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171-567: SS units from SS-Truppenübungsplatz Böhmen were used to form Kampfgruppe Wallenstein , which was used in unsuccessful suppression of General Andrey Vlasov 's Liberation army during Prague Uprising . This article related to Nazi Germany is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Czech Republic -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Andrey Vlasov Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov ( Russian : Андрей Андреевич Власов , September 14 [ O.S. September 1] 1901 – August 1, 1946)

342-666: A Pan-Slavic liberation congress, but Nazi political officials would not permit it. The creation of a political movement behind Vlasov and the Russian collaboration became a result of the conflicts within the Nazi Party and the Nazi bureaucracy. While Hitler and the supporters of the Generalplan Ost adhered to the idea of the colonization of the Untermenschen and denied any cooperation with

513-522: A secret trial . After his death, his figure and his movement became objects of various narratives in memory politics and historiography. Born in Lomakino , Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, Russian Empire , Vlasov was originally a student at a Russian Orthodox seminary . He quit the study of divinity after the Russian Revolution , briefly studying agricultural sciences instead, and in 1919 joined

684-436: A "five-year plan" to modernize Chinese industry was perhaps inspired by the successes of the "Ten-Year Plan" that Yan had announced several years earlier. In Shanxi, Yan implemented numerous successful reforms in an effort to centralize his control over the province. Although embracing the traditional values of the landed gentry, he denounced their "oppression" of the peasantry and took steps to initiate land reform and weaken

855-456: A "propaganda trick", and that they were unscrupulous people motivated only by lust for power or physical survival whose movement could not be democratic in any way. B. Dvinov, one of the most harsh Nicolaevsky's opponents, supported his publications with documents. Alexander Dallin called his publications "a documented but one-sided attempt in Russian émigré politics to reduce the Vlasov movement to

1026-663: A German propaganda trick." Among the positions of the émigrés was a compromise one that 'Vlasovism' may be a democratic movement, but Vlasov and the other leaders should be condemned, and that the Vlasovites should admit that collaboration with the Nazis was a mistake, but the Vlasovites from the SBONR , which joined the AMCOMLIB, refused to admit the latter and continued to idolize their executed leader; they accused their opponents of Communism, while

1197-547: A Heart-Washing Society, whose members gathered each Sunday to meditate and listen to sermons based on the themes of the Confucian classics. Everyone at the meetings was supposed to rise and confess aloud his misdeeds of the past week, inviting criticism from the other members. Yan attributed much of the West's vitality to Christianity and believed that China could resist and overtake the West only by generating an ideological tradition that

1368-508: A capacity for innate goodness, but to fulfill that capacity people had to subordinate their emotions and desires to the control of their conscience. He admired the Ming dynasty philosophers Lu Jiuyuan and Wang Yangming , who disparaged knowledge and urged men to act on the basis of their intuition. Because Yan believed that human beings could achieve their potentials only through intense self-criticism and self-cultivation, he established in every town

1539-425: A complex of heavy industries around Taiyuan but neglected to publicize the extent of his success outside of Shanxi, probably to deceive Chiang. Despite his measured successes in modernizing the industry of Shanxi, Yan repeatedly petitioned the central government for financial assistance to extend the local railroad, and for other reasons, but his requests were usually denied. When Yan refused to send taxes collected from

1710-799: A dissertation about the ROA; the earlier successful defense of this dissertation was followed with a scandal, as pro-Kremlin organizations, including the CPRF, forwarded the dissertation to Russian prosecutors to inspect for violation of Putin's " memory law ," which criminalizes "lies about the activities of the Soviet Union in the Second World War" and held rallies with slogans such as "Bandera in Ukraine - Vlasov in Russia", and Aleksandrov's article about Bandera written back in 2014

1881-527: A flood of messages with the same text: "Only Vlasovites discredit the army." Before the invasion, Alexei Navalny was labelled a Vlasovite, as the official allegations included "memory crimes"; in 2020, the Russian Foreign Ministry officially protested against a monument to the ROA fighters who participated in Prague Uprising. Vladimir Putin personally mentioned Vlasov only in 2024, after

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2052-556: A large and well-equipped army similar to the ones commanded by Chiang at the time. Yan was also unable to match the quality of leadership in Chiang's officer corps and the prestige that Chiang and the Nationalist Army had at the time. Before Chiang's armies defeated Feng and Yan, Yan Xishan appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine , with the subtitle "China's Next President." The attention given to him by foreign observers in that period and

2223-462: A network of semi-religious organizations, known as "Heart-Washing Societies." Yan was emotionally attached to Confucianism by virtue of his upbringing, and he identified its values as a historically effective solution to the chaos and disorder of his time. He justified his rule via Confucian political theories and attempted to revive Confucian virtues as being universally accepted. In his speeches and writing, Yan developed an extravagant admiration for

2394-414: A network of village newspapers and traveling dramatic troupes. He co-ordinated dramatic public meetings in which participants confessed their own misdeeds and/or denounced those of others. He devised a system of public education , producing a population of trained workers and farmers literate enough to be indoctrinated without difficulty. The early date by which Yan devised and implemented the reforms, during

2565-682: A number of criticisms of the Western Allies as a compromise with Himmler's insistence to add antisemitic points. The Nazis were suspicious of Vlasov, his organisation and his ideological position, and the Gestapo warned about the possibility of the Vlasovites betraying the Reich. The suspicions and criticism of the Vlasovites from the Reich officials was summarised in a document by the Ministry of Propaganda official Eberhard Taubert who described his concerns about

2736-500: A period of warlordism. The determination of Shanxi to resist Manchu rule was a factor leading Yuan to believe that only the abolition of the Qing dynasty could bring peace to China and end the civil war. Yan's inability to resist Yuan's military domination of northern China was a factor contributing to Sun Yat-sen's decision not to personally pursue the presidency of the Republic of China , which

2907-591: A pretext to expel the Kuomintang from the province on the grounds of public safety. After that event, the Kuomintang ceased to exist in Shanxi except as a dummy organization whose members were more loyal to Yan than to Chiang. Future difficulties in securing the loyalty of other Chinese warlords across China, the ongoing civil war with the Communists, and the ongoing threat of Japanese invasion motivated Chiang to let Yan retain

3078-484: A rival warlord convinced Yan that Shanxi was not sufficiently developed to compete for hegemony with other warlords, and he avoided the violent national politics of the time by enforcing a neutrality policy on Shanxi to free his province from the civil wars . Instead of participating in the ongoing civil wars, Yan devoted himself almost exclusively to modernizing Shanxi and developing its resources. The success of his reforms were sufficient for him to be dubbed by outsiders as

3249-409: A standardized system of diagnosis; sanitary science, including bacteriology; surgical skills, including obstetrics; and the use of diagnostic instruments. Yan hoped that his support of the school would eventually lead to increased revenues in the domestic and international trade of Chinese drugs, improved public health, and improved public education. Yan's interest in having such a school active in Shanxi

3420-497: A strategy of shifting alliances between various warring cliques and inevitably joining only winning sides. Although he was weaker than many of the warlords who surrounded him, he often held the balance of power between neighboring rivals, and even those whom he betrayed hesitated to retaliate against him in case they needed his support in the future. To resist the domination of the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin , Yan allied himself with

3591-485: A symbol "past and current betrayal in Russia"; in the second part of the 1990s, Boris Yeltsin turned back to commemoration of the Great Patriotic War, and after the rise of Putin, "this anti-Vlasov discourse hardens and takes on increasing domestic political uses," connecting Vlasov with the 'collapse of Empire' and influence of the West. Jade McGlynn and Tromly describe how Vlasov's figure became unsuitable for

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3762-476: A transitional figure who advocated using Western technology to protect Chinese traditions, while at the same time reforming older political, social and economic conditions in a way that paved the way for the radical changes that would occur after his rule. Yan Xishan was born during the late Qing dynasty in Wutai County , Xinzhou , Shanxi , to a family who had been bankers and merchants for generations (Shanxi

