The article also goes on to state that:If, in the eyes of many people, Germans who fought against Hitler were not traitors, why should the Russians who fought against the Soviet system be traitors?
Essentially, I wish to know what the general consensus is amongst Russians in this post-communist era, with chance for a more objective stance to be taken on such an issue.The tragedy of the Vlasov Movement was that it was fighting one totalitarian system at the side of another, that it was fighting for the liberation of its own nation at the side of another nation which wanted to enslave it. Its liberal programs were a kind of paradox. The same held true for the national anti-Soviet movements of the non-Russian peoples have not met with understanding in the West. In those days, all Soviet citizens who took up arms against the USSR were in the eyes of the West traitors to their country who did not deserve leniency. This was of course, a much too simple way of looking at the whole question.
From the moral point of view, the Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Cossacks, the Georgians, Armenians, and Turkomans, and the members of all the other non-Russian nations were not traitors. No matter under which government they were born and in which part of the world, they all fought against a government which was not their government and against a country which was not their country, but which had enslaved them. By contrast, the Russians of General Vlasov fought only against their government but not against their own nation; what is more, they fought for the liberation of their nation from the system which enslaved it. One could say of them that they were traitors to their government but not traitors to their nation, and in Soviet Russia the government and the nation are not the same, as in the West.
There never was in Russia a government of the people, the affairs of the state are not controlled by the people, and the state (and government) does not exist for the people but the other way around. General Vlasov and the thousands of his soldiers and millions of his supporters were good Russians and not Hitler's hirelings which, unfortunately, they appeared to be and which Hitler wanted them to be. Already in the autumn of 1942, the German Foreign Office stated in a memorandum that General Vlasov "is not....a mere seeker after political glory and accordingly will never become a purchasable hireling and will never be willing to lead hirelings."
General Vlasov did not become the leader of the mutiny against the Soviet system because of personal grievances; far from it, to the very end of his service in the Red Army he was making an excellent career. Treason does not come easy even to people of a low moral level. At the side of General Vlasov almost a million Soviet citizens were fighting shoulder to shoulder with the invader, and millions of others were showing sympathy for the invader: there must have been very important reasons for this phenomenon.
In my opinion there is one reason which explains everything: the general hatred of the Soviet system, a hatred greater than inborn patriotism and loyalty to one's own government. Those who have not seen the limitless degradation of man in what was the Soviet hell cannot understand that a moment may come when a man out of sheer desperation will take up arms against the hateful system even at the side of an enemy. The responsibility for his mutiny falls on the system and not him. Here the notions of loyalty and treason lose their meaning.
Regards,
Edelweiss