Initially, this army existed only on paper and was used by Germans to goad Red Army troops to surrender, while any political and military activities were officially forbidden to him by the Nazis after his visits to the occupied territory;[2] only in November 1944 did Heinrich Himmler, aware of Germany's shortage of manpower, arrange for Vlasov formations composed of Soviet prisoners of war as armed forces of Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, a political organisation headed by Vlasov.

He fought in the southern theatre in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Crimea during the Russian Civil War, including against the White forces of Anton Denikin and Pyotr Wrangel, and the anarchist army of Nestor Makhno.

[9] After this success, Vlasov was put in command of the 2nd Shock Army of the Volkhov Front and ordered to lead the attempt to lift the Siege of Leningrad—the Lyuban-Chudovo Offensive Operation of January–April 1942.

Strik-Strikfeldt, who had been a participant in the White movement during the Russian Civil War, persuaded Vlasov to become involved in aiding the German advance against the rule of Joseph Stalin and Bolshevism.

While in Pskov, Vlasov dealt himself a nearly fatal political blow by referring to the Germans as mere "guests" during a speech, which Hitler found belittling.

[citation needed] According to Varlam Shalamov and his tale The Last Battle of Major Pugachov, Vlasov emissaries lectured to the Russian prisoners of war, explaining to them that their government had declared them all traitors, and that escaping was pointless.

While Hitler and the supporters of the Generalplan Ost adhered to the idea of the colonization of the Untermenschen and denied any cooperation with the population of the USSR, Alfred Rosenberg proposed the creation of monoethnic nation-states as satellites of the Third Reich ruled by local nationalist collaborators.

As the reports of the Osstruppen defecting the Soviet partisans reached Hitler, he demanded that all the units be disbanded, and the men sent to the mines and factories, but this order wasn't executed due to the resistance of the OKW.

After the 20 July plot, the Eastern troops were handed to the SS, and as Hitler weakened due to physical conditions, Himmler found possible the creation of a collaborationist political organisation with its army.

The Vlasovites opposed their programs, the Smolensk Declaration, Vlasov's open letter "Why I Decided to Fight against Bolshevism", the Prague Manifesto of the KONR and Bloknot Propagandista (an important document which was written by rather minor members of the KONR as open for discussion and was not recognized as an official program), both to the Western capitalism and Stalinism, which was called by the word "Bolshevism" and described in the Manifesto not as socialism but as "state capitalism", and proclaimed their devotion to "completing the Revolution" of 1917 without distinguishing the February Revolution and the October Revolution, and to ideals of either a "Russia without Bolsheviks and Capitalists" (Smolensk Declaration and the open letter), or a welfare state (Bloknot Propagandista); the influence of the NTS on the Manifesto is seen in the description of the future system of Russia as a "national-labour" system, some of Vlasov's generals joined the NTS.

However, antisemitic remarks were made in one of the speeches of Vasily Malyshkin in 1943 and in and in Georgi Zhilenkov's interview to the Völkischer Beobachter; Vlasov was critical of such remarks and replied to the Nazi concerns that "the Jewish question" "was an internal Russian problem and would be dealt with after they [the ROA] had accomplished the primary aim of overthrowing the existing regime"; however, antisemitism frequently appeared in the pro-Vlasov Nazi and collaborationist newspapers issued before the formation of KONR, including the ones edited by Zykov, often in form of articles reprinted from the Völkischer Beobachter with the citation of the source.

The suspicions and criticism of the Vlasovites from the Reich officials was summarised in a document by the Ministry of Propaganda official Eberhard Taubert who described his concerns about the movement being "not National Socialist": "It is significant that it does not fight Jewry, that the Jewish Question is not recognized as such at all"; instead it presented "a watered-down infusion of liberal and Bolshevik ideologies", and Taubert described the concern with "strong Anglophile sympathies" and it "toying with the idea of a possible change of course" while not "feel[ing] bound to Germany".