3933-439: A way of life. He then decreased the size of the army until 1923 to save money until a rumor circulated that rival warlords were planning on invading Shanxi. Yan then introduced military reforms designed to train a rural militia of 100,000 men, along the lines of Japanese and American reserves. Yan attempted via conscription to create a civilian reserve, which would become the foundation of society in Shanxi. His troops were perhaps

4104-506: Is 70% political and only 30% military, while the job of preventing its growth altogether is 90% political." To prevent a Communist threat to Shanxi, Yan sent troops to fight the Communists in Jiangxi and (later) Shaanxi , organized the gentry and village authorities into anti-corruption and anti-communist political organizations, and attempted (mostly unsuccessfully) to undertake a large-scale program of land reform. Those reforms did not prevent

4275-456: Is considered the end of China's Warlord Era . The events between 1927 and 1931 are best explained as the strategies of warlords accustomed to the constantly-shifting chaotic alliances that had characterized Chinese politics since the breakdown of the central government a decade earlier. The main causes of Yan's defeat were the low population and the lack of development in the areas that he had under his control, which made him incapable of fielding

4446-618: Is unclear whether his officer corps either understood or sympathized with his objectives or entered his service solely in the interests of achieving prestige and a higher standard of living. Yan built an arsenal in Taiyuan that for the entire period of his administration remained the only center in China that could produce field artillery. The presence of the arsenal was one of the main reasons for Yan maintaining Shanxi's relative independence. While not particularly effective fighting rival warlords, Yan's army

4617-576: The Völkischer Beobachter ; Vlasov was critical of such remarks and replied to the Nazi concerns that "the Jewish question" "was an internal Russian problem and would be dealt with after they [the ROA] had accomplished the primary aim of overthrowing the existing regime"; however, antisemitism frequently appeared in the pro-Vlasov Nazi and collaborationist newspapers issued before the formation of KONR, including

4788-569: The perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union, narratives described above entered Russian historiography and memory politics . These narratives challenge the myth of the Soviet, increasingly perceived as Russian, Victory in the Great Patriotic War , which is significant to Russian national identity. As this myth has been increasingly used by the Putin regime to legitimize its state and its actions,

4959-636: The 162nd Tank Brigade had Vlasov dragged out of his car, put on a tank and driven straight to the Soviet 13th Army HQ. Vlasov was then transported from the 13th Army HQ to Marshal Ivan Konev 's command post in Dresden , and from there sent immediately to Moscow. Vlasov was confined in Lubyanka prison where he was interrogated. A secret trial was held, beginning on 30 July 1946 and was presided over by Viktor Abakumov who sentenced him and eleven other senior officers from his army to death for high treason. Vlasov

5130-520: The 37th Army near Kiev and escaped encirclement. He then played an important role in the defense of Moscow , as his 20th Army counterattacked and retook Solnechnogorsk . Vlasov's picture was printed (along with those of other Soviet generals) in the newspaper Pravda as that of one of the "defenders of Moscow". Vlasov was decorated on January 24, 1942, with the Order of the Red Banner for his efforts in

5301-788: The Chinese Civil War . As the leader of a relatively small, poor, remote province, he survived Yuan Shikai , the Warlord Era , the Nationalist Era , the Japanese invasion of China and the subsequent civil war , being forced from office only when the Nationalist armies with which he was aligned had completely lost control of the Chinese mainland, isolating Shanxi from any source of economic or military supply. He has been viewed by Western biographers as

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5472-760: The Lyuban offensive operation to break the Leningrad encirclement . Planned as a combined operation between the Volkhov and Leningrad Fronts on a 30 km frontage, other armies of the Leningrad Front (including the 54th) were supposed to participate at scheduled intervals in this operation. Crossing the Volkhov River , Vlasov's army was successful in breaking through the German 18th Army 's lines and penetrated 70–74 km deep inside

5643-601: The October Revolution , and to ideals of either a "Russia without Bolsheviks and Capitalists" (Smolensk Declaration and the open letter), or a welfare state ( Bloknot Propagandista ); the influence of the NTS on the Manifesto is seen in the description of the future system of Russia as a "national-labour" system, some of Vlasov's generals joined the NTS. All of these documents granted the basic democratic freedoms and rights, including

5814-787: The Red Army fighting in the southern theatre in Ukraine , the Caucasus , and the Crimea during the Russian Civil War . He distinguished himself as an officer and gradually rose through the ranks of the Red Army. Vlasov joined the Communist Party in 1930. Sent to China, he acted as a military adviser to Chiang Kai-shek from 1938 to November 1939. From February to May 1939 he was the advisor to Yan Xishan ,

5985-528: The Russian Civil War , persuaded Vlasov to become involved in aiding the German advance against the rule of Joseph Stalin and Bolshevism . With Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Boyarsky , Vlasov wrote a memo shortly after his capture to the German military leaders suggesting cooperation between anti-Stalinist Russians and the German Army. In 2016, in his habilitation thesis , Russian historian Kirill Alexandrov analyzed

6156-601: The White movement , described by him as a movement of conservative gentry, had remained distant from realities of the USSR and lacked "any progressive principles", ranging from apoliticism to reaction, and through seeking a "restoration of the old noble-landowning system" did nothing but legitimizing the Bolsheviks. The Vlasovites and the Whites had very different world views, partially because for

6327-586: The émigrés , and opponents of Nicolaevsky among oborontsy , the word from the vocabulary of the WWI to indicate the patriotic opposition to the Bolsheviks' defeatism, the supporters of the war effort of the USSR in the WWII, attacked the Vlasovites and Nicolaevsky: according to them, the democratic program was just a way to court the West in the face of Nazi defeat, that they were national traitors and mere "powerless pawns" in "organized and merciless destruction" of their own people,

6498-511: The "Liberation Movement of the Peoples of Russia", underlying its multinationality. Although at first Vlasov hoped for an open co-operation of his movement and the Nazis, during his tour at the occupied territories, he emphasised that the Russians, and that National Socialism could not be imposed on Russia, and that "a foreign coat [would] not fit a Russian." In his nationalist speeches, Vlasov promoted

6669-402: The "Model Governor," with Shanxi the "Model Province." In 1918, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in northern Shanxi that lasted for two months and killed 2,664 people. Yan dealt with the epidemic by issuing instructions on modern germ theory and plague management to his officials. Yan instructed people that the plague was caused by tiny germs that were breathed into the lungs, the disease

6840-588: The "Smolensk Proclamation", which was dropped from aircraft by the millions on Soviet forces and Soviet-controlled soil. In March of the same year, Vlasov also published an open letter titled " Why I Have Taken Up the Struggle Against Bolshevism ". Even though no Russian Liberation Army yet existed, the Nazi propaganda department issued Russian Liberation Army patches to Russian volunteers and tried to use Vlasov's name in order to encourage defections. Several hundred thousand former Soviet citizens served in

7011-453: The 1930s, he attempted to set up in every village a "Good People's Movement" to promote the values of Chiang's New Life Movement . The values included honesty, friendliness, dignity, diligence, modesty, thrift, personal neatness, and obedience. In 1931 Yan returned from his exile in Dalian impressed with the apparent successes of Soviet Union 's first five-year plan and attempted to reorganize

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7182-536: The 1930s. Yan's efforts to stimulate Shanxi's economy mostly consisted of state-led investment in a broad variety of industries, and he generally failed to encourage private investment and trade. Though gains were made to improve the economy of Shanxi, his efforts were limited by the fact that he himself had little formal training in economic or industrial theory. He also suffered from a lack of experienced, trained advisers capable of directing even moderately complicated tasks related to economic development. Because most of

7353-541: The 1990s and received a backlash as a "slander of the entire generation" "who had fought in the war". The opponents of such narratives, including the Communist Party of the Russian Federation created in 1993, started connecting the apology for Vlasov and the ROA with the chaos of the 1990s: economic collapse, dissolution of the Soviet Union and the First Chechen War , the rize of the organized crime, making Vlasov

