He became a naturalized American citizen while leading a splinter far-right organization, the Russian National Revolutionary Labor and Workers Peasant Party of Fascists.
[1] His family, though Polish in origin, was known for its long devotion to the Russian czars; one of Vonsyatsky's paternal great-grandfather had been handed a comital[2] estate from the Romanovs,[3] which allowed him to use the courtesy title of Count.
[1] Vonsyatsky was educated at a military prep school in Moscow and the Emperor Nicholas II Cavalry Academy in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
[3] After the revolutionary events of October 1917, which brought the Leninist Bolsheviks to power and climaxed in the protracted Russian Civil War of 1917–1923, Vonsyatsky, newly admitted to St. Petersburg as a military cadet, took part in the anti-Bolshevik opposition and served in the counter-revolutionary White movement, first seeing action against the Red Army at Rostov.
Minister of Justice Nabokov organized the investigation, their materials were transferred to the military authorities, but the killers remained free and continued to kill and rape.
One of the participants in these bloody affairs, officer Vonsyatsky, having gone into exile and probably needing money, sold his memories about them to the editors of Latest News, where they were published under his signature.
In another, one of the murderers complained about brain tissue that had spattered on his mackintosh after he had shot a young Jew through the head in front of the victim's horrified parents.
Although he later stated that the material was extracted from his personal diary by a friend who wanted it published, it is unlikely that Vonsyatsky took part in the atrocities that he so floridly evoked.
[5] Leaving the White Army's stronghold in the Crimean Peninsula with the departing forces of General Wrangel, Vonsyatsky was evacuated to western Europe in 1920.
[1][3] Despite earlier publications supplemented by photographs of German soldiers beneath such titles as "The Army of the Holy Swastika"[3] and continuing collaboration with the German American Bund elements during World War II, in public appeals amid the growing anti-German sentiment of the early 1940s, Vonsyatsky's addresses to his target audience struck a different tone.
[1] In summer 1940, Vonsyatsky's publications declared the following:[3] The Russian National Revolutionary Party, of which I am the leader, does not support either Germany's or Japan's ambition for hegemony in Europe or the Far East.
The Germans and the Japanese have never made clear their attitude toward a replacement of the present Stalinist rule by a Russian National Government.
Thompson, Conn. July 4, 1940[3]In 1942, Sergei Nikitich Ivanov, a representative of Anastasy Vonsiatsky in Berlin, proposed the creation of the Russian National People's Army (RNNA).
[6] In March 1942, Ivanov met with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, and received permission to form a Russian military unit from Soviet prisoners of war in Barysaw, Smolensk, Roslavl, and Vyazma.
The RNNA's leadership told soldiers that their task was, "the fight against Bolshevism and Jewry for the creation of a new Russian state and the restoration of the pre-revolutionary system.
[3] Indicted for conspiring to assist Nazi Germany in violation of the Espionage Act alongside fellow conspirators Wilhelm Kunze, Otto Willumeit, Wolfgang Ebell, and Reverend Kurt E. B. Molzahn, Vonsyatsky submitted a guilty plea after first protestations of innocence, and was convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act by a jury in Hartford, Connecticut on June 22, 1942.
[1] He authored a book entitled Rasplata (Retribution) about World War II, where "he accused the Japanese government, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his personal nemesis, Thomas J. Dodd, of hampering the anti-Soviet cause".
Many of the documents of Vonsiatsky were stored in the archives of the Hoover Institution in California, in the collection of Professor John Stephan, author of The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925–1945,[11] and Providence College, Phillips Memorial Library.