Andrey Vlasov

Andrey Vlasov was a Soviet general who fought against Germany before being captured in 1942. He later collaborated with Nazi Germany and became the leading figure in the Russian Liberation Army, which sought to recruit Soviet prisoners and opponents of Stalin.

Captured by Soviet forces at the end of the Second World War, Vlasov was tried for treason and executed in 1946. His career remains controversial because it combines military defeat, anti-Stalinism, collaboration and the coercive conditions faced by Soviet prisoners of war.

In William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central, Real and fictional lives are paired across the two regimes: Käthe Kollwitz attempts to preserve humane art under Nazism; Kurt Gerstein enters the SS and tries to expose mass murder; Friedrich Paulus is trapped with the Sixth Army at Stalingrad; and Andrey Vlasov crosses from Soviet command into collaboration with Germany.