Traitors or Patriots?

Multi-Ethnic Empires

One reason why both world wars proved to be such complex affairs was because the major combatant powers were not just nation states but empires, that's to say, either they formally possessed multi-ethnic territories far beyond their own national borders or they could claim widespread foreign interests and allegiances. In this sense, WW1 and WW2 were conflicts fuelled as much by inter-ethnic and ideological civil strife as by great power rivalries. For the ordinary soldiers and citizens caught up in these multi-layered struggles, this often made for challenging choices in a world that drew a sharp distinction between loyal patriotism and treacherous sedition.

Austro-Hungary in WW1

Take the Austro-Hungarian Empire in WW1. It was huge in size, straddling vast areas of central, eastern and southern Europe, and made up of multiple ethnicities - as well as Austrians and Hungarians, there were Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), Romanians, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes and Italians (to name just the biggest groups). Under the so-called Dual Monarchy, Austria and Hungary had their own parliaments and governments, a compromise designed to appease Hungarian nationalism - but it did not go far enough for some Hungarians and left other ethnic groups feeling marginalised. So that assassination of 1914 in Sarajevo which started it all, of the Austrian archduke by a disgruntled Serb nationalist, was no accident: real and imagined resentments were widespread across the empire long before the war broke out. Add to this the abundant miseries of a protracted and attritional war from 1914, and it's not surprising to learn that, as the empire's polyglot armies began to suffer successive defeats and massive casualties (by the war's end, 1.2 million combat dead), rates of desertion soared and nationalist unrest grew louder, especially among those ethnic groups (notably the Czechs and southern Slavs) that wanted independence from Habsburg rule.

The Czechoslovak Legion

In the summer of 1918, open revolts and mutinies took place and spread to a number of garrison towns in Bohemia, Styria and Serbia. By the autumn, these pressures caused the Austro-Hungarian army to disintegrate - and the whole empire formally to collapse shortly after. So were those tens of thousands of deserters really the traitors that Vienna labelled them? For many Habsburg commanders had resorted to pre-war prejudices to account for their defeats by openly blaming their Czech, Slovene or Serb units and darkly alleging collaboration with the enemy. In the spring of 1915, in fact, after being routed at the Russian front, two whole regiments consisting almost entirely of Czech soldiers were disbanded, accused of cowardice and treason. The men were later exonerated by a military court, but the damage to morale in the army more widely (1 million Czechs served) could not be undone. The Entente powers soon got the message and began organising Czech, Slovak and Polish volunteer units within their respective armies. The largest of these (over 80,000 men by the end of the war) was the Czechoslovak Legion, recruited in Russia from Austro-Hungarian POWs who wanted an independent Czech state. The Legion went on to play an important role in the subsequent Russian Civil War (on the the White Russian side), but by the time WW1 was over, their dream was fulfilled: Czechs and southern Slavs were living in their own sovereign nation states, namely Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

The Soviet Union and WW2

What the Versailles peace settlement achieved, in accordance with its guiding principle of self-determination - a whole raft of new nation states in the middle of Europe - contained the seeds of the next world war. For these new nations were themselves possessed of significant minorities which over time would grow to resent their second-class status, giving rise to potent grievances that others could exploit for their own ends (look no further than the German minority in Czechoslovakia, which ended badly for the Czechs at Munich in 1938 and thereafter). Bolshevik Russia had come out of WW1 with a significant loss of territory, but by 1941 Stalin had forcibly annexed eastern Poland, the Baltic states, part of Finland, as well as western Ukraine (previously in Poland), adding populations with their own languages and culture that had no wish to join the Soviet system imposed on them. Ukraine, independent in the past and briefly an independent republic from 1917, had become a founder member of the USSR in 1922. For most of the 1920s, the Soviet republics enjoyed considerable toleration of their indigenous culture, but Stalin's violent imposition of collectivisation in the 1930s and harsh repression of nationalist tendencies led to widespread famine in Ukraine (well over 3.5 million Ukrainians died in 1932-33) and significant popular hostility to Soviet power. In these circumstances, it' s hardly surprising that many Soviet citizens in different parts of the USSR saw the German invaders of 1941 as liberators. Significant numbers of nationalist Ukrainians, for example, helped the Germans as anti-Soviet partisans (some still fighting on into the 1950s) or, more infamously, as police and auxiliaries, enabled the massacre of up to a million Ukrainian Jews. The question that arises here is whether such Ukrainians were being 'patriots' by assisting the Germans against what they saw as a despotic Soviet state? Or were they rather 'collaborators' with a totalitarian regime whose record of violence and mass murder was (and would be) at least as bad as Stalin's.

