Abstract: The object of this research is the public relations emerged in the process of establishment and implementation of the legal institution of responsibility of the collaborationists in USSR during the Great Patriotic War. The subject is the system of the normative legal acts that regulate the responsibility of Soviet citizens cooperated with the German Fascist occupants during the war. The author reveals the essence and characteristic peculiarities of the legal regulation of the examined type of responsibility. Based on the analysis of protective legal norms contained in the legislative and institutional acts, the author reviews the specificity of establishment and transformation of the legal approach of Soviet State towards the assessment of collaborationists’ activity and demarcation of the various manifestations of collaborationism. As a result of this research, the author highlights a number of peculiarities common to the lawmaking and law enforcement in the area of counteracting collaborationism, which under the conditions of the urgently elevated during the wartime political and ideological orientations, conduced the formation of the practice of unreasonable and unjust repressions with regards to the Soviet citizens, who were involved in collaboration with the German occupants. The author makes a conclusion on the appropriateness of assessment of the institution of collaborationists’ responsibility as an exceptionally repressive and deprived of any fairness. At the same time, he believes that the enhancement of responsibility for the unlawful activity of collaborationist nature under the extreme circumstances of the Great Patriotic War was necessary and justifiable. Separate examples in the article demonstrate the trends of the gradual transformation of the protective norms towards differentiation and individualization of responsibility of the persons that in one or another way are involved into cooperation with the enemy.