It's Too Early To Forgive Vlasov

Vlasov at a German POW camp in 1942.

By Valeria Korchagina and Andrei Zolotov Jr. Staff Writer

 

MOSCOW - Mention the name Vlasov to an ordinary Russian and one word will pop into mind: traitor.

Ask whether history should smile down on Lieutenant General Andrei Vlasov, the Soviet commander who defected to the Germans in World War II, and the ground would be laid for hours of heated debate. Several generations of young Soviet students were taught to hate Vlasov as a traitor who turned his back on the fatherland at a time when defenders were most needed.

These days, the line is growing blurred as evidence mounts that Vlasov may have changed sides in a bid to give his countrymen a better life than the one they had under Stalin.

But the story is apparently not far enough in the past to forgive and forget the man whose life and deeds are still largely seen through a cloud of political agendas and historical cover-ups.

The country's top military court refused Thursday to rehabilitate Vlasov, who was convicted of state treason and hanged in 1946 after being turned over by the Allies a year earlier.

The appeal of the original conviction was launched by the small monarchist group For Faith and Fatherland.

"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," one of the group's leaders, suspended Orthodox priest Nikon Belavenets, was quoted as saying in the Gazeta newspaper.

But judges at the Military Collegium were less supportive of Vlasov's methods of combating oppression at home.

"The truth is that although some argue that he was fighting against the Soviet regime and, thus, should not be seen as a traitor, by doing so he also fought against the state and the people. And this is treason," said Nikolai Petukhov, chairperson of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court and deputy chairperson of the Supreme Court.

Vlasov was born in 1900 in the Vladimir Region. The son of a wealthy peasant, he was drafted into the Red Army in 1919 and became a career officer. He joined the Communist Party in 1930.

From 1941 until his defection to German Army in July 1942, Vlasov was a key commander in defending Kiev and Moscow. It is unclear whether he was captured, as Western history books say, or surrendered, as Soviet books say.

In any case, he agreed to cooperate with Nazi Germany.

Vlasov was one of millions of Russians who ended up in Germany voluntarily or as POWs during the war. They found themselves caught in a tragic situation - they were suddenly free of Stalin's totalitarianism but were looked upon as Untermenschen by the Nazis.

Vlasov maintained that he underwent a profound change of heart that left him a dedicated anti-Communist during the days before he went with the Germans. Those days were spent on the Volkhov front after he and his troops were surrounded by Nazis.

Once in Berlin and surrounded by SS officers, Vlasov presented himself as a Russian patriot and refused to wear a German uniform. He wanted to lead an armed Russian force into the Soviet Union, apparently to start a revolt against the Stalin regime and create an independent Russia.

While the Nazi leadership eagerly used Vlasov as a key tool in a propaganda war, they didn't risk forming an armed Russian force until the end of the war. In the summer of 1943, Vlasov was taken on a tour through occupied northwestern Russia and was welcomed so enthusiastically that the Nazis cut the trip short, sent him back to Berlin and put him under de facto house arrest.

In November 1944, the Germans finally allowed Vlasov to inaugurate his Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, which proclaimed among its goals "the overthrow of Stalin's tyranny," civil rights, private property and "honorable peace with Germany."

However, sufficient proof exists to indicate that military formations under Vlasov's command were involved in training spies and saboteurs for territories controlled by the Red Army, Petukhov of the Military Collegium said in a telephone interview.

Finding himself at the crossroads of history, Vlasov thought he could become a third force in the battle of totalitarian giants.

Vlasov's army is viewed by Nobel Prize-winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn and some historians as an episode of Russia's Civil War removed in time by a quarter of a century.

"These people who have felt with their own skin 24 years of Communist happiness knew already in 1941 what no one else in the world yet knew: that on the whole planet and in all history there has never been a regime more evil, bloody and at the same time wily and shifty than Bolshevism," Solzhenitsyn wrote in "The Gulag Archipelago."

The memoirs of Vlasov followers, known as Vlasovites, suggest that the general was convinced that if he had a full army, Soviet generals would join him and the Communist regime would fall.

