De-Cossackization: Difference between revisions
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{{Cossacks}} |
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'''Decossackization''' is a term used |
'''Decossackization''' is a term used for the elimination of the Cossack estates as a judicial entity in Russia.<ref name="Black"> 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 </ref> |
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==Background== |
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This was the first example of Soviet leaders deciding to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory."<ref name="Black"/> |
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The policy was established by a secret resolution of the Bolshevik Party on [[January 24]] [[1919]]. In mid-March 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.<ref name="Black"/> |
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Cossacks were a military estate in prevolutionary Russia from the 18th to the early 20th century. They lived mainly in southern Russia in the Don and Kuban areas, as well as parts of Siberia and Central Asia such as Orenburg and Transbaikalia. As a social group they were similar to the streltsy (professional musketeers) and artillerymen. Because of their military tradition, Cossack forces played an important role in Russia’s wars of the 18th and 19th centuries such as the Crimean War and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, relying on the economic prosperity of the Cossacks, their privileged status as a military estate, and their political conservativsm, the tsarist regime employed them extensively to perform police service and suppress the revolutionary movement, especially in 1905-07. <ref> http://www.cultinfo.ru/fulltext/1/001/008/057/598.htm</ref> |
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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.<ref name="Black"/> Almost all Cossacks joined the [[Green Army]] or other rebel forces. Together with [[Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel|Baron Wrangel's]] troops, they forced the Red Army out of the region in August 1920. |
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Following the Russian Revolution, Cossack elites adopted a hostile policy against soviets of workers' deputies while poorer Cossacks supported the soviets. During the civil war in Russia, Cossacks served both the Red and White armies. Cossack units under the command of P.V. Bakhturov, M.F. Blinov, S.M. Budennyi, B.M. Dumenko, N.D. Kashirin, F.K. Mironov, and others fought in the ranks of the Red Army. They participated disproportionately in both sides. One-fifth of all Cossacks under arms served in the Red Army. <ref name=Holquist11>[http://books.google.com/books?id=Hvz80NWkMuUC&pg=PA174&dq=Holquist+under+arms+cossacks#PPA175,M1 Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution]</ref> |
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After the retaking of the [[Crimea]] by [[Red Army]], the Cossacks became victims of the [[Red Terror]]. [[NKVD troika|Special commissions]] in charge of decossackization condemned more than 6,000 people to death in October 1920 alone.<ref name="Black"/> 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]], |
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:"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."<ref name="Black"/> |
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The concept of decossackization was discussed in the Imperial period. There had long been talk about eliminating the Cossack estate as a judicial entity and reducing the Cossacks' privileges to those enjoyed by other citizens. This was a form of "decossackization." Some Cossacks supported these plans: elimination of privileges also entailed the elimination of burdens including universal, life-long military service or the need to meet equipment obligations.<ref name=Holquist> Holquist, Peter, "A Russian Vendee: The Practice of Revolutionary Politics in the Don Countryside, 1917-1921." Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1994.</ref> |
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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 [[Chekism|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."<ref name="Black"/> 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]].<ref name="Black"/> |
