The tragedy of narration. "Decossackization

Decossackization- the policy pursued by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War - the massive Red Terror and repressions against the Cossacks as a social and cultural community, an estate of the Russian state. The policy of decossackization consisted of mass executions, taking hostages, burning villages, setting nonresidents against the Cossacks.

The policy of decossackization was started by the Bolsheviks with the adoption on November 11 (24), 1917 of the decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Council of People's Commissars "On the destruction of estates and civil ranks" and the decision of the Council of People's Commissars of December 9 (22), 1917: the elimination of estate partitions and duties of the Cossacks began, which gradually turned into the extermination of the Cossacks . Quite often, this is also associated with the directive of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) of January 24, 1919. In the process of decossackization, requisitions of livestock and agricultural products were also carried out, the resettlement of the out-of-town poor on lands that previously belonged to the Cossacks, in combination with actions to formally liquidate the Cossacks.

According to the studies of a number of historians, one of the main ideologists of decossackization in the Don Cossacks was the chairman of the Don Bureau of the RCP (b) and the head of the Civil Administration, S. I. Syrtsov. “A recent student of the Petrograd Polytechnic Institute, twice forced to flee from the Cossacks from Rostov, Syrtsov unequivocally assessed the Cossack Don as a “Russian Vendee”, being convinced that “the agrarian revolution on the Don should consist in the complete destruction of the economic basis of the Cossacks”, “erasing any economic boundaries between peasants and Cossacks” and that “general conditions force us, going towards the peasants, with the exception of the very tops, to make them our support in the elimination of the Cossacks,” as reported in his reports and reports to the Central Committee.

The opinion of modern historians regarding the direction of decossackization is ambiguous. A number of researchers, in particular, E. Losev, A. V. Venkov, V. L. Genis, N. F. Bugai, A. I. Kozlov, S. A. Kislitsyn, V. P. Trut, define decossackization as a policy aimed at the elimination of the Cossacks as an ethno-social group. At the same time, E. Losev and A. V. Venkov point to the guilt of initiating the decossackization of only individuals from the CPSU (b), and A. I. Kozlov, S. A. Kislitsyn, V. L. Genis note the policy of terror as a property, characteristic of the time regime. V. P. Trut and A. V. Venkov consider the ethnic features of the Cossacks to be partially blurred and note its partial merger with the peasantry, while V. L. Genis and N. F. Bugai see elements of genocide in the policy of decossackization. P. G. Chernopitsky, E. N. Oskolkov, Ya. A. Perekhov note the class, rather than ethnic, approach of the Bolsheviks to the Cossacks, opposing the assessment of decossackization as a special anti-Cossack policy pursued along ethnic lines.

At the same time, the resolution of the Donburo of the RCP (b) of April 8, 1919 considers the Cossacks as the base of the counter-revolution and suggests its destruction as a special economic group:

All this raises the urgent task of the complete, rapid, decisive destruction of the Cossacks as a special economic group, the destruction of its economic foundations, the physical destruction of the Cossack officials and officers, in general, all the tops of the Cossacks, actively counter-revolutionary, the dispersal and neutralization of the ordinary Cossacks and the formal liquidation of the Cossacks.

Reasons for repression

The attitude of the Bolsheviks who came to power towards the Cossacks was ambivalent and due to real reasons. On the one hand, it was negative, since the Cossacks, being professional soldiers, not so long ago "faithfully" served the Russian monarchy, protecting the state not only from external enemies, but also participating in the suppression of unrest and workers' protests, dispersing demonstrations and escorting convicts by stages. The Cossacks owned land and privileges, which did not meet the definition of the exploited, that is, those on whose behalf the Bolsheviks pursued their policy. On the other hand, the Bolsheviks, realizing that the Cossacks are a well-organized armed force, wanted to attract the Cossacks to their side, or at least at the initial stage to be neutral with them. The Cossacks were in the same uncertain state. The first decrees of the Bolsheviks swayed the bulk of the Cossacks to the side of the Soviets - after a long war they were able to return to their villages, and the land of ordinary Cossacks, according to the Decree on Land, remained untouched. The Cossacks were not initially determined to fight against the Soviet regime, both due to war fatigue and unwillingness to fight in any form, and because of the strong agitation of the Bolsheviks, who threatened bloody reprisals for resistance and promised not to touch the internal Cossack way of life, property and lands in case of non-resistance, and did not interfere in hostilities between the Reds and Whites.

On the issue of fighting the Bolsheviks, the Cossacks did not have a single opinion. Some of them even had anti-volunteer sentiments. The army of General A. I. Denikin was perceived by the Cossacks as not a completely democratic institution, encroaching on their Cossack liberties, an instrument of big politics, which they did not care about. Poorly known by the entire Cossack population, the Bolsheviks, on the contrary, seemed to be something like a lesser evil for the Cossacks. Most of the Cossacks believed the Soviet propaganda and hoped that the Bolsheviks would not touch them. According to General M. V. Alekseev, the Cossacks at that time were "deeply convinced that Bolshevism is directed only against the rich classes - the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia ...". The Cossacks observed the serious military preparations of the Soviet government in the south and believed that only "uninvited aliens" - the Volunteer Army being formed - were inciting its excitement and anger. The Provisional Don Government itself was not alien to this view, seriously hoping, by conciliation with local revolutionary institutions and loyalty to the Soviet government, to reconcile it with the Don and save the region from the invasion of the Bolsheviks.

According to the first draft developed by Krasnov's government, at the first stage, the chieftains of the Kuban, Don, Terek and Astrakhan Cossack troops, the chairman of the Union of Highlanders of the North Caucasus were to proclaim the Don-Caucasian Union a sovereign federal state, which was supposed to remain neutral in the Civil War and not fight against Bolsheviks outside the Don-Caucasian Union. However, the policy of "decossackization" pursued by the Bolsheviks turned the Cossacks into allies of the White movement.

The situation was similar in the Southern Urals, where the Cossacks were embarrassed by rumors about the alleged economic successes of the Bolsheviks throughout Russia, about giving the population unprecedented freedoms before. Bolshevik agitators, who came from Central Russia to the location of the Orenburg Cossack army, tried to inspire the Cossacks with the idea that the Bolsheviks were fighting not with the Cossacks, but with their superiors, who “sold out to the bourgeoisie” and allegedly defended its interests by the heads of the Cossacks. The agitators sought to turn the Cossacks against the officers. Much of what the agitators conveyed to the Cossacks was taken at face value, many were inclined to believe this, especially since there were no people in the villages who exposed the Bolshevik lies at that time.

On the Military Circle in December 1917, when Ataman A. I. Dutov called on the deputies to “stand in defense of Mother Russia and the native army,” the deputies from the front immediately took a hostile position towards him. The front-line soldiers tried to prove that as soon as Dutov was removed, all local unrest would stop, and it would be possible to sign a non-intervention pact with the Bolsheviks.

The military circle decided by an overwhelming majority: Soviet power not to be recognized; continue the fight against the Bolsheviks until complete victory over them. The deputies for the most part understood perfectly well that the Bolsheviks had fought the Cossacks, who had always stood guard over Russian statehood, and now they were again on their way. Colonel Dutov was re-elected military ataman.

Adopted by the III Congress of Soviets on January 27 (February 9), 1918, the Decree on the equalizing redistribution of all lands (on the so-called socialization of the land) led to fluctuations and the beginning of a split in the Cossack environment. The split of the Cossacks was facilitated by the actions of representatives of the Soviet government in the field.

Implementation of repressions by the Soviet authorities against the inhabitants of the Cossack regions

After the Bolsheviks established themselves in the Cossack territories, their activities and repressions were primarily aimed at the Cossacks. So, having occupied Orenburg and established themselves on the territory of the Orenburg Cossack army, in urban and village settlements they carried out reprisals against the opposition and robberies of Cossack farms. On the territory of the Orenburg army, the Bolsheviks burned to the ground several Cossack villages, took out and destroyed grain in the amount of several million pounds, thousands of horses and cattle were slaughtered right on the Cossack territory or stolen. All Cossack villages, regardless of whether they took part in the struggle against the Bolsheviks, paid large contributions, after which they were subjected to huge taxes. The Bolsheviks considered all the Cossacks to be enemies of the Soviet regime, so they did not stand on ceremony with anyone: many officers, officials, Cossacks and even Cossacks were shot, and even more were imprisoned. The Bolsheviks in Orenburg carried out the repressions especially intensively.

Peter Kenez, an American historian and researcher of the Civil War in Russia, cites in his work information about the terror of the Bolsheviks that hit the center of the Don Cossacks, Rostov, left by volunteers. By order of the red commander Sievers, everyone related to the Volunteer Army was to be executed, the order also applied to children of fourteen and fifteen years old who enrolled in the army of General Kornilov, however, perhaps due to the prohibition of their parents, they did not go with her on a campaign to the Kuban.

On February 12, Cossacks from the regiments No. 2, 10, 27 and 44 of the military foreman N. M. Golubov, who went over to the side of the Bolsheviks, occupied the capital of the Don - Novocherkassk, abandoned the day before by the Volunteer Army. Troop foreman N. M. Golubov broke into the building of the “Judicial Establishments”, where a meeting of the Military Circle was held, tore off the general’s shoulder straps from the Military Ataman A. M. Nazarov, arrested him and the chairman of the Military Circle E. A. Voloshinov, and ordered the deputies to “get out to hell". After that, all the delegates of the Cossack circle were arrested by the Reds, and Soviet power was proclaimed in the city. Following Golubov's Cossacks who had gone over to the side of the Bolsheviks, Chekists arrived in the city and began beating the city's intelligentsia and officers. Over the corpses of the executed punishers from the Cheka for a long time and fiercely scoffed: they kicked them with their feet, stabbed them with bayonets, crushed the skulls of those killed with rifle butts. Even Golubov himself could not endure such a turn of events in the Cossack capital, whose red Cossacks began to oppose the red punishers from the Cheka. According to some sources, in response to this opposition to the Chekists by the Cossacks, according to other sources, by order of the local Bolshevik headquarters headed by Golubov, Red Guard miners on February 17 outside the city in the Krasnokutskaya grove, the ataman A. M. Nazarov, who replaced Kaledin, was shot, generals K. Ya. Usachev, P. M. Grudnev, Isaev, Lieutenant Colonel of the General Staff N. A. Rota, Chairman of the Military Circle E. A. Voloshinov, military foreman I. Tararin.

“... You probably already know the details of the arrest from the telegrams. Clearly, this information is far from being true. But the truth and I could not tell, so much was absurd. But there is a lot of comedy in the tragic, and I had the opportunity to laugh. The funniest thing was the spectacle: one hundred or two hundred people of the Circle (Supreme Power), stretched out in line in front of the new Bonaparte of the 20th century ... ".

From a letter from the Chairman of the Military Circle E. V. Voloshinov to his mother:

“... My conscience is clear, and therefore I am not afraid of death. They said that I was sentenced to death by Golubov. If this is so, if I am destined to really die, then forgive me for everything I have done ... ".

On March 6, Golubov also arrested the deputy of the Donskoy ataman, the historian and teacher M.P.

Having carried out repressions in Novocherkassk and even causing dissatisfaction with the Cossacks from Golubov's "revolutionary gang", the Bolshevik punishers, suspecting the "red commander in chief" of insufficient loyalty to Bolshevism, left the Don capital. They left Commissar Larin to keep an eye on the situation in the city.

The introduction of Soviet power in the Don and Kuban was accompanied by the capture of an alien element of local government, robberies, requisitions, arrests, executions, murders (only one officer was killed by the Bolsheviks on the Don about 500 people), punitive expeditions against the protesting villages and villages.

In accordance with the documents of the Special Investigative Commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks in the Don cities, villages and villages, another two thousand people fell victim to the punitive measures of the Soviet power established on the Don.

