Straczynski wrote 92 of the 110 episodes, as well as the pilot and five television movies. The show is a character-driven space opera and features an intentional emphasis on realism in its portrayal of space operations. It also pioneered extensive use of CGI for its special effects. "Babylon 5" was produced and broadcast for five seasons completing Stracynski's planned story arc. Its sequel, "Crusade", was produced for the TNT Network, however it ended with only 13 episodes. Production was halted before the first episode aired.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: He wrote the outlines for nine of the canonical "Babylon 5" novels, supervised the three produced "B5" telefilm novelizations ("In the Beginning", "Thirdspace", and "A Call to Arms"), and is the author of four "Babylon 5" short stories published in magazines, not yet reprinted ().


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: In 2005, Straczynski began publishing his "Babylon 5" scripts. This process ended in June 2008, with the scripts no longer being available from the end of July of that year. His scripts for the television movies were published for a limited time in January 2009.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski also wrote and produced the pilot "", a pilot for the SciFi Network, and wrote, directed and produced "" as a two-hour direct-to-DVD movie.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski has long been a comic fan and began writing comics in the late 1980s. His work in comics includes the adaptations of "Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future", "The Twilight Zone", "Star Trek" and "Babylon 5". In 1999 he created "Rising Stars" for Top Cow/Image Comics. Eventually he worked mostly under his own imprint – Joe's Comics – for which he wrote the "Midnight Nation" miniseries and the illustrated fantasy parable "Delicate Creatures".


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Marvel Comics then signed him to an exclusive contract, beginning with a run on "The Amazing Spider-Man", from 2001 to 2007. He took over the series with Volume 2 issue #30 (cover dated June 2001). Straczynski and artist John Romita Jr. crafted an acclaimed story for "The Amazing Spider-Man" #36 (Dec. 2001) in response to the September 11 attacks. He wrote or co-wrote several major Spider-Man story arcs including "", "", and "". He later wrote several other Marvel titles including "Supreme Power", "Strange", "Fantastic Four", "Thor", and mini-series featuring the Silver Surfer and a "What If" scenario, "Bullet Points".


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski also ran "Jeremiah", loosely based on the Belgian post-apocalyptic comic of the same name, from 2002–2004. Straczynski ran the series for two seasons but was frustrated with the conflicting directions that MGM and Showtime wanted from the show, and even used the pseudonym "Fettes Grey" for the first time since "Spiral Zone" on one of the scripts. In the second season, Straczynski decided to leave the show if things did not improve, and the show ended after two seasons.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski wrote "Changeling", a psychological drama film based partly on the "Wineville Chicken Coop" kidnapping and murder case in Los Angeles, California. Directed by Clint Eastwood, produced by Ron Howard, and starring Angelina Jolie, the film premiered in 2008 and subsequently received eight nominations for the BAFTA Award, including a nomination for Best Original Screenplay. The first draft script was written in eleven days, after Straczynski figured out "how to tell" the story, which ended up being the shooting draft, after Eastwood declined to make any changes. It was optioned immediately by Howard, who at first intended to direct the film but later stepped down after scheduling conflicts.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: At first, Straczynski expressed disbelief at the story, but spent a year researching the case, compiling over six thousands pages of documentation. Straczynski claimed that 95% of the script's content came from the historical record, and went through the script with Universal's legal department, providing attribution for every scene so the film would be described as "a true story" rather than "based on" one. On how his journalistic background helped him write the film, Straczynski stated:


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski announced on February 23, 2007, that he had been hired to write the feature film adaptation of Max Brooks's "New York Times"-bestselling novel "World War Z" for Paramount Pictures and Brad Pitt's production company, Plan B, taking screen story credit on the finished film.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: In 2008, Straczynski wrote a draft of "Ninja Assassin" for Joel Silver, which he completed in just 53 hours. The film was produced by the Wachowskis and released on November 25, 2009.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski is credited as "story writer" along with Mark Protosevich for the 2011 film, "Thor". He also makes a cameo appearance in the film, his first appearance in a movie and his second appearance as an actor (the first being "Sleeping in Light", the final episode of "Babylon 5"). Straczynski was part of the writers room (along with Terry Rossio, Patrick McKay, J. D. Payne, Lindsey Beer, Cat Vasko, T.S. Nowlin, and Jack Paglen) to develop "Godzilla vs. Kong", though was uncredited on the final script.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: When his exclusive contract with Marvel ended, he was announced as the writer for a run on "The Brave and the Bold" for DC Comics. He collaborated with artist Shane Davis on an out-of-continuity original graphic novel starring Superman titled "". The story features a young Superman and focus on his decision about the role he wants to assume in life. On March 8, 2010, it was announced he would be taking over writing duties for the monthly "Superman" title with a story arc entitled "", and the "Wonder Woman" title, beginning with issues 701 and 601 respectively. Less than a year later he was asked by DC to step away from both titles in order to concentrate on the second volume of "Superman: Earth One" and handed them over to Chris Roberson and Phil Hester to finish his Superman and Wonder Woman stories respectively. In 2012, Straczynski wrote "Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan" drawn by Adam Hughes and "Before Watchmen: Nite Owl" drawn by Andy Kubert and Joe Kubert. A second volume of "Superman: Earth One" was released later that same year.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: At the San Diego Comic-Con in 2015, DC Comics announced "The Flash: Earth One", a new graphic novel of its Earth One line to be written by Straczynski, set to be published in 2016.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: In July 2012, J. Michael Straczynski announced the launch of Studio JMS to produce TV series, movies, comics and, down the road, games and web series. On March 27, 2013, Netflix announced they would produce the show "Sense8" with Studio JMS and the Wachowskis, which aired on June 5, 2015, and earned a season 2 announcement by August 10, 2015.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: The Joe's Comics line was revived at Image Comics in 2013 with the launch of "Ten Grand" drawn by Ben Templesmith and "Sidekick" drawn by Tom Mandrake.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Dynamite Entertainment announced in July 2013 a new 12 issue "The Twilight Zone" comic book series penned by Straczynski. The series ran for its projected 12 issues, from December 2013 to February 2015, with art by Guiu Vilanova. Straczynski was announced as the writer of "", a 12 issue comic book series from Dark Horse Comics, along with artist Pete Woods.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: "Sense8", a science fiction television series created by Straczynski and the Wachowskis was ordered straight-to-series by Netflix in March 2013. "Sense8"'s first season debuted in June 2015 on Netflix, from Studio JMS and Georgeville Television. Straczynski executive produced and co-wrote all 12 episodes of the first season with fellow creators, executive producers, and directors Lilly and Lana Wachowski. In August 2015, Netflix renewed "Sense8" for a second season.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: In 2020 Straczynski was named head of the Creative Council for the new comics publishing company AWA, where he was responsible for creating the shared universe used by many of its writers.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Following the publication of his autobiography "Becoming Superman" in 2019 from HarperVoyager, the novel "Together We Will Go" was published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster's Scout Press, and "Becoming A Writer, Staying A Writer" was published in 2021 by Benbella Books.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: In 2004, Straczynski was approached by Paramount Studios to become a producer of the "" series. He declined, believing that he would not be allowed to take the show in the direction he felt it should go. He did write a treatment for a new "Star Trek" series with colleague Bryce Zabel.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: After both "Babylon 5" and "Jeremiah" ended, Straczynski transitioned to working as a feature film screenwriter. In 2006, he was hired to write a feature film based on the story of King David for Universal by producers Erwin Stoff and Akiva Goldsman. In June 2007, it was announced that Straczynski had written a feature screenplay for the "Silver Surfer" movie for Fox, the production of which would depend on the success of the "". Additionally, he has written a script for Tom Hanks' Playtone Productions and Universal Pictures called "They Marched into Sunlight" based upon the Pulitzer nominated novel of the same name and an outline by Paul Greengrass, for Greengrass to direct, should it get a greenlight.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: In June 2008, "Daily Variety" named Straczynski one of the top Ten Screenwriters to Watch. They announced Straczynski was writing "Lensman" for Ron Howard (to whom he had sold a screenplay entitled "The Flickering Light"), that he was selling another spec, "Proving Ground", to Tom Cruise and United Artists. In October 2008, it was announced that Straczynski was engaged to pen a remake of the science fiction classic "Forbidden Planet". In the fall of 2009, it was reported that Straczynski was writing a movie titled "Shattered Union" for Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney. The screenplay, based on the video game of that name, concerns itself with a present-day American civil war.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: In October 2012, Valiant Entertainment announced a live-action feature film adaptation on its comic book series "Shadowman", written and executive produced by Straczynski. "The Flickering Light", Straczynski's directorial debut, was announced in February 2013, with the WWII drama set to be written and produced by Straczynski through his Studio JMS. Straczynski and Studio JMS optioned Harlan Ellison's short story "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman", who granted the option only after reading a finished screenplay written by Straczynski.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: On San Diego Comic-Con 2014, it was announced that Straczynski and Graphic India would team up with Chernin Entertainment to produce a feature film adaptation of his upcoming graphic novel "Titans", to be written and produced by Straczynski, through Studio JMS.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: Straczynski was also hired to adapt "Red Mars" for Spike TV, based on the Kim Stanley Robinson novels, with Vince Gerardis as producer. In December 2015, Spike TV gave a 10-episode straight-to-series order to "Red Mars", set to premiere in January 2017, with Straczynski serving as writer, executive producer, and showrunner through Studio JMS, and production set to begin in Summer 2016. On March 25, 2016 "Deadline" reported that Straczynski had left his position as showrunner with Peter Noah replacing him but he too left due to creative differences with Spike. Spike has put the series on hold for further development.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: On July 30, 2021, Straczynski expressed an interest in becoming showrunner of the BBC Television series "Doctor Who", following the departure of Chris Chibnall, confirming his representatives had been contacting the BBC. On August 19, Straczynski confirmed contact had been made with the BBC, but that the organization had already begun their own selection process and were not seeking new candidates. On September 24, 2021, the BBC confirmed former showrunner Russell T Davies would return, which Straczynski commended.


