Boris Smyslovsky, 91;
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Anti-Communist Czarist General
Boris Smyslovsky, 91, an anti-communist czarist general whose Russian troops fought with Hitler’s soldiers against the Red Army in World War II. Smyslovsky, who then called himself Arthur Holmston, led a 6,000-man contingent known as the First Russian National Army of the German Wehrmacht. At the end of World War II, he and 500 of his remaining soldiers managed to reach neutral Liechtenstein, where staunchly anti-communist Prince Franz Josef II granted them political asylum. Once an officer in the Russian Imperial Guards, Smyslovsky went into Polish and German exile after fighting the Bolsheviks in the 1917 civil war. After Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, he became the first Russian to command a Russian unit fighting for the Germans on the eastern front. In a 1985 interview, he said his goal was to end communism in the Soviet Union and to get rid of Stalin. But he said he was not a Nazi. In Vaduz, Liechtenstein, on Sept. 5.
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