7524-530: The Army in 1940. Timoshenko presented Vlasov with an inscribed gold watch, as he "found the 99th the best of all". The historian John Erickson says of Vlasov at this point that [he] "was an up-and-coming man". In 1940, Vlasov was promoted to major general, and on June 22, 1941, when the Germans and their allies invaded the Soviet Union, Vlasov was commanding the 4th Mechanized Corps . As a lieutenant general, he commanded

7695-619: The Church caused a scandal after the reunification of the Orthodox Church in Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Solzhenitsyn's narrative became more or less convenient, since it did not deny the role of Victory and the Great Patriotic War and united it with criticism of Stalin and the understanding of Vlasov's tragedy which could be reintegrated into national history, making it more inclusive. Yet, it became debated in

7866-447: The Communists and form the united front to resist the impending Japanese invasion of China. In his correspondence with Zhang Xueliang in 1936, Yan indicated that the growing rift between him and Chiang was because of Yan's anxieties over the potential for a Japanese invasion and a concern for the subsequent fate of China and because Yan was not convinced of the correctness of focusing China's resources on anti-Communist campaigns. During

8037-519: The Confucian classics but described Shangdi in terms very similar to the Christian interpretation of God. Like Christianity, Yan Xishan Thought was permeated with the belief that accepting his ideology could make people become regenerated or reborn. In 1911, Yan came to power in Shanxi as a disciple of Chinese nationalism but subsequently came to view nationalism as merely another set of ideas that could be used to achieve his own objectives. He stated that

8208-477: The First Division, Bunyachenko and Vlasov gathered a meeting and discussed whether the First Division should help the insurgents. Vlasov spoke against joining the uprising, but his position was not supported by the others, and the First Division joined the uprising. Two days later, the First Division was forced to leave Prague as Communist Czech partisans began arresting ROA soldiers in order to hand them over to

8379-491: The German army wearing this patch, but never under Vlasov's own command. Vlasov was permitted to make several trips to German-occupied Soviet Union: most notably, to Pskov , Russia, where Russian pro-German volunteers paraded. The populace's reception of Vlasov was mixed. While in Pskov, Vlasov dealt himself a nearly fatal political blow by referring to the Germans as mere "guests" during a speech, which Hitler found belittling. Vlasov

8550-578: The German rear area. However, the other armies (the Volkhov Front's 4th , 52nd , and 59th Armies , 13th Cavalry Corps, and 4th and 6th Guards Rifle Corps , as well as the 54th Army of the Leningrad Front ) failed to exploit Vlasov's advances and provide the required support, and Vlasov's army became stranded. Permission to retreat was refused. With the counter-offensive in May 1942, the Second Shock Army

8721-569: The Japanese by accepting a position as "advisor" of the Suiyuan Mongolian Political Council, an organization created by the central government to organize opposition to the Japanese. The Japanese began promoting "autonomy" for northern China in the summer of 1935. Some high-ranking Japanese military officials believed that Yan and other warlords in the north were fundamentally pro-Japanese and would readily subordinate themselves to

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8892-521: The Japanese in exchange for protection from Chiang. Yan was a particular target because of his education in Japan and his much-publicized admiration of the country's modernization. However, Yan published an open letter in September in which he accused the Japanese of desiring to conquer all of China over the next two decades. According to Japanese sources, Yan entered into negotiations with the Japanese in 1935 but

9063-409: The Japanese until the early 1930s. While he was in exile in Dalian in 1930, Yan became aware of Japanese plans to invade Manchuria and feigned collaboration with the Japanese to pressure Chiang Kai-shek into allowing him to return to Shanxi before warning Chiang of Japan's intent. Japan's subsequent success in taking Manchuria in 1931 terrified Yan, who stated that a major objective of his Ten-Year Plan

9234-423: The Japanese would attempt to take control of Inner Mongolia by subverting Chinese authority in Chahar and Suiyuan . To prevent that, he took control of Suiyuan first, developed its large iron deposits (24% of all iron in China), and settled the province with thousands of soldier-farmers. When the Manchukuo Imperial Army , armed and led by the Japanese, finally invaded Chahar in 1935, Yan virtually declared war on

9405-417: The Kuomintang in Shanxi. On 18 December 1931, a group of students, supported and perhaps orchestrated by officials loyal to Yan, gathered in Taiyuan to protest the Nanjing government's policy of not fighting the Japanese. The demonstration became so violent that Kuomintang police fired into the crowd. The public outrage that the "Massacre of December Eighteenth" generated was strong enough to give Yan's officials

9576-418: The Liberation of the Peoples of Russia , a political organisation headed by Vlasov. While for the Nazis the ROA was a mere propaganda weapon, Vlasov and his associates attempted to create an armed political movement independent of the Nazi control that would present an anti-Stalinist program described by Robert Conquest as "democratic" while attempting to avoid Nazi antisemitism and chauvinism, with "completing

9747-520: The NTS was doomed: "no 'third force' could succeed because there was no viable third choice; neither of the titans would tolerate a power vacuum — nor the arrogation of power by a new, autonomous competitor." Most of these historians relied mostly on the Nazi documents and not the Soviet archives, partly because the latter were unaccessible. A new narrative was constructed in the 1970s and emerged in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 's book The GULAG Archipelago : while not directly advocating collaboration, he and

9918-400: The Nanjing government while he maintained de facto control over Shanxi by alternatively co-operating with and fighting against Communist agents active in his province. Although he was not an active participant, Yan supported the 1936 Xi'an Incident in which Chiang was arrested by Nationalist officers, led by Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng and released only when he agreed to make peace with

10089-441: The Nationalist ideology, including women's rights , Yan allowed girls to enroll in middle school and college, where they promptly formed a women's association. Yan attempted to eradicate the custom of foot binding by threatening to sentence men who married women with bound feet and mothers who bound their daughters' feet to hard labor in state-run factories. He discouraged the use of the traditional lunar calendar and encouraged

10260-601: The Nazis managed to secure his image for the further generations, but "his intentionally murky beliefs make him a convenient straw man to suit cultural and political agendas. Based on the documents, he can be framed as an anti-Bolshevist crusader, Russian patriot, misunderstood democrat, martyred hero, and fascist puppet. Eighty years on, he still defies categorization." Shapiro believed that Vlasov's motivations were complex and laid between opportunism and ideological opposition; she believes moral relativism and "historical consciousness" to be among his most important qualities. After

10431-455: The People that replaced the principles of nationalism and democracy with the principles of virtue and knowledge. During the 1919 May Fourth Movement , when students in Taiyuan staged anti-foreign demonstrations, Yan warned that patriotism, like rainfall, was beneficial only in moderation. After the Kuomintang succeeded in forming a nominal central government in 1930, Yan encouraged Nationalist principles that he viewed as socially beneficial. In

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10602-441: The Peoples of Russia and the creation of its Manifesto, the political organization of the Vlasovites, Zykov was a major ideologue of the Vlasov army and participated in writing of the other Vlasovite program documents. The Vlasovites opposed their programs, the Smolensk Declaration, Vlasov's open letter "Why I Decided to Fight against Bolshevism", the Prague Manifesto of the KONR and Bloknot Propagandista (an important document which

10773-435: The Putin regime; however, it was not until 2022 when it received significant attention. Throughout the 2000s, the state-sponsored narratives of the WWII villainized Vlasov again whenever his figure appeared in public discourse, although the latter did not happen often. In the 2010s, the debates over Vlasov moved to historiography, and Kirill Aleksandrov was stripped of his PhD by the Ministry of Education in 2016 after writing

10944-399: The ROA against the Red Army took place on February 11, 1945, on the river Oder ; it was carried by the First Division led by General Sergei Bunyachenko . After three days of battle against overwhelming forces, the First Division of the ROA was forced to retreat and marched southward to Prague , in German-controlled Bohemia . In March 1945, Bunyachenko started disobeying the commands of

11115-411: The Revolution" of 1917 being the ultimate goal of the movement. In January 1945, Vlasov headed the army as it was declared that it would be no longer a part of Wehrmacht . At the war's end, the 1st division of ROA aided the May 1945 Prague uprising against the Germans. Vlasov and the ROA were captured by Soviet forces with the United States' assistance. Vlasov was tortured, and hanged for treason after

