Andrey Vlasov

Born in Lomakino, Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, Russian Empire, Vlasov was originally a student at a Russian Orthodox seminary. He quit the study of divinity after the Russian Revolution, briefly studying agricultural sciences instead, and in 1919 joined the Red Army. He fought in the southern theatre in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Crimea during the Russian Civil War, including against the White forces of Anton Denikin and Pyotr Wrangel, and the anarchist army of Nestor Makhno. He distinguished himself as an officer and gradually rose through the ranks of the Red Army. In the 1920s and early 1930s he was a company, battalion, and regimental commander, and graduated from an infantry officer course. He was also an instructor at the Frunze Military Academy. Vlasov joined the Communist Party in 1930. Sent to China in 1938, he acted as a military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek until November 1939. From February to May 1939 he was the advisor to Yan Xishan, the governor of Shanxi. Vlasov was also the chief of staff to the head of the Soviet military mission, General Aleksandr Cherepanov. He received a military decoration from Chiang and a watch from his wife, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, which were both taken from him after he returned to the USSR. Upon his return, Vlasov served in several assignments before being given command of the 99th Rifle Division. After just nine months under Vlasov's leadership, and an inspection by Semyon Timoshenko, the division was recognized as one of the best divisions in the Army in 1940. Timoshenko presented Vlasov with an inscribed gold watch, as he "found the 99th the best of all". The historian John Erickson says of Vlasov at this point that [he] "was an up-and-coming man". In 1940, Vlasov was promoted to major general, and on June 22, 1941, when the Germans and their allies invaded the Soviet Union, Vlasov was commanding the 4th Mechanized Corps. As a lieutenant general, he commanded the 37th Army near Kiev and escaped encirclement. He then played an important role in the defense of Moscow, as his 20th Army counterattacked and retook Solnechnogorsk. Vlasov's picture was printed (along with those of other Soviet generals) in the newspaper Pravda as that of one of the "defenders of Moscow". Vlasov was decorated on January 24, 1942, with the Order of the Red Banner for his efforts in the defence of Moscow. Vlasov was ordered to relieve the ailing commander Klykov after the Second Shock Army had been encircled. After this success, Vlasov was put in command of the 2nd Shock Army of the Volkhov Front and ordered to lead the attempt to lift the Siege of Leningrad—the Lyuban-Chudovo Offensive Operation of January–April 1942. On January 7, 1942, Vlasov's army had spearheaded the Lyuban offensive operation to break the Leningrad encirclement. Planned as a combined operation between the Volkhov and Leningrad Fronts on a 30 km frontage, other armies of the Leningrad Front (including the 54th) were supposed to participate at scheduled intervals in this operation. Crossing the Volkhov River, Vlasov's army was successful in breaking through the German 18th Army's lines and penetrated 70–74 km deep inside the German rear area. However, the other armies (the Volkhov Front's 4th, 52nd, and 59th Armies, 13th Cavalry Corps, and 4th and 6th Guards Rifle Corps, as well as the 54th Army of the Leningrad Front) failed to exploit Vlasov's advances and provide the required support, and Vlasov's army became stranded. Permission to retreat was refused. With the counter-offensive in May 1942, the Second Shock Army was finally allowed to retreat, but by now, too weakened, it was surrounded and in June 1942 virtually annihilated during the final breakout at Myasnoi Bor. ==German prisoner==

'' After Vlasov's army was surrounded, he himself was offered an escape by aeroplane. The general refused and hid in German-occupied territory; ten days later, on July 12, 1942, a local farmer exposed him to the Germans. Vlasov's opponent and captor, general Georg Lindemann, interrogated him about the surrounding of his army and details of battles, then "had Vlasov imprisoned in occupied Vinnytsia." While in prison, Vlasov met Captain Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt, a Baltic German who was attempting to foster a Russian Liberation Movement. Strik-Strikfeldt had circulated memos to this effect in the Wehrmacht. Strik-Strikfeldt, who had been a participant in the White movement during the Russian Civil War, persuaded Vlasov to become involved in aiding the German advance against the rule of Joseph Stalin and Bolshevism. With Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Boyarsky, Vlasov wrote a memo shortly after his capture to the German military leaders suggesting cooperation between anti-Stalinist Russians and the German Army. ==Defection==

