Whitewashing Nazis

[TurboSuperA+]

Andriy Melnyk (officer) (T-H-L), Nazi collaborator.

My very best wishes (T-C-L) removed attributed opinion of an academic about Melnyk's antisemitism.

Joko2468 (T-C-L) then removed the whole section on Antisemitism.

Am I the only one who is alarmed by this?

Apparently Yad Vashem is also.

Israel’s Yad Vashem head added to Myrotvorets for criticizing OUN-M leader

Yad Vashem, the notorious Kremlin propagandists and Putinbots... this is getting out of hand.

[TurboSuperA+]

Where is Willy "Wikipedia is overrun by antisemites" Nilly when you need him?

[greyed.out.fields]

Where is Willy "Wikipedia is overrun by antisemites" Nilly when you need him?

Presumably not Willy Nilly, Llareggub's postman?

[Kowal2701]

I'd say go engage with them at the talk page, but you've already been TBANed for screeding and an incensed battleground attitude (also evidenced by your comments on this site, incl. in another thread where you said the only reason you don't engage in off-wiki coordination is because you can't be bothered!). You shouldn't use off-wiki forums to attempt to influence content in topics you're banned from editing.

[TurboSuperA+]

I'd say go engage with them at the talk page, but you've already been TBANed for screeding and an incensed battleground attitude (also evidenced by your comments on this site, incl. in another thread where you said the only reason you don't engage in off-wiki coordination is because you can't be bothered!). You shouldn't use off-wiki forums to attempt to influence content in topics you're banned from editing.

I am not banned from editing this topic.

[Ismail]

Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (T-H-L) is an example of an article I've noticed has been whitewashed multiple times over the years. As I pointed out on its talk page, in the words of one author Avtorkhanov "remained wholly unrepentant about his own grim political record as a leading Nazi collaborator during the Second World War." (Alex Marshall, The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule, p. 4), but that hasn't prevented certain edits claiming such things as that he teamed up with "freedom-fighting Germans" against the Soviets, and otherwise trying to erase his Nazi collaboration or bury it under euphemisms.

[TurboSuperA+]

There was a thread about me on WPO, calling me a "wikivatnik" and "pro-Russian propagandist" because I started an RfC on adding "far right" to the lede of Azov brigade (T-H-L).

It has since been deleted, but I archived it: https://archive.md/qPxoP

When I reported this to ArbCom, they said no rules were broken and that was perfectly fine. So I'm not doing anything wrong.

[NotLookingForTrouble]

There was a thread about me on WPO, calling me a "wikivatnik" and "pro-Russian propagandist" because I started an RfC on adding "far right" to the lede of Azov brigade (T-H-L).

It has since been deleted, but I archived it: https://archive.md/qPxoP

When I reported this to ArbCom, they said no rules were broken and that was perfectly fine. So I'm not doing anything wrong.

It's past and current links to the far-right are mentioned in the lead. I would not call you a "pro-Russian propagandist", tankie is shorter.

[Kowal2701]

I'd say go engage with them at the talk page, but you've already been TBANed for screeding and an incensed battleground attitude (also evidenced by your comments on this site, incl. in another thread where you said the only reason you don't engage in off-wiki coordination is because you can't be bothered!). You shouldn't use off-wiki forums to attempt to influence content in topics you're banned from editing.

I am not banned from editing this topic.

Then edit instead of trying to whip up a moral panic based on dubious info? I know Joko irl, and their edit didn't remove the content, it moved it under a new section and trimmed it to focus on Melnyk (though obv I haven't read the source). Nah it's fine if you're not banned onwiki from the topic, just shitty, but this site appears to mainly exist for people to escape the strict behavioural standards onwiki and chat shit about one another anyway.

[Kowal2701]

FWIW Myverybestwishes seems like a right rotten egg, and our articles are generally a bit slanted towards Ukraine/NATO (the fact Belarus is still labelled as a belligerent in the war, but Ukraine is presented as the sole belligerent on their side despite US intelligence heavily involved on the ground, is just propaganda)

[Randy from Boise]

Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (T-H-L) is an example of an article I've noticed has been whitewashed multiple times over the years. As I pointed out on its talk page, in the words of one author Avtorkhanov "remained wholly unrepentant about his own grim political record as a leading Nazi collaborator during the Second World War." (Alex Marshall, The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule, p. 4), but that hasn't prevented certain edits claiming such things as that he teamed up with "freedom-fighting Germans" against the Soviets, and otherwise trying to erase his Nazi collaboration or bury it under euphemisms.