Splits in the Cossacks caused by the Civil War

An important factor contributing to the policy of decossackization were internal splits in the Cossacks, as well as conflicts between the Cossack and non-Cossack population, which were more actively manifested during the period of ideological and political confrontation during the Civil War.

The historian A. Kozlov cites the following information: “Breaking into the borders of neighboring provinces, the White Cossack units were hanged, shot, hacked, raped, robbed and flogged. These atrocities were then recorded by the Saratov and Voronezh peasants and workers at the expense of all the Cossacks, giving rise to fear and hatred. The spontaneous response resulted in revenge also on all Cossacks, indiscriminately. It was the innocent and defenseless who suffered first.”

There are cases of internal Cossack conflicts caused by ideological and political contradictions. In the village of Bolshoi Ust-Khoperskaya village, the Cossacks of the first Don revolutionary regiment of the 23rd division hacked to death 20 old men "for malicious agitation." In the village of Nizhnechirskaya, the Red Cossacks "by their court punished the" local counter "".

All this contributed to the fact that the Cossacks again took up arms, and, in accordance with their convictions, joined the warring parties. So, around the middle of 1918, under the command of F. K. Mironov, B. M. Dumenko, M. F. Blinov, there were 14 red Cossack regiments. P. N. Krasnov has about 30 regiments in the Don Army.

According to Professor Pavel Golub, Doctor of Historical Sciences, "decossackization" began during the reign of Ataman Krasnov, who set the task of destroying all supporters of Soviet power. The corresponding decree directed against the Red Cossacks was adopted by the Don Salvation Circle in May 1918, almost a year before the directive of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b).

About 1,400 sentences were adopted (many for tens or even hundreds of people) to expel Soviet sympathizers from the Cossack class - with the deprivation of all Cossack rights and benefits, confiscation of property and land, deportation outside the Don or to forced hard labor. More than 50 such sentences were published in the government newspapers Donskoy Krai and Donskie Vedomosti. Based on these data, I made a calculation that showed: up to 30 thousand Red Cossacks with their families were completely deprived of their livelihood and were persecuted.

The decree of the Great Military Circle, directed against the front-line Cossacks who joined the Red Army, was issued in October of the same year - all Red Cossacks who were captured were executed.

Cossack uprisings and their suppression by the Bolsheviks

The policy of the Soviet government in the Kuban, expressed in the "destruction of the Cossacks as an estate", also led to the rejection of the Cossacks against Bolshevism.
On April 27, an uprising took place in 7 villages of the Yeysk department. In early May, uprisings took place in the Yekaterinodar, Caucasian and other departments.
And in June, several villages of the Labinsk department rebelled; the uprising was suppressed by the Bolsheviks especially cruelly: not counting those killed in battle with the punitive detachments of the Bolsheviks, after the suppression of the uprising, 770 Labin Cossacks were executed by the punishers.

According to the materials and documents of the Special Investigative Commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks:

On June 12, a party of Cossacks was taken to the cemetery fence ... they stabbed everyone with bayonets, with bayonets, like pitchforks, they threw the bodies into the grave through the fence. There were living Cossacks among the abandoned ones, they buried them alive in the ground. The executed Cossacks were buried, who were driven out to work with weapons. When they buried the Cossack Sedenko, who had been hacked to pieces by swords, he groaned and began to ask for a drink. The Bolsheviks offered him to drink blood from the fresh wounds of the villagers hacked to death with him ... In total, 185 Cossacks were executed in Chamlykskaya. Their corpses remained unburied for several days; pigs and dogs dragged the Cossack body across the fields ...

From the memoirs of the former commander of the Veshensky uprising, emigrant Pavel Kudinov: “And then the order came from the Reds to surrender their weapons. The Cossacks balked: “Where is the justice of the agreement-agreement?” And then new orders were posted on the streets: “Whoever does not hand over his weapon - execution.” The next day, the requisition of bread, livestock and the taxation of monetary tribute began. The Cossacks remembered: “Then the kings muzzled in a bridle for three hundred years, then the white generals let’s bend us into a ram’s horn, and now the red ones are knitting with a tripod ... And where is the agreement-agreement?” And off we go ... Cossacks-front-line soldiers are a brave and proud people. This pride among the Cossack people spoke and straightened up. We did not see from our Don base all the needs and sorrows of Russia at that time, we were not used to such a conversation, we did not know who was to blame for the excesses, but the ripe pride in us spoke, boiled in our hearts, and we reached for weapons, while we had we were not taken away. Here, of course, counters of all stripes - monarchists, rich atamans, socialist-revolutionaries - rejoiced and let's add Cossack oil to the fire, let's fan it from all sides - the flames blazed.

At the VIII Congress of the RCP (b) in 1919, I. V. Stalin defines the Cossacks as "the primordial instrument of Russian imperialism", which was "the stronghold of the Denikin-Kolchak counter-revolution", which determines the rationale for decossackization:

The Cossack units, calling themselves Soviet, cannot, do not want to wage a decisive struggle against the Cossack counter-revolution ... have become the base of the counter-revolution ... Who else could be the stronghold of the Denikin-Kolchak counter-revolution, if not the primordial instrument of Russian imperialism, enjoying privileges and organized into a military estate, - the Cossacks, who have long been exploiting non-Russian peoples on the outskirts?

The overthrow of Soviet power in the Cossack regions

According to historian Peter Kenez, what Ataman Kaledin failed to do - to force the Don Cossacks to revolt against Bolshevism - was helped by the communist experiment - the Don Soviet Republic. In order to establish contact with Moscow, the leadership of the Bolsheviks sent their representative, Commissar Voetsehovsky, to the Don, who, together with Sievers, really controlled the region and organized the nationalization of mines and factories, the seizure of food, extortion of money from the bourgeoisie and was known as the "king of terror". During the two months of Bolshevik domination for the inhabitants of the South, the Soviet regime became a symbol of terror and anarchy, the most punitive measures were manifested in the two main strongholds of the Bolsheviks: in Rostov and Taganrog. An American historian writes:

In the last months of the Kaledin regime, the Bolsheviks received enormous support in these cities of the Don. The population was waiting for the troops of the Red Army as liberators. The arrival of the troops destroyed this illusion in a short time, and sympathy was replaced by fear. Arrests and executions began immediately.

The Soviet regime, with its inevitable methods - murders, robberies and violence, already in the Cossack environment began to arouse the will to active resistance. It arose in many places spontaneously, unorganized and scattered. Thus, in addition to the Yeysk district, serious uprisings broke out in the regions of Armavir and the Caucasus, bloodily suppressed by the Bolsheviks, who, fully armed with military equipment, attacked the almost unarmed Cossack militias. In many larger centers, along with the Cossack revolutionary democracy, which was still looking for ways to reconcile with the Soviet regime, along with the passive philistine and a fairly significant number of "neutral" officers, hidden leadership activities and active elements were created: secret circles and organizations were created, in the composition which, in addition to energetic officers and more prominent Cossacks, included representatives of the urban bourgeoisie and democracy. Without any skill for such work, all these organizations already had their long martyrologies issued and tortured. But most of the Kuban villages were left to their own devices. All their intelligentsia - a terrorized priest, a neutral teacher and an officer in hiding - cautiously avoided participation in the movement, not fully trusting its sincerity and seriousness. Moreover, the Soviet authorities instigated a cruel persecution of this particular intelligentsia, especially the clergy.

Anti-Soviet resistance began from the villages near Novocherkassk, a wealthy area that suffered the most from the looting of the Reds and the seizure of food by them. Despite the fact that the Cossacks in the villages suffered less from the actions of the Bolsheviks than the urban population, it was they who played an important role in the overthrow of Soviet power on the Don, since the Bolsheviks turned out to be a direct threat to the Cossacks, acting in accordance with the Soviet commander Sablin’s representative announced before the occupation of Novocherkassk The range of tasks: "The Cossacks, as a separate and privileged class, must be eliminated." The awakening of the Cossacks went faster than its fall. Already in mid-March, strong unrest began in various parts of the region and the secret organization of the Cossack forces, which was greatly facilitated by the spring thaw that prevented the movement of the Bolshevik punitive detachments. On March 18, for the first time, the congress of the Cherkassy district gathers in the village of Manychskaya, at which the Cossacks pass resolutions against the Soviet government. Armed demonstrations also began in the second half of March.

Documents from the time of narration

On January 24, 1919, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), after discussing the 6th item on the agenda - “Circular letter of the Central Committee on the attitude towards the Cossacks”, adopts a secret directive “To all responsible comrades working in the Cossack regions” with the resolution: “Adopt the text circular letter. Propose to the Commissariat of Agriculture to develop practical measures for the resettlement of the poor on a large scale to the Cossack lands. This directive, signed on January 29 by the Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Ya. Sverdlov, marked the beginning of decossackization.

From the Directive of the Central Committee of the RCP "To all responsible comrades working in the Cossack regions":

... given the experience of the year of the civil war with the Cossacks, to recognize the only right thing is the most merciless struggle against all the tops of the Cossacks through their total extermination. No compromises, no half-heartedness of the path are unacceptable. Therefore it is necessary:
1. Carry out mass terror against the rich Cossacks, exterminating them without exception; to carry out merciless mass terror against all Cossacks in general who took any direct or indirect part in the struggle against Soviet power. It is necessary to apply to the average Cossacks all those measures that give a guarantee against any attempts on their part to new actions against the Soviet power.
2. To confiscate grain and force it to dump all surpluses at the indicated points, this applies both to bread and to all other agricultural products.
3. Take all measures to help the relocating immigrant poor, organizing resettlement where possible
5. Carry out complete disarmament, shooting everyone who is found to have a weapon after the deadline for surrender ...

According to the studies of historians, the ideologist and compiler of this directive is I.V. Stalin (historian G. Magner), Ya.M. Sverdlov (opinion of the historian R.A. Medvedev), or S.I. of historical sciences L. I. Futoryansky, who studies the problems of the Cossacks).

At the same time, the Soviet historian R. A. Medvedev has two versions of the mechanism for adopting this directive:

1) Adopted by the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) according to the report of the Don Bureau, Sverdlov only signed
2) developed and submitted personally by Sverdlov.

Prominent historians, such as R. A. Medvedev, S. P. Starikov, G. Magner, stand in defense of the sole issuance of a directive by one of the leaders of the party, differing only in its definition. First of all, the following facts point to this: a full discussion and adoption of the Orgburo directive contradicted all resolutions and appeals of the Council of People's Commissars, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR, decrees, letters and speeches of V. I. Lenin and Ya. M. Sverdlov, the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which definitely would not support the directive. In particular, V. I. Lenin did not have information about the adoption of this directive, and having received some information, he criticized it, earlier declaring even the inadmissibility of interference in the life of the Cossacks, not to mention terror. Historian G. Magner, in his study, is working on a version regarding the possibility of the sole preparation of repressions by I. V. Stalin, since it was he who oversaw the issues of nationalities, communities and small peoples, had sufficient influence to be able to independently resolve issues and issue a directive without the consent of V. I. Lenin and discussions at the organizing bureau. In defense of this version, the fact of the continuation of repressions and terror against the Cossacks after the death of Ya. Doctor of Historical Sciences Professor Pavel Golub, author of the book “The Truth and Lies about the ‘Decossackization’ of the Cossacks”, analyzing who the anonymous author of that document, motivatedly rejected assumptions about Sverdlov and Stalin, was inclined to the conclusion that a directive was being prepared in the bowels of the military department led by Trotsky .

The attitude of the regional leaders of the bodies of the RCP (b) to the Cossacks as a whole was negative, which follows from statements, for example, by the chairman of the Donburo of the Central Committee of the Central Committee, Syrtsov, that any cooperation with the Cossacks and bringing them to the side of the revolutionary government would be "conspiracy with the counter-revolution." At the same time, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, V. A. Trifonov, in a letter to A. A. Solts, speaking of the Cossacks, declares: “The fate of the greatest revolution is in the hands of these idiots - there is something to go crazy with [”.

