As soon as little Frauke fell asleep, his wife drew him into the bedroom. The love and need in her eyes made him feel ashamed. She’d remained as steadfast as the stars on his collar. Weeping softly, she begged him to impregnate her. She said: This may be my final chance to receive the Honor Cross of the German Mother.
(They heard her mother coughing on the other side of the wall.)
Five days later, Vlasov’s scouts found the little house in the Allgäu where his best friend’s family lay hiding. Peeking through the almost-curtained window, Frau Strik-Strikfeldt clapped a hand over her open mouth. She had thought them all safe-settled here at the heart of this last isle of German summer, where steep yellow-green meadows were shaded by evergreen forests. For years she’d vainly tried to persuade her husband not to mix himself up with Slavs. And now this. Smiling, our jolly old Balt emerged in the doorway. Fruitlessly he outstretched his hand. He swallowed. With a pettish laugh, he cried: How changeable fortune is! Sometimes a man can hardly catch his breath! Don’t think I’m indifferent to all you’ve suffered. (By the way, you need a shave.) What can we do when—speaking of which, I heard a splendid joke the other day. Definition of cowardice: Leaving Berlin to volunteer for the Ostfront! Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha-ha!
The tall, pallid puppet seated itself before him on a concrete shard. It plucked a dandelion. Then it drew a tall bottle of schnapps from its rucksack. Resheathing the bottle without sharing it, it rose, and remarked with wooden formality: Germany has collapsed sooner than I expected.
But, my dear fellow, the Führer has promised that our “Wonder Weapons” will soon be ready…
Forgive me, Wilfried Karlovich, but I… Anyhow, there’s no use in having it out with you. I don’t blame anyone. What is it that Heidi always says? The strongest survives.
(He remembered the way home: the barbed wire, the sentry, then the horseshoe barricades and truncated pyramids of sandbags on Smolensk Street, followed by the door which couldn’t quite close, the pitch-dark, icy stairs, the inner door, and beyond that a desperation clotted into darkness which in turn had frozen into grief and sickness where his other wife, his integrity, lay waiting.)
On 27.4.45, his comrade Zherebkhov urged him to flee to Spain by air, to work for the liberation movement in securer surroundings. Vlasov replied that he wished to share his soldiers’ fate.
After that, we find him in the midst of the Prague Uprising, issuing his commands on a scarcely audible field telephone. On 8.5.45, as skeletonized buildings became lyres for flames to play upon, the Czech National Council sent an urgent appeal to Vlasov’s troops, begging them to turn against the Fascists, but when he tried to negotiate asylum after the war, the Czechs replied that they could guarantee nothing. That very same day, accepting the entreaties of his soldiers, he turned his attention to the Anglo-American zone. (She was whispering: And then come home to me, Andrei… ) On 11.5.45 he demanded to be judged by the International Tribunal, not by any Soviet court. The following day the Red Army broke into his sector. Hanging his cartridge belt from a wrecked girder, Vlasov summoned the spurious protection of an American convoy en route to Bavaria. His hopes resembled corpses frozen with outstretched hands upon a plain of dirty melting snow.
And so one more time Vlasov found himself compelled to disband his encircled army and advise his men to break out in small groups. Some were lucky enough to reach the Americans and surrender to them. Vlasov, of course, was not.34 His stations of the cross remained thoroughly in keeping with the times: first the bridge with a British sentry on one side, a Soviet guard on the other, then the crossroads at the edge of the forest where light tanks and searchlights trained their malice on the “Fascist chaff”; next the barbed-wire compound, followed by the first interrogation in the lamplit tent (NKVD men crowding in to regard him as if he were a crocodile); the first beating; the chain of prisons, each link eastward of the last; the inspections, tortures, questions; the stifling windowless compartments of Black Marias which lurched down war-cratered roads; the murmur of Moscow traffic; finally, the Lubyanka cells. The very first thing they’d taken away was his memory-token (Geco, 7.65 millimeter). Punching him in the teeth, they upraised that German shell in triumph—literal proof that he was a murdering Hitlerite! Vlasov wiped his bloody mouth. All he wanted now was to get through the formalities.