title: J. Michael Straczynski

text: An asteroid, discovered in 1992 at the Kitt Peak National Observatory, was honorarily named 8379 Straczynski.


title: New Economic Policy

text: The New Economic Policy (NEP) () was an economic policy of the Soviet Union proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 as a temporary expedient. Lenin characterized the NEP in 1922 as an economic system that would include "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control", while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis".


title: New Economic Policy

text: The NEP represented a more market-oriented economic policy (deemed necessary after the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1922) to foster the economy of the country, which had suffered severely since 1915. The Soviet authorities partially revoked the complete nationalization of industry (established during the period of war communism of 1918 to 1921) and introduced a mixed economy which allowed private individuals to own small and medium sized enterprises, while the state continued to control large industries, banks and foreign trade. In addition, the NEP abolished "prodrazvyorstka" (forced grain-requisition) and introduced "prodnalog": a tax on farmers, payable in the form of raw agricultural product. The Bolshevik government adopted the NEP in the course of the 10th Congress of the All-Russian Communist Party (March 1921) and promulgated it by a decree on 21 March 1921: "On the Replacement of "Prodrazvyorstka" by "Prodnalog"". Further decrees refined the policy. Other policies included monetary reform (1922–1924) and the attraction of foreign capital.


title: New Economic Policy

text: The NEP created a new category of people called NEPmen (нэпманы) ("nouveau riches"). Joseph Stalin abandoned the NEP in 1928 with the Great Break.


title: New Economic Policy

text: In November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized control of key centres in Russia. This led to the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, which pitted the Bolsheviks and their allies against the Whites and other counter-revolutionary forces. During this period the Bolsheviks attempted to administrate Russia's economy purely by decree, a policy of the War Communism. Farmers and factory workers were ordered to produce, and food and goods were seized and issued by decree. While this policy enabled the Bolshevik regime to overcome some initial difficulties, it soon caused economic disruptions and hardships. Producers who were not directly compensated for their labor often stopped working, leading to widespread shortages. Combined with the devastation of the war, these were major hardships for the Russian people and diminished popular support for the Bolsheviks.


title: New Economic Policy

text: At the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks controlled Russian cities, but 80% of the Russian population were peasants. Although almost all the fighting had occurred outside urban areas, urban populations decreased substantially. The war disrupted transportation (especially railroads), and basic public services. Infectious diseases thrived, especially typhus. Shipments of food and fuel by railroad and by water dramatically decreased. City residents first experienced a shortage of heating oil, then coal, until they resorted to wood. Populations in northern towns (excluding capital cities) declined an average of 24%. Northern towns received less food than towns in the agricultural south. Petrograd alone lost 850,000 people, half of the urban population decline during the Civil War. Hunger and poor conditions drove residents out of cities. Workers migrated south to get peasants' surpluses. Recent migrants to cities left because they still had ties to villages.


title: New Economic Policy

text: Urban workers formed the core of Bolshevik support, so the exodus posed a serious problem. Factory production severely slowed or halted. Factories lacked 30,000 workers in 1919. To survive, city dwellers sold personal valuables, made artisan craft-goods for sale or barter, and planted gardens. The acute need for food drove them to obtain 50–60% of food through illegal trading (see "meshochnik"). The shortage of cash caused the black market to use a barter system, which was inefficient. Drought and frost led to the Russian famine of 1921, in which millions starved to death, especially in the Volga region, and urban support for the Bolshevik party eroded. When no bread arrived in Moscow in 1921, workers became hungry and disillusioned. They organised demonstrations against the Bolshevik Party's policy of privileged rations, in which the Red Army, Party members, and students received rations first. The Kronstadt rebellion of soldiers and sailors broke out in March 1921, fueled by anarchism and populism. In 1921 Lenin replaced the food requisitioning policy with a tax, signaling the inauguration of the New Economic Policy.


title: New Economic Policy

text: The laws sanctioned the co-existence of private and public sectors, which were incorporated in the NEP, which was a state oriented "mixed economy". The NEP represented a move away from full nationalization of certain parts of industries. Some kinds of foreign investments were expected by the Soviet Union under the NEP, in order to fund industrial and developmental projects with foreign exchange or technology requirements.


title: New Economic Policy

text: The NEP was primarily a new agricultural policy. The Bolsheviks viewed traditional village life as conservative and backward. With the NEP, the state only allowed private landholdings because the idea of collectivized farming had met strong opposition.


