Decossackization

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Decossackization is a term used to describe Lenin's Bolsheviks policy of the systematic elimination of the Cossacks as social groups.[1]

Contents

[edit] History

This was the first example of Soviet leaders deciding to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory."[1] The policy was established by a secret resolution of the 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. The Don Cossacks created an army of 30,000 well-armed men.[1]

Bolshevik military forces came back in February 1920. The Don region was required to make a grain contribution that amounted the total annual production of the area.[1] Almost all Cossacks joined the Green Army or other rebel forces. Together with Baron Wrangel's troops, they forced the Red Army out of the region in August 1920.

After the 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.[1] The families and often the neighbors of suspected rebels were taken as hostages and sent to concentration camps. According to Martin Latsis who led the 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."[1]

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 the 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."[1] 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.[1]

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, according to conservative estimates.[1] Soviet historian Dmitri Volkogonov asserted that "Almost a third of the Cossack population was exterminated on Lenin’s orders."[2]

[edit] 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 & Alexander 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."[1]
  • "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
  • "Sometimes a whole ethnic group was declared White and genocide took place. Iona Iakir, a famous Red Army general, had 50 percent of the male Don Cossacks exterminated, and used artillery, flamethrowers, and machine guns on women and children." - Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him by Donald Rayfield, pg 83

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7
  2. ^ Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime by Dmitri Volkogonov, pg 74 ISBN 0684871122

[edit] External links

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