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Reinventing Collaboration: The Vlasov Movement in the Postwar Russian Emigration

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Book cover Traitors, Collaborators and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ((PMMS))

Abstract

In this chapter Benjamin Tromly examines the memory of World War Two collaboration in the Russian emigration. A.A. Vlasov, a Soviet general who formed a Russian Liberation Army under Hitler, became the touchstone for anti-communist mobilization among Russian émigrés during the early Cold War. After the general was captured by the Soviets and executed in Moscow in 1946, a post-war Vlasov movement emerged among exiled Russians that sought to repackage the general’s perceived betrayal as national heroism. Yet exiles frequently clashed over what service to the nation entailed. The so-called “Vlasovites” disagreed over which members of their camp had been too loyal to the Germans, while left-wing émigrés rejected the very premise that wartime collaboration could be patriotic. The chapter concludes by discussing how post-war debates over Vlasov and collaboration in the Russian emigration have reemerged in the memory conflicts over the Great Patriotic War in Putin’s Russia.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Den’ skorbi, mestnaia organizatsiia SBONR, Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection (henceforth Nicolaevsky Collection), box 264, folder 1. On Plattling, see Mark Elliot, Pawns of Yalta: Soviet Refugees and America ’ s Role in their Repatriation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 93–96 and William Sloane Coffin, Once to Every Man: A Memoir (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 73–76.

  2. 2.

    Catherine Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Émigré Theories (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 2.

  4. 4.

    K.M. Aleksandrov, Protiv Stalina: Vlasovtsy i vostochnye dobrovol’tsy vo vtoroi mirovoi voine: sbornik stat’ei i materialov (St. Petersburg: Iunventa, 2003), 89–91.

  5. 5.

    Mark Mazower, Hitler ' s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Press, 2008), 466.

  6. 6.

    According to one source, the American army repatriated the “bulk” of Vlasov’s First Division that had surrendered to the Americans (some 15,000 soldiers) as well as the majority of the Second Division that had “disbanded and scattered throughout Bavaria and Austria” (approximately 18,000 men). Elliot, Pawns of Yalta, 85.

  7. 7.

    Den’ skorbi.

  8. 8.

    The “Vlasov movement” invites considerable terminological confusion. The ROA never existed as a military force, although many detachments of Russian volunteers serving under German commanders wore ROA badges. When Vlasov was tasked with forming three divisions in 1944, they were called the KONR Military Forces. Therefore, I use “Vlasov Movement” as a catch-all term for Russian combatants who were in some way associated with Vlasov, whether in KONR or the units only notionally connected to his name.

  9. 9.

    The literature on the Vlasov episode is large. Apart from Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement, see George Fischer, Soviet Opposition to Stalin: A Case Study in World War II (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952) and Sven Steenberg, Vlasov (New York: Knopf, 1970). Recent Russian work includes several books by K.M. Aleksandrov, most notably Armiia general-leitenant A.A. Vlasova, 1944–1945: materialy k istorii Vooruzhennykh Sil KONR (Saint Petersburg, 2004); I.A. Dugas and F. Ia. Cheron, Sovetskie voennoplennye v nemetskikh kontslageriakh: 1941–1945 (Moscow: Avuar Konsalting, 2003); S.I. Drobiazko, Pod znamenami vraga: antisovetskie formirovaniia v sostave Germanskikh Vooruzhennykh Sil, 1941–1945 (Moscow: EKSMO, 2004) and S.I. Chuev, Vlasovtsy--pasynki Tretʹego Reikha (Moscow: Iauza, 2006).

  10. 10.

    On this wider theme, see the pieces in Jan-Werner Müller (ed.), Memory and Power in Post-War Europe Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and particularly Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country: Myth and Memory in Postwar Europe,” in Ibid., 157–183.

  11. 11.

    See Per Anders Rudling, “Historical Representation of the Wartime Accounts of the Activities of the OUN–UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists—Ukrainian Insurgent Army),” East European Jewish Affairs no. 2 (2006): 163–189; Olga Baranova, “Nationalism, Anti-Bolshevism or the Will to Survive? Collaboration in Belarus under the Nazi Occupation of 1941–1944,” European Review of History: Revue Europeenne d ' histoire, no. 2 (2008): 113–128 and Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 114–115.

  12. 12.

    Elliot, Pawns of Yalta, 114–121.

  13. 13.