title: New Economic Policy

text: Lenin understood that economic conditions were dire, so he opened up markets to a greater degree of free trade, hoping to motivate the population to increase production. Under the NEP, not only were "private property, private enterprise, and private profit largely restored in Lenin's Russia," but Lenin's regime turned to international capitalism for assistance, willing to provide "generous concessions to foreign capitalism." Lenin took the position that in order to achieve socialism, he had to create "the missing material prerequisites" of modernization and industrial development that made it imperative for Soviet Russia to "fall back on a centrally supervised market-influenced program of state capitalism". Lenin was following Karl Marx's precepts that a nation must first reach "full maturation of capitalism as the precondition for socialist realization." Future years would use the term Marxism–Leninism to describe Lenin's approach to economic policies which were seen to favor policies that moved the country toward communism. The main policy Lenin used was an end to grain requisitions and instead instituted a tax on the peasants, thereby allowing them to keep and trade part of their produce. At first, this tax was paid in kind, but as the currency became more stable in 1924, it was changed to a cash payment. This increased the peasants' incentive to produce, and in response production jumped by 40% after the drought and famine of 1921–22.


title: New Economic Policy

text: NEP economic reforms aimed to take a step back from central planning and allow the economy to become more independent. NEP labor reforms tied labor to productivity, incentivizing the reduction of costs and the redoubled efforts of labor. Labor unions became independent civic organizations. NEP reforms also opened up government positions to the most qualified workers. The NEP gave opportunities for the government to use engineers, specialists, and intelligentsia for cost accounting, equipment purchasing, efficiency procedures, railway construction, and industrial administration. A new class of "NEPmen" thrived. These private traders opened up urban firms hiring up to 20 workers. NEPmen also included rural artisan craftsmen selling their wares on the private market.


title: New Economic Policy

text: Lenin considered the NEP as a strategic retreat from socialism. He believed it was capitalism, but justified it by insisting that it was a different type of capitalism, "state capitalism", the last stage of capitalism before socialism evolved. While Stalin seemed receptive towards Lenin's shift in policy towards a state capitalist system, he stated in the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923 that it allowed the "growth of nationalistic and reactionary thinking..". He also states that in the recent Central Committee plenum there were speeches made which were incompatible with communism, all of which were ultimately caused by the NEP. These statements were made just after Lenin was incapacitated by strokes.


title: New Economic Policy

text: Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin disagreed over how to develop the Soviet economy. Trotsky, supported by radical members of the Communist Party, believed that socialism in Russia would only survive if the state controlled the allocation of all output. Trotsky believed that the state should repossess all output to invest in capital formation. On the other hand, Stalin supported the more moderate members of the Communist Party and advocated for a state-run capitalist economy. Stalin managed to wrest control of the Communist Party from Trotsky. After defeating the Trotsky faction, Stalin reversed his opinions about economic policy and implemented the first five-year plan.


title: New Economic Policy

text: After the New Economic Policy was instituted, agricultural production increased greatly. In order to stimulate economic growth, farmers were given the opportunity to sell portions of their crops to the government in exchange for monetary compensation. Farmers now had the option to sell some of their produce, giving them a personal economic incentive to produce more grain. This incentive, coupled with the breakup of the quasi-feudal landed estates, surpassed pre-Revolution agricultural production. The agricultural sector became increasingly reliant on small family farms, while heavy industries, banks, and financial institutions remained owned and run by the state. This created an imbalance in the economy where the agricultural sector was growing much faster than heavy industry. To maintain their income, factories raised prices. Due to the rising cost of manufactured goods, peasants had to produce much more wheat to buy these consumer goods, which increased supply and thus lowered the price of these agricultural products. This fall in prices of agricultural goods and sharp rise in prices of industrial products was known as the Scissors Crisis (due to the crossing of graphs of the prices of the two types of product). Peasants began withholding their surpluses in wait for higher prices, or sold them to "NEPmen" (traders and middle-men) who re-sold them at high prices. Many Communist Party members considered this an exploitation of urban consumers. To lower the price of consumer goods, the state took measures to decrease inflation and enact reforms on the internal practices of the factories. The government also fixed prices, in an attempt to halt the scissor effect.


title: New Economic Policy

text: The NEP succeeded in creating an economic recovery after the devastation of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian Civil War. By 1925, in the wake of Lenin's NEP, a "... major transformation was occurring politically, economically, culturally and spiritually." Small-scale and light industries were largely in the hands of private entrepreneurs or cooperatives. By 1928, agricultural and industrial production had been restored to the 1913 (pre-World War I) level.


title: New Economic Policy

text: By 1924, the year of Lenin's death, Nikolai Bukharin had become the foremost supporter of the New Economic Policy. The USSR abandoned NEP in 1928 after Joseph Stalin obtained a position of leadership during the Great Break. Stalin was initially noncommitted to the NEP. Stalin then enacted a system of collectivization during the Grain Procurement Crisis of 1928 and saw the need to quickly accumulate capital for the vast industrialization programme introduced with the Five Year Plans starting in 1928. The Bolsheviks hoped that the USSR's industrial base would reach the level of capitalist countries in the West, to avoid losing a future war. (Stalin proclaimed, "Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.") Stalin asserted that the grain crisis was caused by "kulaks" – relatively wealthy farmers who allegedly "hoarded" grain and participated in "speculation of agricultural produce". He also considered peasant farms too small to support the massive agricultural demands of the Soviet Union's push for rapid industrialization, and Soviet economists claimed that only large collective farms could support such an expansion. Accordingly, Stalin imposed collectivization of agriculture. Land held by the "kulaks" was seized and given to agricultural cooperatives (kolkhozes and sovkhozes).


title: New Economic Policy

text: Lenin and his followers saw the NEP as an interim measure. However, it proved highly unpopular with the Left Opposition in the Bolshevik Party because of its compromise with some capitalist elements and the relinquishment of state control. The Left saw the NEP as a betrayal of Communist principles, and believed it would have a negative long-term economic effect, so they wanted a fully planned economy instead. In particular, the NEP fostered a class of traders ("NEPmen") whom the Communists regarded as "class enemies" of the working class. Vladimir Lenin is quoted to have said "For a year we have been retreating. On behalf of the Party we must now call a halt. The purpose pursued by the retreat has been achieved. This period is drawing, or has drawn, to a close." which implies Lenin believed the NEP should have ended in his lifetime. Lenin had also been known to say about NEP, "We are taking one step backward, to take two steps forward later", suggesting that, though the NEP pointed in another direction, it would provide the economic conditions necessary for socialism eventually to evolve.


title: New Economic Policy

text: After only seven years of NEP, Lenin's successor Stalin introduced full central planning, re-nationalized much of the economy, and from the late 1920s onwards introduced a policy of rapid industrialization. Stalin's collectivization of agriculture was his most notable departure from the NEP approach.


title: New Economic Policy

text: Pantsov and Levine see many of the post-Mao economic reforms of the Chinese Communist Party's former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping away from a command economy and towards a "socialist market economy" during the 1980s as influenced by the NEP: "It will be recalled that Deng Xiaoping himself had studied Marxism from the works of the Bolshevik leaders who had propounded NEP. He drew on ideas from NEP when he spoke of his own reforms. In 1985, he openly acknowledged that 'perhaps' the most correct model of socialism was the New Economic Policy of the USSR."


