On June 22, 1941, German forces crossed the Soviet border and launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest invasion in European history. As armored columns advanced eastward, city after city fell and millions of Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner. Nazi propaganda portrayed the invasion as a crusade against Bolshevism, and among those who welcomed it was an elderly former general of the vanished Russian Empire.
In his seventies, he declared his support for Adolf Hitler and called on the Cossacks to fight alongside Nazi Germany. Through speeches and radio broadcasts, he depicted the Soviet government as the rule of "Bolshevik Jews" and presented the advancing German forces as liberators. Thousands answered his call, and many of them were eventually sent to the Balkans, where Cossack formations became associated with reprisals, looting, and violence against civilians.
Four years later, as the Third Reich collapsed, he surrendered to British forces in Austria, believing that decades of exile would save him from Soviet justice. Instead, he was handed over to the Soviet Union, where his cooperation 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 a duty and a tradition. His father, Nikolai Krasnov, was a lieutenant general in the Imperial Russian Army, while his grandfather, Ivan Krasnov, was a general and a 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 to 1905, traveling through Manchuria, China, and Japan. His articles, which reflected both his admiration for Japanese bravery and his criticism of their military leadership, caught the attention of Tsar Nicholas II and were later published as a book with support from the Ministry of War.
During World War I, Krasnov led Cossack cavalry with skill and distinction. The collapse of the Russian state in 1917 moved him from the battlefield to the political arena. When the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, now Saint Petersburg, during the October Revolution, the deposed head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, turned to Krasnov to retake the capital from the Bolsheviks, and a small Cossack column advanced toward Petrograd. The attempt, known as the Kerensky-Krasnov uprising, collapsed within days, and Krasnov was captured by the Communists.
Leon Trotsky, one of the key figures of the Bolshevik Revolution, released Krasnov only after he gave his word not to bear 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, the political and military leader of the Don Cossack Host, in May 1918.
The terms of his authority were shaped by a wider catastrophe. With the German Imperial Army occupying southern parts of the former Russian Empire, especially Ukraine, after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Krasnov looked to Germany for weapons and recognition, writing to Kaiser Wilhelm II to declare that the Cossacks were friends of the Reich and to request his protection. This choice provided him with weapons but cost him standing in the broader anti-Bolshevik movement in Russia. His alliance with Germany complicated his relationship with the Allied-leaning White commander Anton Denikin and earned him lasting distrust within the White movement, which was formally committed to the Allied cause in its fight against Bolshevism.
Thanks to German money and rifles, Krasnov's Don Army reached roughly 40,000 men by mid-1918. Krasnov cleared the Don region of Bolsheviks and advanced toward Tsaritsyn, now the city of Volgograd on the Volga River, hoping to open the road to Moscow, but the offensive was repelled. Krasnov's rule in the Don was also marked by the violence of the Russian Civil War. Under his leadership, White Terror swept the region, targeting suspected Bolshevik supporters. Historians estimate that between 25,000 and 40,000 people were killed.
When Germany was defeated in November 1918, foreign support for Krasnov faded and his position weakened. The Allies, who had assigned the Don region to British influence, armed only Denikin's Volunteer Army. In January 1919, the blockade forced Krasnov to recognize Denikin's authority over the White movement. A month later, after losing the Cossacks' confidence in a contest for the ataman post, Krasnov resigned and left Russia for good.
He first settled in Germany and, from 1923, in France, joining the large wave of White Russian emigrants spread across war-torn Europe. There, the writer overshadowed the soldier. Over two decades of exile, he produced about 40 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 Banner" a deeply antisemitic work, as it adopted "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the most famous and widely circulated antisemitic publication of the modern era, as an authentic document and accused world Jewry of inventing Communism. Antisemitism was not confined to Krasnov's fiction. During the Bern Trial held in the Swiss capital in the mid-1930s, which centered on the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Krasnov secretly affirmed his belief in the antisemitic forgery.
His political views hardened over the years into an implacable hatred of Bolshevism and contempt for the liberal West. As the 1930s wore on, he was drawn toward 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, after several leaders of the White Russian emigres in Paris were assassinated 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.
World War II 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, by then over seventy, committed himself to the cause without reservation. Upon hearing of the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Krasnov issued a statement supporting the crusade against "Bolshevik Jewry" and declared: "I would like to tell all Cossacks that this is not a war against Russia, but against the Communists and the Jews and their henchmen who trade in Russian blood. May God help the German sword and Hitler. May they complete their endeavor, 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 on Berlin Radio in Russian to deliver pro-Nazi speeches, and his request was approved. From late June 1941 onward, Krasnov became a regular speaker on Berlin Radio in Russian, delivering antisemitic speeches 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 head the Central Office of the Cossacks. Rosenberg believed that only a Cossack of high standing could stimulate recruitment where German officials had failed. Despite his advanced age and his reliance on a cane, Krasnov remained widely respected as a former ataman and a famous novelist, and he was chosen for the prestige and authority his name carried. As a symbolic figure and recruitment official, he urged the Cossacks to view the conflict not as a war against Russia but as a struggle against the Communists and the Jews, repeating the ideology of the Nazi regime.
In September 1943, soldiers of the newly formed 1st Cossack Cavalry Division learned that their division would not be sent, as expected, to fight on the Eastern Front, but would go to the Balkans to fight Communist partisans. At the request of the division's commander, Major General Helmut von Pannwitz, Krasnov traveled to address the division. Krasnov tried to calm the wounded feelings of the Cossacks, who did not want to go to the Balkans, by assuring them that fighting the partisans was part of the same struggle against the international Communist conspiracy on the Eastern Front. He promised them that if they performed well in the Balkans, they would eventually go to the Eastern Front.
In the Balkans, the division quickly gained a reputation for unruly and brutal conduct, not only toward the partisans but also toward the civilian population, prompting even the Nazi-aligned Croatian authorities to complain to the Germans, and finally to Adolf Hitler himself. Alongside the rape of women, the killing of people, and the looting and burning of towns suspected of sheltering 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 World War II in May 1945, Krasnov's Cossack forces surrendered to British forces in the Drau Valley near the city of Linz in Austria. British officers gave assurances that the emigrants among them, men who had left Russia decades earlier and had never held Soviet citizenship, would not be sent to the Soviet Union. Those assurances were not kept. 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 subsequently evacuated by force 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. Pyotr Krasnov was charged with cooperating with Nazi Germany during World War II 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 Helmut von Pannwitz, who had led Cossack units in German service.
When Pyotr Krasnov was executed on January 17, 1947, he was 77 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.