    See Charles T. O’Connell, “The Munich Institute for the Study of the USSR: Origin and Social Composition,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 808 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, 1992), 16–18.

  14. 14.

    MOIC, 9 January 1948, in National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Record Group (RG) 319, Entry 134A: Security Classified Intelligence and Investigative Dossiers - Impersonal Files, XE182853, 270/84/20/02, box 23 (henceforth AZONDER), vol. 1, fol. 1.

  15. 15.

    “Summary report of investigation,” HQ CIC Region IV, 4 February 1948, 3 in AZONDER, vol. 1, fol. 1.

  16. 16.

    A CIC document lists the following ATsONDR members employed at “ECIS” at Oberammergau, presumably the well-known 6819th Army Information and Education Special School (AIESS): P. Illinskii-Ponomarev, N. Tsurikov, V.I. Alekseev, G. Dikov-Diachkov, B. Iakovlev-Troitskii, K. Krylov and V. Krylova. See Agent report: Democratic Russian League, Albert F. Werner, 7970th CIC group, 1 October 1948, pp. 1–2, in AZONDER, vol. 2, fol. 2.

  17. 17.

    K.M. Aleksandrov, Ofitserskii korpus armii general-leitenanta A.A. Vlasova: 1944–1945 (St. Petersburg: Russko-Baltiiskii Informatsonnyi BLITS, 2001).

  18. 18.

    A masterful account of the White armies in exile is Paul Robinson, The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002).

  19. 19.

    Iurii Tsurganov, Neudavshiisia revansh: belaia emigratsiia vo vtoroi mirovoi voine (Moscow: Intrada, 2001), 167, 172–198.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 170.

  21. 21.

    See the recent discussion of Soviet soldiers, captivity and collaboration in Mark Edele, Stalin’s Defectors: How Red Army Soldiers became Hitler’s Collaborators, 1941–1945 (NY & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  22. 22.

    See “K chemu stremitsia russkaia emigratsiia,” Sotsialisticheskii Vestnik (henceforth SV) no. 2 (605) (28 February 1948): 45.

  23. 23.

    MOIC, Su: KROMIADI Group, 20 April 1948, p. 3 in AZONDER, vol. 1, fol. 1.

  24. 24.

    National Committee for a Free Europe, “Political Trends among Russian Exiles,” in George Fischer (ed.), Russian Emigre Politics (NY: Free Russia Fund, 1951), 3 and Boris L. Dvinov, Politics of the Russian Emigration (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corp., 1955), 196.

  25. 25.

    “K programme Osvoboditel’nogo Dvizheniia,” Bor ’ ba 2/6 (February 1948): 2.

  26. 26.

    “Litso dvizheniia,” Bor ’ ba 2/3 (1947): 1–2.

  27. 27.

    AZONDR. Re: Baranowsky Group, 21 December 1948, in AZONDER, vol. 2, folder 1. A recent evaluation of the controversial Gehlen Organization is Kevin C. Ruffner, “A Controversial Liaison Relationship: American Intelligence and the Gehlen Organization, 1945–49” (CIA Studies in Intelligence, 1997), available at the Central Intelligence Agency Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room at http://www.foia.cia.gov/ (accessed 4 June 2014).

  28. 28.

    Agent Report: AZONDR, Albert F. Werner, S/A, CIC, Region IV, 16 August 1948, AZONDER, vol. 2, fol. 2 and Rezoliutsiia rasshirennogo soveshchaniia Rukovodiashchego Soveta SBONR s predstaviteliami mestnykh organizatsii SBONR, 15 August 1948, in Nicolaevsky Collection, box 264, fol. 1.

  29. 29.

    Agent report, Edward W. Shick, 7970th CIC Group, Region V, 6 August 1948, AZONDER, vol. 2, fol. 2.

  30. 30.

    In 1947 the CIC carried out “Operation Hagberry,” a counter-intelligence operation that led to the arrest for espionage of the Vlasovites A.F. Chikalov and Viacheslav Tukhol’nikov. Tucholnikov aka Sololow, Lt. Col. Theodore K. Diott to CO, Sub Det “A,” 902d CIC Det, 1 June 1954, in NARA, RG 319, Entry 134B: IRR Security Classified Intelligence and Investigative Dossiers—Personal Files, 270/84/01/01, G8167289, box 810, Wjatscheslaw Tucholnikov. See also Aleksandrov, Protiv Stalina, 109.

  31. 31.