For example, in late 1942 he told another SS official who was based in Minsk that Russian collaborators should not be promised a national state and only a liberation from Bolshevism and possibly better living standards.

Himmler later noted that there were Wehrmacht officers who wanted to give Vlasov a million-man army, and speculated that in the future it could theoritically turn against Germany.

"[18] It was not until Germany's position was weakened in the spring of 1944 that Himmler began changing his mind, with the encouragement of Gunter d'Alquen and others, and decided to meet with Vlasov.

In March 1945, Bunyachenko started disobeying the commands of the Wehrmacht; eventually Ferdinand Schörner (and later Rudolf Toussaint[21]) threatened to use armed force against the ROA.

[21] Two days later, the First Division was forced to leave Prague as Communist Czech partisans began arresting ROA soldiers in order to hand them over to the Soviets for execution.

Vlasov and the rest of his forces, trying to evade the Red Army, attempted to head west to surrender to the Allies in the closing days of the war in Europe.

[2][22] Vlasov's division, commanded by General Sergei Bunyachenko, was captured 40 kilometres (25 mi) southeast of Plzeň by the Soviet 25th Tank Corps, after their attempt to surrender to US troops was rejected.

A secret trial was held, beginning on 30 July 1946 and was presided over by Viktor Abakumov who sentenced him and eleven other senior officers from his army to death for high treason.

[28] However, the new narrative was left-wing, being constructed by the Menshevik intellectual and historian Boris Nicolaevsky, who after visiting DP camps came to a belief that the Vlasov Movement was democratic and even anti-Nazi to some extent.

[25] However, the Vlasovites did not have a necessity to present themselves left-wing democrats, since the CIA did not scruple to fund the openly far-right collaborators from the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, like the Belarusian Central Council.

[25][29] Alexander Dallin called his publications "a documented but one-sided attempt in Russian émigré politics to reduce the Vlasov movement to a German propaganda trick.

More to it, the SBONR in their responses made nationalist and allegedly antisemitic dog whistles, since they never mentioned the Jewish origins of their opponents, but contrasted the "Russian people" with the American exiles who "long ago forgotten how to understand" the first; later they compromised themselves more with "historical apologies for restoration and reaction", therefore making Nicolaevsky's narrative unable to be adopted as universal, since one of their publications called Kerensky a traitor for preventing the Kornilov coup in 1917.

[28] A new narrative was constructed in the 1970s and emerged in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book The GULAG Archipelago: while not directly advocating collaboration, he and the later authors labelled Vlasov as "the symbol of the suffering Russian people" and its "victimhood" throughout the 20th century.

[27] Julia Shapiro writes that Vlasov during his collaboration with the Nazis managed to secure his image for the further generations, but "his intentionally murky beliefs make him a convenient straw man to suit cultural and political agendas.

As this myth has been increasingly used by Vladimir Putin and his Putinist regime to legitimize its state and its actions, the figure of Vlasov gains a political value in contemporary Russia.

[32] The fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to immediate popularisation of Vlasov among the emerging far-right nationalists, since they preferred the ideals of Pan-Slavism and an Empire to a separatist nation-state.

[34][27] Solzhenitsyn's narrative became more or less convenient, since it did not deny the role of Victory and the Great Patriotic War and united it with criticism of Stalin and the understanding of Vlasov's tragedy which could be reintegrated into national history, making it more inclusive.

[36][25][27] After the Annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the War in Donbas in 2014 Putin called the Ukrainian authorities "Banderites", and Kremlin-affiliated media and politicians alike framed the fighting as a rerun of the Second World War; the usage of the word "banderite" became popular in propaganda, and the Russian media and politicians were eager to remind of collaborators of other nationalities, Tatars and Chechens, but avoided Vlasov and the ROA: McGlynn noted that in an analysis of 3,509 comparisons between the 2014 conflict and WWII, Vlasov was mentioned just once, as a reminder of Russian collaboration could "besmirch Russia's moral authority as an heir to the Soviet Union's Great Victory of 1945 and self-appointed defender of the war's memory.