Russian nationalism of the ROA is nothing more than propaganda, inflated by Soviet sympathizers with anti-Russian tendencies. The Russian Liberation Army was not some Russian Orthodox army that would soon restore the tsar and overthrow the Bolsheviks; it was the same Bolsheviks who would have built the same USSR, but in a much more grotesque form.
In the newspaper “Pravda” No. 19(92) from Thursday, May 13, 1943, General Vlasov openly states that pre-revolutionary Russia was a “prison of nations,” a notion that the Bolsheviks themselves promoted until a certain point.
“…General Vlasov stated: ‘Pre-revolutionary tsarist Russia was based on the principle of the oppression of nationalities and was a prison of nations.’ This statement requires no further explanation.”
“…The Soviet Union became the same prison of nations that tsarist Russia once was.”
So much for “traditional Orthodox tsarist Russia,” I should say. But that’s not all, dear readers. There is another equally interesting figure who worked in the headquarters of the KONR (Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia). Meet Miletij Alexandrovich Zykov (his real name was Emil Izrailevich Yarkho), a Jew who, during his collaborationist activities, positioned himself as an anti-Stalinist Marxist.
He was the chief ideologist of the KONR and taught at the school for Russian propagandists in Dabendorf, as well as editing the newspapers “Zarya” and “Dobrovolets.” Zykov was willing to compromise with Nazi propaganda if it would give the Russian Liberation Movement the opportunity to fight against Stalin. At the same time, Zykov believed that despite the destructive aspects of Stalinism, the Soviet system as a whole had its positive aspects.
Here is what Vlasovite Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt recalls in his book “Against Stalin and Hitler” about Zykov:
“Zykov, who spent four years in exile in Siberia, was a passionate enemy of Stalin, but not of the Soviet system as such. In this regard, he differed somewhat from Vlasov and many other generals from his later staff. However, none of them had a personal grievance against the Soviet government, which had given them the opportunity to become what they were. This united them.
Within this so-called ‘genuine task,’ we faced many fundamental issues. One of the main problems was how to properly deal with the people entrusted to us and those who trusted us. They came to us from a different spiritual world and, in most cases, could not quickly adapt to the new environment. Despite their rejection of the Stalinist system, the impact of twenty-four years of indoctrination with a rigid Marxist-Leninist worldview was evident.”
And here is what Sergey Fröhlich (1904-1982), a German officer assigned to Vlasov, said about Miletij:
“Zykov was an interesting figure: the brain behind all of Dabendorf [the camp for training Vlasov’s officers]. But he was a law unto himself. He was a convinced old-school Marxist, which he did not hide. Although he was sincerely disappointed with Stalin’s abuses of Marxism, the Gestapo had no sympathy for him. After all, he was a Jew.”
It turns out that the homegrown Nazis who love “Russia without the Bolshevik Putin” are latent Marxists, ready to embrace similar leftists and Marxists as long as they are against Stalin? It seems that way. Yes, Stalin cannot be called a Russian nationalist, but his policies in the 1940s were far more nationalist than the pro-German rhetoric about the “prison of nations” with its anti-Soviet undertones.
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