11286-407: The Russian Federation's military prosecutor for a review of Vlasov's case, saying that "Vlasov was a patriot who spent much time re-evaluating his service in the Red Army and the essence of Stalin's regime before agreeing to collaborate with the Germans". The military prosecutor concluded that the law of rehabilitation of victims of political repressions did not apply to Vlasov and refused to consider

11457-418: The Socialist émigrés accused Vlasovites of Nazism, and both claims were dangerous since the FBI had been closely monitoring both of the factions. More to it, the SBONR in their responses made nationalist and allegedly antisemitic dog whistles , since they never mentioned the Jewish origins of their opponents, but contrasted the "Russian people" with the American exiles who "long ago forgotten how to understand"

11628-439: The Socialist émigrés dismissed Nicolaevsky and his narrative. While Benjamin Tromly and other authors believe the description of the ROA as a somewhat revolutionary movement of ideological protest against Stalinism which conflicted with the Nazis to be largely constructed by the Vlasovites themselves, this claim is rather inaccurate, since the theme of the ROA was explored in the works of several Western historians: along with

11799-403: The Socialist émigrés , including Nicolaevsky, only as powerful representatives of American power. However, the Vlasovites did not have a necessity to present themselves left-wing democrats, since the CIA did not scruple to fund the openly far-right collaborators from the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations , like the Belarusian Central Council . Nicolaevsky's narrative resulted in a polemics among

11970-462: The Soviet Union's Great Victory of 1945 and self-appointed defender of the war's memory." According to Tromly, the Russian state avoids the mentions of ethnic Russian collaboration and views "reviving a positive memory of Vlasov" as an "instrument of information war" against itself. The attention to Vlasov increased after the Russian invasion of Ukraine: McGlynn notes that "written references to Vlasovites have increased to levels that usually accompany

12141-404: The Soviet population more successfully than could the Germans. But as a leader with a will and a following, he and his movement could also develop a dynamic of their own and — precisely because they might be successful — could become potentially distinct from or even hostile to the interests of the German leadership." Dallin also wrote that the idea of the "third force" promoted by the Vlasovites and

12312-577: The Soviets for execution. Vlasov and the rest of his forces, trying to evade the Red Army, attempted to head west to surrender to the Allies in the closing days of the war in Europe. Vlasov's division, commanded by General Sergei Bunyachenko , was captured 40 kilometres (25 mi) southeast of Plzeň by the Soviet 25th Tank Corps , after their attempt to surrender to US troops was rejected. Captain M. I. Yakushev of

12483-534: The Tsarist period" and alleged that the Soviets, not the collaborators, were the real national traitors. Such ideas were not popular among the majority of the surviving Vlasovites, but for a few years the Whites became their new leaders and even established Monarchist Vlasovite organizations, since they were naturalized citizens of European states and had more chances of surviving, also because of "aristocratic cohesion" and such benefits as knowledge of foreign languages, while

12654-569: The USSR". However, in the emigration and later in the Post-Soviet Russia, he and his movement became objects of various narratives. The first narrative in the emigration was set up by the former White Guards who served in the ROA or supported Vlasov, although they were a minority in the ROA and had conflicts with the Vlasovites, since the Whites were suspicious of the former Soviet soldiers and sometimes called them "Reds", while Vasily Malyshkin , one of Vlasov's closest associates, charged that

12825-488: The Vlasovites were in danger of Operation Keelhaul , forced repatriation to the USSR carried out by the U.S. with the subsequential punishment for treason; the Whites attempted to unite the whole emigration and get funding by the CIA, and the latter could help Vlasovites survive. However, the Whites failed to get the attention of the CIA, and their narrative was soon rejected. However, it would reemerge in post-Soviet Russia. To get

12996-476: The WWII became "a double sacrifice. This is the idea that the Soviet people, now increasingly perceived as the Russian people, won the war against Nazism despite the brutality and incompetence of the Soviet state. In this context, Vlasov's sacrifice is entirely appropriate." With all these narratives given, Benjamin Tromly calls Vlasov an "empty signifier". Julia Shapiro writes that Vlasov during his collaboration with

13167-501: The Warlord Era, contradicts later claims that these reforms were modeled on Communist programs and not vice versa. When Yan returned from Japan in 1909, he was a firm proponent of militarism and proposed a system of national conscription along German and Japanese lines. Germany's defeat during World War I and Yan's defeat in Henan in 1919 caused him to reassess the value of militarism as

13338-512: The Wehrmacht; eventually Ferdinand Schörner (and later Rudolf Toussaint ) threatened to use armed force against the ROA. Vlasov reprimanded Bunyachenko during their meeting with Schörner in assertion of his loyalty, but privately granted Bunyachenko complete independence in sign of his approval while himself taking care of the rest two incomplete divisions. During the Prague uprising, the officers of

13509-407: The Whites struggle against the USSR and collaboration with the Nazis was not a means of survival, partially because the Vlasovites who were grown on the Soviet culture saw conservatism of the Whites as backward-looking and irrelevant, and Malyshkin suggested that the conflict between the Whites and the Vlasovites was rooted in different social backgrounds and class origins and worldviews. However, after

13680-456: The Xi'an Incident itself, Yan actively involved himself in the negotiations by sending representatives to prevent Chiang's execution and the civil war that Yan believed would follow and to push for a united front to resist the Japanese invasion of China that Yan believed was imminent. The financial relationship between Shanxi and the central government remained complicated. Yan was successful in creating

13851-457: The availability of narcotics into the 1930s and after 1932 executed over 600 people caught smuggling drugs into Shanxi. The traffic persisted, but Yan's interests in opposing it were perhaps limited by a fear of provoking the Japanese, who manufactured most of the morphine and heroin available in China in their concession area in Tianjin and came to control much of the drug trade in northern China in

14022-528: The camp, but was dissuaded by his associates, namely Malyshkin and Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt . Ideologically, the Vlasov movement was between the Russian nationalism of the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists , an organisation of far-right origins which collaborated with the Nazis but the members of which were repressed by Gestapo in 1943-1944 (so Vlasov had to ask Himmler to free them), as its ideologues surrounded Vlasov, and social democratic views of

14193-607: The careers of 180 Soviet generals and officers who joined the Vlasov army. He concluded that most of them personally experienced atrocities committed by the NKVD during the Great Purge and previous purges in the Red Army, which made them disillusioned with the leadership of Stalin and motivated them to defect to the Nazis. Alexandrov's work was reported to the FSB by Russian and Soviet nationalists as "inciting hatred" but his university, regardless of

14364-570: The case again. However, Vlasov's Article 58 conviction for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda was vacated. A memorial dedicated to General Vlasov was erected at the Novo-Diveevo Russian Orthodox convent and cemetery in Nanuet , New York , US. Twice annually, on the anniversary of Vlasov's execution and on the Sunday following Orthodox Easter , a memorial service is held for Vlasov and

14535-425: The conditions responsible for them. Like Karl Marx , Yan wanted to eliminate what he saw as unearned profit by restructuring Shanxi's economy to reward only those who worked. Unlike Marx, Yan reinterpreted Communism to correct what he believed was Marxism 's chief flaw: the inevitability of class warfare . Yan praised Marx for his analysis of the material aspects of human society but professed to believe that there

14706-558: The context in which Vlasov troops were recruited, the émigrés employed in Nazi security agencies, and the deep internal hostilities within the KONR's ranks", as well as the war crimes committed by the soldiers of the ROA. This theme was also explored by Dallin who wrote that "Vlasov was no puppet: therein lay, from the German point of view, both his potential value and his challenge. A relatively 'autonomous' figure, as yet untarnished by association with German abuses and atrocities, he could appeal to

14877-527: The creation of a strong and united China, similar to how Otto von Bismarck had created a strong and united Germany. Yan also joined an even more militant organization of Chinese revolutionaries, the "Dare-to-Die Corps." When Yan returned to China in 1909, he was assigned as a division commander of the New Army in Shanxi but secretly worked to overthrow the Qing. During the 1911 Xinhai Revolution , Yan led local revolutionary forces in driving Manchu troops from

