Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia

The Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (Russian: Комитет освобождения народов России, Komitet osvobozhdeniya narodov Rossii, abbreviated as Russian: КОНР, KONR) was composed of military and civilian collaborators with Nazi Germany from territories of the Soviet Union, most of them being ethnic Russians, and was the political authority of the Russian anti-Soviet movement aligned with the Axis powers. It was founded by General Andrey Vlasov on 14 November 1944, in Prague, occupied Czechoslovakia, which was purposely chosen because it was a Slavic city that was still under Axis control. Vlasov had received the permission to establish the committee from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

The goals of the committee were embodied in a document known as the Prague Manifesto. The manifesto's fourteen points guaranteed the freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly, as well as a right to self-determination of any ethnic group living in territories belonging to Russia; based on the right to self-determination, the Vlasovites planned to dissolve the Soviet Union and create independent nation states, including a separatist Russian nation-state. Ideologically, the Vlasov movement was between the Russian nationalism of the NTS, as its ideologues surrounded Vlasov with the support of the Nazis, and the other POWs which held to more social democratic views; some of Vlasov's close associates like Milety Zykov, the main ideologue of his movement and the Russian Liberation Army, described themselves as Marxists. The Prague Manifesto supported a social system based on private agriculture and disbandment of the collective farms while keeping the industry nationalized; the Vlasovites opposed their program both to Stalinism and capitalism. The Prague Manifesto did not contain any explicit anti-semitic or other racially inspired rhetoric, which caused a conflict with the Nazis (see below). However, criticism aimed at the Western Allies (specifically US and UK) was included in the manifesto's preamble.

In January 1945 Vlasov's Russian Liberation Army began to be organized into several divisions, though not all of them finished forming due to the collapse of the German war effort, and other Russian volunteer units serving in the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS were nominally transferred to its command in April 1945 as the "Armed Forces of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia." The latter included Cossack forces aligned with Timofey Domanov, which had gathered in northern Yugoslavia by May 1945. In the chaotic final months of the Third Reich, the divisions under Vlasov's direct command tried to gather in western Czechoslovakia and Austria after briefly engaging the Red Army in Operation April Storm during its advance on Berlin. The Russian troops sided against the Germans during the Prague Uprising, before leaving the city due to the Red Army approaching Prague. After trying to surrender to the United States Army, many of its members either surrendered to the Soviets or were later repatriated to the Soviet Union by the Western Allies.

After the surrender of Germany to the Allies, the committee ceased to operate. During the immediate post-war period, several new organisations sprang up that intended to continue the committee's goal of fighting communism (i.e., the Union of the St. Andrew Flag; the Committee of United Vlasovites; the Union of Battle for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia), started by veterans of the committee and the Russian Liberation Army who managed to escape forced repatriation to the Soviet Union. Two latter organisations participated in US-led efforts to form a united anti-Soviet platform of Soviet emigres.

In the United States, a CIA-led organisation with a similar name, the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, was founded in the late 1940s, and became known for their propaganda broadcaster Radio Liberty, which was run by the Central Intelligence Agency and later funded by the United States Congress. It operated from Munich, in West Germany. Members of the Vlasovite organisations established after the war contributed to the American Committee.