De-Cossackization

When the Red Army took control of the Don Cossack region in 1919, they launched a "decossackization" campaign that included the deportation of the Don Cossack elite. In March 1919, confronted with increasing Cossack rebellion and opposition within the Bolshevik Party, the Soviet government repealed its decossackization policy.[1] The Cossacks were a pre-revolutionary military estate that formed the backbone of the White Army. However, Cossacks also served in large numbers in the Red Army, particularly the forces commanded by Budenny. In 1920, nine entire Terek Cossack towns in the North Caucasus were deported, and their lands were distributed among Red Cossacks and Chechens. [2] These deportations punished the Cossacks for their role in the White Army. However, they were also a form of anticolonial reparation directly linked to the formation of a new Mountaineer national territory. [3] Although precise figures are not available, The Soviet-era dissident Roy Medvedev claimed more than 8000 Cossacks were shot in this period.[4]

History

That was the first example when Soviet leaders decided to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory" The policy was established by a secret resolution of Bol'shevik Party on January 24 1919. In mid-March of 1919, Cheka forces executed more than 8,000 Cossacks. In response to this, a revolt began in the large settlement ("stanitsa") of Veshenskaya on 11 March 1919. The Cossacks claimed to be for free elections but against Communists and collective farming. Don Cossacks created an army of 30,000 well-armed men.

Bol'shevik military forces came back in February 1920. Don region was required to make a grain contribution amounted the total annual production of the area . Almost all Cossacks joined Green Army or other rebel forces. Together with Baron Wrangel troops, they forced Red Army out of the region in August 1920.

After retaking of the Crimea by Red Army, the Cossacks became victims of the Red Terror. Special commissions in charge of decossackization condemned more than 6,000 people to death in October 1920 alone . The families and often the neighbors of suspected rebels were taken as hostages and sent to concentration camps. According to Martin Latsis who led Ukrainian Cheka,

"Gathered together in a camp near Maikop, the hostages, women, children and old men survive in the most appalling conditions, in the cold and the mud of October... They are dying like flies. The women will do anything to escape death. The soldiers guarding the camp take advantage of this and treat them as prostitutes."

The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a "day of Red Terror" to execute 300 people in one day. They ordered local Communist Party organizations to draw up execution lists. According to one of chekists, "this rather unsatisfactory method led to a great deal of private settling of old scores... In Kislovodsk, for lack of a better idea, it was decided to kill people who were in the hospital" . Many Cossack towns were burned to the ground, and all survivors deported on the orders by Sergo Ordzhonikidze who was head of the Revolutionary Committee of the Northern Caucasus .

Some authors allege that between 300,000 and 500,000 people were killed or deported in 1919-1920 out of a population of 3 million in the Don and Kuban regions, as a result of decossackization, . However, the 1926 Soviet census for the Kuban okrug shows that there were 915,102 Ukrainians.[5] Most of these were Kuban Cossacks. [6] The Kuban okrug was approximately half the size of the Tsarist Kuban Cossack host. Overall, the 1926 census shows that in the provinces of the former Cossack hosts, there were about 3 million Don and Kuban Cossacks[7], compared to 2.8 million in 1917. [8][9]

Opinions

• "The suppression of the Don Cossack revolt in the spring and summer of 1919 took the form of genocide. One historian has estimated that approximately 70 percent of the Don Cossacks were physically eliminated."- Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present by Mikhail Heller & Aleksandr Nekrich, pg 87

• “The policy of "de-Cossackization" begun in 1920 corresponds largely to our definition of genocide: a population group firmly established in a particular territory, the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women, children and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over to new, non-Cossack occupants. Lenin compared the Cossacks to the Vendée during the French Revolution and gladly subjected them to a program of what Gracchus Babeuf, the "inventor" of modern Communism, characterized in 1795 as "populicide."

• "However, it must be said in Denikin's defense that he was responding to what can only be called a war of genocide against the Cossacks. The Bolsheviks had made it clear that their aim in the northern Don was to unleash ‘mass terror against the rich Cossacks by exterminating them to the last man' and transferring their land to the Russian peasants. During this campaign of 'decossackization', in the early months of 1919, some 12,000 Cossacks, many of them old men, were executed as "counter-revolutionaries' by tribunals of the invading Red Army." - A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes, pg 660

External Links

Soviet order to exterminate Cossacks is unearthed