Avtorkhanov, from memory here, was Chechen — one of the small handful of nationalities physically targeted by Stalin and his regime during the terror and WWII. The Chechens and the German invaders were a bit of a dubious alliance; certainly to an extent that calling Avtorkhanov a "Nazi collaborator" needs an asterisk.

I don't know about his specific case without studying it. I've got a couple of his books in the other room, let me see if I can dig one out and see how it describes him...

The Russian titles are buried or in storage and all I can find without spending time searching is a hardcover with no dj of his Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party: A Study in the Technology of Power (Praeger, 1959), which is regarded as his signature work. Praeger, incidentally, was a publisher very tight with the US State Department and CIA. And this particular book was published in.............wait for it.......... West Germany!

A trained historian, Avtorkhanov opens by mentioning that he was a grad student at the Institute of Red Professors (T-H-L) in 1928, which would indicate he was 95%+ sure of being a Communist Party member at that point.

A lot of shit happened in the next 15 years.

t

=============

Oh, here's a fun fact from my card catalog: Avtorkhanov wrote The Reign of Stalin, published in 1953, using the pen name Alexander Uralov. I think I've got a copy of that still in the house...

Just barely still here, I was getting ready to run this into storage since I needed the shelf space. Back to the shelf with it.

The book identifies Avtorkhanov as "Uralov" on the DJ and in the introduction, in which he says he decided against going pseudonymous with it since it might cheapen the book and for the fact that "my principle reason — the safety of my own people — is no longer valid.... Not only has my family been liquidated, but the Chechen race, to which I belonged, has been totally destroyed."

"The Ukase of the Supreme Council of the USSR, dated the 25th of June 1946, announcing the 'liquidation of the autonomous Chechen–Ingush Republic,' did no more than legalize, as was established later, a state of affairs which had existed since the 23rd of February 1944. On that day, ...the regular troops of the NKVD carried out an action of the most inhuman kind against a small nation with a love of liberty, the Chechens. After massacring a large part of the population, theis army of mercenaries deported the survivors to Central Asia, where there is reason to suppose their extermination has been continued."

Avtorkhanov says he was a Komsomol from age 14, had party stazh from 1926, was in the Institute of Red Professors from 1928 to 1930. (Like many there), he was a Bukharinist, he says. Came under criticism and recanted, he says. (I note, this would have put a HUGE target on his back in the Terror than followed.) Thereafter, he says, he worked for the regional committee of the Chechen Communist Party. Advanced course in Marxism from 1932 to 33. Then went to work for the CC in the propaganda department, writing five books along the tendency of Mikhail Pokrovsky (another red flag). This followed by another stint at the Institute of Red Professors, where he finished up in 1937.

Arrested in the Terror in 1937, charged with having "affiliated with the clandestine organization of national minorities in Moscow," a charge expanded to include spying for the British. Managed to last out the Terror without catching a bullet in the back of his head. Acquitted and released on March 19, 1940. Returned to Moscow and was rearrested by the NKVD in December, based on the old charges. ("We never make mistakes.")

Released again April 21, 1942. Went to the Caucuses this time, where he was arrested by the Gestapo in the summer of 1942, accused this time of being a Communist. Managed to beat the charges with the help of friends, who swore that he wasn't. Silent about activities in 1943 and 1944.

Gotta put a pretty huge asterisk on there, regardless.

================

Looks like I need to work on that WP article, there is some basic wrong info. A published memoir in the form of a book introduction from 1953 trumps a formal memoir written three decades later.

[Zoloft]

There was a thread about me on WPO, calling me a "wikivatnik" and "pro-Russian propagandist" because I started an RfC on adding "far right" to the lede of Azov brigade (T-H-L).