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The war crimes and crimes against humanity which were perpetrated by the Soviet Union and its armed forces from 1919 to 1991 include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the NKVD, including acts which were committed by the NKVD's Internal Troops. In some cases, these acts were committed upon the orders of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet Government's policy of "Red Terror". In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: A significant number of these incidents occurred in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe recently before, and during, the aftermath of World War II, involving summary executions and the mass murder of prisoners of war, such as in the Katyn massacre and mass rape by troops of the Red Army in territories they occupied.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: When the Allied Powers of World War II founded the post-war International Military Tribunal to examine war crimes committed during the conflict by Nazi Germany, with officials from the Soviet Union taking an active part in the judicial processes, there was no examination of Allied Forces' actions and no charges were ever brought against its troops, because they were also an undefeated power which then held Europe under military occupation, marring the historical authority of the Tribunal's activity as being, in part, victor's justice.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: In the 1990s and 2000s, some war crimes trials held in the Baltic states led to prosecution of Russian nationals for crimes against humanity committed during or shortly after World War II, including killings or deportations of civilians.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Today, the Russian government engages in historical negationism. Russian media refers to the crimes against humanity and war crimes as a "Western myth", in Russian history textbooks, the atrocities are either altered to portray the Soviets positively or omitted entirely. In 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin acknowledged the "horrors of Stalinism", but he also criticized the "excessive demonization of Stalin" by "Russia's enemies".


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The Soviet Union did not recognize Imperial Russia's signing of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 as binding, and as a result, it refused to recognize them until 1955. This created a situation in which war crimes by the Soviet armed forces could eventually be rationalized. The Soviet refusal to recognize the Hague Conventions also gave Nazi Germany the rationale for its inhuman treatment of captured Soviet military personnel.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The early Soviet leaders publicly denounced anti-Semitism, William Korey wrote: "Anti-Jewish discrimination had become an integral part of Soviet state policy ever since the late thirties." Efforts were made by Soviet authorities to contain anti-Jewish bigotry notably during the Russian civil war, whenever the Red Army units perpetrated pogroms, as well as during the Soviet-Polish War of 1919–1920 at Baranovichi. Only a small number of pogroms were attributed to the Red Army, with the vast majority of the 'collectively violent' acts in the period having been committed by anti-Communist and nationalist forces.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The pogroms were condemned by the Red Army high command and guilty units were disarmed, while individual pogromists were court-martialed. Those found guilty could and did face execution. Although pogroms by Ukrainian units of the Red Army still occurred after this, the Jews regarded the Red Army as the only force which was willing to protect them.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: It is estimated that 3,450 Jews or 2.3 percent of the Jewish victims killed during the Russian Civil War were murdered by the Bolshevik armies. In comparison, according to the Morgenthau Report, a total of about 300 Jews lost their lives in all incidents involving Polish responsibility. The commission also found that the Polish military and civil authorities did their best to prevent such incidents and their recurrence in the future. The Morgenthau report stated that some forms of discrimination against Jews were of a political rather than an anti-Semitic nature and it specifically avoided using the term "pogrom", noting that the term's use was applied to a wide range of excesses, and it also had no specific definition.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: On 6 February 1922 the Cheka was replaced by the State Political Administration or OGPU, a section of the NKVD. The declared function of the NKVD was to protect the state security of the Soviet Union, which was accomplished by the large scale political persecution of "class enemies". The Red Army often gave support to the NKVD in the implementation of political repressions. As an internal security force and a prison guard contingent of the Gulag, the Internal Troops repressed political dissidents and engaged in war crimes during periods of military hostilities throughout Soviet history. They were specifically responsible for maintaining the political regime in the Gulag and conducting mass deportations and forced resettlement. The latter targeted a number of ethnic groups that the Soviet authorities presumed to be hostile to its policies and likely to collaborate with the enemy, including Chechens, Crimean Tatars, and Koreans.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: War crimes by Soviet armed forces against civilians and prisoners of war in the territories occupied by the USSR between 1939 and 1941 in regions including Western Ukraine, the Baltic states and Bessarabia in Romania, along with war crimes in 1944–1945, have been ongoing issues within these countries. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a more systematic, locally controlled discussion of these events has taken place.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: As the Red Army withdrew after the German attack of 1941 which is known as Operation Barbarossa, numerous reports of war crimes committed by Soviet armed forces against captured German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe soldiers from the very beginning of hostilities were documented in thousands of files of the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau which was established by Nazi Germany in September 1939 to investigate violations of the Hague and Geneva conventions by Germany's enemies. The targets included both collaborators with Germany and the members of anti-Communist resistance movements such as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in Ukraine, the Forest Brothers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and the Polish Armia Krajowa. The NKVD also conducted the Katyn massacre, summarily executing over 20,000 Polish military officer prisoners in April and May 1940.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The Soviets deployed mustard gas bombs during the Soviet invasion of Xinjiang. Civilians were killed by conventional bombs during the invasion.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: In accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact Estonia was annexed by the Soviet Union on 6 August 1940 and renamed the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Estonian standing army was broken up, its officers executed or deported. In 1941, some 34,000 Estonians were drafted into the Red Army, of whom less than 30% survived the war. No more than half of those men were used for military service. The rest were sent to labour battalions where around 12,000 died, mainly in the early months of the war. After it became clear that the German invasion of Estonia would be successful, political prisoners who could not be evacuated were executed by the NKVD, so that they would not be able to make contact with the Nazi government. More than 300,000 citizens of Estonia, almost a third of the population at the time, were affected by deportations, arrests, execution and other acts of repression. As a result of the Soviet occupation, Estonia permanently lost at least 200,000 people or 20% of its population to repression, exodus and war.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Soviet political repressions in Estonia were met by an armed resistance by the Forest Brothers, composed of former conscripts into the German military, Omakaitse militia and volunteers in the Finnish Infantry Regiment 200 who fought a guerrilla war, which was not completely suppressed until the late 1950s. In addition to the expected human and material losses suffered due to the fighting, until its end this conflict led to the deportation of tens of thousands of people, along with hundreds of political prisoners and thousands of civilians lost their lives.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: On 14 June 1941, and the following two days, 9,254 to 10,861 people, mostly urban residents, of them over 5,000 women and over 2,500 children under 16, 439 Jews (more than 10% of the Estonian Jewish population) were deported, mostly to Kirov Oblast, Novosibirsk Oblast or prisons. Deportations were predominantly to Siberia and Kazakhstan by means of railroad cattle cars, without prior announcement, while deported were given few night hours at best to pack their belongings and separated from their families, usually also sent to the east. The procedure was established by the Serov Instructions. Estonians residing in Leningrad Oblast had already been subjected to deportation since 1935.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: In 1941, to implement Stalin's scorched earth policy, destruction battalions were formed in the western regions of the Soviet Union. In Estonia, they killed thousands of people including a large proportion of women and children, while burning down dozens of villages, schools and public buildings. A school boy named Tullio Lindsaar had all of the bones in his hands broken then was bayoneted for hoisting the flag of Estonia. Mauricius Parts, son of the Estonian War of Independence veteran Karl Parts, was doused in acid. In August 1941, all residents of the village of Viru-Kabala were killed including a two-year-old child and a six-day-old infant. A partisan war broke out in response to the atrocities of the destruction battalions, with tens of thousands of men forming the Forest Brothers to protect the local population from these battalions. Occasionally, the battalions burned people alive. The destruction battalions murdered 1,850 people in Estonia. Almost all of them were partisans or unarmed civilians.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Another example of the destruction battalions' actions is the Kautla massacre, where twenty civilians were murdered and tens of farms destroyed. Many of the people were killed after torture. The low toll of human deaths in comparison with the number of burned farms is due to the Erna long-range reconnaissance group breaking the Red Army blockade on the area, allowing many civilians to escape.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: On 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression agreement. Latvia was included in the Soviet sphere of interest. On 17 June 1940, Latvia was occupied by Soviet forces. The Kārlis Ulmanis government was removed, and new illegitimate elections were held on 21 June 1940 with only one party listed, "electing" a fake parliament which made resolution to join the Soviet Union, with the resolution having already been drawn up in Moscow prior the election. Latvia became part of the Soviet Union on 5 August, and on 25 August all people in Latvia became citizens of the Soviet Union. The Ministry of Foreign affairs was closed isolating Latvia from the rest of the world.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: On 14 June 1941, thousands of people were taken from their homes, loaded onto freight trains and taken to Siberia. Whole families, women, children and old people were sent to labor camps in Siberia. The crime was perpetrated by the Soviet occupation regime on the orders of high authorities in Moscow. Prior the deportation, the Peoples Commissariat established operational groups who performed arrests, search and seizure of the property. Arrests took place in all parts in Latvia including rural areas.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Lithuania, and the other Baltic States, fell victim to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. This agreement was signed between the USSR and Germany in August 1939; leading first to Lithuania being invaded by the Red Army on 15 June 1940, and then to its annexation and incorporation into the Soviet Union on 3 August 1940. The Soviet annexation resulted in mass terror, the denial of civil liberties, the destruction of the country's economic system and the suppression of Lithuanian culture. Between 1940 and 1941, thousands of Lithuanians were arrested and hundreds of political prisoners were arbitrarily executed. More than 17,000 people were deported to Siberia in June 1941. After the German attack on the Soviet Union, the incipient Soviet political apparatus was either destroyed or retreated eastward. Lithuania was then occupied by Nazi Germany for a little over three years. In 1944, the Soviet Union reoccupied Lithuania. Following World War II and the subsequent suppression of the Lithuanian Forest Brothers, the Soviet authorities executed thousands of resistance fighters and civilians whom they accused of aiding them. Some 300,000 Lithuanians were deported or sentenced to terms in prison camps on political grounds. It is estimated that Lithuania lost almost 780,000 citizens as a result of the Soviet occupation, of these around 440,000 were war refugees.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The estimated death toll in Soviet prisons and camps between 1944 and 1953 was at least 14,000. The estimated death toll among deportees between 1945 and 1958 was 20,000, including 5,000 children.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: During the restoration of Lithuanian independence in 1990 and 1991, the Soviet army killed 13 people in Vilnius during the January Events.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: In September 1939, the Red Army invaded eastern Poland and occupied it in accordance with the secret protocols of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviets later forcefully occupied the Baltic States and parts of Romania, including Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: German historian Thomas Urban<ref name="OCLC/Urban">WorldCat, Thomas Urban. Library catalog. Holdings. Retrieved December 28, 2014.</ref> writes that the Soviet policy towards the people who fell under their control in occupied areas was harsh, showing strong elements of ethnic cleansing.<ref name="Urban/Verlust2">Thomas Urban, "Der Verlust", p. 9 (ibidem): "Massendeportationen nach Rußland. Seit dem frühen Morgen zogen Wagen mit ganzen polnischen Familien durch die Stadt zum Bahnhof. Man schaffte reichere polnische Familien, Familien von national gesinnten Anhängern, polnischen Patrioten, die Intelligenz weg, Familien von Häftlingen in sowjetischen Gefängnissen, es war schwer, sich auch nur ein Bild davon zu machen, welche Kategorie Menschen deportiert wurden. Weinen, Stöhnen und schreckliche Verzweiflung in polnischen Seelen [...] Sowjets freuen sich lautstark und drohen damit, daß bald alle Polen deportiert werden. Und man könnte das erwarten, weil sie den ganzen 20. Juni über und am folgenden 21. Juni [1941] pausenlos Menschen zum Bahnhof brachten." Alojza Piesiewiczówna.</ref> The NKVD task forces followed the Red Army to remove 'hostile elements' from the conquered territories in what was known as the 'revolution by hanging'. Polish historian, Prof. Tomasz Strzembosz, has noted parallels between the Nazi Einsatzgruppen and these Soviet units. Many civilians tried to escape from the Soviet NKVD round-ups; those who failed were taken into custody and afterwards they were deported to Siberia and vanished in the Gulags.<ref name="Urban/Verlust">Thomas Urban, "Der Verlust" (PDF file, direct download), p. 145. Verlag C. H. Beck 2004, . "Revolution durch den Strick."</ref>