15048-581: The defence of Moscow. Vlasov was ordered to relieve the ailing commander Klykov after the Second Shock Army had been encircled. After this success, Vlasov was put in command of the 2nd Shock Army of the Volkhov Front and ordered to lead the attempt to lift the Siege of Leningrad —the Lyuban-Chudovo Offensive Operation of January–April 1942. On January 7, 1942, Vlasov's army had spearheaded

15219-448: The defense of Christians during the anti-foreigner and anti-Christian demonstrations that polarized Taiyuan. Yan deliberately organized many features of his Heart-Washing Society on the Christian church, including ending each service with hymns praising Confucius. He urged his subjects to place their faith in a supreme being that he called " Shangdi " and justified his belief in Shangdi via

15390-795: The development of local Boy Scout organizations. Like the Communists, who later succeeded Yan, he punished habitual lawbreakers to "redemption through labour" in state-run factories. In 1916, at least 10% of Shanxi's 11 million people were addicted to opium , and Yan attempted to eradicate opium use in Shanxi after he came to power. At first, he dealt with opium dealers and addicts severely by throwing addicts in prison and exposing them and their families to public humiliation. After 1922, partly because of public opposition to harsh punishment, Yan abandoned punishing addicts in favor of attempting to rehabilitate them, pressuring individuals through their families, and constructing sanitariums designed to slowly cure addicts of their addictions. Yan's attempts to suppress

15561-540: The economy of Shanxi by using Soviet methods, according to a local "Ten-Year Plan" that Yan himself developed. Throughout the 1930s, Yan bluntly equated economic development with state control of industry and finance, and he had become successful in bringing most major industry and commerce under state control by the late 1930s. Yan's speeches after 1931 reflect an interpretation of Marxist economics , mostly drawn from Das Kapital , that he had gained in exile in Dalian. Following that interpretation, Yan attempted to change

15732-433: The economy of Shanxi to become more like that of the Soviets and inspired a scheme of economic "distribution according to labour". When the threat of Communists became a significant threat to Yan's rule, he defended them as courageous and self-sacrificing fanatics who were different from common bandits, contrary to Kuomintang propaganda and thought that their challenge must be met by social and economic reforms, which alleviated

15903-416: The educated staff to whom he had access to were solidly entrenched within the landed gentry of Shanxi, it is possible that many of his officials may have deliberately sabotaged his efforts for reform by preferring that the peasants working their fields continue their traditional cheap labour. Throughout his life, Yan attempted to identify, formulate, and disseminate a comprehensive ideology that would improve

16074-576: The failure of his ideology to become popular on the faults of his officials by charging that they abused their power and failed to explain his ideas to the common people. In general, the officials of Shanxi misappropriated funds intended to be used for propaganda, attempted to explain Yan's ideas in language too sophisticated for the common people, and often behaved in a dictatorial manner that discredited Yan's ideology and failed to generate popular enthusiasm for his regime. Yan did not come into serious conflict with

16245-410: The figure of Vlasov gains a political value in contemporary Russia. The positive attitude towards Vlasov became visible in the late 1980s, but the majority of Russian society is negative towards collaboration, although there is still no unity on this question. The fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to immediate popularisation of Vlasov among the emerging far-right nationalists, since they preferred

16416-547: The first; later they compromised themselves more with "historical apologies for restoration and reaction", therefore making Nicolaevsky's narrative unable to be adopted as universal, since one of their publications called Kerensky a traitor for preventing the Kornilov coup in 1917. However, after the polemic Nicolaevsky continued his publications about the biographies of the Vlasovite leaders and did not change his opinion, and not all

16587-655: The forces of Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, during the Nationalists' Northern Expedition . While aiding Chiang, Yan's occupation of Beijing in June 1928 brought the Northern Expedition to a successful conclusion. Yan's assistance to Chiang was rewarded shortly afterwards by his being named minister of the interior and deputy commander-in-chief of all Kuomintang armies Yan's support for Chiang's military campaigns and his suppression of Communists influenced Chiang to recognize Yan as

16758-531: The forces of the Russian Liberation Army . Books: Documentaries: Yan Xishan Yan Xishan ( IPA: [jɛ̌n ɕíʂán] ; 8 October 1883 – 22 July 1960; also romanized as Yen Hsi-shan ) was a Chinese warlord who served in the government of the Republic of China . He effectively controlled the province of Shanxi from the 1911 Xinhai Revolution to the 1949 Communist victory in

16929-418: The government's abilities to mobilize its populace in support of its policies and to the close respectful relationship that existed between the military and civilian populations. He attributed the surprising Japanese victory in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War to the enthusiastic mobilization of the Japanese public in supporting the military. After returning to China in 1910, he wrote a pamphlet warning China that it

17100-400: The governor of Shanxi . Vlasov was also the chief of staff to the head of the Soviet military mission, General Aleksandr Cherepanov . Upon his return, Vlasov served in several assignments before being given command of the 99th Rifle Division . After just nine months under Vlasov's leadership, and an inspection by Semyon Timoshenko , the division was recognized as one of the best divisions in

17271-674: The governor of Manchuria, Zhang Xueliang , publicly declared his allegiance to Chiang, whose support Zhang required to contest the Russians and Japanese, Yan fled to Dalian in the Japanese-held Kwantung Leased Territory and returned to an unconquered Shanxi only after he had made peace with Chiang in 1931. During the Central Plains War , the Kuomintang encouraged Muslims and Mongols to overthrow both Feng Yuxiang and Yan. Chiang's defeat of Yan and Feng in 1930

17442-574: The governor of Shanxi and to allow him to expand his influence into Hebei . Yan's alliance with Chiang was interrupted in 1929 when Yan joined Chiang's enemies to establish an alternative national government in northern China. His allies included the northern warlord Feng Yuxiang , the Guangxi Clique led by Li Zongren , and the left-leaning Kuomintang faction led by Wang Jingwei . While Feng and Chiang's armies were annihilating each other, Yan marched virtually unopposed through Shandong and captured

17613-466: The grounds of the ROA, but he saw Vlasov's political career as an overcoming of opportunism and "inertness", although he failed to "overcome" "Bolshevism"; Catherine Andreev agreed with Fischer's last point, but criticized the other two. More to it, Tromly believes that the works of Catherine Andreev and Kirill Aleksandrov  [ ru ] keep the "essential contours" of Nicolaevsky's narrative, and that Andreev "bypasses controversial questions about

17784-566: The idea of equal partnership with Germany and the idea of an independent Russia; his speeches angered Himmler, and in response, Wilhelm Keitel issued an order that Vlasov must be returned to POW camp and that his name henceforth should be used only for propaganda purposes. Rosenberg stopped supporting Vlasov, but he was placed under virtual house arrest in Dahlem instead of being sent to the POW camp. Disappointed, Vlasov said several times that he would return to

17955-456: The ideals of Pan-Slavism and an Empire to a separatist nation-state. A major liberal politician during the fall of the USSR and the mayor of Moscow Gavriil Popov wrote a complimentary book about Vlasov, but was not supported. In the 2000s various nationalist organizations which associated themselves with the White movement campaigned for rehabilitation of Vlasov; the support for the White narrative in

18126-521: The interest of the U.S. military intelligence, the post-war Vlasovites stressed the anti-Communist nature of their movement. However, the new narrative was left-wing, being constructed by the Menshevik intellectual and historian Boris Nicolaevsky , who after visiting DP camps came to a belief that the Vlasov Movement was democratic and even anti-Nazi to some extent. His narrative was somewhat closer to

18297-465: The later authors labelled Vlasov as "the symbol of the suffering Russian people" and its "victimhood" throughout the 20th century. Solzhenitsyn described the Vlasovite prisoners met by him in GULAG camps and wrote that "it's not the Vlasovites who betrayed Russia - it's the Soviet state which betrayed these soldiers", since "Stalin sacrificed armies meaninglessly. He had treated prisoners of war as traitors", and

