Hero of the Battle of Moscow who defected to lead the Nazi-backed Russian Liberation Army
June 1942: with his 2nd Shock Army encircled, Vlasov was offered escape by plane. He refused, hid in German-occupied territory with his men, and was betrayed by a local farmer ten days later.
Andrey Vlasov was a Red Army lieutenant general hailed as a "defender of Moscow" for leading the 20th Army in the capital's defense, who after his capture in the 1942 Lyuban operation defected to Nazi Germany. As leader of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) and the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (KONR), he advanced an anti-Stalinist program for a democratic Russia, codified in the 1944 Prague Manifesto with its pledges of national self-determination and basic freedoms. The Nazis used him chiefly as a propaganda weapon, but in the war's final days the ROA's 1st Division joined the Prague uprising against the Germans. Captured by Soviet forces after the war, he was hanged for treason following a secret trial; his legacy remains fiercely contested in Russian historiography and memory politics.
Career Timeline
- 1919Joined Red Army; fought White armies and Makhno's forces on the Southern Front
- 1930Joined the CPSU(B); instructor at the Frunze Military Academy
- 1938–39Posted to China as military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek
- 1940–41Commander, 99th Rifle Division (named best in the Red Army); then 4th Mechanized Corps
- 1941Commander, 37th Army (Kiev); then 20th Army, retook Solnechnogorsk in the Battle of Moscow
- 1942Commander, 2nd Shock Army; encircled and captured in the Lyuban operation; defected to Germany
- 1944Chairman of KONR; issued the Prague Manifesto
- 1945Commander-in-Chief of the ROA; captured by Soviet forces after the war