Among the measures taken were measures that were generally used during the Red Terror, for example, the taking of hostages "enjoying some kind of authority", which follows from the instructions of the Donburo:

“In order to eliminate the Cossack counter-revolution as soon as possible and prevent possible uprisings, the Donburo proposes to carry out the following through the relevant Soviet institutions: 1) In all villages, farms, immediately arrest all prominent representatives of this village or farm, who enjoy any authority, although they are not involved in counter-revolutionary actions , and send as hostages to the district revolutionary tribunal. (According to the directive of the Central Committee, those caught must be shot.) 2) When publishing an order to surrender weapons, announce that, if someone has a weapon after the specified period, not only the owner of the weapon, but also several hostages will be shot. 3) In no case can the composition of the revolutionary committee include persons of the Cossack rank, non-communists. Responsibility for violation of the above lies with the regional revolutionary committees and the organizer of the local revolutionary committee.
4) Compile lists of all escaped Cossacks in the villages under the responsibility of the revolutionary committees (the same applies to kulaks) and, without any exception, arrest and send them to district tribunals, where capital punishment should be applied.
The Donburo of the Central Committee of the RCP, as the body responsible for carrying out decossackization, reacts promptly to the directive, which follows from the reports to the Central Committee of the party:
from the report of the Secretary of the Donburo of the Central Committee of the RCP A. Frenkel to the VIII Congress (March 1919):
“... widely apply more radical terrorist methods indicated in the same instructions of the Central Committee, but not yet used, namely: the expropriation of the Cossacks (decossackization) and their mass resettlement inside Russia, with the introduction of alien labor elements in their place. This will dissolve the Cossacks in the best way "
“But these measures are within the power of only the center, where a special commission should be formed to develop this issue. And this needs to be done urgently. ... you cannot destroy all the Cossacks, and under such conditions, the uprisings will continue"

... I propose the following for steady execution: intensify all efforts to quickly eliminate the unrest that has arisen by concentrating maximum forces to suppress the uprising and by applying the most severe measures in relation to the instigators-farms:
a) burning of the rebellious farms;
b) merciless executions of all persons without exception who took direct or indirect part in the uprising;
c) executions through 5 or 10 people of the adult male population of the rebelled farms;
d) mass taking of hostages from neighboring farms to the insurgents;
e) widespread notification of the population of villages, villages, etc., that all villages and farms seen in helping the rebels will be subjected to merciless extermination of the entire adult male population and be burned at the first case of finding help; exemplary implementation of punitive measures with a wide warning of the population.

The Revolutionary Military Council of the 8th Army orders as soon as possible to suppress the uprising of traitors who took advantage of the confidence of the Red troops and mutinied in the rear. The traitors of the Don once again discovered in themselves the centuries-old enemies of the working people. All Cossacks who took up arms in the rear of the Red troops must be completely destroyed, and all those who have anything to do with the uprising and anti-Soviet agitation, without stopping at the percentage destruction of the population of the villages, must be burned down the farms and villages who raised arms against us in the rear. There is no pity for traitors. All units operating against the rebels are ordered to go through with fire and sword the area engulfed in rebellion, so that other villages would not even have the thought that the Krasnovsky tsarist general regime could be returned through a treacherous uprising.

Regarding the mechanism for suppressing uprisings and punitive measures, there is an order from a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 8th Army, I. E. Yakir:
No information was received from any of the divisional commissars about the number of executed White Guards, the complete annihilation of which is the only guarantee of the strength of our gains. In the rear of our troops, uprisings will continue to flare up if measures are not taken that radically suppress even the idea of ​​such a rise. These measures: the destruction of all who raised the uprising, the execution on the spot of all those with weapons, and even the percentage destruction of the male population. There should be no negotiations with the rebels.

On April 8, 1919, the Donburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) decides "on the rapid and decisive destruction of the Cossacks as a special economic group ... and on its formal liquidation."

On September 18, 1919, a joint meeting of the Politburo and the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) approved the “Theses on work on the Don”, which determined the policy of the RCP (b) on the Cossack issue. Trotsky was the author of the document.

We explain to the Cossacks in words and prove in deeds that our policy is not a policy of revenge for the past. We do not forget anything, but we do not avenge the past. Further relationships are determined depending on the behavior of various groups of the Cossacks themselves "…" The criterion in our relations with the various layers and groups of the Don Cossacks in the coming period will be not so much a direct class assessment of different layers (kulaks, middle peasants, poor peasants), but the attitude of various groups of the Cossacks themselves to our Red Army. We will take under our resolute patronage and armed protection those elements of the Cossacks who, in deed, will meet us halfway. We will mercilessly exterminate all those elements who will directly or indirectly support the enemy and cause difficulties for the Red Army.

The Donburo of the RCP(b) asked the Central Committee of the party to keep the troops from excesses, warning that the Cossacks were afraid of "a repetition of those troubles, irresponsible speeches, the chaotic management of all rogues, which had a wide place on the Don." The parts were sent such, for example, cautionary instructions:

271I-19 [on] behalf of the Revolutionary Military Council and the Political Department of the Army, I circularly order all political workers to take categorical measures [to] eliminate, during the occupation of the territory of the Don, phenomena that cause dissatisfaction of the population with the Soviet authorities: mass terror, illegal requisitions, generally aimless violence. Head of political department 9 Povolotsky.

In defense of the Cossacks, a member of the Central Committee of the RCP G. Ya. Sokolnikov made a report on the impracticability of the “Decree of the Central Committee on the Cossacks” at the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee, stating that part of the Don, Orenburg and other Cossacks did not oppose the revolutionary government and fought for it with weapons in their hands.

At the same time, the revolutionary press writes that

The mass of the Cossacks is still so uncultured... The old Cossacks must be burned in the flames of the social revolution. The one hundred million Russian proletariat has no moral right to apply generosity to the Don... The Don must be dehorned, disarmed and dehumanized, and turned into a purely agricultural country.

A little later, V. Lenin recognized the fallacy of a number of revolutionary measures, when the most complex issues were resolved "by the direct orders of the proletarian state in a small peasant country."

On March 16, 1919, with the participation of V. I. Lenin, a plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) was held, which, at the request of the member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, G. Ya. in general, to the Cossacks who took any direct or indirect part in the struggle against the Soviet power. The basis was Sokolnikov’s statement that, in particular, “in the Don region there is a sharp difference between the North and the South, which makes our intervention unnecessary,” perhaps by this he meant the uprisings of the Cossacks against the Krasnov regime in the north of the Don region in early 1919 of the year. This state of affairs was also confirmed by the White Cossack side. According to the chief of staff of the Don Army, General Polyakov: “The northern half of the region had to be cleared with battle from the Bolsheviks and from the Cossacks, and the“ impulse ”of the latter was expressed ... in the fact that they replenished the Cossack red divisions and with unusual bitterness defended their villages from us and farms."

Implementation of the policy of decossackization in the regions

The implementation of the state policy on decossackization on the ground was ambiguous and differentiated, since, in fact, most of the issue was transferred to regional and local authorities, which could understand and interpret the decisions of the Central Committee and the Revolutionary Military Council in two ways, considering the idea of ​​decossackization as equalizing Cossacks with non-Cossacks in the economic relation, or as the physical destruction of the Cossacks. In the detachments of the Red Cossacks, secret partisan groups of the White Cossacks were also created from among the Cossacks dissatisfied with the policy of the revolutionary authorities in the field of the Cossacks. There were also reports of acts of disobedience or of "alert" and "doubtful moods" loyal to the authorities of the Cossacks. The reason for this in a number of regions was that the local authorities understood the position of the Central Committee as a line to eliminate the Cossacks as a whole, conducting searches in the houses of the Red Cossacks loyal to the authorities, which could often turn into acts of robbery. In a number of regions, the Cossacks were forbidden to wear Cossack paraphernalia and Cossack uniforms, the villages were subject to renaming, the Cossacks were infringed on their civil rights. The actions of a number of local authorities were beyond the control of even the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which protested the repressive measures: “issues of extreme importance, often affecting the foundations of Cossack life, established for centuries, are considered and resolved without any participation from the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee.” At the same time, however, a little later at the next meeting, the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee changes its position and declares support for state policy in the field of the Cossacks and specifically measures to eliminate the Cossacks.

The Ural Regional Revolutionary Committee issued an instruction in February 1919, according to which it was necessary: ​​"outlaw the Cossacks, and they are subject to extermination." In pursuance of the instructions, the existing concentration camps were used, and a number of new places of deprivation of liberty were organized. In a memorandum to the Central Committee of the RCP (b) a member of the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Ruzheinikov at the end of 1919, it is reported that the most stringent and decisive repressive measures were taken on the ground: for example, on the night of May 6-7, 1919, from the prisoners in the Ural prison 350- 400 people from the 9th and 10th Ural Cossack regiments, who went over to the side of the Bolsheviks in March 1919, 100-120 people were shot, several imprisoned Cossacks were drowned. The report of a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee also states that the executed Cossacks were thrown into the Ural River, which caused rather a negative attitude towards the Soviet government. It is reported that the Chapaevskaya division, when advancing from Lbischensk to the village of Skvorkina, burned out all the villages 80 miles long and 30-40 wide.

In the Astrakhan province, the lands confiscated from the Cossacks were not subject to return. The Cossacks were deprived of the right to use natural resources, such as forest land, fish. In the Astrakhan province in 1920, about 2,000 Cossacks were kept in concentration camps.

In pursuance of secret order No. 01726 and. O. commander of the Caucasian Labor Army A. Medvedev, the village of Kalinovskaya was burned, the villages of Ermolovskaya (now the village of Alkhankala), Romanovskaya (Zakanyurtovskaya) (village of Zakanyurt), Samashkinskaya (village of Samashki), Mikhailovskaya (village of Sernovodskoye) were subjected to repressive measures and were looted . The village of Kokhanovskaya was completely destroyed. The male population of the villages from among the Cossacks aged from 18 to 50 years, in accordance with the order, it was decided "to load into echelons and send under escort to the North ... for heavy forced labor." Women, children and the elderly were evicted "to the North", in total 2917 families were evicted from these villages, about 11,000 people.

K. K. Krasnushkin, chairman of the Uryupinsk Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, in his memorandum to the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, states the following facts:

There were a number of cases when the commissars of villages and farms appointed to responsible posts robbed the population, got drunk, abused their power, committed all sorts of violence against the population, taking away cattle, milk, bread, eggs and other products, and things in their favor when they personal accounts were reported to the revolutionary tribunal against citizens, and they suffered because of this ... The department of searches and searches at the revolutionary tribunal, as well as the commissioners during the searches, took away things, products with complete impunity on the basis of personal considerations and arbitrariness, and, as can be seen from the correspondence on inquiries, the selected items disappeared to no one knows where. These seizures and requisitions were carried out all the time ... with the commission of physical violence. The tribunal dealt with 50 cases a day ... Death sentences were poured in bundles, and quite often innocent people, old men, old women and children, were often shot. There are known cases of shooting an old woman of 60 years old for no known reason, a girl of 17 years old on a denunciation out of jealousy of one of her wives, and it is definitely known that this girl never took any part in politics. They were shot on suspicion of speculation, espionage. It was enough for the mentally abnormal member of the tribunal Demkin to declare that the defendant was known to him as a counter-revolutionary for the tribunal, having no other data, to sentence a person to death ... Executions were often carried out during the day, in front of the entire village, 30-40 people at a time ...

It is reported about the mass executions carried out by members of the Revolutionary Committee on the ground in the villages:
Boguslavsky, who headed the Revolutionary Committee in the village of Morozovskaya, went to prison in a drunken state, took a list of those arrested, called in order the numbers of 64 Cossacks who were in prison, and shot them all in turn. And in the future, Boguslavsky and other members of the Revolutionary Committee carried out the same mass executions, calling the Cossacks to the Revolutionary Committee and to their homes. The indignation at these extrajudicial executions was so great that when the headquarters of the 9th Army moved to the village, the political department of this army ordered the arrest of the entire composition of the Morozov Revolutionary Committee and an investigation. A terrible picture of wild reprisals against the inhabitants of the village and surrounding farms was revealed. Only in the courtyard of Boguslavsky found 50 buried corpses of executed and slaughtered Cossacks and members of their families. Another 150 corpses were found in different places outside the village. The audit showed that most of those killed were not guilty of anything and all of them were subject to release.

