On the twenty-second of June 1941, German forces crossed the Soviet border and launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in European history. As armored columns pushed eastward, city after city fell, and millions of Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner. Nazi propaganda framed the invasion as a crusade against Bolshevism, and among those who welcomed it was an aging former general of the vanished Russian Empire. In his seventies, he declared his support for Adolf Hitler and urged the Cossacks to fight alongside Nazi Germany.
Through speeches and radio broadcasts, he portrayed the Soviet government as the rule of “Bolshevik Jews” and presented the advancing German forces as liberators. Thousands answered his call, and many were eventually sent to the Balkans, where Cossack formations became associated with reprisals, looting, and violence against civilians. Four years later, with the Third Reich collapsing, he surrendered to British forces in Austria, believing that decades of exile would spare him from Soviet justice. Instead, he was handed over to the Soviet Union, where his collaboration with Nazi Germany ultimately cost him his life.
His name was Pyotr Krasnov. Pyotr Nikolayevich Krasnov was born on September 22, 1869, in Saint Petersburg, then part of the Russian Empire. He grew up in a military family of Don Cossacks, the largest Cossack formation in the empire, where service to the tsar was considered both a duty and a tradition. His father, Nikolai Krasnov, had been a lieutenant general in the Imperial Russian Army, while his grandfather, Ivan Krasnov, was a general and writer.
Pyotr Krasnov graduated from the Pavlovsk Military School in 1888 and joined the elite Ataman Regiment of the Imperial Guard. Alongside his military career, Krasnov also established himself as a war correspondent and author. He covered the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905, traveling through Manchuria, China, and Japan. His articles, which reflected both admiration for Japanese bravery and criticism of their military leadership, attracted the attention of Tsar Nicholas II and were later published as a book with the support of the War Ministry.
During the First World War, Krasnov commanded Cossack cavalry with distinction. The collapse of the Russian state in 1917 moved him from the battlefield into the political arena. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd during the October Revolution, the deposed head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, turned to Krasnov to retake the capital from the Bolsheviks. A small column of Cossacks advanced toward Petrograd.
The attempt, known as the Kerensky-Krasnov uprising, collapsed within days, and Krasnov was captured by the communists. Leon Trotsky, a key figure in the Bolshevik revolution, released Krasnov only after he gave his word not to take up arms against the new government, a promise he broke almost immediately. Krasnov made his way to the Don region in southern Russia, the traditional homeland of the Don Cossacks, where an assembly in the city of Novocherkassk elected him Ataman in May 1918, the political and military leader of the Don Cossack army. The conditions of his authority were shaped by the wider catastrophe unfolding around him.
With the Imperial German Army occupying southern parts of the former Russian Empire, particularly Ukraine, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Krasnov looked to Germany for weapons and recognition. He wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm II to declare that the Cossacks were friends of the Reich and to request its protection. This choice provided him with arms, but it cost him standing within the broader anti-Bolshevik movement in Russia. His alliance with Germany complicated his relationship with the Allied-aligned White commander Anton Denikin and earned him lasting distrust within the White movement, which was officially committed to the Allied cause in its fight against Bolshevism.
With German money and rifles, Krasnov’s Don Army reached roughly forty thousand men by mid-1918. He cleared the Don region of Bolsheviks and advanced toward Tsaritsyn, now Volgograd on the Volga River, hoping to open the road to Moscow, but the attack was repulsed. Krasnov’s rule in the Don was also marked by the violence of the Russian Civil War. Under his leadership, the White Terror swept across the region, targeting suspected Bolshevik supporters.
Historians estimate that between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand people were killed. When Germany was defeated in November 1918, Krasnov’s foreign support collapsed and his position weakened. The Allies, who had assigned the Don region to British influence, armed only Denikin’s Volunteer Army. In January 1919, forced by circumstances, Krasnov recognized Denikin’s authority over the White movement.
A month later, having lost the confidence of the Cossacks in a dispute over the ataman office, Krasnov resigned and left Russia for good. He settled first in Germany and then, from 1923, in France, joining the large wave of White Russian emigres scattered across war-torn Europe. In exile, the writer overshadowed the soldier. Over two decades, Krasnov produced around forty books, ranging from historical novels and war stories to memoirs, and became one of the most widely read emigre authors, with his works translated into many languages.
