page_title: Andrey Vlasov
section_title: Defection
hierarchical_section_title: Andrey Vlasov / Defection
caption_attribution_description: English: General Andrey Vlasov and Heinrich Himmler.
context_page_description: Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov was a Russian Red Army general. During World War II, he fought in the Battle of Moscow and later was captured attempting to lift the siege of Leningrad. After being captured, he defected to Nazi Germany and headed the Russian Liberation Army. At the war's end, he changed sides again and ordered the ROA to aid the Prague uprising against the Germans. He and the ROA then tried to escape to the Western Front, but were captured by Soviet forces. Vlasov was tried for treason and hanged.
context_section_description: 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, Nazi general Georg Lindemann, interrogated him about the surrounding of his army and details of battles, then "had Vlasov imprisoned in occupied Vinnytsia."
  Vlasov claimed that during his ten days in hiding he affirmed his anti-Bolshevism, believing Joseph Stalin was the greatest enemy of the Russian people, and there is evidence that suggests Vlasov may have changed sides in a bid to give his countrymen a better life than the one they had under Stalin. His critics, including Marshal Kirill Meretskov (who had endorsed Vlasov's promotion to executive officer of the Volkhov front) and most Soviet historians, argued that Vlasov adopted a pro-Nazi German stance in prison out of opportunism, careerism, and survival, fearing Stalinist retribution for losing his last battle and his army.
  In 2016, in his habilitation thesis, Russian historian Kirill Alexandrov analyzed 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 nationalists as "inciting hatred" but his university, regardless of the political pressure, voted in favor of its scientific value.
caption: Vlasov and Himmler on the cover of Swedish Signal
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