For these reasons, the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front issued a detailed directive based on the results of the March plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), in which, pointing to the ongoing struggle against anti-Soviet rebellions, he indicated:
“At the same time, in relation to peaceful areas, do not resort to mass terror, persecute only active counter-revolutionaries, do not take measures that can stop the decomposition of the Cossacks, strictly pursue arbitrary requisitions, carefully organize retribution for legal requisitions and the supply of carts, not allowing requisitions of working cattle. To absolutely prohibit the collection of indemnities, the organized imposition of extraordinary taxes, to be carried out only by special order of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front. Immediately begin compiling lists of citizens who have suffered losses from the actions of counter-revolutionary bands, robberies, and illegal extortions. Mercilessly punish all Soviet officials guilty of abuses.

The number of victims of the policy of "decossackization"

As the historian L. Futoryansky notes, estimates of the number of victims of the order of hundreds of thousands and even a million people, which have received wide circulation in recent years, do not have documentary evidence and are “fantastic”. According to documented materials of the Special Investigative Commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks, the number of those executed by the Reds in the second half of 1918-1919. on the territory of the Don army, Kuban and Stavropol amounted to 5,598 people, of which 3,442 people were shot on the Don, 2,142 people - in the Kuban and Stavropol. At the same time, the historian L. Futoryansky notes that the numbers contained in the materials of the commission are exaggerated, and during the same period, during the white terror carried out under the Krasnov regime, according to various sources, from 25 to 40 thousand Cossacks were destroyed. On the same issue, Doctor of Historical Sciences Professor Pavel Golub gives the following data: "... in total, during the Krasnovshchina, that is, from May 1918 to February 1919, at least 45 thousand supporters of Soviet power on the Don were brutally exterminated."

dispossession

In the Kuban, on January 25, 1931, the deportation of the Cossacks was carried out among 9,000 families, about 45,000 people from the Black Sea regions were evicted to develop the arid regions of Stavropol and the Salsky steppes. During 1930-1931, at least 300,000 Cossacks from various regions were arrested and deported, mostly from the Ural region and the former territories of the Cossacks in the North Caucasus.

Rehabilitation of the Russian Cossacks

In 1991, the Law of the RSFSR “On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples” was adopted in Russia.

The Russian Cossacks, as a community subjected to terror and repressed during the years of Soviet power, was initially rehabilitated by the Decree of the RF Armed Forces of July 16, 1992 N 3321-1 “On the Rehabilitation of the Cossacks”.

The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation "in order to fully rehabilitate the Cossacks and create the necessary conditions for their revival" decided "to cancel as illegal all acts against the Cossacks, adopted since 1918, in part relating to the use of repressive measures against them."

The revival of the modern Cossacks began in the late 1980s - early 1990s, when public Cossack organizations began to be created in Moscow, the Krasnodar Territory, the Rostov Region and other regions of Russia. Their legal basis was the Law of the RSFSR of April 26, 1991 "On the rehabilitation of repressed peoples" and Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of June 15, 1992 No. 632 "On measures to implement the Law of the Russian Federation "On the rehabilitation of repressed peoples" in relation to the Cossacks", in which, in particular, the President of the Russian Federation decided:
In order to restore historical justice in relation to the Cossacks, its rehabilitation as a historically established cultural and ethnic community ... To condemn the ongoing party-state policy of repression, arbitrariness and lawlessness against the Cossacks and its individual representatives.

On April 22, 1994, Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation No. 355 “On the concept of state policy in relation to the Cossacks” came into force, which approved the “Basic provisions of the concept of state policy in relation to the Cossacks” and the concept “The revival of the public service of the Cossacks, traditional for Russia, is one of the elements formation of a new Russian statehood, strengthening its security. (Article 1 of the Regulation).

This Decree approved exemplary provisions on the public service of the Cossacks, provided an exhaustive list of types of public service of the Russian Cossacks: service in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, service for the protection of the state border, customs service, service in the operational units of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, service for the protection of public order, a security service for escorting goods and objects of state and important national economic importance, a huntsman and other environmental service, which will be further supplemented (Article 2 of the Resolution). Subsequently, the legal and organizational foundations of the civil service of the Cossacks were defined in more detail by the Federal Law N 154-FZ of December 5, 2005 "On the Civil Service of the Russian Cossacks".

On July 3, 2008, the President of the Russian Federation D. Medvedev adopted a new "Concept of the state policy of the Russian Federation in relation to the Russian Cossacks", the purpose of which is to develop the state policy of the Russian Federation to revive the Russian Cossacks, to generalize the principles of the state policy of the Russian Federation in relation to the Russian Cossacks and the tasks of the Russian Cossacks in the field of public service, interaction of the Cossacks and Cossack communities with state and municipal authorities.

Memory

In an address on January 18, 2007, the President of the Karachay-Cherkess Republic Batdyev M.A-A. declared that January 24, 1919 was a tragic date in the fate of the Cossacks. On this day, the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) adopted a circular letter signed by Yakov Sverdlov, which determined the policy of the new government in relation to the Cossacks, who faithfully served the Fatherland for more than one century. "Merciless terror, no compromises, wholesale extermination" - such was the verdict of the document, which cost the lives of more than two million Cossacks. The so-called “decossackization”, which means repressions, exiles, executions, confiscation of acquired property, was more than once an act.

The Day of Remembrance of the Cossacks - victims of political repression and genocide of the Cossacks was held in all Cossack districts, yurts and villages of Orthodox churches of the Great Don Army. According to the Department of Cossack Affairs of the Rostov Region, the Day of Remembrance by the ataman of the Great Don Army (VVD), Cossack General Viktor Vodolatsky, was announced in connection with the 88th anniversary of the circular letter of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), signed on January 24 by Ya. M. Sverdlov on holding a mass terror against the wealthy Cossacks. This was the beginning of the development of genocide against the Cossacks, according to the VVD.

Mourning events in the Cossack villages were dedicated to the memory of the Cossacks who died for Orthodoxy, the Don and the Fatherland. In memory of the victims of political repression and the genocide that claimed the lives of more than two million Cossacks, memorial services for the innocently murdered Cossacks were held in all Orthodox churches of the Great Don Army. In the Cossack cadet corps, schools, schools with the regional status of "Cossack" memory lessons were held.

In Penza, in memory of all those who fell victim to the policy of "decossackization", a memorial service was held in the church "Old Savior". In the 1920s and 1930s, the temple building was used as a transit prison. Dozens of people died here: nobles, peasants, Cossacks.

In the church of John the Baptist in Volgograd, a memorial service was held for the innocently murdered Cossacks. In a number of settlements of the region - the working settlement of Chernyshkovsky, the cities of Serafimovich, Uryupinsk, Ilovlya and others - religious processions and funeral prayers were held in memory of those tragic events.

On January 24, on the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repressions of the Cossacks, mourning events were held in Karachay-Cherkessia. Ataman of the Kuban Cossack Army Vladimir Gromov took part in them.

Mourning events took place in the Ust-Dzhegutinsky, Urupsky and Zelenchuksky regions of the republic, where monuments to the repressed Cossacks were erected. In the church of Peter and Paul in the village of Zelenchukskaya Karachay-Cherkessia, the Cossacks served a memorial service and went in procession from the church to the memorial sign to the victims of repression.

Decossackization according to the legislation of the Russian Federation

According to the current law of the RSFSR of 04.26.1991 N 1107-1 “On the rehabilitation of repressed peoples”, in relation to the Cossacks, “a policy of slander and genocide was carried out at the state level, accompanied by forced resettlement, the establishment of a regime of terror and violence in places of special settlements” (Article 2 of the law) .

Literature

Kenez Peter Red attack, white resistance. 1917-1918 / Transl. from English. K. A. Nikiforova. - M.: CJSC Tsentrpoligraf, 2007. - 287 s - (Russia at a turning point in history). ISBN 978-5-9524-2748-8
Red Terror during the Civil War: Based on the materials of the Special Investigation Commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. Edited by Doctors of Historical Sciences Yu. G. Felshtinsky and G. I. Chernyavsky / London, 1992.
Denikin A.I. ESSAYS OF THE RUSSIAN TROUBLES. [In 3 books] Book 2, v.2. The struggle of General Kornilov; v.3. White movement and the struggle of the Volunteer Army - M .: Airis-press, 2006. - 736 p.: ill. + incl. 16 s - (White Russia) - V.2, 3 - ISBN 5-8112-1891-5 (Book 2)
Ivchenko B. Politics of the Radian Power of the Don Cossacks (1917-1937) - Kh.: Tochka, 2010.
Ivchenko B. Rozkozachuvannya on the Don in 1919: a sample of the definition // Collection of Kharkiv Historical and Philological Association. New series. - H.: Kharkov historical and philological partnership, 2009. - T. 13. - S. 51-58.
Big Encyclopedia "Revolution and Civil War in Russia: 1917-1923": Encyclopedia in 4 volumes Chapters. editor d.h.s. Prof. S. A. Kondratiev / Big Encyclopedia. - Moscow, Terra, 2008 ISBN 978-5-273-00560-0O.A. Leusyan "Front without a front line": Cossack uprisings in the Kuban in the spring of 1918

At the same time, E. Losev and A. V. Venkov point to the guilt of initiating the decossackization of only certain individuals from the CPSU (b), and A. I. Kozlov, S. A. Kislitsyn, V. L. Genis note the policy of terror as a property, characteristic of the time regime. V. P. Trut and A. V. Venkov consider the ethnic features of the Cossacks to be partially blurred and note its partial merger with the peasantry, while V. L. Genis and N. F. Bugai see elements of genocide in the policy of decossackization. P. G. Chernopitsky, E. N. Oskolkov, Ya. A. Perekhov note the class rather than ethnic approach of the Bolsheviks to the Cossacks, opposing the assessment of decossackization as a special anti-Cossack policy pursued along ethnic lines.

At the same time, the resolution of the Donburo of the RCP (b) of April 8, 1919 considers the Cossacks as the base of the counter-revolution and suggests its destruction as a special economic group:

All this raises the urgent task of the complete, rapid, decisive destruction of the Cossacks as a special economic group, the destruction of its economic foundations, the physical destruction of the Cossack officials and officers, in general, all the tops of the Cossacks, actively counter-revolutionary, the dispersal and neutralization of the ordinary Cossacks and the formal liquidation of the Cossacks.

Reasons for repression

On the issue of fighting the Bolsheviks, the Cossacks did not have a single opinion. Some of them even had anti-volunteer sentiments. The army of General Denikin was perceived by the Cossacks as not a completely democratic institution, encroaching on their Cossack freedoms, an instrument of big politics, which they did not care about. Poorly known by the entire Cossack population, the Bolsheviks, on the contrary, seemed to be something like a lesser evil for the Cossacks. Most of the Cossacks believed the Soviet agitation and hoped that the Bolsheviks would not touch them; in addition, according to General M. V. Alekseev, the Cossacks at that time were "deeply convinced that Bolshevism is directed only against the rich classes - the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia ...". The Cossacks observed the serious military preparations of the Soviet government in the south and believed that only “uninvited aliens” - the Volunteer Army being formed, were inciting its excitement and anger. The Don government itself was not alien to this short-sighted view, seriously hoping, by conciliation with local revolutionary institutions and loyalty to the Soviet government, to reconcile it with the Don and save the region from the invasion of the Bolsheviks.