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Soon after the establishment of soviet power in Petrograd and other cities in November 1917, conflict broke out between the new government in Russia and Cossack warlords. In the Don territory, ataman Kaledin declared that he would “offer full support, in close alliance with the governments of the other Cossack hosts” to Kerensky's forces. Establishing ties with the Ukrainian Central Rada and the Kuban, Terek, and Orenburg hosts, Kaledin sought to overthrow Soviet power and create a counterrevolutionary regime in Russia. On 15 November 1917 Generals Kornilov, Alekseev, and Denikin began to organize the Volunteer Army in Novocherkassk. Imposing martial law, Kaledin moved in late November to attack workers' centers and eliminate the soviets. On December 15, after a seven day battle, the counterrevolutionaries occupied Rostov. On 7 January 1918, Russian troops began a coordinated offensive from Gorlovka, Lugansk, and Millerovo. They were supported by uprisings among the workers and Cossacks. On February 25, revolutionary troops liberated Rostov and Novocherkassk. The remnants of the White Cossacks, headed by Ataman Popov, fled into the Salsk steppes. <ref> http://www.cultinfo.ru/fulltext/1/001/008/057/821.htm </ref> |
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Between 300,000 and 500,000 people were killed or [[Population transfer in the Soviet Union|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.<ref name="Black"/> Soviet historian [[Dmitri Volkogonov]] asserted that "Almost a third of the Cossack population was exterminated on Lenin’s orders."<ref>''Autopsy of an Empire: The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime'' by [[Dmitri Volkogonov]], pg 74 ISBN 0684871122</ref> |
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After the German forces invaded and occupied Rostov on May 8, a puppet government headed by General Krasnov was formed in the Don province. In July 1918, the White Cossack forces of General Krasnov launched their first invasion of Tsaritsyn. Soviet forces counterattacked and drove out the White Cossacks by September 7. On September 22, Krasnov’s forces launched a second invasion of Tsaritsyn but by October 25, Krasnov’s forces were thrown back beyond the Don by Soviet troops. On January 1, 1919, Krasnov launched a third invasion of Tsaritsyn. Soviet forces repelled the invasion and forced Krasnov’s forces to withdraw from Tsaritsyn in mid-February 1919. <ref>http://www.cultinfo.ru/fulltext/1/001/008/120/252.htm</ref> In the period that General Krasnov's White Cossack forces controlled the Don province, from May 1918 to February 1919, the "All-Great Don Host" punitive organs sentenced some 25,000 people to death. <ref name=Holquist11/> |
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==Opinions== |
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*''"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 |
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==History== |
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*''“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 [[Revolt in the Vendée|Vendée]] during the [[French Revolution]] and gladly subjected them to a program of what [[François-Noël Babeuf|Gracchus Babeuf]], the "inventor" of modern Communism, characterized in 1795 as "[[populicide]]."<ref name="Black"/> |
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The policy was established by a secret resolution of the Bol'shevik Party on [[January 24]] [[1919]]. The Southern Front sought to limit the application of repression only to those who had actively opposed Soviet power. According to the Southern Front’s instructions of February 7: "khutor atamans should be subject to execution only in those cases where it can be proved that they actively supported Krasnov's policies (having organized pacification, conducted mobilization, refused to offer refuge to revolutionary Cossacks or to Red Army men)” <ref name=Holquist/> The policy of “high decossackization” was cancelled on March 16, 1919 in response to a major revolt against Soviet power in Veshenskaia. The Soviet state focused on the formal elimination of the Cossackry as a monolithic social, juridical, and economic entity. <ref name=Holquist/> The complete rehabilitation of the Cossacks and the Don Territory came in September 1919. An article in the newspaper of the Army instructed that: "While it is true that a certain portion of the Don Territory's population is counter-revolutionary for reasons of an economic nature, this is far from the majority. And this entire remaining section of the population could become our ally." <ref name=Holquist/> |
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The overall number of executions is difficult to establish. In Khoper, the tribunal was very active, with a one-month total of 226 executions. The Berezovskaia tribunal made a total of twenty arrests in a community of 13,500 people. One Russian historian provides a comprehensive estimate of executions in the Veshenskaia area: "it is possible, and indeed likely, that the number of those who would have suffered repression would have reached a large figure, but in fact the number at the time of the uprising was around 300." Both the insurgents and later the Whites inflated the number of executions for propaganda purposes. In one example, an insurgent leader reported that 140 were executed in Bokovskaia, but later provided a different account, according to which only eight people in Bokovskaia were sentenced to death, and the authorities did not manage to carry these sentences out. Lists of victims compiled immediately after the uprising provide modest figures than were reported propaganda broadsheets. Some historians conclude that White reports of Red atrocities in the Don were consciously scripted for agitational purposes. <ref name=Holquist/> |
