Anastasy Vonsyatsky

Anastasy Andreyevich Vonsiatsky (, ; June 12, 1898 – February 5, 1965), better known in the United States as Anastase Andreivitch Vonsiatsky, was a Russian anti-Bolshevik émigré and fascist leader based in the United States from the 1920s. He was the founder of the All-Russian Fascist Organisation.

He became a naturalized American citizen while leading a splinter far-right organization, the Russian National Revolutionary Labor and Workers Peasant Party of Fascists. The headquarters of the RFO were based in Putnam, Connecticut. In 1942, following the United States's entry into war with Germany and Japan, Vonsiatsky was charged with supporting secret contacts with agents of Nazi Germany. He pleaded guilty to espionage and was sentenced to 5 years in prison. Released in 1946, Vonsiatsky lived out the remainder of his life in the United States. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1965.

Early life Anastasy Andreyevich Vonsiatsky was born in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). His family, though Polish in origin, was known for its long devotion to the Russian czars; one of Vonsiatsky's paternal great-grandfather had been handed a comital estate from the Romanovs, which allowed him to use the courtesy title of Count. "Counterintelligence officers arrested individuals, mainly Jews, whose bullet-ridden bodies were later found somewhere in the ravines in the vicinity of Yalta. Minister of Justice Nabokov organized the investigation, their materials were transferred to the military authorities, but the killers remained free and continued to kill and rape. One of the participants in these bloody affairs, officer Vonsiatsky, having gone into exile and probably needing money, sold his memories about them to the editors of Latest News, where they were published under his signature. I read them then with deep disgust and was indignant that the newspaper was printing them."In one account, several White officers had pulled out the fingernails and bayonetted the calves of their victim. In another, one of the murderers complained about brain tissue that had spattered on his mackintosh after he had shot a young Jew through the head in front of the victim's horrified parents. However, in The Russian Fascists: Tragedy And Farce In Exile, 1925-1945, John J. Stephan disputed the account."Read with a cold eye, Memoirs were outpourings of an overheated imagination. Although he later stated that the material was extracted from his personal diary by a friend who wanted it published, it is unlikely that Vonsiatsky took part in the atrocities that he so floridly evoked. Memoirs was set in the Crimea. Yet Anastasy's two-month sojourn in Yalta (his only visit to the Crimea) was serenely spent as an invalid and then as a son-in-law in a Jewish household. Memoirs might well have been a clumsy didactic tale deploring a tendency among many Whites to equate Jews with Bolsheviks. It probably represented the author’s first flight into make-believe."Nevertheless, Vonsiatsky's participation in atrocities are undeniable. Later in life, he recalled how he and other White soldiers had machine-gunned 500 Bolshevik prisoners in Rostov on November 27, 1919. Vonsiatsky was wounded several times in the war. He was once shot in the abdomen, and carried this bullet with him for the rest of his life. His brother, Nikolai, was killed in action.

Leaving the White Army's stronghold in the Crimean Peninsula with the departing forces of General Wrangel, Vonsiatsky was evacuated to western Europe in 1920. Traveling through Constantinople and France, Vonsiatsky arrived in the United States in 1922. In March 1930, Vonsiatsky was given an American reserve officer's commission and appointed a first lieutenant of the United States Army Reserve; the military commission would eventually expire in 1935. In March 1942, Ivanov met with Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, and received permission to form a Russian military unit from Soviet prisoners of war in Barysaw, Smolensk, Roslavl, and Vyazma. The RNNA's leadership told soldiers that their task was, "the fight against Bolshevism and Jewry for the creation of a new Russian state and the restoration of the pre-revolutionary system."

Vonsiatsky became a subject of FBI investigation and was indicted in 1942 for connections with proxies for German interests, including key participants in the pro-Nazi German American Bund, whose leader, Fritz Kuhn, had previously been assisted by Vonsiatsky's bail money in 1939. Indicted for conspiring to assist Nazi Germany in violation of the Espionage Act alongside fellow conspirators Wilhelm Kunze, Otto Willumeit, Wolfgang Ebell, and Reverend Kurt E. B. Molzahn, Vonsiatsky submitted a guilty plea after first protestations of innocence, and was convicted under the 1917 Espionage Act by a jury in Hartford, Connecticut on June 22, 1942. The lead prosecutor in the case was Thomas J. Dodd, a future U.S. Senator who went on to prosecute Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials following the end of the war. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in the Superior Court of Windham County, Putnam, Connecticut, on September 30, 1927, and Providence College, Phillips Memorial Library.