Vlasov Movement

Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, Manifesto. November 14, 1944

This overview traced the Vlasov movement to the catastrophes of 1941–42, when millions of Soviet soldiers fell into German captivity and some turned to collaboration out of resentment, desperation, or hopes for a different Russia. Centered on the captured Red Army general Andrei Vlasov, the movement tried to present itself as a political alternative to Stalin, later forming the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia and issuing the Prague Manifesto. The text also highlighted its fatal contradiction: dependence on Nazi patronage. Vlasov’s forces arrived too late to matter, and many participants faced harsh punishment after the war.

Original Source: Volia Naroda (Berlin), No. 1 (15 November 1944).

Countrymen! Brothers, and Sisters!

In this hour of great trials we must decide the fate of our homeland, our peoples, and our own fate.

Mankind is going through an era of the greatest upheavals. The present world war is a fight to the finish of opposing political systems.

It is fought by the powers of imperialism, led by the plutocrats of England and the USA, whose power is based on the suppression and exploitation of other countries and peoples. It is fought by the powers of internationalism, led by the Stalin clique, dreaming of world revolution and the destruction of the national independence of other countries and peoples. It is fought by freedom-loving nations, who thirst to live their own way of life, determined by their historical and national development...

For more than a quarter of a century the peoples of Russia have experienced the burden of Bolshevik tyranny.

In the Revolution of 1917 the peoples who inhabited the Russian Empire sought to realize their aspirations for justice, general welfare, and national freedom. They revolted against the spent regime of the Tsar, which did not and could not abolish the causes of social injustice, the remnants of serfdom, and the economic and cultural backwardness. But after the Tsarist empire was overthrown by the peoples of Russia in February 1917, the parties and leaders were unable to decide on bold and consequent reforms. With their ambiguous policy, their compromises and their unwillingness to assume responsibility before the future, they failed to justify themselves before the people. The people spontaneously followed those who promised them immediate peace, land, freedom, and bread, those who advanced the most radical slogans. The Bolshevik Party promised the people a social-order system, where the people could live happily and, for this, the people made incalculable sacrifices. It is not the fault of the people that this party, after seizing power, not only failed to realize the demands of the people but, strengthening their repressive organs more and more, robbed the people of the rights they had won, and forced the people into permanent misery, into lawlessness, and into the most unscrupulous exploitation...

The Bolsheviks condemned the peoples of our homeland to permanent misery, hunger, and extinction, to spiritual and physical slavery, and, finally, they forced them into a criminal war for causes foreign to them.

All this is being camouflaged with the lie about the democratism of the Stalin constitution and the building of a socialist society. No other country in the world has or ever had such a low standard of living, while the material wealth of the country is so enormous. No other country has had such trammeling of rights and humiliation of the individual personality as there has been and remains under the Bolshevik system.

The peoples of Russia have lost forever their faith in Bolshevism, where the state is an all-devouring machine and the people have become impoverished slaves without any rights...

The Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia has as its aim:

(a) The overthrow of Stalin's tyranny, the liberation of the peoples of Russia from the Bolshevik system, and the restitution of those rights to the peoples of Russia which they fought for and won in the people's revolution of 1917;

(b) Discontinuation of the war and an honorable peace with Germany;

(c) Creation of a new free People's political system without Bolsheviks and exploiters.

As the basis for the new political system of the peoples of Russia the committee lays down the following main principles:

(1) Equality of all peoples of Russia and their real right for national development, self-determination, and state independence;

(2) Establishment of a national labor system where the interests of the state are subordinated to the task of raising the welfare and the development of the nation;

(3) Maintenance of peace, establishment of friendly relations with all countries, and international co6peration to the greatest possible extent;

(4) Extensive government measures to strengthen family and marriage; real equality of rights for women;

(5) Liquidation of forced labor and guarantee to all laboring people of the right to free labor as the basis for their material well-being; determination of wages for all types of labor that provide for a civilized standard of living;

(6) Liquidation of the kolkhozes, and gratuitous turnover of the land to the peasants as their private property; free choice of forms of land use; freedom to dispose of the products of one's own labor, abolition of forced deliveries, and annulment of debts to the Soviet government;

(7) Establishment of inviolable private property earned by work; reestablishment of trade, crafts, artisan enterprises, and furnishing to private initiative the right and opportunity to participate in the economic life of the country;

(8) Providing the intellectuals with the opportunity to create freely for the well-being of their people;

(9) The guarantee of social justice and protection for laboring people against any kind of exploitation, regardless of their origin and their former activity;

(10) Establishment for all, without exceptions, of a real right to free education, medical care, vacation, and old-age security;

(11) Destruction of the system of terror and tyranny; liquidation of forced resettlement and mass deportation; establishment of genuine freedom of religion, conscience, speech, assembly, and press; guarantee of inviolability of persons, their property, and homes: equality of all before the law, independence and public proceedings of the courts;

(12) Release of all political prisoners of Bolshevism, and the return home of those in the prisons and camps who suffered reprisals for their struggle against Bolshevism; no vengeance or persecution whatsoever of those who discontinue their fight for Stalin and Bolshevism, regardless of whether they fought from conviction or coercion;

(13) Rehabilitation of national property destroyed during the war-towns, villages, factories, and plants-at the expense of the government;

(14) Support of war invalids and their families by the state.

The destruction of Bolshevism is an urgent task of all progressive forces. The Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia is convinced that the united efforts of the peoples of Russia will receive support from all the freedom-loving nations of the world....

Source: George Fischer, Soviet Opposition to Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 194-97.