It has since been deleted, but I archived it: https://archive.md/qPxoP

When I reported this to ArbCom, they said no rules were broken and that was perfectly fine. So I'm not doing anything wrong.

Uhm, that topic was never deleted, you're just bad at using the search engine: link
Please correct yourself.

[Randy from Boise]

As an aside, there are several very puzzling gaps in the chronology above.

I took a pretty close look at outcomes of party members in the Terror once, databasing arrest and execution dates. It was usually a process of 3 to 7 months, I recall, with a couple of outliers topping a year.

Going from a 1937 arrest date to 1940 liberation from jail is pretty much an unheard of scenario. That doesn't register. There were people released, to be sure, but that wasn't a process that took more than two years. They would have tried him and killed him or given him a "tenner" to the camps or they would have released him well before that length of time. Jail space was a scarce commodity when the Terror was roaring.

Similarly, a December 1940 arrest to an April 1942 release is a VERY long interval. Interrogation could take several months, certainly, but nearly a year and a half merits at least a question mark in the margin.

One would also certainly like to know the timeline between interrogation and release by the Gestapo; what was said and what was promised and what was done over the next couple years. I wouldn't trust a drive-by on this to blindly slap on the word "collaborator," I'd be looking for actual scholarship on the case spelling out the particulars.

There's certainly more than meets the eye in all three of these intervals.

I wonder if anyone has ever done a dissertation on Avtorkhanov. Interesting dude.

t


========

I just located a pdf online of the book cited above, Marshall's The Caucasus under Soviet Rule (Routledge, 2010). I'll take a look at that. I'd never seen it before. It being a Routledge title, shit used paperbacks start at $70 and prices move north fast from there. Quite a good find of the (illegal, I'm sure) pdf, since that one wasn't gonna get bought...

---------

Initial comment: Marshall is a war college historian.

Indexed as Avtorkhanov, A: Defection to Nazis:

"On 22 February 1942 there had also begun the formation of the pro-Nazi North Caucasus legions, which ultimately absorbed some 28,000 recruits.[fn 43] In Berlin the North Caucasus Committee headed by Akhmed-Nabi Magomaev facilitated all these efforts, incorporating such émigré figures as Alikhan Kantemirov, Barasbi Baitugan and Sultan Kilich-Girei. These émigrés were before long joined by high-profile Soviet defectors, amongst the most prominent of whom was Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, who went on to edit the committee’s two main journals. The key banner line running above both his publications at the time proclaimed that ‘Allah is above us, Hitler is with us’."[fn 44]

The more substantial section mentioning Avtorkhanov:

Events in Chechnia-Ingushetia (as a consequence of yet more territorial-administrative tinkering, the two territories had finally been unified into an autonomous oblast’ on 15 January 1934, then officially recategorized as an ASSR on 5 December 1936) closely paralleled events in Dagestan, but remain understudied. According to the account of the Chechen émigré historian Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (whom most Western scholars to date have unhesitatingly followed in this regard), in Chechnia-Ingushetia itself, beginning on the night of 31 July–1 August 1937, nearly 14,000 people were rounded up and arrested, before then being either shot or deported, devastating the local Soviet apparatus by the end of the year.[fn 50] However, regarding both the scale and manner of the purges, Avtorkhanov is today increasingly recognized as a serially unreliable witness. Putting to one side for a moment his later collaboration with Nazi Germany, during the early 1930s he had himself worked within the Chechen party apparatus, helping to implement the very policies he was later to so vehemently condemn. Avtorkhanov furthermore spent the critical years 1933–37 in Moscow, which disqualifies him (contrary to how he was often later portrayed) from serving as any kind of ‘eyewitness’ to events in the Chechen-Ingush ASSR.[fn 51] Whilst presented by Avtorkhanov as a peculiarly Chechen tragedy, the purges in the Chechen-Ingush ASSR also need to be set in a broader context of what we now know occurred union-wide. The very fact that, according to MVD statistics, in neighbouring Dagestan, the total number of repressed persons there across the whole period from the 1930s to 1950s stood at 14,000 individuals, would seem to put in doubt Avtorkhanov’s claim of some 14,000 shot or imprisoned in the space of just a few months in the Chechen-Ingush ASSR.[fn 52] Fortunately more accurate statistics are now available on a region-by-region basis which confirm such suspicions, and raise even graver question marks over Avtorkhanov’s account.

