SECRET POLICY: THE R.O.A.
AND THE YALTA CONFERENCE
A practically unknown reality until now was the
concern with which, towards the end of the war, the highranking military authorities saw the growing hegemony of
the Soviet Union in world politics. For the most visionary
ones of them, the clash between democracies and the communist regime was something totally inevitable. Among
the North Americans, Generals Patton and MacArthur
shared this opinion and it also seems that, among the English, Marshal Alexander shared the same concern.
That is how this uneasiness generated a secret project
which considered the idea of using the excellent military
force in which the Cossacks would be the main nucleus for
the creation of Russian National Liberation Army, under the
abbreviation ROA (Ruskaya Osbobudelnaya Armya). Once
completed Germany’s defeat, these armed forces would
turn against the USSR, with the certainty that was shared
by all the Cossack leaders: that the Russians wanted to be
liberated from the Communist yoke and that they would
receive the ROA as once they had received Hitler, this is, as
a liberator and even better, because this time their liberators
were their own fellow citizens.
The high-ranking military authorities of the West
thought they could commit their powerful help for an
enterprise such as this, because they considered –justly–
that having defeated Hitler and his totalitarian regime,
freedom and democracy’s greatest enemies were Stalin and
the Communist regime.12
The man assigned by the allied soldiers for the
coordination of this highly secret plan was Major General
12
See article by Jessica Herschmann in El Mercurio from October 4,
1992. This article, which contains very precise facts on the Krasnovs,
remained unknown to Miguel until its publication, so he does not
know what sources were used for it.
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Simon Krasnov, in the position of a member of the high
Cossack authorities.
Of this visionary plan, as might be expected, no
written document is left.
Unfortunately, the political leaders of the West didn’t
have as much vision, or else they had other commitments
as secretive as these that kept them from backing up these
plans.
Under these circumstances, with victory at their
doors, the Allies’ heads of State met in a tripartite conference.
It began on February 5 of 1945 in Yalta, Crimea, in southern
Russia. Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt –the Three Great,
as they were called by the press of those years– assisted
to it. Their respective counseling teams also met with
them. Among them was Great Britain’s minister of Foreign
Relations, Sir Anthony Eden, who would play a decisive
and ill-fated role in the subsequent events.
The topic of this meeting was mainly the distribution
of the influential zones which each one of the Allies would
control after the victory. It is unnecessary to say that, in this
distribution, the USSR took the best part.
But in this opportunity, Stalin also made a very
concrete request to his two western colleagues: he wanted
all of the Soviet citizens, either prisoners or combaters of the
German army, to be immediately handed over once the war
was over. In reality, it was difficult to establish a difference,
because there were men who had fought against their own
country out of hatred against Communism. But there were
others, and many, who had been forced by the Germans to
take arms for them, through the pressure of hunger.
While putting this petition forth, Stalin wanted to
dismiss a problem that would have given him away as well
as his governmental system: every prisoner –both victors
and vanquished– wished to return to their countries.
Soviet citizens were surely the only ones who would
not want to return. In order to avoid this inexplicable fact to
the West, the only solution was forced repatriation.
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Churchill and Roosevelt accepted this request, as
well as Stalin’s demand that this request would remain
secret. In reality, secrecy was also advantageous to them,
since no matter how much they would constantly praise
Stalin, public opinion in their countries would not approve
the forced return of the victims to the communist regime.
The western leaders made this decision that tread
upon basic principles of free nations, such as the right to
asylum, with open lightness. But the only thing that mattered to them at the moment was to defeat Germany and to
keep Stalin from feeling uneasy. He conditioned his acceptance of certain political objectives and western strategies,
precisely to the accomplishment of this demand.
This agreement, thus, remained under total secrecy
but not the rest of the topics, which –as we have stated–
was to fix the areas of influence of the winning powers.
In this topic, the advantages obtained by Stalin were so
disproportionate, that they shattered the beliefs of the highranking authorities –and the Cossacks– in a next rupture of
the democratic nations with the Soviet tyranny.
The R.O.A. died, therefore, before being born. This
abbreviation was applied, later on, to General Vlassov’s
forces. In any case, he also believed in the future war of the
democracies against Communism for a long time. This is,
until the facts made him see the truth and he himself was
executed as a criminal in the USSR.
Finally, entering the ambiguous terrains of suppositions, it is probable that this future war would have turned
into a reality in the end. What kept that from happening
was the dropping of the two atomic bombs over Japan and
the subsequent fear of weapons whose destructive power
could reach the entire humankind. The inevitable hostility among the ex-Allies, then, turned into the Cold War, in
which every nation, even Chile, became involved.
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