People of the Revolution and the USSR

Russian Empire Imperial establishment and White movement 1869–1947 ✕ Executed

The White ataman who built a Don Cossack anti-Bolshevik state, collaborated with the Nazis, and was a Nobel Prize-nominated novelist

November 1917: captured by Trotsky after his 700 Cossacks failed to take Petrograd, he was paroled on a promise never to fight the Soviet regime — and fled the next day to the Don to join the anti-Bolshevik struggle.

A lieutenant general of the Imperial Russian Army from a Don Cossack military dynasty, he was one of the architects of the Lutsk breakthrough during the Brusilov Offensive in 1916. Elected Ataman of the Don Cossack Host in May 1918, he built the Don Republic as an independent anti-Bolshevik state with German backing, insisting on Don autonomy even as he clashed with Denikin over unified White command. In exile he became a prolific novelist and memoirist, author of over twenty books, including the epic From Double Eagle to the Red Flag, and a Nobel Prize in Literature nominee in 1926. During World War II he headed the Cossack Central Office under the Nazi regime, organizing Cossack units to fight the Soviet Union; handed over by British forces in 1945, he was tried and executed in Moscow in 1947.

Soviet Union Counter-revolutionary forces 1896–1946 ✕ Executed

A staff general who turned from Soviet command to an anti-Soviet armed organisation

In the autumn of 1941, while a prisoner of war, he proposed to the German authorities the creation of units to strike 'railways, warehouses and the like' in the Red Army rear, disrupting supply and command.

Trukhin was a former Imperial Russian officer who built his career in the Red Army as a general responsible for military education and staff work. During Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, he served in the operational command structure of the Baltic Military District and the Northwestern Front, but became a prisoner of war during the retreat. In captivity he collaborated with German authorities and became chief of staff of the armed forces associated with Andrey Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army and the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia. Transferred to Soviet custody after the war, he was convicted of treason and executed; his career shows how professional military expertise was redirected into German occupation policy and an anti-Soviet armed project.