According to the single most authoritative statistical study of the purges to date, 7,159 people were arrested in the Chechen-Ingush ASSR during 1937 – a still hideously high figure, but nowhere near Avtorkhanov’s oft-quoted tally of around 14,000.[fn 53] Arrests in this period unquestionably devastated the Chechen-Ingush party apparatus, with over 200 prominent bureaucrats arrested in the first half of 1937, and 30 out of 76 member and candidate-members of the local party obkom undergoing arrest over the whole period 1937–39.[fn 54] Purges continued on a smaller scale in the years leading up to the war, and only in 1939–41 would party membership in the Chechen-Ingush ASSR again restabilize at 1934 levels.[fn 55] However, once again, nothing is gained from excessively exaggerating the figures. Undoubtedly inspired by the same Cold War-era imperative to portray things as ‘the worse the better’, and now under closer examination similarly easily dismissed, becomes Avtorkhanov’s claim that, between 1936 and 1938, NKVD troikas shot around 80,000 citizens in the Chechen-Ingush republic. This would have been a remarkable feat, considering that the total number arrested there in 1937–38, at the very height of the most violent period of the purges, amounted to 9,446 individuals.

The Chechen-Ingush ASSR was moreover one of 21 regions across the country which (unlike Dagestan) did not file any requests after July 1937 to increase the quota ‘limits’ imposed by the anti-kulak order 00447 – the limits of which for
Chechnia-Ingushetia were set at 500 executions and 1,500 imprisonments. In a republic with an overall population at the time of 659,838 (of whom 430,090 were Chechens and Ingush), this meant that the proportion of almost randomly targeted regime ‘enemies’ in Chechnia-Ingushetia amounted to only 0.3 per cent of the population, compared to (for example) Dagestan, where 0.6 per cent of the population were targeted, or Western Siberia, where 0.7 per cent of the population were affected. The local NKVD itself appears to have submitted comparatively low figures because of ‘our poor agentura and insufficient intelligence networks’, and subsequently reported itself unable to fill even the initial quotas it submitted, owing to local resistance.[fn 56] More recent data for Chechnia-Ingushetia in general meanwhile points in reality to around 2,000 actual executions in 1937.[fn 57]

In this instance the historian could of course be accused of callousness regarding the death or imprisonment of ‘only’ several thousand, rather than several tens of thousands, of people in one particular region. However, the role of the historian is to search for truth: to re-examine oft-touted statistics on the scale or nature of the purges in Chechnia-Ingushetia is not to deny that a brutal and chaotic struggle had been unleashed by Stalin and Ezhov across the whole of the Soviet Union, one which then either ended or ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of often entirely innocent people. But Avtorkhanov was a fascist collaborator, one who spent his later years selling his services to the highest bidder, latterly usually the United States, for Cold War propaganda purposes. His writings should therefore be treated with considerably greater caution than they have been to date, and in fact probably disregarded altogether by all future serious historians of the interwar North Caucasus. The actual nature of purges in Chechnia-Ingushetia meanwhile is also revealing, since they expose a pattern, already evident from collectivization, in which the local Communist Party continued to lack concrete intelligence on, or have a significant presence in, the countryside itself, and consequently struggled to penetrate the parallel clan-like structures which continued to operate there – a phenomenon which contributed to the predominantly ‘political’ nature of the local purges, which targeted and devastated the ‘known quantity’ of the local party structures and urban centres instead."

All Cold War historians guessed about the body count of the Terror. Avtorkhanov was no better or worse than his peers, who ALL guessed high — none moreso than the right wing polemicists like Conquest and Solzhenitsyn. Absolutely none of these guys should be used for tallies of arrests or executions; the archives are/were opened and real numbers exist. Bureaucracies are very good on generating documents and compiling numbers, the Soviet Union certainly included.

[TurboSuperA+]

There was a thread about me on WPO, calling me a "wikivatnik" and "pro-Russian propagandist" because I started an RfC on adding "far right" to the lede of Azov brigade (T-H-L).