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*''"However, it must be said in [[Anton Ivanovich Denikin|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 |
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Some accounts of decossackization portrayed the policy as the result of individual excesses by local officials acting against the policy of the central authorities. In June 1919, Lenin sent a telegram condemning the excesses of the tribunals. <ref name=Holquist/> |
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*''"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 |
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From the Terek province, more than 50,000 Cossacks were deported to Ukraine. Their land was distributed among pro-soviet Cossacks and Chechens.<ref> http://www.memo.ru/history/deport/</ref> |
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==See also== |
==See also== |
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* [http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/presspr/pressreleases/cossacks.htm Soviet order to exterminate Cossacks is unearthed] [[University of York]] Communications Office, 21 January 2003 |
* [http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/presspr/pressreleases/cossacks.htm Soviet order to exterminate Cossacks is unearthed] [[University of York]] Communications Office, 21 January 2003 |
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{{Joseph Stalin}} |
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[[Category:Democides]] |
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[[Category:Genocide]] |
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[[Category:History of the Soviet Union and Soviet Russia]] |
[[Category:History of the Soviet Union and Soviet Russia]] |
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[[Category:Political repression in the Soviet Union]] |
[[Category:Political repression in the Soviet Union]] |
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[[pt:Descossaquização]] |
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[[ru:Расказачивание]] |
[[ru:Расказачивание]] |
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Revision as of 11:36, 4 August 2009
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Decossackization is a term used for the elimination of the Cossack estates as a judicial entity in Russia.[1]
Background
Cossacks were a military estate in prevolutionary Russia from the 18th to the early 20th century. They lived mainly in southern Russia in the Don and Kuban areas, as well as parts of Siberia and Central Asia such as Orenburg and Transbaikalia. As a social group they were similar to the streltsy (professional musketeers) and artillerymen. Because of their military tradition, Cossack forces played an important role in Russia’s wars of the 18th and 19th centuries such as the Crimean War and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, relying on the economic prosperity of the Cossacks, their privileged status as a military estate, and their political conservativsm, the tsarist regime employed them extensively to perform police service and suppress the revolutionary movement, especially in 1905-07. [2]
Following the Russian Revolution, Cossack elites adopted a hostile policy against soviets of workers' deputies while poorer Cossacks supported the soviets. During the civil war in Russia, Cossacks served both the Red and White armies. Cossack units under the command of P.V. Bakhturov, M.F. Blinov, S.M. Budennyi, B.M. Dumenko, N.D. Kashirin, F.K. Mironov, and others fought in the ranks of the Red Army. They participated disproportionately in both sides. One-fifth of all Cossacks under arms served in the Red Army. [3]
The concept of decossackization was discussed in the Imperial period. There had long been talk about eliminating the Cossack estate as a judicial entity and reducing the Cossacks' privileges to those enjoyed by other citizens. This was a form of "decossackization." Some Cossacks supported these plans: elimination of privileges also entailed the elimination of burdens including universal, life-long military service or the need to meet equipment obligations.[4]
