The Vlasov Case: History of a Betrayal

Volume 2: 1945–1946

Russian State Archive for Social and Political History

Edited by Russian State Archive for Social and Political History

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About the Book

A famous Soviet general who fought in the Battle of Moscow (1941/1942) and the siege of Leningrad (1941–1944), Andrey Vlasov (1901–1946) was captured by Nazi troops and then defected to the Third Reich. Supported by Nazi propaganda, he created a “Russian Liberation Committee” that later became the “Russian Liberation Army” (RLA). The RLA was a body of several hundred officers and several thousand troops who had defected from the USSR and served Nazi purposes on Soviet territory. Vlasov was arrested by Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia while trying to escape to the Western Front and was subsequently tried for treason and executed by Soviet authorities.

In 2015, the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) released three volumes of archives documenting the infamous “Vlasov Case,” the main instance of Soviet collaborationism with Nazi Germany. With this volume, which draws on the archives of Russia, Belarus, Germany, and the US, the English-speaking audience can now access the most important documents on this topic for the first time. The documents tell the story of Vlasov’s betrayal, from the moment he became a prisoner, to his service under the Nazis, and up through the trial in Moscow in 1946.

Volume 1 is comprised of archival documents on Vlasov’s activities from 1942 to 1945. Volume 2 explores the Soviet investigations of Vlasov during the 1945–1946 trial.

Author

The Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), which was formed on the basis of the USSR Communist Party Central Archive, holds the collection of CPSU documents, personal archives of Soviet leaders such as Lenin and Stalin, also Marx and Engels files, documents and museum pieces on social history of Europe from the 18th up to the 20th century.

Over the last 30 years the archive has fundamentally changed, from a closed CPSU institution with the explicit aim of protecting retrospective information, to a fully functional civil archive open to researchers. It has become an actor of the so-called “archive revolution”, under which hundreds of thousands of documents of the Soviet era have been declassified and published both in book and electronic forms.

RGASPI now sees its mission in the presentation and publication of retrospective information. Following one of RGASPI’s recent initiatives, the internet site “Documents of the Soviet Epoch” was created, where Stalin’s personal archive, the electronic “Comintern” database, the State Defense Committee (1941–1945) archive, the Politburo archival collection and others were displayed during the last few years.

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