Anastasy Vonsiatsky

Anastasy Andreyevich Vonsyatsky was born in Warsaw, Poland (then part of the Russian Empire).[1] His family, though Polish in origin, was known for its long devotion to the Russian czars; one of Vonsyatsky's paternal great-grandfather had been handed a comital[2] estate from the Romanovs,[3] which allowed him to use the courtesy title of Count.[2] His father, Andrei Nikolaevich,[1] was an army officer assassinated at a Radom office of the Imperial Gendarmes by a Polish revolutionary in 1910.[3] His mother was Nina Anastasievna Plyuschevskaya.[1]

Vonsyatsky was educated at a military prep school in Moscow and the Emperor Nicholas II Cavalry Academy in Saint Petersburg, Russia.[1]

Vonsyatsky embarked upon a military career in the Imperial Russian Army during the reign of Nicholas II.[3] After the revolutionary events of October 1917, which brought the Leninist Bolsheviks to power and climaxed in the protracted Russian Civil War of 1917–1923, Vonsyatsky, newly admitted to St. Petersburg as a military cadet, took part in the anti-Bolshevik opposition and served in the counter-revolutionary White movement, first seeing action against the Red Army at Rostov.[3] Leaving the White Army's stronghold in the Crimean Peninsula with the departing forces of General Wrangel, he was evacuated to western Europe in 1920.

Traveling through Constantinople and France, Vonsyatsky arrived in the United States in 1922. In March 1930, Vonsyatsky 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.[3]

Forming political connections within the émigré circles after establishing himself outside Russia, Vonsyatsky was, at one point in the interwar period, a leader of the Russian Fascist Organization, an initially independent movement that later became closely associated with the Manchuria-based Russian Fascist Party (RFP).[3] Vonsyatsky split from the RFP in 1933.[3] On March 10, 1933, he founded the Russian National Revolutionary Labor and Workers Peasant Party of Fascists (also referred to as the All Russian National Revolutionary Party, or the All-Russian National Revolution Toilers and Worker Peasants Fascist Party (VRO)), another anti-Soviet and anti-communist organization.[3] The headquarters were established at the Vonsyatsky estate in Connecticut[3] and published a newspaper called Fashist.[1]

Despite earlier publications supplemented by photographs of German soldiers beneath such titles as "The Army of the Holy Swastika"[3] and continuing collaboration with the German American Bund elements during World War II, in public appeals amid the growing anti-German sentiment of the early 1940s, Vonsyatsky's addresses to his target audience struck a different tone. Among other statements, Vonsyatsky wrote:

Fascisms are different. The German, Italian, and Russian Fascisms are different in many respects. The Russian Fascist Party is just a united movement of Russians against Communism, and Fascism is the only political society on the earth at the present time that can wipe out Communism. Force is the only thing that can knock it down.[3]

In 1934, Vonsyatsky's organization merged with the Russian Fascist Party, another fascist political organization led by Konstantin Rodzaevsky and headquartered in Tokyo, Japan.[1] However, they soon parted ways.[1]

In summer 1940, Vonsyatsky's publications declared the following:[3]

The Russian National Revolutionary Party, of which I am the leader, does not support either Germany's or Japan's ambition for hegemony in Europe or the Far East. The Germans and the Japanese have never made clear their attitude toward a replacement of the present Stalinist rule by a Russian National Government. The sole aim of our organization is to return Russia to a free people with a government elected by the people, of the people and for the people. Our intention is to form in Russia a truly DEMOCRATIC government. Our Party is not anti-Semitic. Our Party has no membership dues; it is financed solely by voluntary contributions from its members and sympathizers. It is not subsidized by any FOREIGN POWER or foreign individuals. Our organization is BANNED in Germany and Japan. Only in the United States can we enjoy freedom of action and thought within the laws of the country. I HEREWITH STATE EMPHATICALLY THAT THE ACTIVITIES OF OUR ORGANIZATION ARE AGAINST THE PRESENT SOVIET GOVERNMENT ALONE AND THAT IN NO WAY WHATSOEVER DOES IT ACT AGAINST THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OR VIOLATE ITS LAWS WHICH WE LOYALLY SUPPORT. ANASTASE A. VONSIATSKY. Thompson, Conn. July 4, 1940[3]

