After being taken captive he led underground resistance efforts in the various concentration camps he was held in and managed to make multiple escape attempts.

Upon completing seven grades of secondary school he worked as a mechanic at a factory and served as secretary of a Komsomol committee until joining the Red Army in 1934.

[1] Vlasov was active in the defense of the Soviet Union after the first day of Operation Barbarossa as a squadron commander of a fighter aviation regiment on the Western Front.

On one mission he was tasked with landing his plane near enemy troops to transport a wounded pilot, Hero of the Soviet Union Filipp Demchenkov, to safety.

Vlasov then planned a second escape attempt, in which he pretended to be sick and then tried to climb out of a hospital window, but after being caught he was sent to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

He then attempted to organize a prisoner uprising upon the approach of Soviet troops, but after one member of his inner circle betrayed him to the SS, he was tortured and burned alive in a crematorium oven on 26 January 1945.