Ivanovich Yovich would be serving as his deputy. He gave me various orders, xeroxing lists and so forth, which I carried out. After a few years I began having problems with my health and I wrote to Captain Ivanov requesting to be relieved of my duties. I received no reply. I wrote again. All of a sudden I receive a letter saying that Captain Ivanov has had a stroke and is paralyzed. I phoned him, but there was no answer. And then I received orders from him, which he had somehow been able to sign -- I had been appointed president of the Russian Armed Services Union." After Cold War The ROVS continued to be active into the 1990s and had evolved into an organization that was principally concerned with the historical preservation of the precommunist and anticommunist Russian military tradition. In the ROVS's possession were a significant number of Russian imperial and White Army battle flags and standards, which were meant to be returned to Russia when "a national Russian army" was once again in existence. Although its significance and influence in the Russian émigré community had ceased several decades earlier, the ROVS in 1992 became active in Russia itself. In the mid-1990s, however, since the communist regime had fallen and the Soviet Union no longer existed, a split emerged within the ROVS on whether to continue the organization's existence. In 2000, Vladimir Vishnevsky, a US resident who was the ROVS chairman, requested a vote on this issue. The vast majority of ROVS members voted against its dissolution. Vishnevsky died of cancer that year and was succeeded by Igor Borisovich Ivanov. Under Igor Ivanov Under Ivanov, the ROVS not only was committed to the preservation of the history and tradition of pre-Soviet Russia but also appealed to the patriotic Russian public as well as the UN Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), advocated for the resolute condemnation of communism. In his appeal, Ivanov insisted for a legal condemnation of the theory and the practice of communism as done with National Socialism in Germany. He accused OSCE and the PACE countries of having extremely inconsistency and half-heartedness in condemning communism and of being openly Russophobic by drafting resolutions addressing communism, particularly the preliminary version PACE Resolution No. 1481. Ivanov himself is described as an ideological White Guard and is a sharp critic of the ruling authorities of the