It has since been deleted, but I archived it: https://archive.md/qPxoP

When I reported this to ArbCom, they said no rules were broken and that was perfectly fine. So I'm not doing anything wrong.

Uhm, that topic was never deleted, you're just bad at using the search engine: link
Please correct yourself.

Actually, I searched for "wikivatniks", which is the correct spelling of "vatnik". The thread is named "Wikivatnicks". Almost as if the person who created the thread isn't a native English speaker. Chinese maybe?

[Randy from Boise]

Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov (T-H-L)

Eh, well, better anyway. Hopefully that balances out the "he was a radical idealist," "he was a Chechen nationalist," "he was a terror victim," "he was a Nazi collaborator," "he was a freedom-loving dissident," and "he was a flawed historian" streams of thought.

There's more to do, I see that Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party is hugely autobiographical, I need to take an hour to read away at that, at a minimum. I read that book about 30 years ago...


t


The first chapter of that book is gold, a first-hand audience account of the On the Grain Front speech, opening salvo in the civil war of collectivization. Written three decades after the fact, so a discount for that, but still enormously valuable.

-------

Russian Wikipedia is interesting: "Discrepancies between Avtorkhanov's various books should also be noted. For instance, in The Technology of Power (Tekhnologiya vlasti), he recounts his personal involvement in events in Moscow in 1929 while a student at the Institute of Red Professors (IKP). Yet, according to his Memoirs, he was studying at a workers' faculty (*rabfak*) in Grozny at that time."

[tarantino]

There was a thread about me on WPO, calling me a "wikivatnik" and "pro-Russian propagandist" because I started an RfC on adding "far right" to the lede of Azov brigade (T-H-L).

It has since been deleted, but I archived it: https://archive.md/qPxoP

When I reported this to ArbCom, they said no rules were broken and that was perfectly fine. So I'm not doing anything wrong.

Bye

[Kowal2701]

At least they don't appear to be a My Little Pony fan

[Ismail]

As an aside, there are several very puzzling gaps in the chronology above.

Yeah it is worth noting (as I did note a little while back on the article's talk page) that Avtorkhanov's writings about his experiences in the late 20s and 30s do contain dubious statements, and I noted an article going into the matter: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2501404

I don't agree that "calling Avtorkhanov a 'Nazi collaborator' needs an asterisk." Anyone who collaborated with the Nazis against the USSR could plead that they had their reasons, much like collaborators anywhere else. If he deserves an asterisk, so does everyone who collaborated from Andrei Vlasov down to the most obscure priest in a German-occupied village.

While on the subject, two years ago I scanned a book titled Russian Purge and The Extraction of Confession. It's an interesting read. One of the authors (writing under a pseudonym) was Konstantin Shteppa (T-H-L) who as he wrote in the book was a Ukrainian historian arrested during the Great Purges. Of course, as the Wikipedia article notes, he previously served as a long-time informant for the Soviet secret police and during the war collaborated with the German occupiers, so much so that he had a falling out with other collaborators because he was willing to collaborate more consistently. And yet you could conceivably put an asterisk next to the term "Nazi collaborator" since, after all, he didn't just wake up one fine day perfectly contented with the Soviet way of life and accidentally found himself serving the interests of Hitler.

[Randy from Boise]

As an aside, there are several very puzzling gaps in the chronology above.

Yeah it is worth noting (as I did note a little while back on the article's talk page) that Avtorkhanov's writings about his experiences in the late 20s and 30s do contain dubious statements, and I noted an article going into the matter: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2501404

I don't agree that "calling Avtorkhanov a 'Nazi collaborator' needs an asterisk." Anyone who collaborated with the Nazis against the USSR could plead that they had their reasons, much like collaborators anywhere else. If he deserves an asterisk, so does everyone who collaborated from Andrei Vlasov down to the most obscure priest in a German-occupied village.

