Soviet Turncoats

Explores the complex history of Soviet collaboration with the Axis powers during World War II, focusing on Andrei Vlasov.

In April 1945, in one of the final battles of the Second World War, on the Oder river east of Berlin, Russian troops, clad in German uniforms, fought against the advancing Red Army. Why would Russians fight against their compatriots, and how did the Soviet collaboration come about?

In this insightful and meticulously researched study Oleg Beyda and Igor Petrov answer these questions and explore, in vivid detail, the wider issue of the collaboration of Soviet citizens with the Axis powers. Their work throws a fascinating new light onto this long-suppressed aspect of the Great Patriotic War, a crucial topic that remains deeply controversial in contemporary Russia.

The most famous figure in this complicated history is Andrei Vlasov, the captured Red Army general who defected to the Germans and became the commander of the Russian Liberation Army. His wartime career, and the careers of the other Soviet prisoners of war and Russian émigrés who joined him, are the central characters in the story. The motivations of these men varied: while some had switched loyalties out of conviction, for many POWs the choice was between collaboration or slow death in a German prison camp.

As the book reveals, for the most of its history, the Russian Liberation Army remained a German propaganda project, a hodgepodge of scattered yet effective military units from former POWs under strict German command. Nevertheless, Vlasov and his officers sometimes sought to conduct their own policy independent of their German masters. Right at the end of the war, in Prague, in a desperate attempt to ‘do right’ by the Allies, Vlasov’s units fought against German troops, yet again changing sides.

The challenges these men faced, and the choices they had to make between loyalty, anti-Bolshevism and survival, make this book a fascinating reading.