18468-645: The local population, and in some areas, the local people resisted the measures. Yan's determination to modernize Shanxi was partly inspired by his interactions with the foreign doctors and personnel who arrived in Shanxi in 1918 to help him suppress the epidemic. He was impressed with the zeal, talents, and modern outlook of the personnel and subsequently compared foreigners favorably to his own conservative and generally apathetic officials. Conversations with other famous reformers, including John Dewey , Hu Shih , and Yan's close friend H.H. Kung , reinforced his determination to westernize Shanxi. Yan attempted to modernize

18639-515: The moral rehabilitation of the Chinese people. Believing that no single ideology existed to unify the Chinese people when he came to power, Yan attempted to generate an ideal ideology himself, and once boasted that he had succeeded in creating a comprehensive system of belief that embodied the best features of "militarism, nationalism, anarchism, democracy, capitalism, communism, individualism, imperialism, universalism, paternalism and utopianism." Much of Yan's attempts to spread his ideology were through

18810-435: The morale and loyalty of his officials and of the people of Shanxi. During his time of study in Japan, Yan became attracted to militarism and Social Darwinism , but he renounced them after World War I. Throughout the rest of his life, he identified with the position of most Chinese conservatives at the time: social and economic reform would progress from ethical reform, and the problems confronting China could be solved only by

18981-458: The most influential and powerful gentry in Shanxi were often the worst offenders, officials drawn from the privileged class of Shanxi seldom enforced Yan's decrees outlawing the use of narcotics and often evaded punishment themselves. Eventually, Yan was forced to abandon his efforts to suppress opium trafficking and attempted instead to establish a government monopoly on the production and the sale of opium in Shanxi. Yan continued to complain about

19152-486: The movement being "not National Socialist": "It is significant that it does not fight Jewry, that the Jewish Question is not recognized as such at all"; instead it presented "a watered-down infusion of liberal and Bolshevik ideologies", and Taubert described the concern with "strong Anglophile sympathies" and it "toying with the idea of a possible change of course" while not "feel[ing] bound to Germany". Only combat of

19323-537: The ones edited by Zykov, often in form of articles reprinted from the Völkischer Beobachter with the citation of the source. The program documents were also written as a compromise with Nazism to various extents: the Smolensk Declaration included some pro-Nazi points ("Germany was not fighting the war against the Russian people and their homeland but merely against Bolshevism"), and the Manifesto included

19494-517: The only army in the Warlord era drawn exclusively from the province in which it was stationed, and because he insisted for his soldiers to perform work to improve Shanxi's infrastructure, including road-maintenance and assisting farmers, and because his discipline ensured that his soldiers actually paid for anything that they took from civilians, the army in Shanxi enjoyed much more popular support than most of his rivals' armies in China. Yan's officer corps

19665-485: The opium trade in Shanxi were largely successful, and the number of opium addicts in the province had been reduced by 80% by 1922. In the absence of efforts by other warlords to combat opium production and trade, Yan's efforts to combat opium use only increased the price of opium so much that narcotics of all kinds were drawn into Shanxi from other provinces. Users often switched from opium to pills mixed from morphine and heroin , which were easier to smuggle and use. Because

19836-561: The other Russian POWs in Germany; some of Vlasov's close associates like Milety Zykov  [ ru ] , a Soviet journalist of Jewish origins, described themselves as Marxists , Zykov was also described as a Bukharinist . Despite being captured by the Nazi secret police and killed, ostensibly for his Jewish origins and for his views, before the formation of the Committee for the Liberation of

20007-574: The political body of this movement, and its ideals were described in the Prague Manifesto of the Committee in November 1944. Robert Conquest wrote that Vlasov's "program shows that he was entirely out of sympathy with Nazism, and only concerned with a democratic Russia." As Vlasov became the undisputed leader of the movement, it became referred to as "the Vlasov Movement", while his Manifesto calls it

20178-505: The political leader of the Russian collaborationist anti-Soviet movement. Initially this army existed only on paper and was used by Germans to goad Red Army troops to surrender, while any political and military activities were officially forbidden to him by the Nazis after his visits to the occupied territory; only in November 1944 did Heinrich Himmler , aware of Germany's shortage of manpower, arrange for Vlasov formations composed of Soviet prisoners of war as armed forces of Committee for

20349-490: The political pressure, voted in favor of its scientific value. Vlasov was taken to Berlin under the control of the Wehrmacht Propaganda Department . While there, he and other Soviet officers began drafting plans for the creation of a Russian provisional government and the recruitment of a Russian army of liberation under Russian command. In the spring of 1943, Vlasov wrote an anti-Bolshevik leaflet known as

20520-550: The population of the USSR, Alfred Rosenberg proposed the creation of monoethnic nation-states as satellites of the Third Reich ruled by local nationalist collaborators. Hitler rejected this project, but the Soviet defectors were used by Wehrmacht Propaganda . Eventually Hitler agreed to use the Soviet defectors for propaganda purposes. As the reports of the Osstruppen defecting the Soviet partisans reached Hitler, he demanded that all

20691-427: The power of landowners over the populace in the countryside. The reforms also weakened potential rivals in his province and benefited Shanxi farmers. Yan attempted to develop his army as a locally recruited force, which cultivated a public image of being servants, rather than masters, of the people. He developed an all-encompassing idiosyncratic ideology (literally "Yan Xishan Thought") and disseminated it by sponsoring

20862-533: The presidential elections, during which the Ukrainian units of Russian citizens launched an incursion into Russia : he labelled as "Vlasovites" these units, reminded how the Vlasovites were executed, and ordered the FSB to track down every Russian citizen "fighting against Russia": "We will punish them without a statute of limitations, wherever they are." In 2001, a Russian organization "For Faith and Fatherland" applied to

21033-529: The primary goal of the Heart-Washing Society was to encourage Chinese patriotism by reviving the Confucian church, which led foreigners to accuse him of attempting to create a Chinese version of Shinto . Yan attempted to moderate some aspects of Sun Yat-sen 's ideology that he viewed as potentially threatening to his rule. Yan altered some of Sun's doctrines before he disseminated them in Shanxi by formulating his own version of Sun's Three Principles of

21204-412: The progress made by the Japanese, whom the Chinese had previously considered unsophisticated and backward, and began to worry about the consequences if China were to fall behind the rest of the world. That formative experience was later cited as a period of great inspiration for his later efforts to modernize Shanxi. Yan eventually concluded that the Japanese had successfully modernized largely because of

21375-399: The province and proclaimed it independent of the Qing government. He justified his actions by attacking the Qing's failure to repel foreign aggression , and he promised a wide range of social and political reforms. In 1911 Yan hoped to join forces with another prominent Shanxi revolutionary, Wu Luzhen , to undermine Yuan Shikai 's control of north China, but the plans were aborted after Wu

21546-600: The provincial capital of Jinan in June 1930. After those victories, Yan attempted to forge a new national government, with himself as president, by calling an "Enlarged Party Conference." Under his plan, Yan was to be president, and Wang was to serve as his prime minister. The conference attempted to draft a national constitution and involved the participation of numerous high-ranking Chinese militarists and politicians from among Chiang's rivals. The deliberations were interrupted by Chiang, who decisively defeated Feng's armies, invaded Shandong, and virtually annihilated Yan's army. When

21717-441: The queues of anyone still wearing them. In one instance, Yan lured people into theatres to have his police systematically cut the hair of the audience. He attempted to combat widespread female illiteracy by creating in each district at least one vocational school in which peasant girls could be given a primary-school education and taught domestic skills. After Kuomintang military victories in 1925 generated great interest in Shanxi for

21888-618: The reactionary Tsarist and later imperialist bourgeois government with a revolutionary civil war; Nikolaevsky drew a parallel between Vlasov and Leninists and thought the first to be influenced by the latter, believing that Vlasov's motivation was to begin a similar civil war. The Vlasovites embraced Nicolaevsky's narrative, and he would help them to operate through the CIA-supported AMCOMLIB , however, Roman Gul believed that they were insincere and saw Nicolaevsky only as "a direct and CLEAN entry to Washington" and were interested in

