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General Vlasov’s return Scholar Jade McGlynn explains how Putin’s ‘unifying historical truth’ is losing to reality in Ukraine

Source: Meduza

By Dr. Jade McGlynn

As the Putin administration struggles to field an army capable of holding occupied territory in Ukraine, state officials, propagandists, and pro-invasion pundits have resurrected historical analogies to notorious Nazi collaborator Andrey Vlasov in a campaign to discredit and intimidate Russians now fleeing mobilization. In a guest essay for Meduza, Dr. Jade McGlynn, a specialist in Russian memory and foreign policy at the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies, explains how Vlasov’s memory has entered the Kremlin’s contemporary narrative and what it says about the course of the war.

Andrey Vlasov, the infamous Russian officer who switched sides to the Nazis during World War II, was executed by hanging in 1946. More than seven decades later, his specter still haunts Russian cultural memory, albeit drowned out by pobedobesie (Moscow’s hyperbolic Victory Day celebrations) and the Kremlin’s insistent efforts to straitjacket the tragic nuances of Russian history into a usable and unifying narrative. 

Speaking in 2012, which he decreed by executive order to be the Year of Russian History, Vladimir Putin argued, “The civil war still isn’t over for many people, and the past is extremely politicized. Our country needs some careful cultural therapy.” Instead of going to cultural therapy, however, Russia went to war in Ukraine in 2014. Seeking to reassert Russia’s ostensible right to buffer zones and Great Power status, Putin launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022, escalating a conflict that Moscow has framed using selective historical analogies — warped concepts that helped make the war imaginable in the first place.

The use of, and belief in, historical myths about Russia and Ukraine lay at the heart of the invasion’s early failures in the Battles for Kyiv and Kharkiv, deluding the Kremlin into thinking it could seize these cities with relative ease. The discursive return of General Vlasov as a hated figure reflects how Moscow’s political rhetoric and historical falsehoods have unraveled as its soldiers are driven back on the battlefield.

Vlasov created the Nazi-sponsored Russian Liberation Army, which had up to 800,000 former Soviet soldiers, mostly ethnic Russians. With the USSR’s demise came the rise of Russian ethno-nationalism and efforts to fill in the blank spots of Soviet history. Political figures like Boris Yeltsin and intellectuals like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dealt with the Soviet legacy by trying to externalize it from Russian identity. In Gulag Archipelago, for example, Solzhenitsyn evaluated not only Vlasov but collaborators generally through a nuanced, even sympathetic lens, foreshadowing the nationalist reassessment of Vlasov as a Russian patriot in the 1990s. 

But in the 2000s, as Vladimir Putin re-entrenched the Brezhnev-era’s Great Patriotic War cult, state-sponsored historical narratives once more depicted Vlasov as a villainous traitor whenever he or the Russian Liberation Army appeared in public discourse and popular culture (which was not very often).

When Russia annexed Crimea and sparked conflict in Ukraine’s eastern territories in 2014, Kremlin-affiliated media and politicians alike framed the fighting as a rerun of the Second World War, with Russian-speakers cast as Red Army soldiers battling banderite Ukrainians (a reference to the followers of wartime Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera). Russian media outlets were happy to detail Nazi collaboration by Ukrainians and other nationalities (like Tatars and Chechens), but the same was not true for Russian treachery. For example, in an analysis of 3,509 comparisons between the 2014 conflict and WWII, Russian media and politicians referred to Vlasov just once. Reporters and the authorities compared the Russian opposition to Banderites rather than label them “Vlasovites,” avoiding anything that might besmirch Russia’s moral authority as heir to the Soviet Union’s Great Victory of 1945 and self-appointed defender of the war’s memory. 

Efforts to revise or reconsider Vlasov’s historical role must be understood within the context of the Kremlin’s battle against what it decries as “historical falsification.” Positive depictions of Vlasov are generally seen as part of broader attempts to rewrite history and undermine Russian memory and identity. Russia’s Education Ministry even stripped one scholar of his PhD for writing about the topic in 2018.

Since February 24, written references to Vlasovites have increased to levels that usually accompany the release of a popular new book on the subject. Some of the mentions are indirect references to the Free Russia Legion, a contemporary formation that by its own account comprises two battalions of Russian volunteers and POWs fighting for Ukraine against the Russian Army.

The parallels are obvious if imperfect. 

Invoking General Vlasov (and his fate as a traitor) is also a useful, indirect way to remind young men of the costs of collaborating with the enemy (still steep today). Thanks to recently adopted legislation, any Russian soldier who “voluntarily surrenders” during an armed conflict faces up to 10 years in prison, with “mobilization, martial law, and wartime” codified as aggravating circumstances. 

On social media, for example, prominent nationalist figures have branded Russians fleeing mobilization as Vlasovite deserters. Also, some reactionary news outlets have stressed the inextricable links between Vlasovites and Banderites. In fact, even before the February 24 invasion but increasingly so since, “patriotic” pundits have described imprisoned opposition figure Alexey Navalny as a Vlasovite, echoing the authorities’ allegations that he has committed various “memory crimes” including rehabilitating Nazism and offending veterans.

After criticizing Russia’s war on Ukraine, independent journalist Dmitry Kozelev received a flood of messages bearing the same text: “Only Vlasovites discredit the army.” But it’s not just the POWs and reporters who disparage Russia’s armed forces: military-focused bloggers and war correspondents have also shared vocal criticism, prompting the Kremlin to crack down recently on some of these writers, suggesting that the Putin administration may be losing some confidence in its own popularity (which has at times struggled to harness the unwieldy power of ethnic nationalism).

Russian ethnic nationalists could gain public appeal as Putin’s unifying “historical truth” shatters on contact with reality, but they’re unlikely to promote Vlasov or much nuance when it comes to the Great Patriotic War, and their support of the invasion probably ensures that the authorities will not brand them Vlasovites.

As ever in Russia, being on the right side of history is largely a question of being on the right side of politics. In today’s climate, Vlasov is firmly on the wrong side of both, and he remains beyond the bounds of acceptable debate. Just like in the USSR, this will remain true while the media focuses on Vlasov as an individual. It might not always be tenable, however, to invoke Vlasov’s collaboration while sidestepping attendant moral and philosophical questions that remain highly relevant today, such as the distinction between state loyalty and patriotism or the readiness to sacrifice large numbers of young men’s lives for paltry military gains.