20th Army

Vlasov's 20th Army, newly formed from Moscow reserves, held the last line on the direct road to the capital around Krasnaya Polyana in late November 1941, the closest point of the German advance from the northwest. On 6 December it joined the counteroffensive, driving the wedge between Klin and Solnechnogorsk and pushing the Germans back across the frozen reservoirs. In January and February 1942 it pressed the pursuit toward Rzhev through deep snow, outrunning its supplies but keeping the German 9th Army off balance all winter. Vlasov, then a rising star decorated for the defence of Kyiv and Moscow, would within a year surrender at Leningrad and lend his name to the German-sponsored Russian Liberation Army, one of the war's bitterest ironies; in December 1941, however, his army's drive was the cleanest Soviet success of the counteroffensive. Vlasov received the Order of Lenin. The tracks recorded here are schematic headquarters-area positions, not surveyed front lines.