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Torture was used on a wide scale in various prisons, especially in those prisons that were located in small towns. Prisoners were scalded with boiling water in Bobrka; in Przemyslany, people's noses, ears, and fingers were cut off and their eyes were also put out; in Czortków, the breasts of female inmates were cut off; and in Drohobycz, victims were bound together with barbed wire. Similar atrocities occurred in Sambor, Stanisławów, Stryj, and Złoczów. According to historian, Prof. Jan T. Gross:


title: Soviet war crimes

text: According to sociologist, Prof. Tadeusz Piotrowski, during the years from 1939 to 1941, nearly 1.5 million persons (including both local inhabitants and refugees from German-occupied Poland) were deported from the Soviet-controlled areas of former eastern Poland deep into the Soviet Union, of whom 58.0% were Poles, 19.4% Jews and the remainder other ethnic nationalities. Only a small number of these deportees returned to their homes after the war, when their homelands were annexed by the Soviet Union. According to American professor Carroll Quigley, at least one third of the 320,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by the Red Army in 1939 were murdered.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: It's estimated that between 10 and 35 thousand prisoners were killed either in prisons or on prison trail to the Soviet Union in the few days after the 22 June 1941 German attack on the Soviets (prisons: Brygidki, Zolochiv, Dubno, Drohobych, and so on).


