On June 22, 1941, German forces crossed the Soviet border without a declaration of war, attacking along a front stretching from the Baltic to the Carpathians. Entire armies were destroyed within weeks, and millions of Soviet soldiers were taken prisoner.
For most of those prisoners, captivity meant a slow death. Men were held in open fields without shelter or food, dying in the hundreds of thousands from starvation, disease, and exposure.
It was under these conditions that collaboration began to emerge. Some prisoners concluded that cooperation with the enemy was the only alternative to dying in a German camp. Others hated Stalin's regime enough to take up arms against it, and many were driven by a mixture of both motives.
In the summer of 1942, German officers searching for a senior Soviet figure capable of leading a Russian anti-Stalinist movement believed they had found the ideal candidate. His name was Andrey Vlasov, and the army he would build from the ruins of German captivity was the Russian Liberation Army.
Vlasov had once been one of Stalin's most celebrated officers and was widely regarded as a hero of the defense of Moscow. In July 1942, however, the Germans captured him on the Volkhov front, where his Second Shock Army had been encircled, left without supplies or support, and ultimately destroyed.
Vlasov had been offered evacuation by aircraft but refused, choosing instead to remain with his men until a local farmer eventually handed him over to the Germans. In captivity, he met German army officers who had long sought a senior Soviet military figure willing to front a Russian anti-Stalinist movement, and within weeks Vlasov had agreed to become that figure.
Whether conviction or calculation drove the decision has never been fully resolved. But it is possible that, as an intelligent man, he knew Soviet officers captured by the enemy were regarded by Stalin as criminals deserving the death penalty. Vlasov himself realized that even if he escaped German captivity, he could not return to the Soviet Union while Stalin was still alive.
The founding document of the Vlasov movement was the Smolensk declaration, created in December 1942. It promised the Russian people and other nations of the Soviet Union the abolition of collective farms, freedom of religion and speech, the right to private property, and government without Bolshevik terror.
Yet for the next two years, the Russian Liberation Army, also known as the ROA or the Vlasov Army, remained little more than a name on paper. Adolf Hitler was unwilling to allow the formation of an autonomous Russian unit.
Hitler regarded Slavs as subhuman and refused to arm Russian volunteers under Russian command, viewing the entire project as a potential threat to German control of the occupied East. Vlasov was in Berlin, where he cooperated with Nazi propaganda, but for a long time his activities were reduced to drafting manifestos for formations that would not be authorized until 1944.
By then, Germany's military position had become desperate enough to create units of the Russian Liberation Army. Even then, only two divisions were sanctioned, and equipment and supplies arrived slowly and incompletely.
The formal ceremony establishing the movement's political body, the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, took place on November 14, 1944, in Prague. There Vlasov read aloud a manifesto committing the movement to 14 principles, including freedom of religion, abolition of collective farms, and equality before the law.
German pressure to include anti-Semitic language was successfully resisted by Vlasov's committee. They were obliged, however, to include a statement criticizing the Western Allies, labeling them plutocracies that were allies of Stalin in his conquest of Europe.
The men who gathered around Vlasov came from across the wreckage of the Soviet officer corps, captured at different moments of the Second World War. They were drawn into the movement by different combinations of conviction and desperation, caused in part by the appalling conditions faced by Soviet prisoners of war in German camps, where millions died of malnutrition, disease, and exposure, or were beaten to death by German guards.
Sergei Bunyachenko became the most important military figure in the movement below Vlasov himself. He had been captured by Romanian forces in December 1942, and by late 1944 commanded the ROA's First Division, also known as the 600th Russian Infantry Division, the only formation the Vlasov Army ever brought to full operational readiness.
The division began forming on December 1, 1944, in the town of Munsingen, in southwestern Germany. Its initial nucleus was drawn partly from the remnants of the Kaminski Brigade, a Soviet collaborationist formation notorious for atrocities in Belorussia and Warsaw, whose former members Bunyachenko accepted reluctantly and in limited numbers.
Allegedly, when the rabble of the Kaminski Brigade arrived at the camp where the division was being formed, gangs of armed and unarmed men in all kinds of uniforms, accompanied by women in gaudy dresses, spilled out of the railway carriages. At the sight of them, Bunyachenko exclaimed in anger, "So, this is what you're giving me? Bandits, robbers, thieves. You'll let me have what you can no longer use."
Despite problems with this unit and chronic shortages of equipment, the division reached combat strength by the end of February 1945. The ROA's first engagement came that same month, when a small unit of around 50 men, led by Igor Konstantinovich Sakharov, attacked Soviet positions on the eastern bank of the Oder River, north of Frankfurt on the Oder.
The assault achieved limited initial success, capturing the villages of Neulewin and Kustenbruck. In a German report, Sakharov's unit was said to demonstrate high fighting qualities and outstanding courage, and Sakharov was awarded the Iron Cross for his role, although he had not personally been present at the fighting due to having been ill.
