SUMMARY:

The article analyzes the preconditions and general political climate of the phenomenon of mass collaboration of Soviet citizens with Nazi armed forces during World War II. Andrii Bolianovskyi diagnoses deep societal crisis in the prewar USSR and considers its political, national and social aspects. He employs the framework of “civil war” as a part of the German–Soviet confrontation to account for nuances of experience of collaboration. The article also investigates the reasons for and incentives of Nazi Germany’s creation of international military units packed with peoples of the Soviet Union, and the impact of ideological Nazism and colonialism of German leadership on the policies of recruitment and application of these auxiliary forces. Bolianovskyi’s other major concern in the article is the statistics of East Europeans in the German military service. His analysis in this part is based on a unique range of archival and published sources and historiography. He concludes that the numbers of Soviet collaborators reflect the deep level of alienation of many citizens of the USSR from Stalin’s regime, while the Third Reich policy of “civil war” at the Eastern Front, though numerically successful, resulted in failure. Nazi colonialism did not allow the anti-Soviet mobilization to be sustained in the form of regular armed forces on a grand scale.