The Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (in Russian: Комитет Освобождения Народов России, abbreviated as КОНР) was a committee composed of military and civilian anticommunists from the Soviet Union. It was founded with the approval and sponsorship of Germany on November 14, 1944, in German-controlled Prague (purposely chosen because it was a Slavic city that was still not under Soviet control).
The committee's stated goals were
- The overthrow of Stalin's tyranny, the liberation of the peoples of Russia from the Bolshevik system, and the restitution of those rights to the peoples of Russia which they fought for and won in the people's revolution of 1917
- Discontinuation of the war and an honorable peace with Germany
- Creation of a new free people's political system without Bolsheviks and exploiters
They sought to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union via an independent liberation army, which would be armed by and work in alliance with Germany. It claimed to support the creation of a new democratic government in Russia. The goals of the committee were embodied in a document known as the Prague Manifesto. The manifesto nominally guaranteed the freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly, as well as a right to self-determination of any ethnic group living in Russia (the same rights were already guaranteed by the existing Soviet Constitution, but disregarded on a daily basis by Stalin's government; it remains a matter of speculation whether a government established by the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia would have behaved differently). The Prague Manifesto did not contain any anti-semitic or otherwise racially inspired rhetoric, which caused a conflict with Nazi propagandists. To appease them, the manifesto's authors agreed to include a criticism aimed at the Allies in the manifesto's preamble.
The chairman of the committee was General Vlasov, who also commanded the Russian Liberation Army. The committee was viewed as the political arm of the Russian Liberation Army, although it also united several Ukrainian and other ethnic forces that were anti-Soviet.
After the surrender of Germany to the Allies, the committee ceased to operate—its members rechanneling their energy towards saving the Russian Liberation Army and other former Soviet citizens who had collaborated with the Axis Powers from forced repatriation to the Soviet SMERSH. During the immediate post war period, several new organizations sprung up that intended to continue the committee's goal of fighting communism (i.e. The Union of the St. Andrew Flag, the Union of Battle for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia), started by veterans of the committee and the Russian Liberation Army who managed to escape forced repatriation to the Soviets.
In the United States an organization with a similar name, the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, was founded in the late 1940s, and became known for their Congress-funded and later CIA-run propaganda broadcaster Radio Liberty, which was operating from Western Germany.
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