(February 1945) Vlasov was taken to Berlin under the control of the Wehrmacht Propaganda Department. While there, he and other Soviet officers began drafting plans for the creation of a Russian provisional government and the recruitment of a Russian army of liberation under Russian command. In the spring of 1943, Vlasov wrote an anti-Bolshevik leaflet known as the "Smolensk Proclamation", which was dropped from aircraft by the millions on Soviet forces and Soviet-controlled soil. In March of the same year, Vlasov also published an open letter titled "Why I Have Taken Up the Struggle Against Bolshevism". Even though no Russian Liberation Army yet existed, the Nazi propaganda department issued Russian Liberation Army patches to Russian volunteers and tried to use Vlasov's name in order to encourage defections. Several hundred thousand former Soviet citizens served in the German army wearing this patch, but never under Vlasov's own command. Vlasov was permitted to make several trips to German-occupied Soviet Union: most notably, to Pskov, Russia, where Russian pro-German volunteers paraded. The populace's reception of Vlasov was mixed. While in Pskov, Vlasov dealt himself a nearly fatal political blow by referring to the Germans as mere "guests" during a speech, which Hitler found belittling. Vlasov was even put under house arrest and threatened with being handed over to the Gestapo. Despondent about his mission, Vlasov threatened to resign and return to the POW camp, but was dissuaded at the last minute by his confidants. According to Varlam Shalamov and his tale The Last Battle of Major Pugachov, Vlasov emissaries lectured to the Russian prisoners of war, explaining to them that their government had declared them all traitors, and that escaping was pointless. As Vlasov proclaimed, even if the Soviets succeeded, Stalin would send them to Siberia. == Vlasov Movement ==

" (1943) by Arthur Szyk depicts Vlasov as a far-right reactionary surrounded by the White Guards with the Russian imperial double-headed eagle above him; the drawing is dedicated to the leader of the Russian Whites Anton Denikin, known for Jewish pogroms The creation of a political movement behind Vlasov and the Russian collaboration became a result of the conflicts within the Nazi Party and the Nazi bureaucracy. While Hitler and the supporters of the Generalplan Ost adhered to the idea of the colonization of the Untermenschen and denied any cooperation with the population of the USSR, Alfred Rosenberg proposed the creation of monoethnic nation-states as satellites of the Third Reich ruled by local nationalist collaborators. Hitler rejected this project, but the Soviet defectors were used by Wehrmacht Propaganda. Eventually Hitler agreed to use the Soviet defectors for propaganda purposes. As the reports of the Osttruppen defecting the Soviet partisans reached Hitler, he demanded that all the units be disbanded, and the men sent to the mines and factories, but this order wasn't executed due to the resistance of the OKW. After the 20 July plot, the Eastern troops were handed to the SS, and as Hitler weakened due to physical conditions, Himmler found possible the creation of a collaborationist political organisation with its army. while his Manifesto calls it the "Liberation Movement of the Peoples of Russia", Some of Vlasov's close associates like , a Soviet journalist of Jewish origins, described themselves as Marxists, Zykov was also described as a Bukharinist. Despite being captured by the Nazi secret police and killed, ostensibly for his Jewish origins and for his views, before the formation of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia and the creation of its Manifesto, the political organization of the Vlasovites, Zykov was a major ideologue of the Vlasov army and participated in writing of the other Vlasovite program documents. The Vlasovites opposed their programs, the Smolensk Declaration, Vlasov's open letter "Why I Decided to Fight against Bolshevism", the Prague Manifesto of the KONR and Bloknot Propagandista (an important document which was written by rather minor members of the KONR as open for discussion and was not recognized as an official program), both to the Western capitalism and Stalinism, which was called by the word "Bolshevism" and described in the Manifesto not as socialism but as "state capitalism", and proclaimed their devotion to "completing the Revolution" of 1917 without distinguishing the February Revolution and the October Revolution, and to ideals of either a "Russia without Bolsheviks and Capitalists" (Smolensk Declaration and the open letter), or a welfare state (Bloknot Propagandista); the influence of the NTS on the Manifesto is seen in the description of the future system of Russia as a "national-labour" system, some of Vlasov's generals joined the NTS. All of these documents granted the basic democratic freedoms and rights, including the right of the nations to self-determination and to separate from Russia and did not contain antisemitic remarks and invectives; Bloknot Propagandista also contained an attempt in critique of Marxism and denied both internationalism and national chauvinism. However, antisemitic remarks were made in one of the speeches of Vasily Malyshkin in 1943 and in Georgi Zhilenkov's interview to the Völkischer Beobachter; Vlasov was critical of such remarks and replied to the Nazi concerns that "the Jewish question" "was an internal Russian problem and would be dealt with after they [the ROA] had accomplished the primary aim of overthrowing the existing regime"; however, antisemitism frequently appeared in the pro-Vlasov Nazi and collaborationist newspapers issued before the formation of KONR, including the ones edited by Zykov, often in form of articles reprinted from the Völkischer Beobachter with the citation of the source. The program documents were also written as a compromise with Nazism to various extents: the Smolensk Declaration included some pro-Nazi points ("Germany was not fighting the war against the Russian people and their homeland but merely against Bolshevism"), and the Manifesto included a number of criticisms of the Western Allies as a compromise with Himmler's insistence to add antisemitic points. Himmler, the head of the SS, had a negative attitude towards Vlasov and the idea of arming Russian formations. For example, in late 1942 he told another SS official who was based in Minsk that Russian collaborators should not be promised a national state and only a liberation from Bolshevism and possibly better living standards. He oversaw the creation of the SS-Volunteer Division "Galicia" in October 1943 from Ukrainian volunteers, but that same month he said that Vlasov made him "genuinely anxious." Himmler later noted that there were Wehrmacht officers who wanted to give Vlasov a million-man army, and speculated that in the future it could theoretically turn against Germany. Himmler did not want Vlasov to even be used for propaganda and on another occasion said that Vlasov's ideology "must be intellectually totally annihilated among us." Hitler had similar concerns, having said in June 1943 that Vlasov was unneeded, because the Germans "would never build up a Russian army." It was not until Germany's position was weakened in the spring of 1944 that Himmler began changing his mind, with the encouragement of Gunter d'Alquen and others, and decided to meet with Vlasov. Their meeting was scheduled for the evening of 20 July 1944, but was postponed by the assassination attempt against Hitler until 16 September 1944. When it happened, Himmler promised Vlasov several Russian divisions. Two began to be formed, the 600th Infantry Division in November 1944 and the 650th Infantry Division in January 1945, respectively. He also approved the creation of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR). Earlier, in the summer of 1944 Vlasov, who had been depressed after the first few years of failing to get German support for the Russian Liberation Movement, was sent to an SS recovery center in Ruhpolding that was run by Heidi Bielenberg, the widow of an SS officer. Several weeks after meeting they decided to get married, even though neither one spoke each other's language and Vlasov probably knew that his first wife was still alive in the Soviet Union. This may have been done under the pressure of the SS. According to the SS liaison officer assigned to Vlasov's staff, the idea for the marriage came mainly from her, because she liked the idea of her becoming the "first lady" of a future Russian state. ==Commander of the ROA==

