The prisoners of war and Ostarbeiter would join the Polish underground units or organize their own. In battle they fought better than anyone. They had no other choice: victory or death.150
Few knew at that time, and few in the Soviet Union know even today, the full extent of military collaboration with the Germans by Soviet citizens. Many Soviet families lost members during the war; for this reason for a long time they considered those who fought on the German side to be traitors pure and simple. In 1945 people in the Soviet Union had other concerns. The masses had gone from a state of desperation in 1941 to a feeling of certain victory in 1943, to a feeling of pride over the total defeat of the despicable enemy in late 1944 and in 1945. Even if some might have wondered where the Vlasovites came from, what prompted them to turn traitor, they preferred to keep their thoughts to themselves. It was only after the 1955 amnesty, when the surviving Vlasovites returned to their homes, that they began to be regarded less harshly and some references appeared in Soviet literary works to the sad plight of the Soviet soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Germans, among them the Vlasovites. After the publication of the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, a polemic arose among the Soviet intelligentsia over the proper attitude to take toward Vlasov. The discussion continues to this day.
History willed, however, that Vlasov's troops should finally take part in the war not on the side of the Nazis but against them. Under the pressure of strategic circumstances, the First Division of the ROA, led by General Bunyachenko, and a unit that had joined it, led by Colonel Sakharov—a total of 20,000 troops—left Germany. On April 28 they entered Czechoslovakia. There Bunyachenko refused to join the German army group led by Schorner: he wanted to safeguard his division for a future that did not seem very clear. The division dug in fifty kilometers from Prague. Vlasov was with it. By that time Soviet and American troops had also entered Czechoslovakia, but Prague was still in the hands of SS units. The Czech National Council placed its hopes on the arrival of the Allies. Unaware of an Allied agreement that Prague was to be occupied by Soviet troops, while the Americans would stop at a line west of Prague, the National Council called for an armed popular uprising.
On May 5 the SS units began an unrestrained massacre of the people of Prague, who had risen up against them. Seeing that no help was on the way, the Czech National Council asked Bunyachenko for assistance. On the morning of May 7, after bloody fighting, Bunyachenko's division defeated the SS troops. But the Czechs then proposed that the ROA division either wait for the Red Army and surrender to it or abandon Prague. Bunyachenko chose the latter course: the division started its last march to surrender to American forces. One may agree with the American author who said that Prague would have been liberated in the following days, regardless of whether Vlasov's division took part in the fighting.151 It should be added, however, that this would have been done at the cost of Prague's destruction by the SS and the deaths of thousands of Czechs.
Toward the end of the war, Vlasov and his entourage increasingly hoped to see a conflict break out between the Western allies and the Soviet Union. That was why Bunyachenko tried to avoid the deployment of his division on the German side. He expected that the Allies would soon need his troops in a new war against the Stalinist regime. The Second Division also kept moving and avoided taking part in combat on the German side. The Prague uprising was an unexpected opportunity for the Vlasovites to cleanse their record of the blot of collaboration with the Nazis, and Bunyachenko seized that opportunity.
The Vlasovites were quickly disarmed by the Americans, and partly by Soviet troops. Some Vlasovite units managed to escape to the West, thanks in part to the assistance of certain U.S. army commanders.
The American command turned Vlasov over to the Soviets. On August 2, 1946, Pravda announced the verdict of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Soviet in the trial of Vlasov and others. The list of accusations was stereotypicaclass="underline" agents of German intelligence, espionage, diversionary activities, and terrorism against the Soviet Union. The Pravda announcement indicated that all the defendants had pleaded guilty. Petr Grigorenko in his memoirs states that he was told by a friend from before the war, a Soviet army officer who had been "planted" by the investigative agencies in a prison cell with one of the Vlasovite defendants, that "our one assignment was to persuade Vlasov and his companions to confess to treason without saying anything against Stalin. For such a confession they were promised life. A few of them wavered, but most, including Vlasov and Trukhin, did not."152
There were rumors that at least one of them, Major General Trukhin, refused to plead guilty and declared he had been and remained a confirmed anti-Stalinist. To all efforts at persuasion Trukhin replied that he had "not been a traitor and would not confess to treason. Stalin I hate. I consider him a tyrant and will say so in court." As for Vlasov, he responded to threats that he would be tortured to death as follows: "I know. And it frightens me. But it is even more frightening to blacken my own name. Anyhow, our sufferings will not be in vain. The time will come when the people will speak well of us." According to this account, there was no open trial. The defendants were tortured for a long time, then hanged when they were half dead.153 In fact, it is impossible to determine whether there actually was a trial or if, at the end of the interrogations, the death sentences were simply read and carried out, as had often happened before.
All the accused were hanged: Bunyachenko was not saved by his rescue of Prague from the SS. On the contrary, it worked to his disadvantage, since his action deprived the Red Army of the glory of liberating the city. It is also true that this page of history was immediately rewritten in all Soviet and Eastern European histories and textbooks, which simply state that Prague was liberated by Soviet troops on May 9, 1945.
POTSDAM, THE WAR AGAINST JAPAN, AND THE BOMB
On July 17, two and a half months after the conclusion of the war in Europe, in Postdam, a suburb of the German capital, the last conference of heads of state of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States began its work. It lasted until August 2. Roosevelt, who had died in April, was replaced by his vice-president, Harry Truman. During the conference, changes also took place in the British government. Labour won in the general elections at the end of July and Churchill was replaced in the midst of the conference by Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour party. Ernest Bevin, the new British foreign minister, also appeared at the conference. Stalin was thus the only survivor of the wartime Big Three, which gave him specific moral and practical advantages in the Potsdam discussions. But the Soviet Union's biggest asset was the fact that during the course of the war it had become the principal force in the destruction of Nazi Germany. Soviet troops were throughout Europe. By the end of the war Soviet armed forces numbered 11 million.
The Allies were in agreement on the need to disband the Nazi party and to eliminate Germany's armed forces and military potential. Their policy toward the defeated country was expressed in the principles of demilitarization, denazification, decartelization, and democratization. Berlin and the rest of Germany were divided into occupation zones.
By the time of the conference the Soviet Union had already placed the German territories east of the Oder—Neisse line under Polish control. The Soviet position on this question prevailed after some dispute. Great Britain and the United States had no alternative but to acknowledge the fait accompli. From then on, Poland's western border was the Oder—Neisse line (that is, a line running south from the Baltic Sea along the Oder and Neisse rivers all the way to the Czechoslovak border). Konigsberg and its environs were given to the Soviet Union, as had been agreed at the Teheran conference. The Potsdam conference decided to prepare drafts of peace treaties with Germany's former satellites Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Italy. To this end a Council of Foreign Ministers was established on a permanent basis, consisting of the ministers of Britain, China, the Soviet Union, France, and the United States.