According to the first project developed by Krasnov's government, at the first stage, the chieftains of the Kuban, Don, Terek and Astrakhan Cossack troops, the chairman of the Union of Highlanders of the North Caucasus were to proclaim the Don-Caucasian Union a sovereign federal state, which was supposed to remain neutral in the Civil War and not fight against Bolsheviks outside the Don-Caucasian Union. However, the policy of "decossackization" pursued by the Bolsheviks turned the Cossacks into allies of the White movement.

The situation was similar in the Southern Urals, where the Cossacks were embarrassed by rumors about the alleged economic successes of the Bolsheviks throughout Russia, about giving the population unprecedented freedoms before. Bolshevik agitators, who came from Central Russia to the location of the Orenburg Cossack army, tried to inspire the Cossacks with the idea that the Bolsheviks were fighting not with the Cossacks, but with their superiors, who “sold out to the bourgeoisie” and allegedly defended their interests by the heads of the Cossacks. The agitators sought to turn the Cossacks against the officers. Much of what the agitators conveyed to the Cossacks was perceived by them at face value, many were inclined to believe, especially since there were no people who exposed the Bolshevik lies at that time in the villages.

At the Military Circle in December 1917, when Ataman Dutov called on the deputies to "stand in defense of Mother Russia and the native army," the deputies from the front immediately took a hostile position towards him. The front-line soldiers tried to prove that if Dutov was removed, all local unrest would stop, and it would be possible to sign a non-intervention pact with the Bolsheviks.

The military circle decided by an overwhelming majority: do not recognize Soviet power; continue the fight against the Bolsheviks until complete victory over them. The deputies, for the most part, perfectly understood that the Bolsheviks had waged a struggle against the Cossacks, who had always stood guard over Russian statehood, and now they were again on their way. Colonel Dutov was re-elected military ataman

From a letter from the Chairman of the Military Circle E. V. Voloshinov to his mother:

“... My conscience is clear, and therefore I am not afraid of death. They said that I was sentenced to death by Golubov. If this is so, if I am destined to really die, then forgive me for everything I have done ... "

On March 6, Golubov also arrested the deputy of the Don ataman, the historian and teacher MP Bogaevsky, who was shot by the Bolsheviks with the beginning of the uprising of the grassroots villages.

Having carried out repressions in Novocherkassk and even causing dissatisfaction with the Cossacks from Golubov’s “revolutionary gang”, the Bolshevik punishers, suspecting the “red commander in chief” of insufficient loyalty to Bolshevism, left the Don capital. They left Commissar Larin to keep an eye on the situation in the city.

The introduction of Soviet power in the Don and Kuban was accompanied by the capture of an alien element of local government, robberies, requisitions, arrests, executions, murders (only one officer was killed by the Bolsheviks on the Don about 500 people), punitive expeditions against the protesting villages and villages.

In accordance with the documents of the Special Investigative Commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks in the Don cities, villages and villages, another two thousand people fell victim to the punitive measures of the Soviet power established on the Don.

Splits in the Cossacks caused by the Civil War

An important factor contributing to the policy of decossackization were internal splits in the Cossacks, as well as conflicts between the Cossack and non-Cossack population, which were more actively manifested during the period of ideological and political confrontation during the Civil War.

Historian A. Kozlov gives the following information: “ Breaking into the borders of neighboring provinces, the White Cossack units were hanged, shot, chopped, raped, robbed and flogged. These atrocities were then recorded by the Saratov and Voronezh peasants and workers at the expense of all the Cossacks, giving rise to fear and hatred. The spontaneous response resulted in revenge also on all Cossacks, indiscriminately. The innocent and defenseless suffered first.».

There are cases of internal Cossack conflicts caused by ideological and political contradictions. In the village of Bolshoi Ust-Khoperskaya village, the Cossacks of the first Don revolutionary regiment of the 23rd division hacked to death 20 old men "for malicious agitation." In the village of Nizhnechirskaya, the Red Cossacks "by their court punished the" local contra "" .

All this contributed to the fact that the Cossacks again took up arms, and, in accordance with their convictions, joined the warring parties. So, around the middle of 1918, under the command of F. K. Mironov, B. M. Dumenko, M. F. Blinov, there were 14 red Cossack regiments. P. N. Krasnov has about 30 regiments in the Don Army.

According to Professor Pavel Golub, Doctor of Historical Sciences, "Decossackization" began during the reign of Ataman Krasnov, who set the task of destroying all supporters of Soviet power. The corresponding decree directed against the Red Cossacks was adopted by the Don Salvation Circle in May 1918, almost a year before the directive of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b).

About 1,400 sentences were adopted (many for tens or even hundreds of people) to expel Soviet sympathizers from the Cossack class - with the deprivation of all Cossack rights and benefits, confiscation of property and land, deportation outside the Don or to forced hard labor. More than 50 such sentences were published in the government newspapers Donskoy Krai and Donskie Vedomosti. Based on these data, I made a calculation that showed: up to 30 thousand Red Cossacks with their families were completely deprived of their livelihood and were persecuted.

The decree of the Great Military Circle, directed against the front-line Cossacks who joined the Red Army, was issued in October of the same year - all Red Cossacks who were captured were executed.

Cossack uprisings and their suppression by the Bolsheviks

On the territory of the Orenburg army, the first steps of the Soviet government were marked by total exactions and forcible confiscation of the property of the inhabitants, which caused a number of uprisings, brutally suppressed locally by the Soviet authorities. After the Cossacks were convinced of what kind of policy the Soviet government was pursuing in practice, they were already ready to use every opportunity to fight against this government with arms in hand.

The policy of the Soviet government in the Kuban, expressed in the "destruction of the Cossacks as an estate", also led to the rejection of the Cossacks against Bolshevism.

On April 27, an uprising took place in 7 villages of the Yeysk department. In early May, uprisings took place in the Yekaterinodar, Caucasian and other departments.

And in June, several villages of the Labinsk department rebelled; the uprising was suppressed by the Bolsheviks especially cruelly: not counting those killed in battle with the punitive detachments of the Bolsheviks, after the suppression of the uprising, 770 Labin Cossacks were executed by the punishers.

On June 12, a party of Cossacks was taken to the cemetery fence ... they stabbed everyone with bayonets, with bayonets, like pitchforks, they threw the bodies into the grave through the fence. There were living Cossacks among the abandoned ones, they buried them alive in the ground. The executed Cossacks were buried, who were driven out to work with weapons. When they buried the Cossack Sedenko, who had been hacked to pieces by swords, he groaned and began to ask for a drink. The Bolsheviks offered him to drink blood from the fresh wounds of the villagers hacked to death with him ... In total, 185 Cossacks were executed in Chamlykskaya. Their corpses remained unburied for several days; pigs and dogs dragged the Cossack body across the fields ...

From the memoirs of the former commander of the Veshensky uprising, emigrant Pavel Kudinov: “ And then came the order of the Reds to hand over their weapons. The Cossacks balked: “Where is the justice of the agreement-agreement?” And then new orders were posted on the streets: “Whoever does not hand over his weapon - execution.” The next day, the requisition of grain, livestock and the taxation of monetary tribute began. The Cossacks remembered: “Then the kings muzzled in a bridle for three hundred years, then the white generals let’s bend us into a ram’s horn, and now the red ones are knitting with a tripod ... And where is the agreement-agreement?” And off we go ... Cossacks-front-line soldiers are a brave and proud people. This pride among the Cossack people spoke and straightened up. We did not see from our Don base all the needs and sorrows of Russia at that time, we were not used to such a conversation, we did not know who was to blame for the excesses, but the ripe pride in us spoke, boiled in our hearts, and we reached for weapons, while we had we were not taken away. Here, of course, counters of all stripes - monarchists, chieftains - the rich, socialist-revolutionaries - rejoiced and let's add Cossack oil to the fire, let's inflate it from all sides - the flames blazed.: .

At the VIII Congress of the RCP (b) in 1919, I. V. Stalin defines the Cossacks as "the primordial instrument of Russian imperialism", which was "the stronghold of the Denikin-Kolchak counter-revolution", which determines the rationale for decossackization:

The Cossack units, calling themselves Soviet, cannot, do not want to wage a decisive struggle against the Cossack counter-revolution ... have become the base of the counter-revolution ... Who else could be the stronghold of the Denikin-Kolchak counter-revolution, if not the primordial instrument of Russian imperialism, enjoying privileges and organized into a military estate, - the Cossacks, who have long been exploiting non-Russian peoples on the outskirts?

The Soviet regime, with its inevitable methods - murders, robberies and violence, already in the Cossack environment began to arouse the will to active resistance. It arose in many places spontaneously, unorganized and scattered. Thus, in addition to the Yeysk district, serious uprisings broke out in the regions of Armavir and the Caucasus, bloodily suppressed by the Bolsheviks, who, fully armed with military equipment, attacked the almost unarmed Cossack militias. In many larger centers, along with the Cossack revolutionary democracy, which was still looking for ways to reconcile with the Soviet regime, along with the passive philistine and a fairly significant number of "neutral" officers, hidden leadership activities and active elements were created: secret circles and organizations were created, in the composition which, in addition to energetic officers and more prominent Cossacks, included representatives of the urban bourgeoisie and democracy. Without any skill for such work, all these organizations already had their long martyrologies issued and tortured. But most of the Kuban villages were left to their own devices. All their intelligentsia - a terrorized priest, a neutral teacher and an officer in hiding - cautiously avoided participation in the movement, not fully trusting its sincerity and seriousness. Moreover, the Soviet authorities instigated a cruel persecution of this particular intelligentsia, especially the clergy. .

Anti-Soviet resistance began from the villages near Novocherkassk, a wealthy area that suffered the most from the looting of the Reds and the seizure of food by them. Despite the fact that the Cossacks in the villages suffered less from the actions of the Bolsheviks than the urban population, it was they who played an important role in the overthrow of Soviet power on the Don, since the Bolsheviks turned out to be a direct threat to the Cossacks, acting in accordance with the Soviet commander Sablin’s representative announced before the occupation of Novocherkassk The range of tasks: "The Cossacks, as a separate and privileged class, must be liquidated." The awakening of the Cossacks went faster than its fall. Already in mid-March, strong unrest began in various parts of the region and the secret organization of the Cossack forces, which was greatly facilitated by the spring thaw that prevented the movement of the Bolshevik punitive detachments. On March 18, for the first time, the congress of the Cherkassy district gathers in the village of Manychskaya, at which the Cossacks pass resolutions against the Soviet government. Armed demonstrations also began in the second half of March.

Documents from the time of narration

... given the experience of the year of the civil war with the Cossacks, to recognize the only right thing is the most merciless struggle against all the tops of the Cossacks through their total extermination. No compromises, no half-heartedness of the path are unacceptable. Therefore it is necessary:
1. Carry out mass terror against the rich Cossacks, exterminating them without exception; to carry out merciless mass terror against all Cossacks in general who took any direct or indirect part in the struggle against Soviet power. It is necessary to apply to the average Cossacks all those measures that give a guarantee against any attempts on their part to new actions against the Soviet power.
2. To confiscate grain and force it to dump all surpluses at the indicated points, this applies both to bread and to all other agricultural products.
3. Take all measures to help the relocating immigrant poor, organizing resettlement where possible
5. Carry out complete disarmament, shooting everyone who is found to have a weapon after the deadline for surrender ...

According to the studies of historians, the ideologist and compiler of this directive is I.V. Stalin (historian G. Magner), Ya.M. Sverdlov (opinion of the historian R.A. Medvedev), or S.I. historical sciences L. I. Futoryansky, who studies the problems of the Cossacks).