In mid-April 1945, Bunyachenko's division went to the Oder Front. The division attacked a heavily fortified Red Army bridgehead near Frankfurt on the Oder that German forces had previously failed to eliminate.
Going in without adequate artillery or air support, after several days the outnumbered division was forced to retreat. Bunyachenko withdrew on his own authority and informed the German command he would take no further orders.
A few days later, the division began marching toward the former Czechoslovak frontier together with other Russian volunteers, more than 20,000 men in total. On the way, the Germans tried in vain to induce him to obey their orders.
At the end of April, the division reached the Czech lands, where Vlasov himself joined it. The march brought the division to the outskirts of Prague in early May 1945, as Czechoslovak resistance fighters launched an uprising against the German occupation on May 5.
The insurgents seized the radio station and threw up barricades across the city. German forces responded with tanks, artillery, and SS reinforcements.
The Czech National Council sent representatives to Bunyachenko requesting his intervention against German units. Vlasov was initially reluctant to agree to that move, but ultimately did not resist General Bunyachenko's decision to fight against the Germans.
Soon the division joined the fighting against the Nazis. They defended or captured key strongholds and strategic points in Prague and took control of a large part of the city and its suburbs.
Their intervention helped liberate much of the left bank of the Vltava River. They even surrounded Ruzyně Airport, but German forces managed to break out of the encirclement, and the ROA units encountered only the German rearguard.
ROA units joined Czech fighters on the barricades in the city. The division's artillery and anti-tank weapons proved decisive in fighting against German units, but also took their price. Around 300 ROA soldiers were killed during the Prague uprising.
Czech civilians, except communists who saw them as traitors to their own country, greeted Vlasov's men as liberators. The relief was short-lived.
Bunyachenko learned that Prague would be occupied by the Soviet Red Army, not the Americans. On the morning of May 8, the division marched out westward in an attempt to avoid the advancing units of the Red Army.
One day later, large numbers of Soviet troops entered Prague. Alongside them came members of the NKVD secret police and the SMERSH military counterintelligence service.
Almost immediately, arrests of ROA members began, as Soviet authorities regarded them as traitors and enemies of the Soviet Union. Bunyachenko had managed to withdraw many lightly wounded soldiers from Prague, but seriously wounded ROA troops lying in Prague hospitals were left behind.
NKVD and SMERSH personnel dragged many of them from their beds, beat them to death, and threw their bodies into an unmarked pit at Prague's Olšany Cemetery. It is estimated that approximately 198 wounded ROA members were murdered in this manner.
One group of ROA soldiers, unable to flee Prague ahead of the Red Army, was shot by Russian soldiers in Prague-Jinonice. Their bodies remain buried in an unmarked spot in a field to this day.
Days later, the ROA men laid down their arms in the village of Schüsselburg, now Linares, in the Czech Republic, apparently within the American zone. They were informed on May 12 that Schüsselburg would fall within the Soviet zone, and that the local American commander would not permit the whole division to cross the new demarcation line.
Bunyachenko disbanded the formation and advised his men to attempt the crossing individually. He was right in this decision, as almost all officers who were seized by Soviets were shot on the spot, and soldiers were punished by 25 years of forced labor.
The men who succeeded in crossing the lines had hoped that surrender to the Americans would protect them from Soviet revenge, and for a short time it seemed possible. General George Patton, commanding the United States Third Army, largely refused orders to repatriate Soviet citizens under his control.
But the Yalta Agreements, signed by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in February 1945, required all Allied powers to repatriate Soviet citizens found on liberated territory, and most Allied commanders eventually complied.
Just four days after the end of the Second World War in Europe, on May 12, Vlasov was being transported in a United States Army convoy when Soviet troops stopped his vehicle and seized him. One by one, through the summer of 1945, the ROA military leadership was brought to Moscow and delivered to Lubyanka prison.
The investigation conducted by SMERSH produced thousands of pages of interrogation transcripts. The court before which the case was heard was the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union.
This body adjudicated criminal cases of exceptional importance involving the highest command of the army and navy, as well as individuals accused of treason and counter-revolutionary activities. In practice, appeals against its judgments were not allowed due to the secrecy surrounding the cases.
The president of the military court at the time of the trial in 1946 was Vasily Vasilyevich Ulrich, a military judge who had also presided over other well-known trials in the Soviet Union. The planned death sentence for all of the defendants was approved by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party on July 23, 1946.
The trial was held a few days later, from July 30 to August 1, 1946. On August 1, all 12 defendants, including former generals and senior commanders of the ROA units, among them Vlasov and Bunyachenko, were found guilty and condemned to death.
The sentences were carried out the same day in Butyrka prison in Moscow. All 12 were hanged.
The bodies were taken to the crematorium, and their ashes were poured into the moat of the Donskoy Monastery, mixed into a mass grave already holding the remains of thousands of other victims of Stalinist terror.