"I will end the war by telephone with [Marshal Georgy] Zhukov," Vlasov was quoted as saying on several occasions. Zhukov was one of the top Soviet commanders.

But even in the last weeks of the war, when the Soviet Army was already at the German border, only two incomplete divisions led by Vlasov were armed. One of them helped liberate Prague when a popular uprising took place in the city in May 1945. But the Vlasovites left to give way to the Soviet Army.

"Looking into the events surrounding the liberation of Prague in May 1945, when Vlasov's forces turned against the Germans, we found that the switch was not prompted by orders but came as the decision of ordinary soldiers," Petukhov said.

The judges, however, did decide Thursday to strike one point from the original verdict - the charge under which Vlasov was found guilty of anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda. This charge was used frequently during Stalinist repressions. Under current laws, the charge is automatically removed from all convictions made during the 80 years of Soviet rule.

The hearing on Thursday also addressed the cases of 11 of Vlasov's subordinates in his Russia Liberation Army. They were all denied rehabilitation.

 

Hitler's Tartar Units

This shield was issued in 1942 and worn by Volga Tartar volunteers. This arm shield shows a white crossed knife and arrow on a blue and green horizontal stripe background. The black border on top has the white inscription "IDEL-URAL." The word "IDEL" in Tartar means Volga River.

The Volga-Tatar Legion (German: Wolgatatarische Legion) or Legion Idel-Ural (Janalif: Idel-Ural Legionь) was a volunteer Wehrmacht unit composed of Muslim Volga Tatars, but also included other Idel-Ural peoples such as Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Mari people, Udmurt people, Mordva.

In late 1942, the Nazis started forming what they called "national legions". Among others, the Idel-Ural legion was formed in Jedlina, Poland, consisting of prisoners of war belonging to the nations of the Volga basin. Since the majority of the legion were Volga Tatars, the Germans usually called it the Volga-Tatar legion. The Nazis tried preparing the legionnaires for action against the Soviet Army in a chauvinistic and anti-Soviet fashion. Musa Cälil joined the Wehrmacht propaganda unit for the legion under the false name of Gumeroff. Cälil's group set out to wreck the Nazi plans, to convince the men to use the weapons they would be supplied with against the Nazis themselves. The members of the resistance group infiltrated the editorial board of the Idel-Ural newspaper the German command produced, and printed and circulated anti-fascist leaflets among the legionnaires into esoteric action groups consisting of five men each. The first battalion of the Volga-Tatar legion that was sent to the Eastern front mutinied, shot all the German officers there, and defected to the Soviet partisans in Belarus.

Tatar volunteers

    SS-Waffengruppe Idel-Ural (Turkic volunteers from Volga/Ural area)

    Waffen-Gebirgs-Brigade der SS (Tatar Nr. 1) (Tatar Volunteers)

    30.Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS (russische Nr. 2)(Armenians, Tatars Volunteers units)

    Wolgatatarische Legion (Volga Tatars but also of other volunteers from the region)

    Tataren-Gebirgsjäger-Regiment der SS (Crimean Tatar volunteers)

    Waffen-Gruppe Krim (Tatar Crimean volunteers)

    Schutzmannschaft Battalion (Crimean Tatar volunteers)

Russian emigration in Germany – Post 1917

Many Russian emigrants left Germany in 1933, or soon after; among them were Simon Dubnov, Grigorii Landau, Semen Frank, Leonid Pasternak, Roman Gul’ and Vladimir Nabokov. Many others put their faith in the anti-Bolshevism of the new regime and did not reject it until much later, as was the case with the philosophers Ivan Il’in and Boris Vysheslavtsev. A good number offered their services as Russian National Socialists to various organizations of the new order – not always to their satisfaction, as the Third Reich viewed the emigrants as moaners and schemers, an egoistical bunch who needed watching and bringing into line. But a good many of them collaborated with the Nazi authorities up to the bitter end, while dozens of those who had once sought refuge in Berlin were later hunted down and killed all over Europe – this was the fate of Mikhail Gorlin and Raisa Bloch in Paris, and of Simon Dubnov in Riga, to name but three.

