Red Army hero who fought for French Resistance dies

A Red Army officer who fought for the French Resistance before being sent to the Gulag by Soviet authorities has died aged 95, officials said on Dec. 8.

Nikolai Vasenin died a few months after learning that the French love he lost 70 years ago had also passed away.

Vasenin's extraordinary life saw him captured by the Nazis, escape from German captivity, lead a French resistance group only to be locked up by Stalin's secret police on his return to the Soviet Union.

"The fate of Nikolai Maksimovich Vasenin was truly unique," said Yevgeny Kuivashev, the governor of the Sverdlovsk region, where the veteran lived.

After being taken prisoner by the Nazis in 1941, Vasenin managed to escape from a camp in France in October 1943 to join a group of "maquisards," rural fighters of the French Resistance.

The young Russian became a commander of a 25-strong guerrilla detachment later dubbed "Nicolas's group."

While fighting in the French resistance, he fell in love with Jeanne, the daughter of his commander, Gerard Monot. He asked Monot for his daughter's hand, but was rebuffed.

In the spring of 1945, just before the end of the war, Vasenin returned to the Soviet Black Sea port city of Odessa where he was immediately arrested, in a cruel twist of fate suffered by many Soviet ex-prisoners of war.

He was sentenced to 15 years in the Gulag "for treason" but was released early after a few years and sent into exile in Siberia.

At the end of his prison term, Vasenin married a geologist who visited the mine where inmates worked.

He was rehabilitated during the perestroika reforms under the USSR's last leader Mikhail Gorbachev, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Vasenin...