Vonsyatsky 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 Vonsyatsky's bail money in 1939.[3] Among other contacts was the American Hitler admirer William Dudley Pelley.[3] 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, Vonsyatsky 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.[1]

Vonsiatsky was sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5000. He was imprisoned at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.[1] Vonsiatsky was released from prison on February 26, 1946.[1][3]

After his release from prison, Vonsyatsky moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he wrote articles in Russian newspapers and journals.[1] He authored a book entitled Rasplata (Retribution) about World War II, where "he accused the Japanese government, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his personal nemesis, Thomas J. Dodd, of hampering the anti-Soviet cause".[1] Meanwhile, Vonsyatsky dedicated the Tsar Nicholas II Museum in St Petersburg, Florida.[1]

Vonsiatsky was married twice. He first married Lyuba Muromsky in Ukraine on January 31, 1920.[1]

On February 4, 1922, still married to Lyuba, Vonsiatsky married Marion Buckingham Ream,[3] the daughter of businessman Norman B. Ream, and a multi-millionaire heiress by the time they married.[4][5] He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in the Superior Court of Windham County, Putnam, Connecticut, on September 30, 1927,[3] after Marion appealed to Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes.[1] Two months after his second marriage, he was accused of bigamy by his legal wife Lyuba; in November 1922, nine months after Vonsiatsky become a bigamist, the US federal government and the Russian Orthodox Church granted him an annulment of the marriage to Lyuba.[1] The Vonsiatskys resided at Quinnatisset Farm in Putnam, Connecticut.[1]

Vonsiatsky separated from Ream and started a romantic relationship with Edith Priscilla Royster in 1948.[1] In July 1950, Vonsiatsky and Royster had a son together, Andre Anastase Vonsiatsky.[1] In May 1952, the courts granted Vonsiatsky and Ream a legal separation. Ream continued to take care of Vonsiatsky and his son financially, setting up a $12,000 trust for the boy in 1958 (equivalent to $122,000 in 2022), and leaving Vonsiatsky $25,000 when she died in 1963 (equivalent to $239,000 in 2022).[1]

Vonsyatsky died of coronary thrombosis on February 5, 1965, in St. Petersburg, Florida at Mound Park Hospital, at 66. His body was interred at West Thompson Cemetery in Thompson, Connecticut.

Many of the documents of Vonsyatsky were stored in the archives of the Hoover Institution in California, in the collection of Professor John Stephan, author of The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925–1945,[6] and Providence College, Phillips Memorial Library.[1][7]

• The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile, 1925–1945 by John J. Stephan ISBN 0-06-014099-2
• Oberlander, Erwin (1966). "The All-Russian Fascist Party". Journal of Contemporary History. 1 (1): 158–173. doi:10.1177/002200946600100110. JSTOR 259654. S2CID 159295789.
• К. В. Родзаевский. Завещание Русского фашиста. М., ФЭРИ-В, 2001 ISBN 5-94138-010-0
• А.В. Окороков. Фашизм и русская эмиграция (1920–1945 гг.). М., Руссаки, 2002 ISBN 5-93347-063-5
• Н.Н. Грозин. Защитные рубашки. Шанхай: Издательство Всероссийский Русский Календарь, 1939.
• FBI History. Famous Cases. Vonsiatsky Espionage. N.B.: the article confuses the political term "White Russian" (or "White émigré") with Belarusian origin, as Belarus was then often referred to as "White Russia".
• The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia (1946)
• Knútr Benoit: Konstantin Rodzaevsky. Dict, 2012, ISBN 978-6-13841624-1

• Anastasy Vonsiatsky at Find a Grave
• Inventory to the John J. Stephan Collection, 1932—1978