Cossacks

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Cossacks

On January 24, 1919, the Orgburo, the administrative body subordinate to the Politburo, issued a secret order for the immediate genocide of the Cossacks; local officials were ordered to carry out the policy with the utmost ruthlessness. The categories of those selected for extermination were broad and loosely defined, and within the space of twelve weeks more than ten thousand Don Cossack men, women, and children were executed by revolutionary tribunals. The policy was abruptly abandoned in March 1919 when the Cossacks revolted, driving the Bolsheviks from the Don territory and setting the stage for the climactic phase of the Russian civil war. The policy of genocide against the Cossacks was unique and arose from a complex matrix of Cossack history, Bolshevik beliefs, and the course of the civil war.

In 1914 the Cossacks numbered approximately 4.5 million people scattered across the whole of the Eurasian from the River Don in the west to the River Ussuri in the Far East. The Cossacks had originated in the steppe lands of Russia in the sixteenth century when Slavic frontiersmen and fugitives joined with nomadic peoples of the steppe to form distinct and autonomous communities. For the first two hundred years of their existence, the Cossacks and their way of life had been the incarnation of freedom for the enserfed masses of Russia. From the late eighteenth century, however, the tsarist state succeeded in harnessing the Cossacks' military skills for its own ends, enlisting them to serve either as soldiers or as a form of paramilitary police. By the twentieth century the Cossacks were the most feared defenders of the tsarist state and widely loathed, particularly by the revolutionary movement and the Jews. Cossack attitudes toward the throne and the revolutionary movement were actually far more complex and ambiguous than the popular stereotype suggested. But the perception that all Cossacks were inveterate reactionaries remained an instinctive prejudice for all those opposed to the tsarist regime.

With the Bolsheviks' seizure of power in October 1917 came the civil war. The rapid descent into barbarism by all sides formed the immediate context for the genocide of 1919. But it was the combination of prejudice, the habit of violence, and Cossack behavior during the civil war that coalesced to trigger the policy of genocide. Although divided in their attitudes toward the October Revolution, most Cossacks were much less hostile to the Bolshevik regime than is generally recognized. Nevertheless, the experience of Bolshevik rule in early 1918 led to large-scale rebellions against it in many Cossack territories. These rebellions were not an endorsement of the wider anti-Bolshevik movement; rather, they had the much more limited aim of removing the Bolsheviks from Cossack territories. For the Bolsheviks, however, the rebellions during the spring of 1918 were ample proof of the counterrevolutionary nature of the Cossacks as a whole. Rebellion against Bolshevik rule was seen not as the action of individual Cossacks making choices, but as something inherent in being a Cossack. Already accustomed to using violence and terror on an unprecedented scale, the Bolsheviks took this policy to its logical conclusion with the order for genocide.

Compared to earlier and subsequent genocides and even by the standards of the Russian civil war, the killing of ten thousand Cossacks in the Don region over a three-month period can easily be overlooked. Yet there is no doubt that the genocide which occurred was a state-driven policy. It was devised at the highest level of the Bolshevik state, it targeted a specific community on the basis of who they were, not what they had done, and it was carried out by officials and organizations of that state. It stopped not because the leadership had qualms about the morality of the genocide, but because the Cossacks successfully rebelled and expelled the Bolsheviks. Later the Bolsheviks modified their treatment of the Cossacks, still regarding them suspiciously but acting more circumspect in their dealings with them. By this point, however, the civil war had eviscerated the Cossacks, destroying their communities and way of life. Collectivization was the final catastrophe for the Cossacks, irrevocably ending any possibility of their continued existence as a distinct community.

During World War II many Cossacks fought with the Nazis against the Stalinist regime at whose hands they had suffered so much. The Cossacks retreated with the German army and many thousands of Cossacks ended up in Austria at the war's end. In May 1945 they surrendered to the British. Although many of the Cossacks had never been Soviet citizens, the British decided to comply with a Soviet request for their repatriation. With a great deal of brutality, British soldiers forced the Cossacks onto trains and then to the NKVD. The leaders of the Cossack armies were executed in Moscow, while the rank and file were sent to the Gulag. The regime of Nikita Khrushchev later released any survivors.