An infamous 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” which later established 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 Federal Archival Agency of Russia and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI) released three volumes of archives documenting the infamous “Vlasov Case,” drawing on the archives of Russia, Belarus, Germany, and the US. With the release of a two-volume translation, the English-speaking audience can now access the most important documents on the main instance of Soviet collaborationism with Nazi Germany.
Speakers:
Andrey K. Sorokin is Scientific Supervisor and former Director of the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI). He is Vice-President of the Russian Political Science Association and a member of the Commission under the President of the Russian Federation for the Rehabilitation of Political Repressions Victims. Mr. Sorokin works with archival documents from the Soviet period, especially the period under Stalin, and was one of the main editors of General Vlasov: History of a Betrayal.
Tatiana V. Tsarevskaya-Dyakina is chief specialist at the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History’s (RGASPI) center for document publication. She has published more than twenty five archive books, including The History of Stalin’s Gulag, The Soviet Military Administration in Germany 1945-1949, and Ukrainian Nationalist Organizations during WWII. She was one of the main editors of General Vlasov: History of a Betrayal.
Dr. Sergey Kudryashov has been a scientific researcher at the German Historical Institute in Moscow since 2005. Before joining the Institute Dr. Kudryashov was Chief Editor of the Russian archival journal ISTOCHNIK. He defended his Ph.D. at the Institute for Russian History (1996, Russian Academy of Sciences) and has published on various aspects of the Second World War, including collections of documents and the monograph Occupied Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1939-1945 (Berg, 2012).
Michael David-Fox is Professor in the School of Foreign Service and Department of History at Georgetown University. He also serves as Founding and Executive Editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History and as Scholarly Advisor at the International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. He is author or editor of 13 books, including Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh, 2015) and Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921-1941 (Oxford, 2012). He is currently completing a book entitled “Crucibles of Power: Smolensk under Nazi and Soviet Rule” for Harvard University Press.
Benjamin Tromly is a scholar of Russia and the Soviet Union who teaches a range of courses in modern European history. His courses include first-year seminars on World War Two and the Russian Revolution, introductory courses on Europe and Russia and upper-division courses on the Cold War, espionage, totalitarianism, and nationalism. His first book, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia: Universities and Intellectual Life under Stalin and Khrushchev (Cambridge University Press, 2014), was based on an award-winning dissertation at Harvard University. It examines elite Soviet universities in Russia and Ukraine during the early Cold War, with a focus on student life and politics. His new book, Cold War Exiles: Plotting to Free Russia (Oxford University Press, 2019) tells the story of anti-communist Russian exiles who sought to undermine Soviet communism from abroad with the support of the US government.
Oleg Beyda completed his PhD in History at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, in 2019. Beyda’s thesis concerned White Russian émigrés who fought in the Wehrmacht on the German-Soviet front. His recent publications include two chapters on French and Soviet collaboration with the German side in D. Stahel (ed.), Joining Hitler’s Crusade: European Nations and the Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941, and the annotated memoirs of an émigré who served in the Spanish ‘Blue Division’, Un ruso blanco en la División Azul. Memorias de Vladimir I. Kovalevski (1941) (2019). Currently Dr Beyda is working on a book about the Vlasov’s army (ROA).