Great Betrayal - Paperback

by William Dritschilo (Translator), Vyacheslav G. Naumenko (Author)

At the end of World War Two, in a beautiful alpine valley in Austria, an event occurred that has been variously described as a tragedy, a betrayal, and even a war crime. Cossacks and their followers massed by the tens of thousands around Lienz expecting to be given the freedom to continue their more than 25-year struggle against Soviet oppression. Instead, they were brutally betrayed into the hands of those oppressors. During his final years in the United States, General Vyacheslav Grigroryevich Naumenko compiled numerous documents and eyewitness accounts about the incident. He published his first volume of Great Betrayal in 1962. It is mainly composed of accounts of the incident at Lienz. A second volume, relating the fate of the Cossack officers, was published in 1970. Snippets of the material Naumenko collected have been translated into English and published to great effect in various books over the years, but this is the first full translation of his first volume. It now makes the full first person accounts in Great Betrayal available in English to the remaining survivors and their many descendants, most of whom cannot read the original Russian.

Author Biography

General V. G. Naumenko (1883-1979) was a Kuban Cossack who rose to colonel in the Russian Imperial Army during World War I and then to general under Generals Anton Denikin and Peter Wrangel in the Volunteer Army, the last of the White Armies that fought the Soviet Red Army during the Russian Civil War. He was elected Ataman of the Kuban Cossacks while in exile on the island of Lemnos after being evacuated from Crimea at the end of the Civil War. After Lemnos, he settled in Yugoslavia, remaining as Ataman. After World War II, he resettled near New York City in the United States. Translator William Dritschilo is the author or coauthor of the non-fiction books, Earth Days and Survivors of Lienz, the Web biography, Magnificent Failure, and the recently published historical novels, Ecologists and Lienz Cossacks.b