Some considered his trilogy “From the Double-Headed Eagle to the Red Flag” deeply anti-Semitic, relying on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the most notorious anti-Semitic publication of the modern era, as an authentic document, and accusing world Jewry of inventing communism. Anti-Semitism was not confined to Krasnov’s fiction. During the Bern trial in the Swiss capital in the mid-1930s, which centered on the forged Protocols, Krasnov secretly affirmed his belief in the authenticity of the anti-Semitic forgery. His political views hardened over the years into an unrelenting hatred of Bolshevism and contempt for the liberal West.
As the 1930s progressed, he was drawn to the German far right, seeing in the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party the instrument that might finally destroy the Soviet state. In 1937, following the assassination of several White Russian emigre leaders in Paris by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, Krasnov moved to Berlin, where he believed he would be safer, and declared his support for the Third Reich. The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Less than two years later, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Krasnov, who was already over seventy, committed himself to the cause without reservation.
Upon hearing of the launch of Operation Barbarossa, he issued a statement supporting the crusade against “Bolshevik Judaism” and declared: “I would like to say to all Cossacks that this is not a war against Russia, but against the communists, Jews, and their accomplices who trade in Russian blood. May God help the German sword and Hitler. May they complete their mission, just as the Russians and Emperor Alexander I did for Prussia in 1813. ”
Krasnov contacted Joseph Goebbels, the German propaganda minister, and requested permission to speak over Berlin Radio in Russian to deliver pro-Nazi speeches.
His request was approved. From late June 1941 onward, Krasnov became a regular speaker on Berlin Radio in Russian, delivering anti-Semitic addresses that portrayed the Soviet government as the rule of Bolshevik Jews and the advancing German forces inside the Soviet Union as liberators. In January 1943, Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi minister for the occupied eastern territories, appointed Krasnov to lead the Central Cossack Office. Rosenberg believed that only a Cossack of high standing could motivate recruitment where German officials had failed.
Despite his advanced age and reliance on a cane, Krasnov remained widely respected as a former Ataman and a famous novelist, and his name carried prestige and authority. As a symbolic figure and recruitment official, he urged Cossacks to view the conflict not as a war against Russia, but as a struggle against communists and Jews, repeating the ideology of the Nazi regime. In September 1943, soldiers of the newly formed First Cossack Cavalry Division learned that their division would not be sent to fight on the Eastern Front as expected, but would instead go to the Balkans to fight communist partisans. At the request of the division commander, Major General Helmuth von Pannwitz, Krasnov traveled to address the division.
He tried to soothe the wounded feelings of the Cossacks, who did not want to go to the Balkans, by assuring them that fighting partisans was part of the same conflict against the international communist conspiracy as the Eastern Front. He promised them that if they performed well in the Balkans, they would eventually be sent to the Eastern Front. In the Balkans, the division quickly gained a reputation for undisciplined and cruel behavior, not only toward partisans but also toward civilian populations, prompting even the pro-Nazi Croatian authorities to complain to the Germans, and finally to Adolf Hitler himself. Alongside the rape of women, killing of people, looting, and burning of towns suspected of harboring partisans and their supporters, the division used telegraph poles along railway lines for mass hangings as a warning to partisans and others.
At the end of the Second World War in May 1945, Krasnov’s Cossack forces surrendered to British troops in the Drava Valley near the city of Linz in Austria. British officers gave assurances that the emigres among them, men who had left Russia decades earlier and never held Soviet citizenship, would not be sent to the Soviet Union. These assurances were not honored. Under the repatriation agreement approved by the Allies at the Yalta Conference, the Cossacks were handed over to the Soviet Union.
Officers were separated from their men through deception, summoned to what they believed was a conference, and then arrested. The camps were then forcibly cleared amid scenes of resistance, despair, and suicide, in what became known as the betrayal of the Cossacks. Krasnov was handed over to the Soviets at the end of May 1945. He was charged with collaborating with Nazi Germany during the Second World War and with his role in the White Terror during the Russian Civil War.
He was tried in Moscow before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, alongside other Cossack and White Army leaders, as well as SS commander Helmuth von Pannwitz, who had led Cossack units in German service. When Pyotr Krasnov was executed on January 17, 1947, he was seventy-seven years old. His legacy remains contested. Russian courts have refused to rehabilitate him, rejecting attempts to portray him as a victim of Bolshevism rather than a collaborator with Nazi Germany.
Yet he is still honored in parts of the Cossack and emigre world as an anti-Soviet martyr.