Georgiy Petrovich Ryabtsev

As with other officers who served in the KONR, the only information available about Colonel Georgiy Petrovich Ryabtsev comes from Aleksandrov’s detailed research.[i] In Ryabtsev’s case, that information is sparse and provides little information about his motivation for cooperating with the Germans beyond being a POW. However, his pre-revolutionary service in the Imperial Army may have influenced his decision.

Ryabtsev was born in January 1897 in village of Podolnovo near Kostroma, northeast of Moscow. He attended school in St. Petersburg and began working as a mechanic. In 1914 he was called into the Imperial Army, beginning a military career that would continue until his death in 1945.

He served as a non-commissioned officer during World War I and was captured as a POW in late 1916. He escaped from a German POW camp[ii] and joined the Russian Expeditionary Forces in France, and then from 1917 to 1919 joined the French Foreign Legion, along with many other tsarist-era Russian military personnel. When he returned to Russia, he fought in the civil war where he was first introduced into military intelligence. In July 1920 he was assigned as the chief of a reconnaissance team in an infantry regiment, and in December, he was the chief of a brigade reconnaissance section on the southern Front. He was wounded in June 1921, and after several months of convalescence he was assigned to the Leningrad Military District on the Northern Front to command an infantry company.

After the civil war he transferred to GPU duties as a commander of a border guard company, and he continued in the GPU/OGPU border guards through the 1920s. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1932. In 1935 he graduated from a military academy and returned to Red Army service, where he filled various command and staff assignments in infantry units. He was promoted to captain in 1936 and returned to intelligence work in October 1939 as the senior adjutant in a reconnaissance battalion; in February 1940 he became the battalion commander. A personnel evaluation written when Ryabtsev was a captain described him as politically active and compliant with the party line. The evaluation deemed him worthy of promotion to major, which occurred in 1941.

Ryabtsev’s Soviet military career ended when he was captured in action in September 1941. He was a German linguist, so he was released from a POW camp and assigned as an interpreter for construction parties. He took the false name Aleksandrov, possibly to distance himself from his past as an intelligence officer, and it is unclear how much the German Army took advantage of his intelligence experience during interrogations. In spring 1944, when the ROA was formed, he worked briefly in ROA propaganda training, and in November 1944 he was recommended as commander of the 1603rd Infantry Regiment and promoted to lieutenant colonel. He played an instrumental role in setting up the unit and supported the concept of removing the KONR from underneath German command. In May 1945 he commanded the regiment when it marched to Prague. However, when it became clear that U.S. forces would repatriate KONR members to the Soviet Union, Ryabtsev was among a group of KONR officers who committed suicide in May 1945.