    “Otkrytoe pis’mo Rukovoditeliam Antibol’shevistskogo Tsentra Osvoboditel’nogo Dvizheniia Narodov Rossiii (A.Ts.O.N.D.R) i Glavnomu Upravleniu Soiuza Andreevskogo Flaga (G.U.S.-S.A.F.), August 1948, Nicolaevsky Collection, box 264, fol. 1.

  32. 32.

    Su: Dissident Russian Groups, Lt. Col. Ellington D. Golden to Commanding Officer, 970th CIC Detachment, 3 May 1948, in AZONDER, vol. 1, fol. 1.

  33. 33.

    The best published account of the League is written by a participant in the events. Dvinov, Politics of the Russian Emigration, 285–302.

  34. 34.

    André Liebich, “Mensheviks Wage the Cold War,” Journal of Contemporary History 30, No. 2 (1995): 247–264; Ibidem, From the Other Shore: Russian Social Democracy after 1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and A. V. Antoshin, “Mensheviki v emigratsii posle Vtoroi mirovoi voiny,” Otechesvtennaia istoriia no. 1 (2007): 102–115.

  35. 35.

    MOIC, Su: ODNR, 9 March 1948, 13 in AZONDER vol. 1, fol. 1.

  36. 36.

    Philip E. Mosely, “Boris Nicolaevsky: The American Years,” in Boris I. Nicolaevsky et al., Revolution and Politics in Russia: Essays in Memory of B.I. Nicolaevsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), 36.

  37. 37.

    “Liga bor’by za narodnuiu svobodu,” SV no. 3 (618) (1949): 44.

  38. 38.

    HQ, Sub-Region Frankfurt, CIC Region III, Su: Rurr, Fred, 22 September 1947, in NARA, RG 319, IRR, D211036, Nikolaewskij, Boris. See also Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 84–85.

  39. 39.

    “V Ligu bor’by za narodnuiu svobodu,” Nicolaevsky Collection, box 264, fol. 15.

  40. 40.

    Dvinov, Politics of the Russian Emigration, 289–290.

  41. 41.

    Boris Nicolaevsky, “O ‘staroi’ i ‘novoi’ emigratsii,” SV no. 2 (605) (1948): 33–35. For Russian socialists, defeatism had the added benefit of suggesting associations with past “defeatist” revolutionary movements during the Russo-Japanese and First World Wars. Fischer, Soviet Opposition to Stalin, 212–213 (n. 8).

  42. 42.

    Su: KONR (Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Peoples, Memorandum for the Officer in Charge by CIC special agent Rea M. Pile, 9 January 1948, 19 in AZONDER, vol. 1, fol. 2.

  43. 43.

    Widener Library, Harvard University, Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online, http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/hpsss/index.html (henceforth HPSSS), schedule A, vol. 23, case 468, 15–16.

  44. 44.

    Pervyi s ’ ezd SBONR: materialy sekretariata s ’ ezda (Munich: Izdatel’stvo Borʹba, 1950), 17, 6. Here the Vlasovites’ appeal to a sense of moral victory in defeat recalled the historical memory of the White emigration. Anatol Shmelev, “Gallipoli to Golgotha: Remembering the Internment of the Russian White Army at Gallipoli, 1920–3,” in Jenny Macleod (ed.), Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 195–213.

  45. 45.

    Tsurganov, Neudavshiisia revansh, 180.

  46. 46.

    Konstantin Kromiadi, Za zemliu, za voliu (San Francisco: “Globus,” 1980), 101–107.

  47. 47.

    Su: KONR (Committee for the Liberation of the Russian Peoples), 19 in AZONDER, vol. 1, fol. 2.

  48. 48.

    For one account of this episode, see Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement, 47–55.

  49. 49.

    Su: KONR.

  50. 50.

    HPSSS, schedule A, vol. 35, case 386/ (NY) 1495, 90.

  51. 51.

    See O.V. Budnitskii, "The Great Patriotic War and Soviet Society: Defeatism, 1941–42." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15, no. 4 (2014): 767–797 and Edele, Stalin’s Defectors, 95–120.

  52. 52.

    B. Nikolaevskii, “O ‘staroi’ i ‘novoi’ emigratsii,” SV no. 2 (605) (March 1948): 35.

  53. 53.

    For one example, see HPSSS, schedule B, vol. 10, case 143, 8–9. On anti-partisan operations, see Ben Shepherd, War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

  54. 54.