For the majority of the emigrants the onset of Nazi rule merely meant that life went on, with community activities, functions, balls, anniversaries, job-hunting and the like. Even Russian Jews in Berlin were long unaware of the seriousness of their situation. In 1936 the ‘Russian Intermediary Office’ was reconstituted under the direction of General Biskupskii, above all, in order to sort out the rival emigrant organizations. It also meant that it had to accept a number of language directives, such as those issued after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 and the invasion of Poland, under which they had to agree that the pact was entirely in the interest of the Russian people.

The decisive turning point did not, of course, come until the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. Now many emigrants saw themselves presented with the opportunity to return home and to turn the slogan of the ‘anti-Bolshevik struggle’ into deeds – alongside the Wehrmacht, the SS and the Special Units.

A good number of emigrants collaborated with the Germans in order to work towards this goal. Russian emigrants in countries occupied by the Wehrmacht reported to the Russian Intermediary Offices in Paris, Warsaw and Brussels, took the oath of loyalty to the Third Reich (as Generals Golovin, Kusonskii and von Lampe did) and then reported to their units, while suspicious or uncooperative members of the emigrant community were harassed and sometimes even imprisoned. The attitude of the German authorities to the emigrants was, though, inconsistent and ambivalent: on the one hand the emigrants were needed, on the other hand they were regarded as unreliable – after all, it was Hitler’s watchword that ‘none but Germans should be allowed to bear arms.’ The deployment of Russian emigrants was therefore subject to various limitations: emigrants of the first generation and former members of the Red Army found it difficult to agree on things, some German organizations had great suspicion of the ‘Russians’ as such, while the competing plans of the Germans lacked uniformity. The idea of forming a Russian Liberation Army under General Andrei Vlasov, who had been captured in July 1942, was postponed time and again because of German anxiety about arming foreigners, and it was not deployed until spring 1945. Emigrants from the inter-war years joined the Vlasov army and the Wehrmacht as translators, specialists and commanders of Russian voluntary units; about 1,500 Russian emigrants from France joined the Wehrmacht, while ca. 1,200 from Germany were assigned to it as translators. As a precautionary measure lists were put together of emigrant experts who would be able to take part in the administration and reconstruction of the occupied territories. Hundreds of Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian and other emigrants worked as translators in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Organizations Todt and Speer, in German counter-intelligence and the Reich Propaganda Ministry. Senior officers from the White Russian emigration (Generals Arkhangel’skii, von Lampe, Dragomirov, Golovin, Kreiter, Cossack atamans Abramov, Balabin and Shkuro) joined the Vlasov movement, as did representatives of new organizations that had only been formed in exile, but this too was not without its problems, as the suspicious Gestapo followed the emigrants’ every step.

Some of the leading representatives of emigration who collaborated with the Wehrmacht were captured after the victory of the Red Army in the East, deported and tried in Moscow or Kharkov, and subsequently executed. Those who could flee to the Western zones of Germany after the War disappeared in the second wave of refugees.

'Death Match': Why a Nazi-Era Soccer Movie Is Making Ukraine Angry

A scene from the movie Match. Central Partnership / Inter-Film / AP

By James Marson / Kiev

The Nazi officers stroll down Kiev's main boulevard through cheering crowds and accept the welcoming gift of bread and salt offered by women in Ukrainian national dress. A man in the crowd nods approvingly. "There will be order," he says in Ukrainian.

This is one of many scenes in a World War II soccer film that have riled Ukrainians as their country prepares to co-host the European Championship, the world's second-biggest soccer tournament after the World Cup. The film, Match, which was made in Russia and released earlier this month in Ukraine, tells the story of a soccer game organized in Kiev in 1942 against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation of what was then the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. A team of locals beats a team comprised of Germans — and some of the players are later killed for refusing to throw the match.


