Soviet courts executed and imprisoned thousands of citizens who collaborated with German forces during the Great Patriotic War, conducting trials from 1941 into the late 1980s.
An estimated 1.5 million Soviet citizens served the occupation regime during World War II, guarding prisons and concentration camps, seizing property, and participating in mass executions as policemen and village elders.
In mid-October 1941, Red Army deserter Nikolai Slastin defected to German forces and became elder of Nadezhnaya village in Zaporozhye Oblast. He confiscated livestock and food from peasants for the Wehrmacht, aided forced labor deportations to Germany, betrayed 15 escaped Red Army prisoners to German gendarmes, and denounced local Communist Party members before a Soviet military court sentenced him to hanging after liberation in front of 180 cheering villagers.
Legal framework and wartime trials
Soviet authorities began prosecuting collaborators immediately after liberating occupied territories under a USSR Presidium of the Supreme Soviet decree issued on April 19, 1943. Section 1 of the decree mandated death by hanging for spies and traitors, while Section 2 established 15 to 20 years of forced labor for local accomplices.
In Iverskoye village in Donbas, locals Nikolai Sosulov and Alexei Ivanov voluntarily joined the German police while Pavel Buturlinov served as village elder. Sosulov beat peasants who avoided field work and targeted Red Army families, while Ivanov conducted raids against communists and partisans.
After Donbas was liberated, more than 500 residents attended an open military field court where an old man lashed by police whips demanded their execution. Following a two-hour trial, Sosulov was sentenced to death, Ivanov received 20 years of forced labor, and Buturlinov received 15 years.
Executions in Krasnodar and the North Caucasus
Although wartime chaos allowed some collaborators to hide under false identities, military courts executed police officers and elders across the Bryansk and Orel regions, the Ukrainian SSR, and the North Caucasus. In 1943, the Central Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League distributed leaflets calling on young collaborators to turn their weapons against German forces and rejoin the Red Army.
The first public trial of war criminals opened in July 1943 in Krasnodar, putting 11 Nazi accomplices on trial. Gestapo investigator Vasily Tishchenko, who had volunteered for German service, was convicted of causing hundreds of deaths through torture interrogations and public executions.
The Military Tribunal of the North-Caucasian Front sentenced Tishchenko and seven co-defendants to death, executing them on Krasnodar's Central Square before 50,000 residents. Special security departments logged other suspects, expecting formal cases after the war as millions of prisoners of war, civilians, and forced laborers returned to the Soviet Union.
Massacres in Estonia, Latvia and Moldavia
In Estonia, members of the German-backed Omakaitse self-defense organization guarded camps, hunted partisans and Jews, and escorted forced laborers. After German troops took Tartu in summer 1941, Omakaitse members killed more than 12,000 civilians and Soviet prisoners, frequently conducting night raids and executing groups as large as 40 people outside the town.
Following Estonia's liberation, Soviet security forces arrested up to 10,000 active Omakaitse members, executing up to 200 and sentencing about 7,500 to prison terms. In Latvia, members of the Aizsargi organization faced military tribunals of the Leningrad Front in 1944 and 1945 under Soviet criminal code articles and the April 1943 decree.
In May 1945, a trial in Dubossary in the Moldavian SSR targeted 11 members of the occupation administration, including mayor Alexander Demenchuk, deputy Feodosy Konsevich-Nemirovsky, and police chief Ivan Vetez. The group carried out mass shootings, killing 1,500 people on September 7, 1941, another 2,500 on September 12, and 500 on September 19.
Demenchuk and Konsevich-Nemirovsky, both Communist Party members who voluntarily joined Romanian occupation authorities, separated victims into groups of 20, forced mothers to hold infants at arm's length in profile, and supervised burial pits. Demenchuk was executed, while Konsevich-Nemirovsky and Vetez received prison sentences after Konsevich-Nemirovsky was convicted of robbing victims and promoting Romanian propaganda.
The trial of General Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Army
Major General Andrey Vlasov became the most prominent collaborator after surrendering voluntarily in July 1942 in Leningrad Oblast. He agreed to lead the German-backed Russian Liberation Army and the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, prompting Red Army political reports to denounce him as a traitor.