title: Soviet war crimes

text: In Poland, German Nazi atrocities ended by late 1944, but they were replaced by Soviet oppression with the advance of Red Army forces. Soviet soldiers often engaged in plunder, rape and other crimes against the Poles, causing the population to fear and hate the regime.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Soldiers of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) were persecuted and imprisoned by Russian forces as a matter of course.<ref name="Davies/reviews">From reviews of Norman Davies, "God's Playground", Columbia, . "On the 22 August the NKVD was ordered to arrest and disarm all members of the Home Army who fell into their hands." Carlo D'Este Rising '44': Betraying Warsaw, New York Times, July 25, 2004. "While [at the same time] the NKVD under General Ivan Serov was unleashing another brutal purge against the Poles in the liberated territories of Poland." Donald Davidson, Rising '44' by Norman Davies, London, Macmillan, 2004. . Retrieved December 28, 2014.</ref> Most victims were deported to the gulags in the Donetsk region.<ref name="Paczkowski/enemy">Andrzej Paczkowski, Poland, the 'Enemy Nation', pp. 372-375 (in) "Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression." Harvard University Press, London, 1999. "The territories newly annexed by the USSR in the autumn of 1944 subsequently witnessed arrests on a massive scale followed by deportations to the gulags or transfer to forced-labor sites, particularly in the Donetsk region." Retrieved December 28, 2014.</ref> In 1945 alone, the number of members of the Polish Underground State who were deported to Siberia and various labor camps in the Soviet Union reached 50,000. Units of the Red Army carried out campaigns against Polish partisans and civilians. During the Augustów chase in 1945, more than 2,000 Poles were captured and about 600 of them are presumed to have died in Soviet custody. For more information about postwar resistance in Poland see the Cursed soldiers.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: It was a common Soviet practice to accuse their victims of being fascists in order to justify their death sentences. All the perversion of this Soviet tactic lay in the fact that practically all of the accused had in reality been fighting against the forces of Nazi Germany since September 1939. At that time the Soviets were still collaborating with Nazi Germany for more than 20 months before Operation Barbarossa started. Precisely therefore these kinds of Poles were judged capable of resisting the Soviets, in the same way that they had resisted the Nazis. After the War, a more elaborate appearance of justice was given under the jurisdiction of the Polish People's Republic orchestrated by the Soviets in the form of mock trials. These were organized after victims had been arrested under false charges by the NKVD or other Soviet controlled security organisations such as the Ministry of Public Security. At least 6,000 political death sentences were issued, and the majority of them were carried out. It is estimated that over 20,000 people died in Soviet prisons . Famous examples include Witold Pilecki or Emil August Fieldorf.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The attitude of Soviet servicemen towards ethnic Poles was better than their attitude towards the Germans, but it was not entirely better. The scale of rape of Polish women in 1945 led to a pandemic of sexually transmitted diseases. Although the total number of victims remains a matter of guessing, the Polish state archives and statistics of the Ministry of Health indicate that it might have exceeded 100,000. In Kraków, the Soviet entry into the city was accompanied by mass rapes of Polish women and girls, as well as the plunder of private property by Red Army soldiers. This behavior reached such a scale that even Polish Communists installed by the Soviet Union composed a letter of protest to Joseph Stalin himself, while church Masses were held in expectation of a Soviet withdrawal.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Between 1941 and 1944, Soviet partisan units conducted raids deep inside Finnish territory, attacking villages and other civilian targets. In November 2006, photographs showing Soviet atrocities were declassified by the Finnish authorities. These include images of slain women and children. The partisans usually executed their military and civilian prisoners after a minor interrogation.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Around 3,500 Finnish prisoners of war, of whom five were women, were captured by the Red Army. Their mortality rate is estimated to have been about 40 percent. The most common causes of death were hunger, cold and oppressive transportation.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: On 9 August 1937, NKVD order 00485 was adopted to target "subversive activities of Polish intelligence" in the Soviet Union, but was later expanded to also include Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians and Chinese.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Large numbers of kulaks regardless of their nationality were resettled to Siberia and Central Asia. According to data from Soviet archives, which were published in 1990, 1,803,392 people were sent to labor colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931, and 1,317,022 reached the destination. Deportations on a smaller scale continued after 1931. Data from the Soviet archives indicates 2.4 million Kulaks were deported from 1930 to 1934. The reported number of kulaks and their relatives who had died in labour colonies from 1932 to 1940 was 389,521. Simon Sebag Montefiore estimated that 15 million kulaks and their families were deported by 1937, during the deportation many people died, but the full number is not known.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Deportations, summary executions of political prisoners and the burning of foodstocks and villages took place when the Red Army retreated before the advancing Axis forces in 1941. In the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, and Bessarabia, the NKVD and attached units of the Red Army massacred prisoners and political opponents before fleeing from the advancing Axis forces.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The prosecution of Greeks in the USSR was gradual: at first the authorities shut down the Greek schools, cultural centres, and publishing houses. Then, in 1942, 1944 and 1949, the NKVD indiscriminately arrested all Greek men 16 years old or older. All Greeks who were wealthy or self-employed professionals were sought for prosecution first. This affected mostly Pontic Greeks and other Minorities in the Krasnodar Krai and along the Black Sea coast. By one estimate, around 50,000 Greeks were deported.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: On 25 September 1956, MVD Order N 0402 was adopted and defined the removal of restrictions towards the deported peoples in the special settlements. Afterward, the Soviet Greeks started returning to their homes, or emigrating towards Greece.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: During the Kalmyk deportations of 1943, codenamed Operation Ulussy (Операция "Улусы"), the deportation of most people of the Kalmyk nationality in the Soviet Union (USSR), and Russian women married to Kalmyks, but excluding Kalmyk women married to men of other nationalities, around half of all (97-98,000) Kalmyk people deported to Siberia died before being allowed to return home in 1957.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: After the retreat of the "Wehrmacht" from Crimea, the NKVD deported around 200,000 Crimean Tatars from the peninsula on 18 May 1944.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: By 1939 the Ingrian Finnish population had decreased to about 50,000, which was about 43% of 1928 population figures, and the Ingrian Finn national district was abolished., Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the Leningrad Blockade, in early 1942 all 20,000 Ingrian Finns remaining in Soviet-controlled territory were deported to Siberia. Most of the Ingrian Finns together with Votes and Izhorians living in German-occupied territory were evacuated to Finland in 1943–1944. After Finland sued for peace, it was forced to return the evacuees. Soviet authorities did not allow the 55,733 people who had been handed over to settle back in Ingria, and instead deported them to central regions of Russia. The main regions of Ingrian Finns forced settlement were the interior areas of Siberia, Central Russia, and Tajikistan.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: In 1943 and 1944, the Soviet government accused several entire ethnic groups of Axis collaboration. As a punishment, several entire ethnic groups were deported, mostly to Central Asia and Siberia into labor camps. The European Parliament described the deportation of Chechens and Ingush, where around a quarter people perished, an act of genocide in 2004:


title: Soviet war crimes

text: According to historian Norman Naimark, statements in Soviet military newspapers and the orders of the Soviet high command were jointly responsible for the excesses of the Red Army. Propaganda proclaimed that the Red Army had entered Germany as an avenger to punish all Germans.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Some historians dispute this, referring to an order issued on 19 January 1945, which required the prevention of mistreatment of civilians. An order of the military council of the 1st Belorussian Front, signed by Marshal Rokossovsky, ordered the shooting of looters and rapists at the scene of the crime. An order issued by Stavka on 20 April 1945 said that there was a need to maintain good relations with German civilians in order to decrease resistance and bring a quicker end to hostilities.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: On several occasions during World War II, Soviet soldiers set fire to buildings, villages, or parts of cities, and they used deadly force against locals who attempted to put out the fires. Most Red Army atrocities took place only in what was regarded as hostile territory (see Przyszowice massacre). Soldiers of the Red Army, together with members of the NKVD, frequently looted German transport trains in Poland in 1944 and 1945.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: For the Germans, the organized evacuation of civilians before the advancing Red Army was delayed by the Nazi government, so as not to demoralize the troops, who were by now fighting in their own country. Nazi propaganda — originally meant to stiffen civil resistance by describing in gory and embellished detail Red Army atrocities such as the Nemmersdorf massacre — often backfired and created panic. Whenever possible, as soon as the Wehrmacht retreated, local civilians began to flee westward on their own initiative.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: 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 evacuation columns encountered units of the Red Army. Civilians were run over by tanks, shot, or otherwise murdered. Women and young girls were raped and left to die.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: In addition, fighter bombers of the Soviet air force flew bombing and strafing missions that targeted columns of refugees.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Although mass executions of civilians by the Red Army were seldom publicly reported, there is a known incident in Treuenbrietzen, where at least 88 male inhabitants were rounded up and shot on 1 May 1945. The incident took place after a victory celebration in which numerous girls from Treuenbrietzen were raped and a Red Army lieutenant-colonel was shot by an unknown assailant. Some sources claim that as many as 1,000 civilians may have been executed during the incident.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The first mayor of the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, Walter Kilian, appointed by the Soviets after the war ended, reported extensive looting by Red Army soldiers in the area: "Individuals, department stores, shops, apartments ... all were robbed blind."


title: Soviet war crimes

text: In the Soviet occupation zone, members of the SED reported to Stalin that looting and rape by Soviet soldiers could result in a negative reaction by the German population towards the Soviet Union and the future of socialism in East Germany. Stalin is said to have angrily reacted: "I shall not tolerate anybody dragging the honour of the Red Army through the mud."