While on the subject, two years ago I scanned a book titled Russian Purge and The Extraction of Confession. It's an interesting read. One of the authors (writing under a pseudonym) was Konstantin Shteppa (T-H-L) who as he wrote in the book was a Ukrainian historian arrested during the Great Purges. Of course, as the Wikipedia article notes, he previously served as a long-time informant for the Soviet secret police and during the war collaborated with the German occupiers, so much so that he had a falling out with other collaborators because he was willing to collaborate more consistently. And yet you could conceivably put an asterisk next to the term "Nazi collaborator" since, after all, he didn't just wake up one fine day perfectly contented with the Soviet way of life and accidentally found himself serving the interests of Hitler.

It seems extremely likely that Avtorkhanov was in exactly the same situatoin: staying alive as an NKVD collaborator, crossing over to become a Nazi collaborator. His timeline doesn't make sense any other way.

I'll see if I can get through the disimproved Wikipedia Library to read that SR article.

I had a pretty much full run of Slavic Review that I sacrificed to the recycle bin when I lost my lease for the shoe store. I kick myself about that every once in a while, but I figured it was all digitized, which rendered that easily replaceable on the one hand and valueless to anyone else on the other.

Little did I know that WP JSTOR accounts would become so shitty.

t

=========

Thank god, through the gate and it even let me download the piece. I'll read it in the morning, it's 2:30 and I'm up for only a couple more minutes.

=========

Bagging a few more articles while things are working wel...

A quick comment about asterisks: I think there is a difference between true believer collaborators and those who collaborated due to pressure and circumstances. It's very much a Vonnegut-Mother Night situation... Ultimately, one is what they pretend to be, so one must be very careful what they pretend to be.

Avtorkhanov — IF one takes him at his word, which seems to be at least slightly problematic in and of itself — was faced with a choice: betray his Chechen friends to the NKVD as an informant on a mission, or roll the dice with the Germans. Or, I suppose, become a partisan fighting everyone, which was how some Ukrainian "bandits" played out the Russian civil war.

That he ended up working for the US government after the war is another story!

t

[smallchief]

I'm sparing in the use of the word "collaborator" to describe someone in territory occupied by the Nazis. About 98 percent of the people in Western Europe went along to get along with their Nazi overlords. The size and impact of the active resistance to the Nazi occupiers is often greatly exaggerated. The number of resisters grew after D-Day when it became clear the Germans were losing the war. The French have a name for johnny-come-lately resisters: the "Mothball Brigade," referring to the French military men who took their uniforms out of the closet and joined the resistance when it became safe to do so.

Was someone who was employed by the Nazis a collaborator? A large number of men on the occupied British Channel Islands worked voluntarily for the Germans building fortifications. Were they collaborators? How about people in occupied countries who made a lot of money selling stuff to the Germans? How about the police and civil servants in occupied countries who stayed on their jobs and were carrying out the orders of the Germans?

There's a marvelous TV series, "A French Village" (Un Village Francais) which goes deeply into the issue of collaboration and resistance to the Nazis.

[Randy from Boise]

I'm sparing in the use of the word "collaborator" to describe someone in territory occupied by the Nazis. About 98 percent of the people in Western Europe went along to get along with their Nazi overlords. The size and impact of the active resistance to the Nazi occupiers is often greatly exaggerated. The number of resisters grew after D-Day when it became clear the Germans were losing the war. The French have a name for johnny-come-lately resisters: the "Mothball Brigade," referring to the French military men who took their uniforms out of the closet and joined the resistance when it became safe to do so.

Was someone who was employed by the Nazis a collaborator? A large number of men on the occupied British Channel Islands worked voluntarily for the Germans building fortifications. Were they collaborators? How about people in occupied countries who made a lot of money selling stuff to the Germans? How about the police and civil servants in occupied countries who stayed on their jobs and were carrying out the orders of the Germans?

There's a marvelous TV series, "A French Village" (Un Village Francais) which goes deeply into the issue of collaboration and resistance to the Nazis.

Lots of asterisks needed!

t

[JarrBarr]

I'm sparing in the use of the word "collaborator" to describe someone in territory occupied by the Nazis. About 98 percent of the people in Western Europe went along to get along with their Nazi overlords. The size and impact of the active resistance to the Nazi occupiers is often greatly exaggerated. The number of resisters grew after D-Day when it became clear the Germans were losing the war. The French have a name for johnny-come-lately resisters: the "Mothball Brigade," referring to the French military men who took their uniforms out of the closet and joined the resistance when it became safe to do so.