'' in the Russian Liberation Army, April 3, 1945. The only combat of the ROA against the Red Army took place on February 11, 1945, on the river Oder; it was carried out by the First Division led by General Sergei Bunyachenko. After three days of battle against overwhelming forces, the First Division of the ROA was forced to retreat and marched southward to Prague, in German-controlled Bohemia. In March 1945, Bunyachenko started disobeying the commands of the Wehrmacht; eventually Ferdinand Schörner (and later Rudolf Toussaint Two days later, the First Division was forced to leave Prague as Communist Czech partisans began arresting ROA soldiers in order to hand them over to the Soviets for execution. Vlasov and the rest of his forces, trying to evade the Red Army, attempted to head west to surrender to the Allies in the closing days of the war in Europe. ==Capture by Soviet forces, trial, and execution==

of the US Army in Plzeň (May 9, 1945) Vlasov's division, commanded by General Sergei Bunyachenko, was captured southeast of Plzeň by the Soviet 25th Tank Corps, after their attempt to surrender to US troops was rejected. Captain M. I. Yakushev of the 162nd Tank Brigade had Vlasov dragged out of his car, put on a tank and driven straight to the Soviet 13th Army HQ. Vlasov was then transported from the 13th Army HQ to Marshal Ivan Konev's command post in Dresden, and from there sent immediately to Moscow. Vlasov was confined in Lubyanka prison where he was interrogated. A secret trial was held, beginning on 30 July 1946 and was presided over by Viktor Abakumov who sentenced him and eleven other senior officers from his army to death for high treason. Vlasov was executed by hanging on 1 August 1946. His execution was among the last death sentences in the Soviet Union carried out by hanging, after which executions were conducted only by shooting. == Legacy ==