His leadership included Major General Vasily Malyshkin, captured near Vyazma in October 1941, and Major General Fyodor Trukhin, captured in Lithuania in June 1941, who directed the committee's armed forces staff. Former Red Army Colonel Sergei Bunyachenko commanded the 1st Division of the liberation army, which briefly backed the Prague Uprising in May 1945 before fleeing toward American lines.
Chaired by Vasily Ulrikh, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR held a closed trial in Moscow beginning July 30, 1946. Prosecutors established that Vlasov and his associates conducted espionage, sabotage, and murder under the direction of Heinrich Himmler to overthrow the Soviet government.
On August 1, 1946, the court stripped Vlasov, Trukhin, Bunyachenko, and Malyshkin of their ranks and sentenced them to death by hanging at Butyrka prison. Armed combatants in the liberation army received 10 to 25 years in labor camps, while unarmed guards received six years in special settlements.
Soviet tribunals conducted more than 20 public trials between 1943 and 1949, convicting over 250 foreign war criminals and dozens of Soviet accomplices. On September 17, 1955, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued an amnesty for wartime collaborators, but explicitly excluded individuals involved in war crimes.
Postwar concealment and the hunt for Alex the Terrible
Alexander Yukhnovsky joined the German secret field police in Romny, Sumy Oblast, at age 16 at his father's urging, earning the nickname Alex the Terrible by age 17. He participated in torture interrogations using rubber truncheons, stood guard at execution sites, and joined firing squads across Ukraine, Moldavia, and Russia.
In August 1944, Yukhnovsky deserted, destroyed his documents, assumed his stepmother's surname Mironenko, and joined the Red Army as a machine gunner. He killed a comrade who recognized him, fought to Berlin, stormed the Reichstag, received medals, joined the Komsomol, and worked as a journalist after leaving the military in the early 1950s.
A veteran state security officer spotted Yukhnovsky on a Moscow subway escalator in 1975, leading to his arrest by the KGB on June 2, 1975. The Moscow City Court sentenced him to death on April 28, 1976, for assisting in the murder of over 2,000 people, stripping him of his wartime medals before his execution on June 23, 1977.
The execution of Tonya the Machine-Gunner
Antonina Makarova, a Moscow canteen worker turned army nurse, escaped encirclement in October 1941 and reached the German-backed Lokot Autonomy in Orel Oblast. She became a staff executioner known as Tonya the Machine-Gunner after starting a relationship with the local prison chief, shooting citizens suspected of partisan ties.
Makarova told investigators that she grew accustomed to executions after her first shooting and acted to preserve her own life. Following the war, she married, took the surname Ginzburg, lived in Belarus, and worked at a sewing factory until KGB officers identified her through a former prison chief arrested after a street fight.
State security agents established surveillance and brought witnesses to confirm her identity before arresting her in summer 1978. The Bryansk Regional Court sentenced Makarova to death on November 20, 1978, for the proven executions of 168 people, rejecting her expectation of a light sentence due to her age.
Extradition from the United States and the Khatyn trial
Crimean native Fyodor Fedorenko volunteered in autumn 1942 to guard the Treblinka death camp in occupied Poland, where he helped strip prisoners, confiscate property, and force victims into gas chambers. He escaped to the United States after the war and gained citizenship, which US President Gerald Ford refused to revoke despite Soviet extradition requests following talks between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev.
Fedorenko visited Crimea as a tourist in 1973 and was questioned by the KGB, but was released until US courts stripped his citizenship following a 1976 trial. The United States deported Fedorenko to the Soviet Union in December 1984, making him the first Nazi criminal extradited by American authorities to the KGB.
The Crimean Regional Court in Simferopol began his trial on June 10, 1986, supervised by retired police colonel Alexander Bykhovets. Witnesses testified that Fedorenko drove prisoners to gas chambers with sticks, leading to his death sentence and execution on July 28, 1987.
Grigory Vasyura served as chief of staff for the 118th Auxiliary Police Battalion, leading punitive operations that burned Belarusian villages along with their residents during the Khatyn massacre. After serving an initial prison sentence, he gained early release under amnesty, managed a collective farm in Kyiv Oblast, and used veteran benefits while carrying forged documents.
Despite attempts by Ukrainian Communist Party leader Vladimir Shcherbitsky to block prosecution to avoid inter-ethnic tension, Vasyura was tried and admitted in court that he burned Khatyn. A military tribunal sentenced Vasyura to death on December 26, 1986, concluding prosecutions 45 years after the crime.
