"Russian" Collaborationism: What the Kremlin Hides

A scale the Kremlin erases

By the estimate of historian Lado Khvedelidze, no fewer than 1.5 million people served as police auxiliaries on the occupied territories, and the “Hiwis” (voluntary helpers of the Wehrmacht) numbered from 800,000 to a million. The Soviet Union and the Russians turned out, in his words, to be the ethnic group “most saturated with collaborators” — a higher percentage existed neither in France, nor in Belgium, nor in the Netherlands^[1].

The figures on collaboration are debated. The modern historian Mark Edele counts only voluntary defectors among Soviet prisoners of war at 117,000–318,000, and the total number of those who served the Germans (Hiwis, police, military formations) is estimated at about a million. But even by cautious calculations, the figure is in the hundreds of thousands — a scale incompatible with the myth of “the Russian victor-people without a single stain.”

The myth and reality of “Vlasov’s army”

The most famous symbol is General Andrey Vlasov. The widespread image of “Vlasov’s almost million-strong army, fighting since 1941,” is a myth: Vlasov, a lieutenant general of the Red Army, went over to the Germans only after being captured, and the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) as a real force took shape late, closer to the end of the war^[2]. The ROA fought under the white-blue-red tricolor — the very same flag that is today the state flag of Russia.

The Lokot “republic” and the RONA

The largest center of collaboration was the Lokot “republic” in Oryol region (more than 2 million people). Its core was made up of former Red Army soldiers, collective-farm chairmen, and even members of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks); Voskoboinikov founded a “Russian fascist party” there. Its armed forces — the RONA (Russian Liberation People’s Army) — numbered more than 25,000, and the Germans recognized Lokot as a “republic”^[3].

When German tanks entered Lokot, they were met with bread and salt — but not under red banners, but under the white-blue-red tricolor, the flag of today’s Russian Federation; the honor guard stood in Soviet uniform with RONA insignia^[4].

Kaminski: from “hero” to perpetrator

At the head stood Voskoboinikov and Bronislav Kaminski — former members of the All-Union Communist Party. Kaminski, who had earlier taken part in suppressing the Tambov uprising as a “hero” of the Red Army, took command of the RONA^[5]. Later his brigade was incorporated into the Waffen-SS; it became notorious for atrocities that shocked even the SS men — in particular the massacre in the Ochota district during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The Germans themselves eventually court-martialed Kaminski and shot him. These were not “liberators,” but perpetrators.

What this means

The history of “Russian” collaborationism is a direct mirror to the Kremlin myth of “Ukraine = Nazis”. Collaboration existed in every occupied country; the question is who speaks of it, and why. Russia, which has made “victory over Nazism” the core of its state ideology, has at the same time raised the flag of its own collaborators and concealed the scale of its own collaboration with Hitler. “Denazification” in the mouth of a state with such a past is nothing other than projection.