Soon after the establishment of soviet power in Petrograd and other cities in November 1917, conflict broke out between the new government in Russia and Cossack warlords. In the Don territory, ataman Kaledin declared that he would “offer full support, in close alliance with the governments of the other Cossack hosts” to Kerensky's forces. Establishing ties with the Ukrainian Central Rada and the Kuban, Terek, and Orenburg hosts, Kaledin sought to overthrow Soviet power and create a counterrevolutionary regime in Russia. On 15 November 1917 Generals Kornilov, Alekseev, and Denikin began to organize the Volunteer Army in Novocherkassk. Imposing martial law, Kaledin moved in late November to attack workers' centers and eliminate the soviets. On December 15, after a seven day battle, the counterrevolutionaries occupied Rostov. On 7 January 1918, Russian troops began a coordinated offensive from Gorlovka, Lugansk, and Millerovo. They were supported by uprisings among the workers and Cossacks. On February 25, revolutionary troops liberated Rostov and Novocherkassk. The remnants of the White Cossacks, headed by Ataman Popov, fled into the Salsk steppes. [5]
After the German forces invaded and occupied Rostov on May 8, a puppet government headed by General Krasnov was formed in the Don province. In July 1918, the White Cossack forces of General Krasnov launched their first invasion of Tsaritsyn. Soviet forces counterattacked and drove out the White Cossacks by September 7. On September 22, Krasnov’s forces launched a second invasion of Tsaritsyn but by October 25, Krasnov’s forces were thrown back beyond the Don by Soviet troops. On January 1, 1919, Krasnov launched a third invasion of Tsaritsyn. Soviet forces repelled the invasion and forced Krasnov’s forces to withdraw from Tsaritsyn in mid-February 1919. [6] In the period that General Krasnov's White Cossack forces controlled the Don province, from May 1918 to February 1919, the "All-Great Don Host" punitive organs sentenced some 25,000 people to death. [3]
History
The policy was established by a secret resolution of the Bol'shevik Party on January 24 1919. The Southern Front sought to limit the application of repression only to those who had actively opposed Soviet power. According to the Southern Front’s instructions of February 7: "khutor atamans should be subject to execution only in those cases where it can be proved that they actively supported Krasnov's policies (having organized pacification, conducted mobilization, refused to offer refuge to revolutionary Cossacks or to Red Army men)” [4] The policy of “high decossackization” was cancelled on March 16, 1919 in response to a major revolt against Soviet power in Veshenskaia. The Soviet state focused on the formal elimination of the Cossackry as a monolithic social, juridical, and economic entity. [4] The complete rehabilitation of the Cossacks and the Don Territory came in September 1919. An article in the newspaper of the Army instructed that: "While it is true that a certain portion of the Don Territory's population is counter-revolutionary for reasons of an economic nature, this is far from the majority. And this entire remaining section of the population could become our ally." [4]
The overall number of executions is difficult to establish. In Khoper, the tribunal was very active, with a one-month total of 226 executions. The Berezovskaia tribunal made a total of twenty arrests in a community of 13,500 people. One Russian historian provides a comprehensive estimate of executions in the Veshenskaia area: "it is possible, and indeed likely, that the number of those who would have suffered repression would have reached a large figure, but in fact the number at the time of the uprising was around 300." Both the insurgents and later the Whites inflated the number of executions for propaganda purposes. In one example, an insurgent leader reported that 140 were executed in Bokovskaia, but later provided a different account, according to which only eight people in Bokovskaia were sentenced to death, and the authorities did not manage to carry these sentences out. Lists of victims compiled immediately after the uprising provide modest figures than were reported propaganda broadsheets. Some historians conclude that White reports of Red atrocities in the Don were consciously scripted for agitational purposes. [4]
Some accounts of decossackization portrayed the policy as the result of individual excesses by local officials acting against the policy of the central authorities. In June 1919, Lenin sent a telegram condemning the excesses of the tribunals. [4]
From the Terek province, more than 50,000 Cossacks were deported to Ukraine. Their land was distributed among pro-soviet Cossacks and Chechens.[7]
See also
Notes
- ^ 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
- ^ http://www.cultinfo.ru/fulltext/1/001/008/057/598.htm
- ^ a b Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution
- ^ a b c d e f Holquist, Peter, "A Russian Vendee: The Practice of Revolutionary Politics in the Don Countryside, 1917-1921." Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1994.
- ^ http://www.cultinfo.ru/fulltext/1/001/008/057/821.htm
- ^ http://www.cultinfo.ru/fulltext/1/001/008/120/252.htm
- ^ http://www.memo.ru/history/deport/
External links
- Soviet order to exterminate Cossacks is unearthed University of York Communications Office, 21 January 2003