Suchergebnisse

This study investigates Russian White émigré collaboration with National Socialist Germany and the participation of Russian military exiles in the war against the USSR in 1941–1945. The main organisation that supplied volunteers from the émigré milieu for the Wehrmacht was the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS). The majority of officers held 'defeatist' views, which entailed continuing the struggle against the Bolsheviks by any means necessary, even by enlisting in a foreign army. The exiles, although united ideologically by broadly understood Russian nationalism, did not establish one single, clear-cut political solution for a future 'liberated Russia.' The study briefly investigates ROVS in the interwar period, gives an overview of the worldview of ROVS members and evaluates the relationship between Hitler's Germany and ROVS. This thesis assesses the émigrés volunteering for service, as well as their activities and expectations during the Second World War and shortly after it.This study demonstrates that the vanquished side attempted to 'replay' the Russian Civil War against the background of the new world conflict. The conservative worldview of former Russian officers who went to the USSR is explained and analysed within the context of the German occupation policies. The émigré volunteers who served in the Wehrmacht were aligned with German anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitic objectives. Yet, unlike other foreign volunteers in the Wehrmacht, they considered themselves Russian nationalists and ignored the anti-Slavic racial dimension to German policy. The émigrés generally empathised with the local population (defined as Orthodox Russians and excluding Russian Jews) and sought to aid them. The exiles mostly understood their role as that of a mediator between the occupants and the occupied. After the war, ROVS members redefined their role in the war as something separate from Nazi ideology. Émigré volunteers were thoroughly distinct from all the other foreign contingents: if the latter fought against 'Russian Bolshevism' and Russians per se, the former were heavily invested in the illusion that they could separate the two and, with the Germans as their allies, achieve an independent, nationalistic Russia.

The article is dedicated to the outstanding mathematician and pedagogue, Professor of Lomonosov Moscow State University, Oleg Georgiyevich Smolyanov (9 Feb. 1938 – 16 Dec. 2021), whose full life path and multifaceted activities were aimed at science and education development in the USSR and Russia. Oleg Georgiyevich, being a talented pedagogue and organiser, was a devotee of the scientific school in the field of the theory of topological vector spaces, infinite-dimensional analysis, beneficial for the formation of a huge number of scientists and teachers of higher educational institutions.

Professor Oleg Grabar, a luminary historian of Islamic visual arts and culture, died on 8 January 2011 at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was a much respected and beloved professor and mentor of generations of undergraduate and graduate students who were inspired by his generous spirit, his probing mind, and his intellectually challenging questions about the nature of culture, art, and history. He was invited to lecture widely in many countries, and he authored more than thirty books—several of which have been translated into multiple languages—as well as over one hundred essays in international journals.