Unique Account of Vlasov Army Veteran Published

“The Russian Patriot – A Red Army Soldier’s Service for His Motherland and Against Bolshevism”.

A gripping wartime account of one man’s unique experience in the vast cauldron of conflict that was the Eastern Front.

Traitor or patriot? For Russian-born naturalized Australian Sigiamund Diczbalis the more than 60 years since the Second World War ended have done little to erase a question that has troubled him lifelong

A committed young Communist who joined the Red Army on the day Hitler’s Blitzkrieg tore across the Soviet Union’s borders in June 1941, Sigismund unquestioningly offered his life to the service of his motherland. Captured and thrown into a barbaric open-air prisoner of war camp by German conquerors fought for survival using all his cunning and intelligence. Fate offered him escape from certain death through service to the ‘new order’; chance made him a red partisan spy.

Ordered to infiltrate a German-run anti-partisan unit, Sigismund’s path to a new and radically different future began.

As Soviet armies turned to the offensive and swept westwards in 1944 Sigismund fled before them. Questioning Soviet orthodoxy, Sigismund’s conversion began and soon he was a committed anti-Bolshevik who joined an obscure new army – one devoted to toppling Stalin and bringing democracy to Russia.

It was all too little too late and when in the spring of 1945 Sigismund fell into the hands of Soviet spy-hunters death seemed a certainty…until fate once again played a part in giving him a new lease of life in a far away land.

Did Sigismund betray his motherland, or was his conversion to the anti-Bolshevik cause the act of a true patriot? That question is at the heart of this compelling account of one man’s tumultuous war.

Published by specialist Spellmount Books, a division of specialist British publisher The History Press, “The Russian Patriot” is the result of several years’ close collaboration between Moscow-based journalist and writer Nick Holdsworth and Brisbane, Australia-based Sigismund Diczbalis.

The two met when Nick was researching a film script about the life of General Andrei Vlasov, a former Red Army officer who founded the Russian Army of Liberation.

Working closely together via telephone, email and occasional meetings in Moscow and St Petersburg during Sigismund’s infrequent trips back to the land of his birth, they expanded and added new material to an earlier Russian language version of the memoirs.

The result is a detailed, lively and gripping read that is thought to be the first ever English-language publication of the memoirs of a rank and file member of the Russian Army of Liberation.

The book is available via Amazon, other internet booksellers and High Street bookstores in Britain, USA and Australia.