Was someone who was employed by the Nazis a collaborator? A large number of men on the occupied British Channel Islands worked voluntarily for the Germans building fortifications. Were they collaborators? How about people in occupied countries who made a lot of money selling stuff to the Germans? How about the police and civil servants in occupied countries who stayed on their jobs and were carrying out the orders of the Germans?

There's a marvelous TV series, "A French Village" (Un Village Francais) which goes deeply into the issue of collaboration and resistance to the Nazis.

Lots of asterisks needed!

t

I would add that for most of Central and Eastern Europe, those who were not just passively trying to survive had brilliant choices to cooperate with: Stalin or Hitler. Totally obvious who was and would be on the right side of history. Also from the point of view of fhe brown ideology having its heyday just around that time and Stalin having an appetite of his own for annexing territories without properly asking if that was OK to begin with.

I mean, obviously there were people who chose collaboration out of sympathy rather than necessity (which is probably how we should define collaborationists), but the majority of "collaborators" didn't really do that because they thought that Hitler was a great chap and Nazism was a wonderful ideology. Communists were more likely to actually work due to their political convictions but then again the Soviets didn't occupy basically all of Europe.

(Poles and Czechs did try the third way of sticking with the Allies, and it didn't go too well for either nation. Sure, today they can show good stuff in their textbooks but they didn't really achieve much at the end of the day as their destinies were being decided behind their backs starting from Tehran. And had the Soviet Union still existed, we would very likely be reading about Western imperialism's agents).

[Ismail]

Worth remembering that Chechnya wasn't occupied by the Nazis during WWII, and there were plenty of Chechens who served in the Red Army and were awarded in the course of the war (which makes Stalin's decision to collectively punish that nation, including the aforementioned troops, all that more obscene.)

We can talk about individuals who quietly adopted a "meet the new boss, same as the old" attitude toward German occupation, but I don't think Avtorkhanov falls in that category. He was entrusted by the Soviet authorities with the task of infiltrating the ranks of anti-government Chechen guerrillas, and rather than carry out that task he went over to the Nazis, opting to join a Nazi-organized committee in Berlin that propagandized to the peoples of the North Caucasus to support the German army.

Again, I'm sure he could bring up all sorts of arguments as to why he did what he did during the war, but he didn't just happen to find himself under Nazi rule and go "aw shucks this isn't good, guess I'll just continue doing my inoffensive job and keep my head low."

How about people in occupied countries who made a lot of money selling stuff to the Germans? How about the police and civil servants in occupied countries who stayed on their jobs and were carrying out the orders of the Germans?

People who actively aided the Nazi war effort are generally considered collaborators, yes. If a policeman was involved in "pacifying" an area by fighting members of the resistance, or if a wealthy person profited off of helping the Nazis, I don't think it's controversial to say those persons were much more likely to be castigated as collaborators compared to a civil servant helping ensure the local sewer system functioned properly, even if that servant could also be considered a collaborator in some sense.

[Randy from Boise]

We can talk about individuals who quietly adopted a "meet the new boss, same as the old" attitude toward German occupation, but I don't think Avtorkhanov falls in that category. [Avtorkhanov] was entrusted by the Soviet authorities with the task of infiltrating the ranks of anti-government Chechen guerrillas, and rather than carry out that task he went over to the Nazis, opting to join a Nazi-organized committee in Berlin that propagandized to the peoples of the North Caucasus to support the German army.

This seems a fair summary of the situation, so far as I can tell from what I have seen in the last 24 hours.

And the asterisk would be that he was also twice arrested by the NKVD, who killed many of his friends and very, very easily could have done the same to him, but for certain promises he no doubt made and activities he no doubt conducted. Avtorkhanov was being asked to be a Judas goat setting up the Chechen nationalist movement but he chose to make a deal of a different kind with a different devil.

And — never forget — after the war he ended up teaching in a US Army specialist Russian Area Studies school in Germany!


t