18 Facts About Pyotr Krasnov

Pyotr Krasnov was born on 22 September 1869 in Saint Petersburg, son to lieutenant-general Nikolay Krasnov and grandson to general Ivan Krasnov.

In 1888 Pyotr Krasnov graduated from Pavlovsk Military School and joined the Ataman regiment of the Life Guards of the Imperial Russian Army.

Pyotr Krasnov mockingly noted that during the march on Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, exhausted Japanese soldiers had to be carried in the wagons of the Russian Army.

Pyotr Krasnov was put in command of the 3rd Cavalry Corps in September 1917 after elements of it took part in the Kornilov affair against the Russian Provisional Government.

The Germans had set up the Ukrainian Zaporizhian Cossack Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi as the puppet leader of Ukraine in April 1918, and Pyotr Krasnov indicated his willingness to serve as a leader of a set-up similar to the Skoropadskyi regime.

On 11 July 1918 Pyotr Krasnov wrote a letter to Wilhelm II declaring that the Cossacks had always been friends of the Reich and went on to say:.

In January 1919 Pyotr Krasnov was forced by the Allied arms embargo against the Don Host to acknowledge General Denikin's authority over the White movement, despite his animosity towards Denikin.

On February 19,1919, Pyotr Krasnov fled to Western Europe after losing the election for the office of Don Ataman.

Pyotr Krasnov had begun writing From Double Eagle to the Red Flag when he was in prison in 1917, but the novel was first published in Russian in Berlin in 1921.

Pyotr Krasnov's novels were translated into English, German, French, Serbian and other European languages.

Unlike other Eurasianists who saw the Soviet Union as a "stepping stone" towards the development of a Eurasianist Russia, Pyotr Krasnov's anti-communism led to the rejection of the "stepping stone thesis".

In 1937, after several Russian White emigre leaders in Paris had been assassinated by the Soviet NKVD, Pyotr Krasnov moved to Berlin where he believed he would be safer, and declared his support for the Third Reich.

From late June 1941 onward, Pyotr Krasnov was a regular speaker on Radio Berlin's Russian-language station and delivered very antisemitic speeches that portrayed the Soviet government as the rule of "Judeo-Bolsheviks" and the German forces advancing into the Soviet Union as liberators.

Pyotr Krasnov, who considered himself a Russian first and a Cossack second, was not in sympathy with Rosenberg's notion of establishing a Nazi puppet state to be called "Cossackia" in southeastern Russia.

At a meeting with the Cossack separatist Vasily Glazkov in Berlin in July 1944, Pyotr Krasnov stated that he did not agree with Glazkov's separatism but was forced under pressure from Rosenberg to appoint three supporters of Cossackia to important positions in the Cossack Central Office.

In November 1944, Pyotr Krasnov refused the appeal of General Andrey Vlasov to join the latter's Russian Liberation Army.

Pyotr Krasnov disliked Vlasov as a former Red Army general, who had defected after his capture in 1942 and because as an old man, he was unwilling to submit to take orders from a much younger man.

On 28 May 1945, Pyotr Krasnov was repatriated to the Soviets by the British authorities during Operation Keelhaul.