At the same time, the Soviet historian R. A. Medvedev has two versions of the mechanism for adopting this directive:

Prominent historians, such as R. A. Medvedev, S. P. Starikov, G. Magner, stand in defense of the sole issuance of a directive by one of the leaders of the party, differing only in its definition. First of all, the following facts point to this: a full discussion and adoption of the Orgburo directive contradicted all resolutions and appeals of the Council of People's Commissars, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, the Revolutionary Military Council of the RSFSR, decrees, letters and speeches of V. I. Lenin and Ya. M. Sverdlov, the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which definitely would not support the directive. In particular, V. I. Lenin did not have information about the adoption of this directive, and having received some information, he criticized it, earlier declaring even the inadmissibility of interference in the life of the Cossacks, not to mention terror. . Historian G. Magner, in his study, is working on a version regarding the possibility of the sole preparation of repressions by I. V. Stalin, since it was he who oversaw the issues of nationalities, communities and small peoples, had sufficient influence to be able to independently resolve issues and issue a directive without the consent of V. I. Lenin and discussions at the organizing bureau. In defense of this version, the fact of the continuation of repressions and terror against the Cossacks after the death of Ya. . Doctor of Historical Sciences Professor Pavel Golub, author of the book “The Truth and Lies about the ‘Decossackization’ of the Cossacks”, analyzing who the anonymous author of that document, motivatedly rejected assumptions about Sverdlov and Stalin, was inclined to the conclusion that a directive was being prepared in the bowels of the military department led by Trotsky .

The attitude of the regional leaders of the bodies of the RCP (b) to the Cossacks as a whole was negative, which follows from statements, for example, by the chairman of the Donburo of the Central Committee of the Central Committee, Syrtsov, that any cooperation with the Cossacks and bringing them to the side of the revolutionary government would be "conspiracy with the counter-revolution". At the same time, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front, V. A. Trifonov, in a letter to A. A. Solts, speaking about the Cossacks, declares: “The fate of the greatest revolution is in the hands of these idiots - there is something to go crazy with”

Among the measures taken were measures applied in general during the red terror, for example, the taking of hostages "enjoying some kind of authority", which follows from the instructions of the Donbureau:

“In order to eliminate the Cossack counter-revolution as soon as possible and prevent possible uprisings, the Donburo proposes to carry out the following through the relevant Soviet institutions: 1) In all villages, farms, immediately arrest all prominent representatives of this village or farm, who enjoy any authority, although they are not involved in counter-revolutionary actions , and send as hostages to the district revolutionary tribunal. (According to the directive of the Central Committee, those caught must be shot.) 2) When publishing an order to surrender weapons, announce that, if someone has a weapon after the specified period, not only the owner of the weapon, but also several hostages will be shot. 3) In no case can the composition of the revolutionary committee include persons of the Cossack rank, non-communists. Responsibility for violation of the above lies with the regional revolutionary committees and the organizer of the local revolutionary committee.

4) Compile lists of all the fleeing Cossacks in the villages under the responsibility of the revolutionary committees (the same applies to the kulaks) and, without any exception, arrest and send them to the district tribunals, where capital punishment should be applied "

The Donburo of the Central Committee of the RCP, as the body responsible for carrying out decossackization, reacts promptly to the directive, which follows from the reports to the Central Committee of the party:

from the report of the Secretary of the Donburo of the Central Committee of the RCP A. Frenkel to the VIII Congress (March 1919):

“... widely apply more radical terrorist methods indicated in the same instructions of the Central Committee, but not yet used, namely: the expropriation of the Cossacks (decossackization) and their mass resettlement inside Russia, with the introduction of alien labor elements in their place. This will dissolve the Cossacks in the best way "
“But these measures are within the power of only the center, where a special commission should be formed to develop this issue. And this needs to be done urgently. ... you cannot destroy all the Cossacks, and under such conditions, the uprisings will continue"

... I propose the following for steady execution: intensify all efforts to quickly eliminate the unrest that has arisen by concentrating maximum forces to suppress the uprising and by applying the most severe measures in relation to the instigators-farms:
a) burning of the rebellious farms;
b) merciless executions of all persons without exception who took direct or indirect part in the uprising;
c) executions through 5 or 10 people of the adult male population of the rebelled farms;
d) mass taking of hostages from neighboring farms to the insurgents;
e) widespread notification of the population of villages, villages, etc., that all villages and farms seen in helping the rebels will be subjected to merciless extermination of the entire adult male population and be burned at the first case of finding help; exemplary implementation of punitive measures with a wide warning of the population.

The Revolutionary Military Council of the 8th Army orders as soon as possible to suppress the uprising of traitors who took advantage of the confidence of the Red troops and mutinied in the rear. The traitors of the Don once again discovered in themselves the centuries-old enemies of the working people. All Cossacks who took up arms in the rear of the Red troops must be completely destroyed, and all those who have anything to do with the uprising and anti-Soviet agitation, without stopping at the percentage destruction of the population of the villages, must be burned down the farms and villages who raised arms against us in the rear. There is no pity for traitors. All units operating against the rebels are ordered to go through with fire and sword the area engulfed in rebellion, so that other villages would not even have the thought that the Krasnovsky tsarist general regime could be returned through a treacherous uprising.

Regarding the mechanism for suppressing uprisings and punitive measures, there is an order from a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 8th Army, I. E. Yakir:

No information was received from any of the divisional commissars about the number of executed White Guards, the complete annihilation of which is the only guarantee of the strength of our gains. In the rear of our troops, uprisings will continue to flare up if measures are not taken that radically suppress even the idea of ​​such a rise. These measures: the destruction of all who raised the uprising, the execution on the spot of all those with weapons, and even the percentage destruction of the male population. There should be no negotiations with the rebels

We explain to the Cossacks in words and prove in deeds that our policy is not a policy of revenge for the past. We do not forget anything, but we do not avenge the past. Further relationships are determined depending on the behavior of various groups of the Cossacks themselves "…" The criterion in our relations with the various strata and groups of the Don Cossacks in the coming period will be not so much a direct class assessment of different strata (kulaks, middle peasants, poor peasants), but the attitude of various groups of the Cossacks themselves to our Red Army. We will take under our resolute patronage and armed protection those elements of the Cossacks who, in deed, will meet us halfway. We will mercilessly exterminate all those elements who will directly or indirectly support the enemy and cause difficulties for the Red Army.

The Donburo of the RCP(b) asked the Central Committee of the party to keep the troops from excesses, warning that the Cossacks were afraid of "a repetition of those troubles, irresponsible speeches, the chaotic management of all rogues, which had a wide place on the Don." The parts were sent such, for example, cautionary instructions:

271I-19 [on] behalf of the Revolutionary Military Council and the Political Department of the Army, I circularly order all political workers to take categorical measures [to] eliminate, during the occupation of the territory of the Don, phenomena that cause dissatisfaction of the population with the Soviet authorities: mass terror, illegal requisitions, generally aimless violence. Head of political department 9 Povolotsky.

In defense of the Cossacks, a member of the Central Committee of the RCP G. Ya. Sokolnikov made a report on the impracticability of the "Decree of the Central Committee on the Cossacks" at the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee, stating that part of the Don, Orenburg and other Cossacks did not oppose the revolutionary government and fought for it with weapons in their hands.

At the same time, the revolutionary press writes that

The mass of the Cossacks is still so uncultured... The old Cossacks must be burned in the flames of the social revolution. The one hundred million Russian proletariat has no moral right to apply generosity to the Don ... Don must be dehorned, disarmed and dehumanized, and turned into a purely agricultural country

On March 16, 1919, with the participation of V. I. Lenin, a plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) was held, which, at the request of G. Ya. in general, to the Cossacks who took any direct or indirect part in the struggle against the Soviet power. The basis was Sokolnikov’s statement that, in particular, “in the Don region there is a sharp difference between the North and the South, which makes our intervention unnecessary,” perhaps by this he meant the uprisings of the Cossacks against the Krasnov regime in the north of the Don region in early 1919 of the year. This state of affairs was also confirmed by the White Cossack side. According to the chief of staff of the Don Army, General Polyakov: “The northern half of the region had to be cleared with battle from the Bolsheviks and from the Cossacks, and the“ impulse ”of the latter was expressed ... in the fact that they replenished the Cossack red divisions and with unusual bitterness defended their villages from us and farms."

Implementation of the policy of decossackization in the regions

The implementation of the state policy on decossackization on the ground was ambiguous and differentiated, since, in fact, most of the issue was transferred to regional and local authorities, which could understand and interpret the decisions of the Central Committee and the Revolutionary Military Council in two ways, considering the idea of ​​decossackization as equalizing Cossacks with non-Cossacks in the economic relation, or as the physical destruction of the Cossacks. In the detachments of the Red Cossacks, secret partisan groups of the White Cossacks were also created from among the Cossacks dissatisfied with the policy of the revolutionary authorities in the field of the Cossacks. There were also reports of acts of disobedience or of "alert" and "doubtful moods" loyal to the authorities of the Cossacks. The reason for this in a number of regions was that the local authorities understood the position of the Central Committee as a line to eliminate the Cossacks as a whole, conducting searches in the houses of the Red Cossacks loyal to the authorities, which could often turn into acts of robbery. In a number of regions, the Cossacks were forbidden to wear Cossack paraphernalia and Cossack uniforms, the villages were subject to renaming, the Cossacks were infringed on their civil rights. The actions of a number of local authorities were beyond the control of even the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which protested the repressive measures: "Issues of extreme importance, often affecting the foundations of Cossack life, established for centuries, are considered and resolved without any participation from the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee". At the same time, however, a little later at the next meeting, the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee changes its position and declares support for state policy in the field of the Cossacks and specifically measures to eliminate the Cossacks.

The Ural Regional Revolutionary Committee issued an instruction in February 1919, according to which it followed: "outlaw the Cossacks, and they are subject to extermination." In pursuance of the instructions, the existing concentration camps were used, and a number of new places of deprivation of liberty were organized. In a memorandum to the Central Committee of the RCP (b) of a member of the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee Ruzheinikov at the end of d, it is reported that the most stringent and decisive repressive measures were taken on the ground: for example, on the night of May 6-7, 1919, from prisoners in the Ural prison 350-400 people from the 9th and 10th Ural Cossack regiments who went over to the side of the Bolsheviks in March 1919, 100-120 people were shot, several imprisoned Cossacks were drowned. The report of a member of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee also states that the executed Cossacks were thrown into the Ural River, which caused rather a negative attitude towards the Soviet government. It is reported that the Chapaevskaya division, when advancing from Lbischensk to the village of Skvorkina, burned out all the villages 80 miles long and 30-40 wide.

In the Astrakhan province, the lands confiscated from the Cossacks were not subject to return. The Cossacks were deprived of the right to use natural resources, such as forest land, fish. In the Astrakhan province in the city, about 2,000 Cossacks were kept in concentration camps.

In pursuance of secret order No. 01726 and. O. commander of the Caucasian Labor Army A. Medvedev, the village of Kalinovskaya was burned, the villages of Ermolovskaya (now the village of Alkhankala), Romanovskaya (Zakanyurtovskaya) (village of Zakanyurt), Samashkinskaya (village of Samashki), Mikhailovskaya (village of Sernovodskoye) were subjected to repressive measures and were looted . The village of Kokhanovskaya was completely destroyed. The male population of the villages from among the Cossacks aged from 18 to 50 years, in accordance with the order, it was decided "to load into echelons and send under escort to the North ... for heavy forced labor." Women, children and the elderly were evicted "to the North", in total 2917 families were evicted from these villages, about 11,000 people.

K. K. Krasnushkin, chairman of the Uryupinsk Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, in his memorandum to the Cossack department of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, states the following facts:

There were a number of cases when the commissars of villages and farms appointed to responsible posts robbed the population, got drunk, abused their power, committed all sorts of violence against the population, taking away cattle, milk, bread, eggs and other products, and things in their favor when they personal accounts were reported to the revolutionary tribunal against citizens, and they suffered because of this ... The department of searches and searches at the revolutionary tribunal, as well as the commissioners during the searches, took away things, products with complete impunity on the basis of personal considerations and arbitrariness, and, as can be seen from the correspondence on inquiries, the selected items disappeared to no one knows where. These seizures and requisitions were carried out all the time ... with the commission of physical violence. The tribunal dealt with 50 cases a day ... Death sentences were poured in bundles, and quite often innocent people, old men, old women and children, were often shot. There are known cases of shooting an old woman of 60 years old for no known reason, a girl of 17 years old on a denunciation out of jealousy of one of her wives, and it is definitely known that this girl never took any part in politics. They were shot on suspicion of speculation, espionage. It was enough for the mentally abnormal member of the tribunal Demkin to declare that the defendant was known to him as a counter-revolutionary for the tribunal, having no other data, to sentence a person to death ... Executions were often carried out during the day, in front of the entire village, 30-40 people at a time ...

