Abstract
One of the complaints was that [my dissertation] did not have citations from a three-volume document collection about Vlasov, published in 2015. I explained that I had read a significant part of these documents in the archives [before the volumes were published] … I asked my critics how the material in the three-volume collection would alter the conclusions of my dissertation. The response was silence.
Thus Kirill Aleksandrov recounted one of several instances where the Russian original of The Vlasov Case was used in a campaign against this leading historian. The English translation comes in two volumes documenting the wartime career of Andrei Andreevich Vlasov. When the Germans attacked in 1941, this Soviet commander proved his mettle in the desperate fighting. Later, his army was encircled and he was captured by the Germans on 12 June 1942. He became the most high-profile collaborator with the Germans. Recaptured in 1945, he was tried for treason, found guilty, and hanged on 1 August 1946.
How can we best understand Vlasov's betrayal of the Soviet Union? The old Soviet view was that he was a cowardly traitor, a morally defective person who gave in to primitive instincts. As the leader of a Soviet commando sent to kill him wrote in disgust, the general was ‘absolutely licentious in his personal life’. Tactless, ‘rude’, and ‘foul-mouthed’, he was ‘getting drunk with women’. According to the similarly scathing German assessment, he was a coward who ‘chose a German prison camp out of fear of Stalin and fear for his own life and did not make use of the airplanes … Stalin sent for him so that he could avoid falling prisoner’.
According to Aleksandrov, however, Vlasov was also a Russian patriot who decided to take the opportunity to fight Stalinism. Reading his situation in 1942 as a replay of the civil war, when the Germans had supported anti-Bolshevik governments, he thought of his service on the side of the enemy not as a betrayal of his country – Russia rather than the Soviet Union – but as a patriotic alliance with an anti-Stalinist force. Given that this alliance would have presupposed that the Nazis were no Nazis, this was a futile project from the get-go. But given that Vlasov usually interacted with German handlers who themselves tried to promote such a project (he never met Hitler), his misapprehensions can be explained contextually.
A final interpretation would see Vlasov as a career soldier driven by what labour historians would call ‘craft consciousness’: a pride in his ability to lead soldiers in battle. As the possibilities for this self-affirmation on the Soviet side ceased to exist, he tried to see if he could make a career on the other side of the frontline. ‘I came to you, Germans, to fight’, Vlasov complained in 1944. It is my craft, one that I have been working on for more than 25 years already. I still consider myself to be a good and experienced general and military leader. … I was in command of three fronts. Here in Germany, I am not needed. … Why do they not give me anything to do? At least give me something small – like a division, for example – and I could show them what I am capable of.
With German victories no more, he contemplated a similar bargain with England.
Notwithstanding the unsubtle framing of the problematic in the Introduction, this collection contains a wealth of evidence supporting Aleksandrov's view – as well as the two others. The Vlasov Case thus supports Julie Fedor's observation that the most contentious historical debates can rarely be settled with recourse to ‘the archival documentary equivalent of the smoking gun’ (Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society, 2021). Moreover, the three interpretations are not mutually exclusive. The desire to survive is not an infrequent sentiment and a taste for drink and sex is not unheard of either. Neither preclude political ambition, and patriotism can go well together with pride in one's ability as a soldier.
The volumes are, thus, valuable to historians; I have used the Russian edition in my book on Soviet defectors. Whether the English translation adds much is another question. The Preface gives some context about the Russian debate, but ends abruptly on the Aleksandrov case and is careful to not take sides. The Introduction can be divided into two parts: a polemical overview of the historiography and a short summary of the facts, much more neutral in tone. One is reminded of Soviet era historical writing, where one best skipped over the initial framing but could learn a lot from the careful empirical work that followed.