Vyacheslav Grigoryevich Naumenko[a] (25 February 1883 – 30 October 1979) was a Kuban Cossack leader, commander in the White Army, and later Nazi collaborator.

[1] He entered the First World War with the rank of voiskovi starshina (lieutenant colonel), serving as chief of staff of the 1st Kuban Cossack Cavalry Division.

Kornilov who was well known for being described as having "the heart of a lion but the brain of a sheep" was a right-wing officer who was the first to raise his banner against the Bolsheviks following the October Revolution.

[1] By early March 1918, Naumenko was leading the Cossacks of the Kuban People's Republic into sporadic, but bitter clashes against the Red Army.

[10] Naumenko served in the reserves of the Armed Forces of South Russia (AFSR) from 14 September 1919 to 11 October 1919, when he took command of the 2nd Kuban Corps, which he held until March 1920.

[2] He went into exile in 1920 following the final defeat of the White Army in the Crimea and was elected ataman of the Kuban Host on the Greek island of Lemnos in the Aegean Sea.

[12] The British prime minister David Lloyd George never lost the hope of reaching a settlement with Vladimir Lenin and saw Wrangel as an obstructionist.

In October 1921, the Lemnos refugee camp was shut down with some of the Kuban Host choosing to return to Soviet Russia where an amnesty was promised for them while those who wished to stay in exile went to either Bulgaria or Yugoslavia.

[14] After Operation Barbarossa started on 22 June 1941, Naumenko declared his willingness to serve Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union.

[17] By the time of the Second World War, Naumenko had changed his opinion about Cossack separatism due to the influence of Alfred Rosenberg, and in 1942 publicly praised the plans unveiled in Berlin for a Nazi puppet state to be called Cossackia.

When the men of the 1st Cossack Cavalry Division learned in September 1943 that they would not be going to the Eastern Front as expected and were instead being sent to the Balkans largely because Adolf Hitler distrusted their loyalty to the Reich, the divisions's commander General Helmuth von Pannwitz had Naumenko together with the former Don Host ataman Pyotr Krasnov give speeches before the Cossacks at their Mielau base.

[18] In January 1944, Naumenko left his home in Belgrade and reviewed while wearing the traditional black uniform of the Kuban Host the 1st Cossack Cavalry Division serving in Bosnia and Croatia, which he then praised in a speech.

Naumenko settled in New York, where he published a two-volume book in 1962 and 1970 about the Repatriation of Cossacks entitled Velikoe Predatelstvo (The Great Betrayal).

[24] The Austrian-born American author Julius Epstein described Naumenko in the early 1970s as living in a modest house in New York together with his daughter and son-in-law Nazarenko.

Naumenko spent his last days in a nursing home run by the Tolstoy Foundation in New York city, where he suffered from senility.

[2][26] The two volumes of Velikoe Predatelstvo were translated into English by the American novelist William Dritschilo under the title The Great Betrayal in 2015 and 2018.