It is reported about the mass executions carried out by members of the Revolutionary Committee on the ground in the villages:

Boguslavsky, who headed the Revolutionary Committee in the village of Morozovskaya, went to prison in a drunken state, took a list of those arrested, called in order the numbers of 64 Cossacks who were in prison, and shot them all in turn. And in the future, Boguslavsky and other members of the Revolutionary Committee carried out the same mass executions, calling the Cossacks to the Revolutionary Committee and to their homes. The indignation at these extrajudicial executions was so great that when the headquarters of the 9th Army moved to the village, the political department of this army ordered the arrest of the entire composition of the Morozov Revolutionary Committee and an investigation. A terrible picture of wild reprisals against the inhabitants of the village and surrounding farms was revealed. Only in the courtyard of Boguslavsky found 50 buried corpses of executed and slaughtered Cossacks and members of their families. Another 150 corpses were found in different places outside the village. The audit showed that most of those killed were not guilty of anything and all of them were subject to release.

For these reasons, the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front issued a detailed directive based on the results of the March plenum of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), in which, pointing to the ongoing struggle against anti-Soviet rebellions, he indicated:

“At the same time, in relation to peaceful areas, do not resort to mass terror, persecute only active counter-revolutionaries, do not take measures that can stop the decomposition of the Cossacks, strictly pursue arbitrary requisitions, carefully organize retribution for legal requisitions and the supply of carts, not allowing requisitions of working cattle. To absolutely prohibit the collection of indemnities, the organized imposition of extraordinary taxes, to be carried out only by special order of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front. Immediately begin compiling lists of citizens who have suffered losses from the actions of counter-revolutionary bands, robberies, and illegal extortions. Mercilessly punish all Soviet officials guilty of abuses.

The number of victims of the policy of "decossackization"

dispossession

Rehabilitation of the Russian Cossacks

The revival of the modern Cossacks began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when public Cossack organizations began to be created in Moscow, Krasnodar Krai, Rostov Oblast and other regions of Russia. Their legal basis was the Law of the RSFSR of April 26, 1991 "On the rehabilitation of repressed peoples" and the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation of June 15, 1992 No. 632 "", in which, in particular, the President of the Russian Federation decided:

In order to restore historical justice in relation to the Cossacks, its rehabilitation as a historically established cultural and ethnic community ... To condemn the ongoing party-state policy of repression, arbitrariness and lawlessness against the Cossacks and its individual representatives.

The Day of Remembrance of the Cossacks - victims of political repression and genocide of the Cossacks was held in all Cossack districts, yurts and villages of Orthodox churches of the Great Don Army. According to the Department of Cossack Affairs of the Rostov Region, the Day of Remembrance by the ataman of the Great Don Army (VVD), Cossack General Viktor Vodolatsky, was announced in connection with the 88th anniversary of the circular letter of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), signed on January 24 by Ya. M. Sverdlov on holding a mass terror against the wealthy Cossacks. This was the beginning of the development of genocide against the Cossacks, according to the VVD.

Mourning events in the Cossack villages were dedicated to the memory of the Cossacks who died for Orthodoxy, the Don and the Fatherland. In memory of the victims of political repression and the genocide that claimed the lives of more than two million Cossacks, memorial services for the innocently murdered Cossacks were held in all Orthodox churches of the Great Don Army. In the Cossack cadet corps, schools, schools with the regional status of "Cossack" memory lessons were held.

In Penza, in memory of all those who fell victim to the policy of "decossackization", a memorial service was held in the church "Old Savior". In the 1920s and 1930s, the temple building was used as a transit prison. Dozens of people died here: nobles, peasants, Cossacks.

Decossackization according to the legislation of the Russian Federation

According to the current law of the RSFSR of 04.26.1991 N 1107-1 “On the rehabilitation of repressed peoples”, in relation to the Cossacks, “a policy of slander and genocide was carried out at the state level, accompanied by forced resettlement, the establishment of a regime of terror and violence in places of special settlements” (Article 2 of the law) .

see also

• Rehabilitation in the Russian Federation - legislation, practice and statistics

Notes

1. Big Encyclopedia "Revolution and Civil War in Russia: 1917-1923": In 4 volumes / Ch. ed. d.h.s. Prof. S. A. Kondratiev. - M., Terra, 2008. - S. 215. - ISBN 978-5-273-00562-4.
2. Magner G. Decossackization in the system of mass repressions // Alternatives: magazine. - 1999. - No. 4.
3. Big Encyclopedia "Revolution and Civil War in Russia: 1917-1923": In 4 volumes / Ch. ed. d.h.s. Prof. S. A. Kondratiev. - M., Terra, 2008. - S. 218. - ISBN 978-5-273-00562-4.
4. Futoryansky L.I. Problems of the Cossacks: decossackization // Bulletin of OSU. - 2002. - V. 2. - S. 43-53.
5. Losev E. Decossackization on the Don - S. 20-22; Venkov A.V.. What is the Cossack question? // Don. - 1990. - No. 2. -S. 140-141; Genis V. L. Decossackization in Soviet Russia // Question. stories. - 1994. - No. 1. - S. 42-55; Cossacks in the history of Russia: int. scientific conf. // Fatherland story. - 1994. - No. 6. - S. 271; Kozlov A. I. Revival of the Cossacks: history and modernity (evolution, politics, theory). - Rostov-on-Don, 1995. - S. 133-134; Kislitsyn S. A. State and decossackization, 1917-1945: textbook. allowance. - Rostov-on-Don, 1996; Trut V. P. Cossack fracture: the Cossacks of the South-East of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century and during the revolution of 1917. - Rostov-on-Don, 1997. - S. 210-216.
6. Chernopitsky P. G. On the fate of the Cossacks in the Soviet era // Kuban Cossacks: problems of history and revival. - Krasnodar, 1992. - S. 83-85; Chernopitsky P. G. About one historical myth // Kuban Cossacks: three centuries of historical path. - Krasnodar, 1996. - S. 277-281; Oskolkov E. N. The fate of the peasantry and the Cossacks in Russia: peasantization, decossackization // Problems of the history of the Cossacks: coll. scientific tr. - Volgograd, 1995. - S. 150-163; Perekhov Ya. A. Power and the Cossacks: the search for consent (1920-1926) - Rostov-on-Don, 1997. - P. 11
7. Kozlov A. The tragedy of the Don Cossacks in the XX century // History of the Don region. - No. 1 (31). - January 20, 2000]
8. P. A. Golub. Truth and Lies about the "Decossackization" of the Cossacks. p.16
9. Denikin A.I. ESSAYS OF THE RUSSIAN TROUBLES. ISBN 5-8112-1891-5 (Book 2), page 179
10. ISBN 978-5-9533-1988-1, page 88
11. Denikin A.I. ESSAYS OF THE RUSSIAN TROUBLES. [In 3 books] Book 2, v.2. The struggle of General Kornilov; v.3. White movement and the struggle of the Volunteer Army - M .: Airis-press, 2006. - 736 p.: ill. + incl. 16 s - (White Russia) - V.2, 3 - ISBN 5-8112-1891-5 (Book 2)
12. Big Encyclopedia "Revolution and Civil War in Russia: 1917-1923": Encyclopedia in 4 volumes Chapters. editor d.h.s. Prof. S. A. Kondratiev / Big Encyclopedia. - Moscow, Terra, 2008 ISBN 978-5-273-00560-0, p. 141
13. White movement. Hike from the Pacific Don to the Pacific Ocean. - M.: Veche, 2007. - 378 p. - (For faith and fidelity). - ISBN 978-5-9533-1988-1, page 128
14. White movement. Hike from the Pacific Don to the Pacific Ocean. - M.: Veche, 2007. - 378 p. - (For faith and fidelity). - ISBN 978-5-9533-1988-1, p.136
15. Kenez Peter ISBN 978-5-9524-2748-8, page 123
16. Ph.D. Rodionov V. The Quiet Don of Ataman Kaledin / Vyacheslav Rodionov. - M.: Algorithm, 2007, p. 254
17. White movement. Hike from the Pacific Don to the Pacific Ocean. - M.: Veche, 2007. - 378 p. - (For faith and fidelity). - ISBN 978-5-9533-1988-1, page 32
18. Encyclopedia of the Cossacks. Moscow. "Veche", 2007. S. 268
19. Ph.D. Rodionov V. The Quiet Don of Ataman Kaledin / Vyacheslav Rodionov. - M.: Algorithm, 2007, p. 257
20. Ph.D. Rodionov V. The Quiet Don of Ataman Kaledin / Vyacheslav Rodionov. - M.: Algorithm, 2007, p. 258
21. Encyclopedia of the Cossacks. Moscow. "Veche", 2007. S. 269
22. Ph.D. Rodionov V. The Quiet Don of Ataman Kaledin / Vyacheslav Rodionov. - M.: Algorithm, 2007, p. 255
23. Encyclopedia of the Cossacks. Moscow. Veche, 2007, p. 70
24. Encyclopedia of the Cossacks. Moscow. Veche, 2007, p. 48
25. Ph.D. Rodionov V. The Quiet Don of Ataman Kaledin / Vyacheslav Rodionov. - M.: Algorithm, 2007, p. 259
26. Denikin A.I. ESSAYS OF THE RUSSIAN TROUBLES. [In 3 books] Book 2, v.2. The struggle of General Kornilov; v.3. White movement and the struggle of the Volunteer Army - M .: Airis-press, 2006. - 736 p.: ill. + incl. 16 s - (White Russia) - V.2, 3 - ISBN 5-8112-1891-5 (Book 2), p. 315
27. Yu. G. Felshtinsky. Red terror during the civil war
28. Truths and lies about "telling"
29. White movement. Hike from the Pacific Don to the Pacific Ocean. - M.: Veche, 2007. - 378 p. - (For faith and fidelity). - ISBN 978-5-9533-1988-1, page 136
30. Denikin A.I. ESSAYS OF THE RUSSIAN TROUBLES. [In 3 books] Book 2, v.2. The struggle of General Kornilov; v.3. White movement and the struggle of the Volunteer Army - M .: Airis-press, 2006. - 736 p.: ill. + incl. 16 s - (White Russia) - V.2, 3 - ISBN 5-8112-1891-5 (Book 2), p. 560
31. Red Terror during the Civil War: Based on the materials of the Special Investigation Commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks. Ed. Doctors of Historical Sciences Yu. G. Felshtinsky and G. I. Chernyavsky / London, 1992.
32. Bykovsky V. I. Cossacks in the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. // Journal "Law and Security" No. 2-3 (3-4) August 2002
33. Stalin I. V. Op. T. 4. S. 124, 285-287
34. Kenez Peter Red attack, white resistance. 1917-1918 / Transl. from English. K. A. Nikiforova. - M.: CJSC Tsentrpoligraf, 2007. - 287 s - (Russia at a turning point in history). ISBN 978-5-9524-2748-8, page 121
35. Kenez Peter Red attack, white resistance. 1917-1918 / Transl. from English. K. A. Nikiforova. - M.: CJSC Tsentrpoligraf, 2007. - 287 s - (Russia at a turning point in history).

And the Cossacks have a lot of information. There is little information about the division of the Cossacks in the process of the French Revolution into traitors and faithful to the oath, but we nevertheless considered this complex topic on the blog. And now it's time to reveal the topic of destruction by the invaders and traitors of those Cossacks who remained faithful to military duty. This cannot be called the revenge of the winner on the vanquished, the destruction of the Cossacks is a brutal brutal genocide, the purpose of which was the complete destruction of the genome of a huge group of people who were able to withstand the enemy, and under the pressure of non-humans were able to remain Humans.