A photograph of the Soviet military court in Moscow shows him to have become paler than ever after his year of “interrogation,” but unlike several of the other defendants whose nude heads bow abjectly, Vlasov stands defiant, his bony jaw clenched, his heavy spectacles (which will be removed on the day when all twelve men get hanged, heads nodding thoughtfully as they sway before the brick wall) occluding our understanding of his eyepits.35 Rubbing his bleached blank forehead, he was actually wondering whether some amalgam of planning and determination could save his colleagues. He thought not. Anyhow, he got distracted just then by the hostile testimony of his former commanding officer, K. A. Meretskov, who’d abandoned him (as he now believed) at Volkhov, and who’d never been able to give him any better talisman than that meaningless phrase local superiority.
Meretskov looked rather well these days. In his evidence proffered to the court, he referred more than once to “the Fascist hireling Vlasov.” With a shadow of his old energy, the accused man smiled upon him, his glasses gleaming like a skull’s eye-sockets.
The prosecutor demanded to know which of his fellow ghosts and shadows had first recruited him into the anti-Soviet conspiracy. Vlasov cleared his throat. He licked the stump of a newly broken tooth. Remembering how Comrade Stalin had once said to him: Speak the truth, like a Communist!, he accepted full responsibility for his actions.
We might say that his mistake was cosmopolitanism, which the Great Soviet Encyclopedia defines as the bourgeois-reactionary ideology of so-called “world citizenship.” Cosmopolitanism pretends to be all-embracing. Really it’s but a front for the aggressively transnational surges of capital. Humanistic pacifism and utopianism are other masks of the same phenomenon—which of course differs utterly from proletarian internationalism.
On 2 August 1946, Izvestiya announced that ‘pursuant to Article 11 of our criminal code, the death sentence of the traitor A. A. Vlasov had been carried out.‣
THE LAST FIELD-MARSHAL
That man should have shot himself… What hurts me most, personally, is that I promoted him to Field-Marshal. I wanted to give him this final satisfaction. That’s the last Field-Marshal I shall appoint in this war.
First Beethoven on the gramophone and then the battle array for Sixth Army; first a kiss on Coca’s snowy cheek and then a conference with von Reichenau, first Poland and then France; first Russia, then everything. In the postwar encomium of his colleague Guderian, he was the finest type of brilliantly clever, conscientious, hard-working, original, and talented General Staff officer, and it is impossible to doubt his pure-minded and lofty patriotism. The war with Russia was to last for six weeks. First summer, and then winter. The telephone rang again. First Operation Magic Fire, then Cases Otto, Green, White and Yellow, the black smoke of historical justice funneling up from shelled villages, German faces laughing through the diamond-window of a Polish castle; first Operation Sea Lion, which got tabled as a result of enemy superiority; then Operation Marita, completed and fulfilled by Operation Mercury, and finally the sheet of darkness spanned by a thick white X. He lit another cigarette. In the upper left quadrant of that blackness, midway between its corner and the absolute center of the X, there shone a white rectangle inscribed with these words in the old Fraktur lettering which sheltered like an aristocratic ghost in secret documents of the Officer Corps: Kriegsgliederung “Barbarossa” and then in the blackness’s lower right a smaller rectangle housed the word B-Tag. The blackness also said Geheime Kommandosache, military secret, and the lower right quadrant of it was stamped: Top secret! For officers only!
34
The Soviet claim, that he was found on the floor of a Studebaker truck, wrapped up in a roll of carpet “like a coward,” has not yet been verified.
35
According to certain émigré sources, whose provenance naturally excludes them from credibility, the accused was warned that he might be tortured to death if he didn’t cooperate. —“I know that, and I’m extremely afraid,” he is alleged to have replied. “But it would be even worse to have to vilify myself…”—The even more mendacious accusation that Vlasov and his cohorts were hanged with piano wire, a hook being inserted at the base of each skull, can be refuted with the simplest extract from the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “Communist morality is the noblest and most just morality, for it expresses the interests and ideals of the whole of working mankind.”