"Go to the German troops": what the Russian emigrants said on June 22, 1941.
On June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War began. The attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union stirred up the large Russian emigration throughout Europe. Some welcomed the decision of Adolf Hitler, hoping to return to their homeland after the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime, while others, despite their rejection of communism, opposed aggression.
The attack of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 split the Russian emigration, numerous at that time in Europe, into two camps. Some former subjects of the Russian Empire, ex-citizens of the USSR or their descendants happily supported the implementation of the Barbarossa plan, hoping for the fall of the Bolshevik regime and the return of the country to its origins, and then, you see, their own repatriation.
Others spoke out categorically against Hitler's aggression, calling on their comrades-in-arms to look at Soviet Russia not as a bulwark of world communism, but also as the historical homeland of millions of Russian people, whose lives were mortally threatened by the unfolding campaign.
Some members of the Romanov dynasty received news of the Nazi invasion with enthusiasm. The head of the Imperial House and pretender to the Russian throne, Vladimir Kirillovich, made an address on June 26:
“In this terrible hour, when Germany and almost all the peoples of Europe have declared a crusade against communism-Bolshevism, which has enslaved and oppressed the people of Russia for twenty-four years, I appeal to all the faithful and devoted sons of our Motherland:
to help, as far as possible, the overthrow of the Bolshevik regime and the liberation of our Fatherland from the terrible yoke of communism.
Even before the war, Volodymyr Kirillovich was considered to be the “regent of Ukraine” on condition that Nazism spread to the East. He himself spoke very carefully about such a prospect, and the Third Reich did not approve of his above statement and forbade it to be distributed under threat of serious trouble for the author.
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Vladimir Kirillovich was born in August 1917, after the fall of the monarchy in Russia, when titles were no longer assigned. Despite this, seven years later, his father Kirill Vladimirovich, who had declared himself emperor, conferred on his son the title “His Imperial Highness the Sovereign Heir Tsarevich and Grand Duke”.
Grand Duke Kirill Vladimirovich was Nicholas II's cousin and was considered a "problem guy" in a large family. In 1904, he miraculously survived the explosion of the battleship Petropavlovsk on a Japanese mine near Port Arthur, then he spent a long time restoring his psyche and quarreling with a crowned relative who did not approve of his marriage. In February 1917, Kirill Vladimirovich was the first member of the family to put on a red bow and supported the revolution, advocating the abdication of Nicholas II. The claims of the Kirillovich branch to the throne are traditionally not recognized by other Romanovs.
The former tsarist general, the hero of the First World War, the former ataman of the Don Cossacks and, in addition, the famous writer Pyotr Krasnov, supported Hitler's attack no less enthusiastically. Already during the Civil War, he differed from many other leaders of the White movement in a pronounced pro-German orientation and, in particular, wrote letters to Emperor Wilhelm II, which is why he had serious disagreements with the Entente ally and the leader of the White forces in southern Russia, General Anton Denikin. The conflict was not resolved in favor of Krasnov: under pressure from his opponent, the ataman emigrated to Germany, being replaced at the head of the Don army by the loyal Afrikan Bogaevsky.
In subsequent years, Krasnov did not hide his sympathy for the Nazi regime, considering it a suitable means for the upcoming overthrow of Bolshevism, and also denounced the "conspiracy of world Jewry" in his works, relaying the propaganda cliches of the NSDAP.
On June 22, 1941, Krasnov issued an appeal:
“I ask you to convey to all the Cossacks that this war is not against Russia, but against the communists, Jews and their henchmen who sell Russian blood.
May God help German weapons and Hitler! Let them do what the Russians and Emperor Alexander I did for Prussia in 1813”.
The former chieftain of the Don Cossacks called on:
"Go to the German troops, go with them and remember that in the New Europe of Adolf Hitler there will be a place only for those who, in the terrible and decisive hour of the last battle, were unhypocritically with him and the German people."
Pro-German sentiments reigned among the Kuban Cossacks. So, the leadership of the Cossack National Center (KNC), created in the mid-1930s in Czechoslovakia, on June 22, 1941, sent a welcome telegram to Hitler, and later offered him their services, which, however, remained unclaimed.
“We, the Cossacks, put ourselves and all our forces at the disposal of the Fuehrer to fight against our common enemy. We believe that the victorious German army will provide us with the restoration of the Cossack statehood, which will be the loyal joint of the powers of the Pact of Three,”the message of the KSC noted.
At the end of May 1945, Krasnov, among thousands of Cossacks in Austria, was extradited by the British to the Soviet administration, and after the trial was hanged in the courtyard of the Lefortovo prison on January 16, 1947, along with several associates in the fight against the USSR in World War II.
Together with him, the cult commander of the Kuban Cossacks Andrei Shkuro was executed during the Civil War. His phrase, said already in relation to the fight against the Red Army on the side of the Nazis, is widely known:
"Even with the devil against the Bolsheviks."