The film, which received a majority of its funding from the Russian government, is typical war-movie fare, with a tough-talking hero, a simpering heroine and underhanded villains. But what sets it apart from others in the genre is the portrayal of most of the Ukrainian speakers in the film as Nazi collaborators and sympathizers. The mayor of Kiev is depicted as a weak Nazi stooge who tries to steal the Russian-speaking hero's girl. Ukrainian guards help Nazi killers at Babyn Yar, the ravine in Kiev where tens of thousands of Jews and others were massacred.

Ukrainians have reacted with outrage at such portrayals. Many call the film an attempt to humiliate the country, which was ruled for centuries by Moscow but is now trying to wriggle free of the Kremlin's grip and form closer ties with Europe.


Ever since Ukraine declared independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has fought hard to keep the country in its sphere of influence. Russians trace the origins of their nation back to Kiev, which gives Ukraine a special meaning in the national psyche, and one of Moscow's favored tools has been to appeal to the countries' common history and culture.

"Ukrainians now think of themselves as a nation that exists separately from the Russian nation, but the Russian nation thinks on the scale of the Soviet Union, of an empire," says Stanislav Kulchytskiy, a Ukrainian historian. "Russia is a great state and wants to act like a lord. The European Union would provide Ukraine with some defense from Russia's constant striving to swallow it."

Ukrainian film officials initially said they would ban the movie over fears it might stir up ethnic tensions ahead of the Euro 2012 championship, which kicks off June 8. They eventually relented, but when the film premiered in Kiev on April 26, activists from the nationalist Svoboda party broke up the event. "Out, Muscovite occupiers!" "Shame on Ukrainophobic films!" a group of around two dozen young men chanted as they tore down posters advertizing the film.


Historians say that some Ukrainians did collaborate with the Nazis during World War II. Some worked as auxiliary police; others formed armed groups to fight for an independent Ukrainian state and briefly hoped the Nazis would help them. But critics say the film is exaggerated to suggest that all Ukrainians who wanted independence were Nazi lackeys — and that Ukraine would be better off sticking with Russia. "It's shot from the official Russian point of view that says all people who fought for Ukrainian independence are bad," says Ukrainian journalist Oksana Faryna, who has written about the movie for the Kyiv Post. "It's political propaganda to bring Ukraine back to Russia, to show we are one nation with one history. It makes Ukrainians look like 'Little Russians' who should let their big brother show them what to do."


Even the events surrounding the match are in dispute. The so-called "Death Match" depicted in the film took place on Aug. 9, 1942, between a Soviet team called Start and Germany's Flakelf. According to the Soviet version of the story, Start players were warned that they should lose or face dire consequences. After they won the match 5-3, some of the players were sent to a concentration camp and shot. The story became legend in the Soviet Union, where it was used as a patriotic tale of loyalty and resistance.

But some accounts dispute this version of events. One theory suggests that the men were shot after glass was discovered in the bread of German officers made at the bakery where the players were working. "It's a film that offends Ukrainian honor and attaches Soviet myths to us Ukrainians," Ihor Miroshnichenko, a sports journalist and nationalist activist, said at the protest on April 26. "There was no 'death match.' It's a fabrication of Muscovite propaganda, of Soviet agitprop."

The film's producers don't shy away from the fact they are perpetuating the Soviet version of events, calling the movie "a historical patriotic drama." "It's a film about all of us and our shared Motherland," they say in a joint statement on the film's website. But the director, Andrei Maliukov, denies any political motivation behind the film or the depictions of Ukrainian characters. "I didn't think about making a pro-Ukrainian or anti-Ukrainian film," he told reporters in April. "It's a film about love, about soccer, about how tough it was for some people to live in this historical moment."


Ukrainians, meanwhile, lament the fact that no film has been made locally about the World War II match. "We don't have our own film industry or any filmmakers with financing who can present real, complicated stories with different shades to allow the viewer to decide," Faryna says. If Ukraine could do that, it would be one way to show Russia that it is truly independent.