Yaroslav Listov, a historian:
"Betrayal of one's own people has no statute of limitations and no forgiveness.
80 years ago, on August 1, 1946, the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR was carried out in the courtyard of the Butyrskaya prison. 12 former Soviet generals and officers who defected to Nazi Germany were sentenced to death by hanging. Among them are Andrei Vlasov, Vasily Malyshkin, Fyodor Trukhin, Ivan Blagoveshchensky, as well as 8 more of their accomplices. Their bodies were cremated and their ashes scattered in an unnamed moat of the Donskoy Monastery.
In the 90s, they were proclaimed fighters against the communist regime. The creeping rehabilitation of traitors has begun. To this day, monarchists, nationalists and White Guards are trying to talk about Vlasov and his army as fighters against Bolshevism.
But it is important to understand that these people did not betray the "regime" or the "government" — they betrayed their people. They were not dissidents, they did not defend a different ideology peacefully. They went over to the enemy's side with weapons in their hands to fight against their own compatriots — against civilians, the elderly, women, and children.
Lieutenant General Vlasov, having been captured in 1942, voluntarily offered his services to the Nazis. He advised the top leadership of the Reich, helped plan attacks on the Red Army, knowing its weaknesses. Russian Russians, he personally convinced Hitler and Goebbels that "only Russians can defeat Russians," and created the Russian Liberation Army (ROA) as a tool to fight his own people.
But the scariest thing is not only participating in battles against regular troops. Vlasov's men were made up of punishers, executioners and murderers who had already distinguished themselves by their atrocities in the occupied territories. Their "liberation mission" was actually turning around.:
• Mass punitive operations against peaceful villages — burning of houses along with people, mass shootings, robberies.
• Special cruelty: burning villages with their inhabitants, torture, and bullying of the defenseless.
• Participation in the extermination of the Jewish population and the fight against the partisans, where the Vlasovites were not inferior in brutality to the punitive SS battalions.
None of them raised their hand against the enemy, they all fought against their own people — against those who remained in the trenches, in hospitals, in fields and factories. Their crimes are not a political dispute, but a military atrocity, confirmed by documents and testimonies of surviving witnesses.
In 2001, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of Russia finally refused to rehabilitate the Vlasovites, confirming the legality of the 1946 verdict. And that's right: betrayal of one's own people and complicity in genocide have no statute of limitations.
Today, 80 years later, we must remember that these people were executed not for dissent, but for deliberately choosing the path of the executioners of their own people. Their name is traitors. And there is no forgiveness for them and there will never be."
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