    G. Aronson, “Chto nado znat’ o Vlasovskom dvizhenii?” SV no. 3 (606) (1948): 61–63.

  55. 55.

    Boris L. Dvinov, Vlasovskoe dvizhenie v svete dokumentov (s prilozheniem sekretnykh dokumentov) (New York, 1950), 69.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 23–25.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 47.

  58. 58.

    “K voprosu o ‘Vlasovskom dvizhenii,’” SV no. 10 (637) (1950): 191.

  59. 59.

    Ibid., 192.

  60. 60.

    “Iz partii,” n. d., International Institute of Social History Archive, Boris L’vovich Dvinov papers, fol. 7.

  61. 61.

    R. Abramovich, “O chem my vse-taki sporim? (Otvet vlasovtsu),” SV no. 4-5/607-608 (1948): 89 and Dvinov, Vlasovskoe dvizhenie, 70.

  62. 62.

    “Neprilichnaia isterika,” SV no. 10 (625) (1949): 175.

  63. 63.

    Liebich, From the Other Shore, 309–317.

  64. 64.

    See the Introduction (Chap. 1) to this volume on boundary work and betrayal.

  65. 65.

    V.S., “O chem zabyl gospodin Aronson,” Bor ’ ba 7-8 (1948): 27.

  66. 66.

    Abramovich, “O chem my vse-taki sporim?”: 89.

  67. 67.

    “Liga bor’by za narodnuiu svobodu,” SV no. 3 (618) (1949): 44.

  68. 68.

    S. Zarudnyi, “Fevral’ 1917 goda,” Bor ’ ba 16-1 (1948): 2.

  69. 69.

    R. Abramovich, “Grekhi fevralia ili otsy i deti,” SV no. 1-2/616-7 (1949): 10–12.

  70. 70.

    Cf. Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  71. 71.

    Andreyev, Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement.

  72. 72.

    Here it is useful to compare the Vlasov issue with that of Wehrmacht deserters in Germany and Austria, as described in the pieces by Pirker and Kramer and by Dräger in this volume. Unlike in these cases, where a gradual reconsideration of the wartime past took place, the Vlasov narrative had long been in existence in the emigration and now swiftly entered public discussion in Russia.

  73. 73.

    K.M. Aleksandrov, Ofitserskii Korpus Armii. See also the literature referenced in Note 9.

  74. 74.

    Ibid., See also the transcript of a radio interview with Aleksandrov. “Nashe vse: Andrei Vlasov, sovetskii voennonachal’nik,” Ekho Moskvy, 20 December 2009, http://echo.msk.ru/programs/all/641371-echo/ (accessed 2 November 2016).

  75. 75.

    Elizabeth A. Wood, “Performing Memory: Vladimir Putin and the Celebration of World War II in Russia,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 2, no. 38 (2011): 172–200.

  76. 76.

    See Mark Edele, “Fighting Russia's History Wars: Vladimir Putin and the Codification of World War II,” History and Memory 29, no. 2 (2017): 90–124 and Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1994).

  77. 77.

    Elena Kuznetsova, "Zashchita s generalom Vlasovym," Fontanka. Peterburgskaia internet-gazeta, 2 March 2016, http://www.fontanka.ru/2016/03/01/173/ (accessed 1 November 2016).

  78. 78.

    A.Iu. Plotnikov and V.V. Vasilik, “’Vlasovskoe dvizhenie’ ili eshche raz ob istorii predatel’stva,” Russkaia narodnaia liniia: informatsionnaia analiticheskaia sluzhba, 18 February 2016, http://ruskline.ru/analitika/2016/2/18/vlasovskoe_dvizhenie_ili-ewe_raz_ob_istorii_predatelstva (accessed 30 October 2016). Apparently, the Ministry of Education and Science denied Aleksandrov the degree of Doctor of Science. “Avtory dissertatsii o vlasovtsakh otkazali v stepeni doktora nauk,” Fontanka, 3 October 2017, http://m.fontanka.ru/2017/10/03/052 (accessed 3 October 2017).

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    Benjamin Tromly

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  1. Department of Ukrainian Studies, V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Kharkiv, Ukraine

    Gelinada Grinchenko

  2. Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Eleonora Narvselius

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Tromly, B. (2018). Reinventing Collaboration: The Vlasov Movement in the Postwar Russian Emigration. In: Grinchenko, G., Narvselius, E. (eds) Traitors, Collaborators and Deserters in Contemporary European Politics of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66496-5_4

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