The Vlasovites

This question is a pertinent one - and tragic - in the case of General Andrei Vlasov and his followers. Vlasov had enjoyed an impeccable career in the Red Army during the 1920s and '30s, rising rapidly through the ranks - and surviving Stalin's military purges of 1936-38 (half of all officers ranked as generals were executed) because he was in China serving as a military liaison with Chiang Kai Shek. After the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, Vlasov played an important part in the defence of Moscow in December that year, earning Stalin's personal approval and promotion to lieutenant-general. However, in the summer of 1942, while leading an attempt to relieve the siege of Leningrad, Vlasov's army became isolated and was encircled by the Germans. Vlasov himself managed to evade capture for over two weeks, but in July gave himself up. He later claimed that, while on the run, he realised that his Red Army career was over: he would be blamed for his defeat and possibly executed (as had happened to other losing Soviet commanders). Earlier, a letter from his wife had informed him that their apartment in Moscow had been searched by the NKVD. These factors among others, according to Vlasov, played in to his growing resentment of Stalin's regime. The upshot was his defection to the Germans after his capture - or, more precisely, his proposal to his captors that he exploit anti-Soviet sentiment among the Russian population and POWs and raise a people's army to fight against Stalin. Given the Nazi view that Slavs were an inferior race and that the Soviet population (70 million lived in German-occupied territory at this point) should be both enslaved and starved, you might argue that Vlasov's plans were naive. However, they found some support in German leadership circles (notably from Himmler), and by the autumn of 1944 Vlasov headed a Russian liberation committee (KONR) and a growing Russian Liberation Army (ROA, which eventually numbered 60,000 men). Unfortunately, all of this came too late, for by this date the Red Army had recaptured much of German-occupied territory and was sweeping into eastern and central Europe. ROA units did see action against a Soviet bridgehead on the Oder in early 1945 and later fought in Prague - switching sides to join the Czech resistance in their successful uprising against the Germans (a belated attempt to curry some favour with the victorious Allies). After that, Vlasov's principle concern was to surrender his men to the Americans before they could be caught by the Red Army: this was achieved a few days after the German surrender on May 8, 1945.

The Bitter End

It won't surprise you that the end was not a happy one for Vlasov and his followers. What they did not know was that at the Yalta conference only 3 months earlier, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that all sides would repatriate their POWS (Stalin particularly wanted the return of collaborators). Thus, despite American assurances to Vlasov and his men that this would not happen, they were forcibly handed over to the Red Army. There was no doubt what lay in store for Vlasov and his fellow commanders of the ROA. Charged with treason behind closed doors, they were all hanged ('gruesomely', according to one eye-witness). Was Vlasov a traitor or a patriot? There's no real consensus. Clearly he collaborated with the Germans. On the other hand, he never expressed support for Nazi ideology, indeed he openly declared that he had no loyalty to Nazi Germany. He insisted that his co-operation with the Germans (importantly for him, his agreement with them was as allies not mercenaries - alongside not under them) was because they had a common enemy, the Stalinist regime. His loyalty was to his homeland not its government. What do you think?

General Andrei Vlasov, while commander of the ROA and head of KONR, 1944-45 (cdn.britannica.com). In post-war Soviet Russia, his name was erased from the record and the subject of the ROA was taboo. Since the dissolution of the USSR, however, his legacy has been bitterly debated, his reputation split between 'patriot' and 'traitor'. In 2001 an attempt was made to rehabilitate his memory by claiming he was merely an anti-Stalinist, but the Russian Supreme Court quashed the move.

If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.

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