Soviet Air Force colonel turned ROA Air Force commander, builder of the Vlasov movement's air arm
In November 1941, wearing his Red Air Force colonel's uniform, he appeared at the German command post in occupied Yalta and declared his desire to fight the Bolsheviks.
A Soviet Air Force colonel who defected to the German side in Yalta in November 1941 and became a leading figure in the collaborationist movement. As commander of the KONR Air Force under General Andrei Vlasov, he built and led an aviation force of some 5,000 men and 40–45 aircraft, though it saw no combat before the war ended. His 1938 arrest by the NKVD, torture, and eventual release without confession proved a decisive turning point; he later published Conveyor of the GPU, an account of his imprisonment widely used in German propaganda. Handed over to the Soviet authorities by the Americans after the war, he was convicted of treason and hanged in 1946.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1918Red Army volunteer; graduated Yegoryevsk flight school (1919)
- 1925–1927Chief, Central Aerodrome near Moscow
- 1927–1931Assistant chief, then chief, Siberian Military District Air Force
- 1936Promoted to colonel
- 1937Chief, Turkmenistan Civil Air Fleet Directorate
- 1938–1939Arrested by NKVD, tortured; released without conviction
- 1939–1941Chief, Aeroflot sanatorium, Yalta
- 1941Defected to Germans in Yalta; burgomaster of Yalta (1942)
- 1943–1944Recruited Soviet POW pilots for Eastern aviation groups
- 1945.2Major general & commander, KONR Air Force (~5,000 men, 40–45 aircraft)
- 1945.4–8Surrendered to US forces; handed over to USSR
- 1946.8.1Convicted of treason, hanged at Butyrka Prison
Related historical events
Surrender and repatriation: the air arm's last road
Maltsev's air arm was the last part of the Vlasov movement to reach the front, and it ended the war without ever flying a sortie against the Red Army. The KONR air force was built from forces that were structurally unfinished: by spring 1945 it numbered up to five thousand men and included an aviation regiment with aircrew and equipment (40 to 45 aircraft), an anti-aircraft artillery regiment, a parachute-landing battalion, and a separate signals company. Its command posts were held both by émigré pilots and by two captured Heroes of the Soviet Union, Semyon Bychkov and Bronislav Antilevsky, and its staff was quartered at Mariánské Lázně. In the closing weeks the ROA's only real combat belonged to Bunyachenko's 1st Division, which fought at the Oder in April 1945 and then turned its weapons on the Germans during the Prague uprising in May. Maltsev's airmen were never committed in that way, and it was this very fact that shaped what followed.
On 30 April 1945 he surrendered with his subordinates to representatives of the US Third Army, and was held in American prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and France, at Cherbourg. Because the Western Allies were bound by the Yalta Conference to repatriate Soviet citizens, most ROA combatants who surrendered were forcibly returned to the Soviet Union, whether to the Red Army or later through handover by the Allies. Here the air force was the exception: it was the only ROA unit that largely avoided repatriation, a distinction his men owed largely to the fact that the unit had never been sent into action. Maltsev himself did not escape. He was handed over to Soviet command representatives in August 1945 and tried to kill himself, cutting his throat and inflicting a severe wound. He was moved to Butyrka prison in Moscow, first to the prison hospital, and remained there while his case was prepared. The fate of the pilot who had been the first of Vlasov's commanders to wear the Red Air Force uniform into a German command post was thus settled not in the air but in the interrogation rooms of a Moscow prison.