Historiography and memory politics 20th century In the USSR, the figure of Vlasov was villainized because of the need to defend the official myth of the Great Patriotic War, which was "created and assiduously supported as a pillar of state legitimacy and national culture in the USSR". However, in the emigration and later in the post-Soviet Russia, he and his movement became objects of various narratives. The first narrative in the emigration was set up by the former White Guards who served in the ROA or supported Vlasov, although they were a minority in the ROA and had conflicts with the Vlasovites, since the Whites were suspicious of the former Soviet soldiers and sometimes called them "Reds", while Vasily Malyshkin, one of Vlasov's closest associates, charged that the White movement, described by him as a movement of conservative gentry, had remained distant from realities of the USSR, To get the interest of the U.S. military intelligence, the post-war Vlasovites stressed the anti-Communist nature of their movement. However, the new narrative was left-wing, being constructed by the Menshevik intellectual and historian Boris Nicolaevsky, who after visiting DP camps came to a belief that the Vlasov Movement was democratic and even anti-Nazi to some extent. His narrative was somewhat closer to the truth, as he, unlike the Whites, could cite Vlasovite documents, like the Prague Manifesto of the KONR. Nikolaevsky described the Vlasovites with the word porazhentsy, "defeatists", the word used by the Bolsheviks during World War I towards themselves, as they campaigned against the war efforts of the Russian Empire and for overthrow of the reactionary Tsarist and later imperialist bourgeois government with a revolutionary civil war; Nicolaevsky's narrative resulted in a polemics among the émigrés, and opponents of Nicolaevsky among oborontsy, the word from the vocabulary of World War I to indicate the patriotic opposition to the Bolsheviks' defeatism, the supporters of the war effort of the USSR in World War II, attacked the Vlasovites and Nicolaevsky: according to them, the democratic program was just a way to court the West in the face of Nazi defeat, that they were national traitors and mere "powerless pawns" in "organized and merciless destruction" of their own people, a "propaganda trick", and that they were unscrupulous people motivated only by lust for power or physical survival whose movement could not be democratic in any way. B. Dvinov, one of the most harsh Nicolaevsky's opponents, supported his publications with documents. Among the positions of the émigrés was a compromise one that 'Vlasovism' may be a democratic movement, but Vlasov and the other leaders should be condemned, and that the Vlasovites should admit that collaboration with the Nazis was a mistake, but the Vlasovites from the SBONR, which joined the AMCOMLIB, refused to admit the latter and continued to idolize their executed leader; they accused their opponents of Communism, while the Socialist émigrés accused Vlasovites of Nazism, and both claims were dangerous since the FBI had been closely monitoring both of the factions. More to it, the SBONR in their responses made nationalist and allegedly antisemitic dog whistles, since they never mentioned the Jewish origins of their opponents, but contrasted the "Russian people" with the American exiles who "long ago forgotten how to understand" the first; later they compromised themselves more with "historical apologies for restoration and reaction", therefore making Nicolaevsky's narrative unable to be adopted as universal, since one of their publications called Kerensky a traitor for preventing the Kornilov coup in 1917. The fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to immediate popularisation of Vlasov among the emerging far-right nationalists, since they preferred the ideals of Pan-Slavism and an Empire to a separatist nation-state. A major liberal politician during the fall of the USSR and the mayor of Moscow Gavriil Popov wrote a complimentary book about Vlasov, but was not supported. In the 2000s various nationalist organizations which associated themselves with the White movement campaigned for rehabilitation of Vlasov; the support for the White narrative in the Church caused a scandal after the reunification of the Orthodox Church in Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Throughout the 2000s, the state-sponsored narratives of World War II villainized Vlasov again whenever his figure appeared in public discourse, although the latter did not happen often. Putin personally mentioned Vlasov only in 2024, after the presidential elections, during which the Ukrainian units of Russian citizens launched an incursion into Russia; he labelled as "Vlasovites" these units, reminded how the Vlasovites were executed, and ordered the FSB to track down every Russian citizen "fighting against Russia". He said: "We will punish them without a statute of limitations, wherever they are." Attempts of rehabilitation In 2001, a Russian organization "For Faith and Fatherland" applied to the Russian Federation's military prosecutor for a review of Vlasov's case, saying that "Vlasov was a patriot who spent much time re-evaluating his service in the Red Army and the essence of Stalin's regime before agreeing to collaborate with the Germans". The military prosecutor concluded that the law of rehabilitation of victims of political repressions did not apply to Vlasov and refused to consider the case again. However, Vlasov's Article 58 conviction for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda was vacated. ==Memorial==

A memorial dedicated to General Vlasov was erected at the Novo-Diveevo Russian Orthodox convent and cemetery in Nanuet, New York. Twice annually, on the anniversary of Vlasov's execution and on the Sunday following Orthodox Easter, a memorial service is held for Vlasov and the forces of the Russian Liberation Army. ==See also==

Books: • • • • Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt: Against Stalin and Hitler. Memoir of the Russian Liberation Movement 1941–5. Macmillan, 1970, • Russian version of the above: Вильфрид Штрик-Штрикфельдт: Против Сталина и Гитлера. Изд. Посев, 1975, 2003. • Sven Steenberg: Wlassow. Verräter oder Patriot? Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Köln 1968. • Sergej Frölich: General Wlassow. Russen und Deutsche zwischen Hitler und Stalin. • Joachim Hoffmann: ''Die Tragödie der 'Russischen Befreiungsarmee' 1944/45. Wlassow gegen Stalin''. Herbig Verlag, 2003 . • Jurgen Thorwald: ''The Illusion: Soviet Soldiers in Hitler's Armies''. English translation, 1974. • Martin Berger: "Impossible alternatives". The Ukrainian Quarterly, Summer-Fall 1995, pp. 258–262. [review of Catherine Andrevyev: Vlasov and the Russian liberation movement] Documentaries: • General for Two Devils 1995 • Europe Central by William T Vollmann • Angels of Death 1998, director: Leo de Boer. Fiction: • Europe Central by William T VollmannEurope Central ==External links==