Treason, Betrayal and Pathos
SALISBURY, HARRISON E.
Treason, Betrayal and Pathos The Illusion: Soviet Soldiers in Hitler's Armies By Jurgen Thorwald Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 332 pp. $12.50. Reviewed by Harrison E. Salisbury Author, "The Gates...
...Whether Vlasov was opposed to Communism per se is not so clear...
...From July 1942 to May 1945, a ghastly charade was played out between individuals and factions within the Nazi structure and Wehr-macht trying to capitalize on the enormous potential of the anti-Stalinist Russians...
...Leningrad had been under siege since September 1942...
...It remained for Solzhenitsyn to point the finger of truth: "The term 'Vlasovite' in our country has the same force as the word sewage...
...In fact, he maneuvered brilliantly under the circumstances Stalin placed him in...
...Those three years, which ended with Vlasov virtually being handed over to the Stalinists by the Americans, are the main focus of Thor-wald's book...
...He was ready to put himself at the head of a Russian movement, but he was no more ready than De Gaulle, for example, to become anyone's puppet...
...Not until June did Stalin approve a rescue effort, and by then it was too late...
...The triumph endured only 24 hours, for the Czechs told their liberators to get out of town when the Red Army was about to enter...
...Vlasov managed to get out 9,322 men as the German ring closed...
...He was one of those who did not escape...
...Not long before that, my own account of the 900-day siege of Leningrad, involving the loss of more than 2 million lives, appeared...
...Reviewed by Harrison E. Salisbury Author, "The Gates of Hell," "The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad" Three decades after the end of World War II hints of some of its most tragic events, long concealed behind curtains of secrecy and guilt, are first starting to emerge...
...He would not permit their formation into units to fight alongside the Reichswehr, let alone discuss a Russian regime after the hoped-for destruction of Stalin...
...More fortunate (or skillful) than most, Vlasov fought his way out of repeated encirclements, returning to Moscow in time to be named to the command of the 20th Army...
...In the winter of 1942, Lieutenant General Vlasov was named deputy commander of the Volkhov front under General Kirill A. Meret-skov...
...between 8,000-10,000 were lost...
...Hitler had officially proclaimed the Russians untermenschen, a subhuman species...
...Jurgen Thorwald's The Illusion: Soviet Soldiers in Hitler's Armies is an expansion of his book on the subject issued in Germany in 1952...
...It was compounded when the Americans and British, fulfilling the Big Three agreements, rounded up thousands of Vlasov troops and shipped them back to the Soviet Union and almost certain death...
...Disaster, as Vlasov had predicted from the beginning, was inevitable...
...For the most part these concern the Russians...
...Vlasov was decorated and foreign correspondents were taken to meet him...
...Wandering about in the marshes, he was captured on July 12, 1942...
...As it turned out, the outstanding achievement of the Vlasov men was to assist the Prague underground in rising against their Nazi masters and freeing the city...
...This is apparent from the memoirs of the two Soviet generals most closely acquainted with the situation, Meretskov and M. S. Khozin...
...In addition to the author's ignorance of Soviet or anti-Soviet Russian materials, his work is marred by an utterly inappropriate gee-whiz style...
...One cannot explain this treason biologically...
...Despite every effort, he was unable to make much progress...
...He then scored one of the great successes of the Battle of Moscow, routing the Germans on a key highway and recapturing Volokolamsk...
...who was more to blame, those youths or the gray Fatherland...
...But that is no way to write history...
...We feel we are dirtying our mouths merely by pronouncing it, and therefore no one dares utter a sentence with 'Vlasovite' as its subject...
...He was an authentic hero of the new Soviet generation...
...It was not always so...
...The Americans sympathized but had orders to halt short of Prague...
...Now, a quarter of a century later, when most of them have perished in camps and those who have survived are living out their lives in the Far North, I would like to issue a reminder, through these pages, that this was a phenomenon totally unheard of in all world history...
...They had no authority to deal with cranky questions like the surrender of Russians who were fighting Russians...
...The tale is one of ceaseless intrigue, betrayal, cowardice, and hypocrisy on the part of the Germans, and stubbornness, stupidity, political blindness, and (often) bravery on the part of the Russians...
...It has to have a social cause...
...The Second Shock Army had been assigned the job of breaking through, but had become bogged down in a terrain of marshes, streams, heavy forests, and few roads...
...These details are important, because Soviet propaganda later attempted to blame Vlasov for the Volkhov disaster...
...From a very early moment in captivity (perhaps even before, while observing a number of incredible military disasters), he concluded that the Stalin regime must go...
...It is doubtful that anyone outside the Soviet Union and a small circle in Germany would have even the faintest idea of what the movement was if Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had not devoted some attention to it in The Gulag Archipelago...
...No one among the Americans or the British or the Germans seemed to understand what they were witnessing...
...Nazi ideology, though, precluded collaboration...
...Obviously, on this point Vlasov's views and that of other Red Army men coincided with the Germans' objectives...
...On April 16, 1942, Vlasov took personal command...
...The story of the Vlasov "treason," however, is more complex than his role in the Volkhov disaster...
...Relying primarily on German sources, Thorwald broadens our knowledge, but the tragedy cries for authoritative treatment utilizing as well the growing Soviet historiography and the memoirs of the Vlasov survivors...
...Vlasov and his commanders tried to surrender to Americans, who had never heard of the movement...
...Where the Russians did fight their countrymen they fought courageously, as Solzhenitsyn testifies from his own experience...
...Perhaps there is something to ponder here...
...But this happened seldom because of the nightmare of Nazi racism and court politics...
...Soon, one must hope, the whole story of these sad men, betrayed by every political figure who touched them—Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt—may be told in all its pathos...
...Thus a year or so ago the terrible story of Operation Keelhaul was published, describing how the Americans and British delivered into Stalin's hands over a million Soviet nationals (prisoners of war and forced laborers) who were promptly sent to Siberian camps...
...the Second Army was itself surrounded most of the time...
...They found a studious, modest, determined man wearing a pince-nez who spoke knowledgeably of Clausewitz and Napoleon...
...The final scenes were of great pity...
...The vital task of the Volkhov forces, in association with units in Leningrad, was to restore communications...
...It was a stunning triumph...
...Now the harsh outlines of the experiences suffered by the Vlasov movement are beginning to be laid bare...
...All accounts agree that by the time he fell into German hands he had become strongly antagonistic to Stalin...
...Hundreds of thousands of Red Army men were organized at various times into anti-Soviet forces, yet relatively few ever saw military service and only two combat divisions were, in the end, commanded briefly by Vlasov...
...He had served in the late 1930s as a military adviser to the Chinese Nationalists and led an armored corps in Lvov at the outbreak of the War...
...that several hundred thousand young men, aged 20 to 30, took up arms against their Fatherland as allies of its most evil enemy...
...But like many Soviet officers and soldiers, his alienation from Moscow was powerful...
...In autumn of 1941, when the fate of Moscow hung in the balance, Andrei Andre-yevich Vlasov was considered to be among the brightest of new Soviet officers...
...Vlasov was the highest-ranking, best-known, most politically conscious Red Army officer in German hands...
...His act required courage, for to Russians the name Vlasov is synonymous with treason...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 6