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Accordingly, all evidence — such as reports, photos and other documents of looting, rape, the burning down of farms and villages by the Red Army — was deleted from all archives in the future GDR.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: A study published by the German government in 1974 estimated the number of German civilian victims of crimes during expulsion of Germans after World War II between 1945 and 1948 to be over 600,000, with about 400,000 deaths in the areas east of Oder and Neisse (ca. 120,000 in acts of direct violence, mostly by Soviet troops but also by Poles, 60,000 in Polish and 40,000 in Soviet concentration camps or prisons mostly from hunger and disease, and 200,000 deaths among civilian deportees to forced labor of Germans in the Soviet Union), 130,000 in Czechoslovakia (thereof 100,000 in camps) and 80,000 in Yugoslavia (thereof 15,000 to 20,000 from violence outside of and in camps and 59,000 deaths from hunger and disease in camps). These figures do not include up to 125,000 civilian deaths in the Battle of Berlin. About 22,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed during the fighting in Berlin only.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Western estimates of the traceable number of rape victims range from two hundred thousand to two million. Following the Winter Offensive of 1945, mass rape by Soviet males occurred in all major cities taken by the Red Army. Women were gang raped by as many as several dozen soldiers during the liberation of Poland. In some cases victims who did not hide in the basements all day were raped up to 15 times. According to historian Antony Beevor, following the Red Army's capture of Berlin in 1945, Soviet troops raped German women and girls as young as eight years old.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The explanation of "revenge" is disputed by Beevor, at least with regard to the mass rapes. Beevor has written that Red Army soldiers also raped Soviet and Polish women liberated from concentration camps, and he contends that this undermines the revenge explanation, they were often committed by rear echelon units.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: According to Norman Naimark, after the summer of 1945, Soviet soldiers caught raping civilians usually received punishments ranging from arrest to execution. However, Naimark contends that the rapes continued until the winter of 1947–48, when Soviet occupation authorities finally confined troops to strictly guarded posts and camps. Naimark concluded that "The social psychology of women and men in the Soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of occupation, through the founding of the GDR in the fall of 1949, until, one could argue, the present."


title: Soviet war crimes

text: According to Richard Overy, the Russians refused to acknowledge Soviet war crimes, partly "because they felt that much of it was justified vengeance against an enemy who committed much worse, and partly it was because they were writing the victors' history."


title: Soviet war crimes

text: According to researcher and author Krisztián Ungváry, some 38,000 civilians were killed during the Siege of Budapest: about 13,000 from military action and 25,000 from starvation, disease and other causes. Included in the latter figure are about 15,000 Jews, largely victims of executions by Nazi SS and Arrow Cross Party death squads. Ungváry writes that when the Soviets finally claimed victory, they initiated an orgy of violence, including the wholesale theft of anything they could lay their hands on, random executions and mass rape. Estimates of the number of rape victims vary from 5,000 to 200,000. According to Norman Naimark, Hungarian girls were kidnapped and taken to Red Army quarters, where they were imprisoned, repeatedly raped and sometimes murdered.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Even embassy staff from neutral countries were captured and raped, as was documented when Soviet soldiers attacked the Swedish legation in Germany.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The Soviet Union also committed war crimes in Romania or against Romanians from the beginning of the occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina in 1940 all the way to the German invasion in 1941, and later from the expulsion of the Germans in the region until 1958. One example was the Fântâna Albă massacre, in which 44–3,000 Romanians were killed by the Soviet Border Troops and the NKVD while attempting to escape to Romania. Such event has been referred to as the "Romanian Katyn".


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Another infamous massacre committed by Soviet troops was the Lunca massacre, where soviet border troops opened fire against several Romanian civilians attempting to escape into Romania, killing 600 of them, only 57 managed to escape, with another 44 being arrested and tried as "members of a counter-revolutionary organization", 12 of them were sentenced to death, with the rest being sentenced to 10 years forced labour and 5 years loss of civil rights, the family members of those arrested and shot would later be arrested and sent to Siberia and Central Asia


title: Soviet war crimes

text: During the occupation, the Soviet government and army deported thousands of Romanian civilians from the occupied regions into "special settlements". According to a secret Soviet Ministry of Interior report dated December 1965, 46,000 people were deported from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic for the period 1940−1953.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Religious persecution was also widespread, the Soviet government sought to exterminate all forms of organized religion in its occupied territories, often persecuting the Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish churches, the Soviet political police arrested numerous priests, with others being arrested and interrogated by the Soviet NKVD itself, then deported to the interior of the USSR, and killed.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Thousands of Transylvanian Saxons would later be deported from 1944 to 1949 under Soviet occupation, with hundreds or even thousands dying on their way to camps in Siberia and Central Asia before being able to come back to their home country.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: According to Yugoslav politician Milovan Djilas, at least 121 cases of rape were documented, 111 of which also involved murder. A total of 1,204 cases of looting with assault were also documented. Djilas described these figures as, "hardly insignificant if it is borne in mind that the Red Army crossed only the northeastern corner of Yugoslavia". This caused concern to the Yugoslav communist partisans, who feared that stories of crimes committed by their Soviet allies would weaken their standing among the population.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Djilas writes that in response, Yugoslav partisan leader Joseph Broz Tito summoned the chief of the Soviet military mission, General Korneev, and formally protested. Despite having been invited "as a comrade", Korneev exploded at them for offering "such insinuations" against the Red Army. Djilas, who was present at the meeting, spoke up and explained the British Army had never engaged in "such excesses" while liberating the other regions of Yugoslavia. General Korneev responded by screaming, "I protest most sharply at this insult given to the Red Army by comparing it with the armies of capitalist countries."


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The meeting with Korneev not only "ended without results", it also caused Stalin to personally attack Djilas during his next visit to the Kremlin. In tears, Stalin denounced "the Yugoslav Army and how it was administered." He then "spoke agitatedly about the sufferings of the Red Army and the horrors that it was forced to endure while it was fighting through thousands of kilometers of devastated country." Stalin climaxed with the words, "And such an Army was insulted by no one else but Djilas! Djilas, of whom I could least have expected such a thing, a man whom I received so well! And an Army which did not spare its blood for you! Does Djilas, who is himself a writer, not know what human suffering and the human heart are? Can't he understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometers through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?"


title: Soviet war crimes

text: According to Djilas, the Soviet refusal to address protests against Red Army war crimes in Yugoslavia enraged Tito's government and it was a contributing factor in Yugoslavia's subsequent exit from the Soviet Bloc.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Slovak communist leader Vlado Clementis complained to Marshal Ivan Konev about the behavior of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia. Konev's response was to claim it was done mainly by Red Army deserters.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: During the invasion of Manchuria, Soviet and Mongolian soldiers attacked and raped Japanese civilians, often encouraged by the local Chinese population who were resentful of Japanese rule. The local Chinese population sometimes even joined in these attacks against the Japanese population with the Soviet soldiers. In one famous example, during the Gegenmiao massacre, Soviet soldiers, encouraged by the local Chinese population, raped and massacred over one thousand Japanese women and children. Property of the Japanese were also looted by the Soviet soldiers and Chinese. Many Japanese women married themselves to local Manchurian men to protect themselves from persecution by Soviet soldiers. These Japanese women mostly married Chinese men and became known as "stranded war wives" (zanryu fujin).