22059-453: The release of a popular new book on the subject." Some of them are related to the Ukrainian units of Russian citizens, like the Freedom of Russia Legion , while prominent nationalist figures have branded Russians fleeing mobilization as Vlasovite deserters, and some media reminded of the connection between Vlasovites and Banderites; after criticizing the war, the journalist Dmitry Kolezev received

22230-459: The right of the nations to self-determination and to separate from Russia and did not contain antisemitic remarks and invectives; Bloknot Propagandista also contained an attempt in critique of Marxism and denied both internationalism and national chauvinism. However, antisemitic remarks were made in one of the speeches of Vasily Malyshkin in 1943 and in and in Georgi Zhilenkov 's interview to

22401-581: The school, he was first introduced to mathematics, physics, and various other subjects imported directly from the West. In 1904, he was sent to Japan to study at the Tokyo Shimbu Gakko , a military preparatory academy, and he later entered the Imperial Japanese Army Academy from which he graduated in 1909. Over the five years that Yan studied in Japan, he became impressed by the country's successful efforts at modernization. He observed

22572-399: The so-called "Russian Liberation Movement", the main goal of which was the overthrow of Stalinism with the aid of the Nazis; the ROA was thought to be the armed force of the movement. Although the White emigres participated in its formation, the Soviet defectors eventually became its leaders and formulated its political ideals. The Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia became

22743-416: The sovietologist Eugene Lyons , the chairman of the AMCOMLIB whose attitute towards the Vlasovites was ambivalent, who also believed the ROA to be influenced with Lenin's revolutionary defeatism , the historians Jurgen Thorwald and Joachim Hoffmann also contributed to the theme; the historian George Fischer, on the contrary, believed the "inertness" and opportunism caused by Stalinist totalitarianism to be

22914-458: The spread of Communist guerrilla operations into Shanxi. Led by Liu Zhidan and Xu Haidong , 34,000 Communist troops crossed into southwestern Shanxi in February 1936. As Yan had predicted, the Communists enjoyed massive popularity; although they were outnumbered and ill-armed, they succeeded in occupying the southern third of Shanxi in less than a month. The Communists' strategy of guerrilla warfare

23085-596: The spread of communism. "The New Deal is an effective way of stopping communism," Yan said, "by having the government step in and ride roughshod over the interests of the rich." Yan then undertook a series of public works projects inspired by the New Deal to reduce unemployment in his own province. In spite of his efforts, Yan did not succeed in making his school of thought widely popular in Shanxi, and most of his subjects refused to believe that his true objectives differed substantially from those of past regimes. Yan himself blamed

23256-566: The state of medicine in China by funding the Research Society for the Advancement of Chinese Medicine, based in Taiyuan, in 1921. Highly unusual in China at the time, the school had a four-year curriculum and included courses in both Chinese and western medicine. Its courses were taught in English, German, and Japanese. The main skills that Yan hoped physicians trained at the school would learn were

23427-400: The support and assistance that he had secured from other high-profile Chinese statesmen implied that there was a credible expectation that Yan would lead a central government if Chiang failed to defeat Yan's alliance. Yan returned to Shanxi only through a complex effort of intrigue and politicking. Much of Chiang's failure to immediately and permanently eject Yan or his subordinates from Shanxi

23598-616: The support and protection of Zhang. That move was not protested by Chiang because of his involvement in suppressing the forces of Li Zongren , who had marched up to northern Hunan from his base in Guangxi in support of Yan. Yan remained in the background of Shanxi politics until the Nanjing government's failure to resist the Japanese takeover of Manchuria after the Mukden Incident gave Yan and his followers an opportunity to informally overthrow

23769-466: The surrounding of his army and details of battles, then "had Vlasov imprisoned in occupied Vinnytsia ." While in prison, Vlasov met Captain Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt , a Baltic German who was attempting to foster a Russian Liberation Movement . Strik-Strikfeldt had circulated memos to this effect in the Wehrmacht. Strik-Strikfeldt, who had been a participant in the White movement during

23940-438: The title of Pacification Commissioner in 1932, and he appointed Yan to the central government's Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission . In 1934, Chiang finally flew to Taiyuan, where he praised Yan's administration in return for Yan's public support for Nanjing. By publicly praising Yan's government, Chiang in effect admitted that Yan remained the undisputed ruler of Shanxi. After 1931, Yan continued to give nominal support to

24111-415: The trade of salt, produced in Shanxi's public factories, to the central government, Chiang retaliated by flooding the market of northern China with so much salt, produced around coastal China, that the price of salt in China's northern provinces dropped extremely low. Those artificially low salt prices made neighboring provinces virtually stop purchasing Shanxi salt altogether. In 1935, Chiang's announcement of

24282-525: The truth, as he, unlike the Whites, could cite Vlasovite documents, like the Prague Manifesto of the KONR. However, it was incomplete and still had some factual errors. Nikolaevsky described the Vlasovites with the word porazhentsy , "defeatists", the word used by the Bolsheviks during the World War II towards themselves, as they campaigned against the war efforts of the Russian Empire and for overthrow of

24453-543: The units be disbanded, and the men sent to the mines and factories, but this order wasn't executed due to the resistance of the OKW . After the 20 July plot, the Eastern troops were handed to the SS, and as Hitler weakened due to physical conditions, Himmler found possible the creation of a collaborationist political organisation with its army. As he defected, Vlasov became the leading figure of

24624-488: The usage of the word "banderite" became popular in propaganda, and the Russian media and politicians were eager to remind of collaborators of other nationalities, Tatars and Chechens, but avoided Vlasov and the ROA: McGlynn noted that in an analysis of 3,509 comparisons between the 2014 conflict and WWII, Vlasov was mentioned just once, as a reminder of Russian collaboration could "besmirch Russia's moral authority as an heir to

24795-521: The virtues of moderation and harmony associated with the Confucian Doctrine of the Mean . Many of the reforms that Yan attempted were undertaken with the intention of demonstrating that he was a junzi , the epitome of Confucian virtue. Yan's interpretations of Confucianism were mostly borrowed from the form of Neo-Confucianism , which had been popular during the Qing dynasty. He taught that everyone had

24966-476: The war, the Whites who participated in the Vlasov Movement sought to connect it with their cause: for example, Constantine Kromiadi wrote that the Vlasov Movement was a part of the "Christian war of the 30 years of the liberation movement against communism"; the White rightists sought to "offset the opprobrium of collaboration with Germany by viewing World War Two through the prism of the Russian Civil War and

25137-618: Was a Soviet Russian Red Army general. During the Axis-Soviet campaigns of World War II he fought (1941–1942) against the Wehrmacht in the Battle of Moscow and later was captured attempting to lift the siege of Leningrad . After his capture, he defected to the Third Reich and nominally headed the collaborationist Russian Liberation Army ( Russkaya osvoboditel'naya armiya , ROA), also becoming

25308-554: Was a moral and spiritual unity of mankind that implied that a state of harmony was closer to the human ideal than conflict. By rejecting economic determinism in favor of morality and free will, Yan hoped to create a society that would be more productive and less violent than he perceived communism to be and to avoid the exploitation and the human misery that he believed was the inevitable result of capitalism. Yan interpreted Franklin Roosevelt 's New Deal as promoting socialism to combat

25479-448: Was assassinated. Yan was elected military governor by his comrades but was unable to prevent a subsequent invasion by the troops of Yuan Shikai, who occupied most parts of Shanxi in 1913. During Yuan's invasion, Yan survived only by withdrawing northward and aligning himself with a friendly insurgent group in neighboring Shaanxi province. By avoiding a decisive military confrontation with Yuan, Yan preserved his own base of power. Though he

25650-556: Was designated as an extremist material; the professional historians who joined the attacks compared the dissertation with "blackening of our history" by foreigners. After the Annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the War in Donbas in 2014 Putin called the Ukrainian authorities "Banderites", and Kremlin-affiliated media and politicians alike framed the fighting as a rerun of the Second World War;