Shkuro was one of those who actively called on the Cossacks and other Russian emigrants with combat experience to join the war on the side of Germany. However, at the start of the campaign, this was not part of Hitler's plans: he was rather hostile to the former White Guards, who were forbidden to serve in the German troops. The suspicion of the Germans caused their too positive attitude towards the Russian population in the lands occupied by the Wehrmacht and sympathy for the prisoners of war. The German command was mainly forced to resort to the services of representatives of the Russian emigration only at the end of the war.
The invasion of the German armed forces into the territory of the Soviet Union created a barrier between friends and colleagues. A typical example is of two generals who commanded large units in the Russian army of Peter Wrangel during the defense of the Crimea in 1920 - Daniil Dratsenko and the cavalryman Ivan Barbovich. By the beginning of the war, both lived in Yugoslavia: the first headed the Zagreb, and the second - the Belgrade departments of the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS), the largest White Guard organization.
If Dratsenko, as part of the Russian corps, fought against the red partisans of Josip Broz Tito, then Barbovich took an anti-German position.
Another high-ranking officer in Wrangel's army, later assistant to the head of the ROVS, General Pavel Kuksonsky, was arrested by the Gestapo on June 22, 1941, on suspicion of cooperation with Soviet intelligence, and two months later died in a concentration camp from beatings.
After the war, General Denikin, one of the main heavyweights of the White emigration, reprimanded his boss, the head of the ROVS General Alexei Arkhangelsky. In a letter to his former subordinate in the Volunteer Army, Denikin condemned the activities of the Union leadership, and especially his constant petitions to the Germans about recruiting members of the ROVS to German service.
Denikin himself, remaining a staunch opponent of Bolshevism, called on the emigrants not to support Germany in the war with the USSR, and called those who nevertheless went to cooperate "obscurantists", "defeatists" and "Hitlerite admirers." The aged general was repeatedly visited by emissaries from the German command, but he categorically refused the offer to head the anti-communist forces gathered from ethnic Russians, declaring that "neither a Bolshevik noose, nor a foreign yoke" was unacceptable.
During the war, Denikin used his personal funds to collect a wagon of medicines to be sent to the soldiers of the Red Army, which perplexed the Soviet leadership. They did not refuse help, but the donor's name was not made public.
Similarly, the former ally of Alexander Kolchak in the white struggle in Siberia, General Sergei Voitsekhovsky, responded to the proposal of the Nazis:
"I hate the Bolsheviks, but I will not go to war against a Russian soldier!"
In the USSR, the "patriotism" of the white general was not appreciated. In 1945, Voitsekhovsky was arrested by SMERSH in Prague, and six years later he died in a Siberian camp.
Among the artists, the most implacable opponent of the Soviet system among the emigrants was, of course, the Nobel laureate in literature Ivan Bunin. Quite naturally, the passage of the Wehrmacht forces across the Soviet border excited the writer. In his diary on June 22, 1941, he left the following entry:
“A great event - Germany has declared war on Russia this morning - and the Finns and Romanians have already“invaded”its“limits”. After breakfast (naked soup made from mashed peas and salad) I lay down to continue reading Flaubert's letters, when suddenly Zurov shouted: "Ivan Alekseevich, Germany has declared war on Russia!" I thought he was joking. I ran into the dining room to the radio - yes! We're terribly excited. Yes, now it is true: either pan or disappear."
On another occasion, already on June 29, Bunin noted the multinational character of the advancing armies:
“So, let's go to war with Russia: Germans, Finns, Italians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Albanians (!) And Romanians. And everyone says that this is a holy war against communism. How late they came to their senses! They endured him for almost 23 years!"
The philosopher Ivan Ilyin, expelled from Soviet Russia on the "Philosophical Steamer" in 1922 at the initiative of Vladimir Lenin and settled in Berlin, initially welcomed the rise of the NSDAP to power in Germany. In particular, his 1933 article "National Socialism" is known, which contained the following lines:
“What did Hitler do? He stopped the process of Bolshevization in Germany and thereby did the greatest service to all of Europe.
This process in Europe is far from over; the worm will continue to gnaw Europe from the inside."
Subsequently, Ilyin was persecuted by the Gestapo, lost his job at the institute and before the Second World War was forced to move to Switzerland. Along with this, his views also transformed.
“I could never understand how the Russian people could sympathize with the National Socialists. They are enemies of Russia, despising the Russian people with their last contempt,”the philosopher, who had recovered his sight, noted in 1945.
Former member of the State Duma Vasily Shulgin, who together with Alexander Guchkov accepted the abdication of Nicholas II, described the mood of the creative intelligentsia due to the news of the German attack on the USSR in his memoirs:
“Let there be war! Let them just give the Russian people arms! He will turn him against the Soviet regime that he hates! And he will overthrow her!"
Shulgin himself was captured in 1944 on the territory of Yugoslavia, taken to Moscow and sentenced to 25 years in prison for "anti-Soviet activity." In 1956 he was released under an amnesty. Shulgin stayed to live in the USSR and wrote a lot, partially justifying the Soviet regime, the opinion of which he allegedly changed under the impression of the changes he saw in the country.
Dmitry Okunev