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Following the invasion of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo (Manchuria), the Soviets laid claim to valuable Japanese materials and industrial equipment in the region. A foreigner witnessed Soviet troops, formerly stationed in Berlin, who were allowed by the Soviet military to go at the city "for three days of rape and pillage." Most of Mukden was gone. Convict soldiers were then used to replace them; it was testified that they "stole everything in sight, broke up bathtubs and toilets with hammers, pulled electric-light wiring out of the plaster, built fires on the floor and either burned down the house or at least a big hole in the floor, and in general behaved completely like savages."


title: Soviet war crimes

text: According to some British and American sources, the Soviets made it a policy to loot and rape civilians in Manchuria. In Harbin, the Chinese posted slogans such as "Down with Red Imperialism!" Soviet forces faced some protests by Chinese communist party leaders against the looting and rapes committed by troops in Manchuria. There were several incidences, where Chinese police forces in Manchuria arrested or even killed Soviet troops for various crimes, leading to some conflicts between the Soviet and Chinese authorities in Manchuria.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Russian historian Konstantin Asmolov argues that such Western accounts of Soviet violence against civilians in the Far East are exaggerations of isolated incidents and the documents of the time don't support the claims of mass crimes. Asmolov also claims that the Soviets, unlike the Germans and the Japanese, prosecuted their soldiers and officers for such acts. Indeed, the incidence of rape committed in the Far East was far less than the number of incidents committed by Soviet soldiers in Europe.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The Soviet Army committed crimes against the Japanese civilian populations and surrendered military personnel in the closing stages of World War II during the assaults on Sakhalin and Kuril Islands.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: On August 10, 1945, Soviet forces carried out fierce naval bombardment and artillery strikes against civilians awaiting evacuation as well as Japanese installations in Maoka. Nearly 1,000 civilians were killed by the invading forces.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: During the evacuation of the Kuriles and Karafuto, civilian convoys were attacked by Soviet submarines in the Aniva Gulf. Soviet Leninets-class submarine "L-12" and "L-19" sank two Japanese refugee transport ships "Ogasawara Maru" and "Taito Maru" while also damaging "No.2 Shinko Maru" on August 22, 7 days after Hirohito had announced Japan's unconditional surrender. Over 2,400 civilians were killed.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Although the Soviet Union had not formally signed the Hague Convention, it considered itself bound by the convention's provisions.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Throughout the Second World War, the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau collected and investigated reports of crimes against the Axis POWs. According to Cuban-American writer Alfred de Zayas, "For the entire duration of the Russian campaign, reports of torture and murder of German prisoners did not cease. The War Crimes Bureau had five major sources of information: (1) captured enemy papers, especially orders, reports of operations, and propaganda leaflets; (2) intercepted radio and wireless messages; (3) testimony of Soviet prisoners of war; (4) testimony of captured Germans who had escaped; and (5) testimony of Germans who saw the corpses or mutilated bodies of executed prisoners of war. From 1941 to 1945 the Bureau compiled several thousand depositions, reports, and captured papers which, if nothing else, indicate that the killing of German prisoners of war upon capture or shortly after their interrogation was not an isolated occurrence. Documents relating to the war in France, Italy, and North Africa contain some reports on the deliberate killing of German prisoners of war, but there can be no comparison with the events on the Eastern Front."


title: Soviet war crimes

text: In a November 1941 report, the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau accused the Red Army of employing "a terror policy... against defenseless German soldiers that have fallen into its hands and against members of the German medical corps. At the same time... it has made use of the following means of camouflage: in a Red Army order that bears the approval of the Council of People's Commissars, dated 1 July 1941, the norms of international law are made public, which the Red Army in the spirit of the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare are supposed to follow... This... Russian order probably had very little distribution, and surely it has not been followed at all. Otherwise the unspeakable crimes would not have occurred."


title: Soviet war crimes

text: According to the depositions, Soviet massacres of German, Italian, Spanish, and other Axis POWs were often incited by unit Commissars, who claimed to be acting under orders from Stalin and the Politburo. Other evidence cemented the War Crimes Bureau's belief that Stalin had given secret orders about the massacre of POWs.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: During the winter of 1941–42, the Red Army captured approximately 10,000 German soldiers each month, but the death rate became so high that the absolute number of prisoners decreased (or was bureaucratically reduced).


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Soviet sources list the deaths of 474,967 of the 2,652,672 German Armed Forces taken prisoner in the War. Dr. Rüdiger Overmans believes that it seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that an additional German military personnel listed as missing actually died in Soviet custody as POWs, putting the estimates of the actual death toll of German POW in the USSR at about 1.0 million.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Soviet soldiers rarely bothered to treat wounded German POWs. A particularly infamous example took place after the Crimean city of Feodosia was briefly recaptured by Soviet forces on December 29, 1942. 160 wounded soldiers had been left in military hospitals by the retreating Wehrmacht. After the Germans retook Feodosia, it was learned that every wounded soldier had been massacred by Red Army, Navy, and NKVD personnel. Some had been shot in their hospital beds, others repeatedly bludgeoned to death, still others were found to have been thrown from hospital windows before being repeatedly drenched with freezing water until they died of hypothermia.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The Massacre of Grischino was committed by an armoured division of the Red Army in February 1943 in the eastern Ukrainian towns of Krasnoarmeyskoye, Postyschevo and Grischino. The Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle also known as WuSt (Wehrmacht criminal investigating authority), announced that among the victims were 406 soldiers of the Wehrmacht, 58 members of the Organisation Todt (including two Danish nationals), 89 Italian soldiers, 9 Romanian soldiers, 4 Hungarian soldiers, 15 German civil officials, 7 German civilian workers and 8 Ukrainian volunteers.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: The places were overrun by the Soviet 4th Guards Tank Corps on the night of 10 and 11 February 1943. After the reconquest by the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking with the support of 333 Infantry Division and the 7th Panzer Division on 18 February 1943 the Wehrmacht soldiers discovered numerous deaths. Many of the bodies were horribly mutilated, ears and noses cut off and genital organs amputated and stuffed into their mouths. Breasts of some of the nurses were cut off, the women being brutally raped. A German military judge who was at the scene stated in an interview during the 1970s that he saw a female body with her legs spread-eagled and a broomstick rammed into her genitals. In the cellar of the main train station around 120 Germans were herded into a large storage room and then mowed down with machine guns.


title: Soviet war crimes

text: Some German prisoners were released soon after the war. Many others, however, remained in the GULAG long after the surrender of Nazi Germany. Among the most famous German POWs to die in Soviet captivity was Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who died of injuries, sustained possibly under torture, in a concentration camp near Stalingrad in 1952. In 2009, Captain Hosenfeld was posthumously honored by the State of Israel for his role in saving Jewish lives during The Holocaust. Similar was the fate of Swedish diplomat and OSS operative Raoul Wallenberg