25821-466: Was drawn from Shanxi's gentry and given two years of education at government expense. Despite efforts to subject his officers to a rigorous Japanese-style training regimen and to indoctrinate them in Yan Xishan Thought, his armies never proved to be especially well-trained or disciplined in battle. In general, Yan's military record is not considered positive (he had more defeats than victories) and it

25992-563: Was equally inspiring. He appreciated the efforts of missionaries, mostly Americans who maintained a complex of schools in Taigu , to educate and modernize Shanxi. He regularly addressed the graduating classes of the schools but was generally unsuccessful in recruiting the students to serve his regime. Yan supported the indigenous Christian church in Taiyuan and at one time seriously considered using Christian chaplains in his army. His public support of Christianity waned after 1925, when he failed to come to

26163-576: Was established after the end of the Qing dynasty . The demonstrated futility of opposing Yuan's military domination must have made it seem more important to Sun to bring Yuan into the process of ruling the republic and to come to terms with his (potential) enemy. By 1911, Shanxi was one of the poorest provinces in China. Yan believed that unless he modernized and revived Shanxi's economy and infrastructure, he would be unable to prevent Shanxi from being overrun by rival warlords. A military defeat in 1919 inflicted by

26334-515: Was even put under house arrest and threatened with being handed over to the Gestapo . Despondent about his mission, Vlasov threatened to resign and return to the POW camp, but was dissuaded at the last minute by his confidants. According to Varlam Shalamov and his tale The Last Battle of Major Pugachov , Vlasov emissaries lectured to the Russian prisoners of war , explaining to them that their government had declared them all traitors, and that escaping

26505-422: Was executed by hanging on 1 August 1946. His execution was among the last death sentences in the Soviet Union carried out by hanging, after which executions were conducted only by shooting . In the USSR, the figure of Vlasov was villainized because of the need to defend the official myth of the Great Patriotic War "which was created and assiduously supported as a pillar of state legitimacy and national culture in

26676-515: Was extremely effective against and demoralizing for Yan's forces, who repeatedly fell victim to surprise attacks. The Communists in Shanxi made good use of co-operation supplied by local peasants to evade and easily locate Yan's forces. When the reinforcements sent by the central government forced the Communists to withdraw from Shanxi, the Red Army escaped by splitting into small groups, which were actively supplied and hidden by local supporters. Yan himself admitted that his troops had fought poorly during

26847-515: Was finally allowed to retreat, but by now, too weakened, it was surrounded and in June 1942 virtually annihilated during the final breakout at Myasnoi Bor. After Vlasov's army was surrounded, he himself was offered an escape by aeroplane. The general refused and hid in German-occupied territory; ten days later, on July 12, 1942, a local farmer exposed him to the Germans. Vlasov's opponent and captor, general Georg Lindemann , interrogated him about

27018-424: Was friends with Sun Yat-sen, Yan withheld support for him in the 1913 " Second Revolution " and instead ingratiated himself with Yuan, who allowed him to return as military governor of Shanxi, commanding a military that was then staffed by Yuan's own henchmen. In 1917, shortly after Yuan Shikai's death, Yan solidified his control over Shanxi , ruling there uncontested. After Yuan's death in 1916, China descended into

27189-482: Was in Japan, he met Sun Yat-sen and joined his Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance), a semi-secret society dedicated to overthrowing the Qing dynasty. He also attempted to popularize Sun's ideology by organizing an affiliated "Blood and Iron Society" within the ranks of Chinese students at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. The goal of the student group was to organize a revolution that would lead to

27360-454: Was in danger of being overtaken by Japan unless it developed a local form of bushido . Even before studying in Japan, Yan had become disgusted with the open and widespread corruption of officials in Shanxi and had become convinced that China's relative helplessness in the 19th century was the result of the Qing dynasty 's generally hostile attitude towards modernization and industrial development and its grossly inept foreign policy. While he

27531-408: Was incurable, and the only way to keep the disease from spreading was physical isolation of the infected. He ordered his officials to keep infected family members, neighbors, or even entire infected communities from each other by threat of police force if necessary. Yan's promotion of germ theory and his enforcement of physical isolation to reduce the effect of epidemics were not completely accepted by

27702-415: Was invaded. Although Yan admired their philosophy and economic methods, he feared the threat posed by Communists almost as much as that of the Japanese. In the early 1930s, he observed that if it invaded Shanxi, the Red Army would enjoy the support of 70% of his subjects and readily be able to recruit one million men from among its most desperate citizens. He remarked that "the job of suppressing communism

27873-529: Was known for its many successful banks until the late 19th century). As a young man he worked for several years at his father's bank while he pursued a traditional Confucian education at a local village school. After his father was ruined by a late 19th-century depression, which ravaged the Chinese economy, Yan enrolled in a free military school that was run and financed by the Manchu government in Taiyuan . While studying at

28044-506: Was largely from the influence of Zhang Xueliang and the Japanese, who were anxious to prevent the extension of Chiang's authority into Manchuria. In Yan's absence, the civil government of Shanxi ground to a halt, and the various military leaders of Shanxi struggled with one another to fill the vacuum, which forced Chiang's government to appoint Shanxi's leaders from among Yan's subordinates. Although he did not immediately declare his return to provincial politics, Yan returned to Shanxi in 1931 with

28215-444: Was limited to the area around Taiyuan. By 1949, three of the seven government-run hospitals were in the city. In 1934, the province produced a ten-year-plan that envisaged employing a hygiene worker in every village, but the advent of World War II and the subsequent civil war made it impossible to carry those plans out. To maintain Shanxi's neutrality and to free it from serious military confrontations with rival warlords, Yan developed

28386-458: Was never very enthusiastic about "autonomy" and rejected their overtures when he realized that they intended to make him their puppet. Yan likely used the negotiations to frighten Chiang into using his armies to defend Shanxi since he was afraid that Chiang was preparing to sacrifice northern China to avoid fighting the Japanese. If those were Yan's intentions, they were successful since Chiang assured Yan that he would defend Shanxi with his army if it

28557-512: Was pointless. As Vlasov proclaimed, even if the Soviets succeeded, Stalin would send them to Siberia . Only in September 1944 did Germany, at the urging of Heinrich Himmler , initially a virulent opponent of Vlasov, finally permit Vlasov to raise his Russian Liberation Army . Vlasov formed and chaired the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia , proclaimed by the Prague Manifesto on 14 November 1944. Vlasov also hoped to create

28728-410: Was sparked after staying in a western hospital in Japan for three months in which he was impressed by seeing modern medical equipment, including X-rays and microscopes, for the first time. Yan continued to promote a tradition of Chinese medicine that was informed by Western medical science throughout his period of governance, but much of the teaching and publication that the school of medicine produced

28899-513: Was successful in eradicating banditry in Shanxi, which allowed him to maintain a relatively-high level of public order and security. Yan's successes in eradicating banditry in Shanxi included his co-operation with Yuan Shikai to defeat Bai Lang's remnant rebels after the failed 1913-1914 Bai Lang Rebellion . Yan went to great lengths to eradicate social traditions that he considered antiquated. He insisted for all men in Shanxi to abandon their Qing-era queues and gave to police instructions to clip off

29070-410: Was to strengthen Shanxi's defense against the Japanese. In the early 1930s, he supported anti-Japanese riots, denounced the Japanese occupation of Manchuria as "barbarous" and "evil," publicly appealed to Chiang to send troops to Manchuria, and arranged for his arsenal to arm partisans fighting the Japanese occupation in Manchuria. In December 1931, Yan was warned that after taking control of Manchuria,

29241-408: Was written by rather minor members of the KONR as open for discussion and was not recognized as an official program), both to the Western capitalism and Stalinism, which was called by the word "Bolshevism" and described in the Manifesto not as socialism , but as " state capitalism ", and proclaimed their devotion to "completing the Revolution" of 1917 without distinguishing the February Revolution and

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