Destruction of the Cossacks or Red Terror

January 24, 1919. On the agenda is the discussion of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) - "Circular letter" by Y. Sverdlov, known as the "directive on decossackization."
The verdict of this document:

"Merciless terror, no compromise, wholesale extermination",

decossackization - or "Cossack Holocaust"
Burned alive, shot, poisoned with military chemicals. Exiled to Siberia for extinction were mostly civilians, the civilian population of the villages: the elderly, women and children.

• According to some experts, from 800 thousand to 1 million 250 thousand lives were claimed by the Cossack genocide.
• According to other sources, the red genocide claimed more than three million lives.

Bronstein (Trotsky)

The Red Terror, which filled with blood after the Bolsheviks came to power, was so terrible that even historians could hardly believe in its conscious thoughtfulness. In fact, the Red Terror is not chaos, it was a well-thought-out, debugged, and well-calibrated mechanism that had its creators. Their names are known to all. The ideologists, inspirers and organizers of the genocide of the Cossacks at the state level were Sverdlov, Lenin, Trotsky.

“The Cossacks are the only part of the Russian nation that is capable of self-organization. Therefore, they must be destroyed without exception. They are a kind of zoological environment, and nothing more ... The cleansing flame should pass through the entire Don and instill fear and almost religious horror in all of them. Let their last remnants, like gospel pigs, be thrown into the Black Sea.

Here is another extract from the directive of the Central Committee of the RCP:

“To all responsible comrades working in the Cossack regions”: “Given the experience of the year of the civil war with the Cossacks, it is necessary to recognize the only right thing is the most merciless struggle against all the tops of the Cossacks through their total extermination. No compromises, no half-heartedness of the path are unacceptable.”

The first paragraph is:

"It is necessary to carry out mass terror directed against the wealthy Cossacks, to exterminate them without exception, to carry out mass merciless terror in general in relation to all Cossacks who took any part in the struggle against Soviet power"

The second paragraph was:

“Confiscate all grain, force the surplus to be dumped in full at the indicated points, this applies to bread and all other agricultural products”

My mother told me how this item was carried out in their Kuban in execution. On a rainy autumn day, from all over the village, Bolshevik activists herded the cattle taken from the inhabitants into the common yard. All the living creatures spent the whole day in the pouring rain, in the open air: bulls, horses, cows. Frost struck at night, and by morning the corpses of animals frozen to the ground lay all over the yard. The winter was hungry, in the spring there was nothing to plow the land.

Bloody Soviet Mechanic Yakov Sverdlov

The whole policy of decossackization is mass executions, inciting non-residents to Cossacks, taking hostages, burning villages.

And here is the letter that Dzerzhinsky wrote to Lenin on December 19, 1919. It says that at that time about a million Cossacks were in captivity of the Bolsheviks. The leader's answer was quite in his spirit:

"Shoot everyone to one!"

And now there are such rallies

Ilyich periodically sends telegrams to the Caucasus:

"We'll cut everyone."

It is good that the Bolsheviks did not physically have the strength to carry out then all the cannibalistic directives of the “humane” grandfather Lenin.

How the Kuban, Don and Terek Cossacks were destroyed

In late 1917 - early 1918, the Don Cossacks, believing the Bolsheviks, took their side, wanting to end the war. But the Commander of the Northern Detachment Yu. V. Sablin, in response to the Don Circle, on February 12, 1918, said:

“The Cossacks must necessarily be destroyed, as such. With his class and privilege.

That was the first attempt at decossackization, of course, the Don Cossacks were not going to endure it. On March 21, 1918, an anti-communist uprising broke out in the village of Suvorovskaya, which soon engulfed the entire Don.
The government of General Krasnov, ataman of the Don Cossacks, has developed a draft

"restoration of the nation-state on an all-Russian scale".

At the first stage, the chieftains of the Kuban, Don, Terek and Astrakhan Cossack troops, the chairman of the Union of Highlanders of the North Caucasus were to proclaim the Don-Caucasian Union as a sovereign federal state, the union was supposed to observe neutrality in the civil war and stop fighting the Bolsheviks outside the Don-Caucasian Union .
This policy of "decossackization" turned the Cossacks into allies of the White movement.

In June 1918, several villages of the Labinsk department rebelled. The Bolsheviks crushed the uprising especially cruelly: 770 Labin Cossacks were executed, not counting those killed in battles with punitive detachments.

The Kuban Cossack army, the second largest after the Don, also suffered a tragic fate. The intrigue lay in the fact that all the Kuban troops were placed at the disposal of the mountain government. General Wrangel, who arrived in the Caucasus, cracked down on the "independents". The Kuban began to leave the front en masse, thinking that at home they would come to an agreement with the Bolsheviks. After the evacuation of volunteers from Novorossiysk, Kuban, at best, was waiting for the Polish front and the Red Army, but at worst and more often - northern and Siberian camps.

The remnants of the Kuban Cossacks were finished off at the end of the 1920s: collectivization, "black boards", famine, unsuccessful uprisings suppressed by punishers. There is not a single work of Soviet writers on this subject. The only agitation is a popular and thoroughly false film of those times - "Kuban Cossacks".

On February 3, 1919, a secret order was issued by the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic of Trotsky, on February 5, another order “On decossackization” No. 171 of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southern Front. The directive of the Donburo of the CPSU (b) directly prescribed:

1. physical extermination of Cossacks capable of carrying weapons, from 18 to 50 years old, at least 100 thousand;
2. the physical destruction of the "tops" of the village (teachers, atamans, judges, and priests), even if they did not take part in counter-revolutionary actions;
3. eviction outside the Don region most of the Cossack families;
4. in place of the liquidated villages - to resettle peasants from land-poor northern provinces.

In addition, the Revolutionary Military Council and the Donburo demand a decisive implementation of directives. Documents of the following type go by authority:

“No information was received about the number of all those who were shot from any of the commissars of the division. Until measures are taken that nip in the bud even thoughts of the possibility of an uprising in our rear, they will continue to flare up. These are: the complete annihilation of all those who raised weapons, the executions on the ground of all those who have weapons, and the percentage destruction of the male population.

This document was signed by the future sufferer I. Yakir (member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the 8th Army).

“... to strict execution: all efforts should be intensified to eliminate the unrest as soon as possible, concentrating maximum efforts to suppress the uprisings and applying the most severe measures in relation to the instigators-khutors:

1. Burning of all rebellious farms;
2. Executions of all persons, without exception, who took part in the uprising, directly or indirectly;
3. Mass executions every 10 people of the adult male population in the rebel farms;
4. Taking hostages from neighboring farms to the insurgents;
5. Broad notification of the population, villages and farms that everyone who is seen in helping the rebels, all villages and farms, will be subjected to merciless extermination of the entire adult male population and, at the first case of finding help, will be burnt.

In addition to mass executions, the so-called food detachments were organized, in other words, bandit formations that took away food. The villages were urgently renamed into villages, and the name "Cossack" was banned.

Communist M. Nesterov sent to the Don testifies:

“... At the head of the food department was some kind of Goldin, his view of the Cossacks was as follows: all the Cossacks must be cut out! And populate the Don region with an alien element "

Philip Mironov, former Commander of the 2nd con. army, on whose conscience the death of a thousand Cossacks, in August 1919, wrote in his order-appeal:

"Don was dumbfounded with terror."

And there is not a village or a farm that would not count their victims in tens and even hundreds. In the Cossack regions, uprisings were artificially provoked in order to exterminate the Cossacks under this guise.
Speaking about the "reprisal against the Cossacks", its "liquidation", the chairman of the Donburo S. Syrtsov noted:

"the villages were depopulated."

In some villages, up to 80% of the inhabitants were destroyed. On the Don alone, about a million people died - this is 35% of the population.

In April 1919, another directive of the Don Bureau was issued:

“Our urgent task is the rapid, complete, and decisive destruction of the entire Cossacks, as a special economic group. Destroy economic foundations. Physically destroy the Cossack officers, bureaucracy, and in general all the tops of the Cossacks, neutralize and disperse the ordinary Cossacks.

The remnants of the Kuban army, by the end of 1920 - mostly ordinary Cossacks, went home, laying down their weapons. If the Bolsheviks wanted to make peace, then this would be a real chance for them, but the Soviet 9th Army again intensified repression.

• In the village of Chamlykskaya - 23 people were shot
• Stanitsa Labinskaya - 42 people were shot
• In the village of Kabardinskaya - shelled with artillery fire, 8 houses were burned.
• In the village of Guriyskaya - hostages were taken, the village was fired upon with artillery fire.
• Artognyom shelled the farm Kuban. The Chichibaba farm and the Armenian farm were completely burned down -
• In the village of Bzhedukhovskaya, 60 houses were burned.
• In Stanitsa Psebayskaya - 48 people were shot.
• Stanitsa. Khanskaya - 100 people were shot, property was confiscated. Families of bandits are sent deep into Russia.

The conclusion of the army headquarters is as follows:

“It is desirable to implement total terror and the most severe repressions against the inhabitants of the Cossack regions!”

And below, handwritten:

"Fulfilled".

Hero of the revolution Chapaev. This is his famous division, when it advanced from Lbischensk to the village of Skvorkina, it burned all the villages for 80 miles in length and 30-40 in width.

In the Southern Urals, on the territory of the Orenburg Cossack army, the Bolsheviks burned villages, shot officers, Cossacks, Cossacks.
Millions of poods of bread were taken out and destroyed. They stole cattle, and what they could not steal was cut right on the spot.

In 1920, in the Astrakhan province in the end. There were about 2,000 Cossacks in the camps.

Implementing the secret order No. 01726, acting commander of the Caucasian Labor. army A. Medvedev, the Kalinovskaya village was burned to the ground, the villages of Romanovskaya (Zakanyurtovskaya), (the village of Zakanyurt), Yermolovskaya (now the village of Alkhankala), Mikhailovskaya (the village of Sernovodskoye) Samashkinskaya (the village of Samashki), looted and subjected to repression. And the village of Kokhanovskaya was completely destroyed. All Cossacks, aged 18 to 50 years, in accordance with the order, it was decided

"loaded into trains and sent under escort to the north, for heavy forced labor."

The elderly, women and children were also evicted. About 11,000 people were evicted from these villages - these are 2917 families,

The extermination of the Cossacks went on for several years. Then there seemed to be a lull. But it was a tactic. The Soviet government sought the return of emigrants, which would then completely eliminate the threat from them, and finish off the surviving Cossacks.
There were 11 Cossack troops in Russia. The Bolsheviks destroyed almost all the Cossacks.

From Sandra Kondrus

Both of my grandfathers were in the Army. And during the First World War, Russia and Germany were recaptured in the most terrible sectors of the front from the very beginning of the war to its end. And then they fought with the Bolsheviks.
White Tsarist Russian Army among the Slavs in 1914 - 1921. was the White Army of Conde: Bella Russia Arm Air Carus Cesarcarus-Zakon Czartorys.

But the Nikolaev Jewish Cossacks, Soviet, of the old Red Prussian Guard, were the occupying troops of Germany in occupied Russia in 1858-1917. and troops of the German state army.
So, everyone, Denikins, Kolchaks, Yudenichi, Wrangels, Mamontovs and others were Prussian officers of the red (Soviet) army of the Hohenzollerns, Holstein, Bronstein and Blank lads. Members of the Social Democrats.
For this reason, the Liberation of Russia from the German occupation of 1858-1917 was not necessary for our Germans to Soviet Jews, these damned Frenchmen with their Kutuzov. They were satisfied with everything, as under the Romanovs.

The whole French revolution of 1853-1921 is a terrible state secret among the Soviet Jewish Germans, those damned Frenchmen with their Kutuzov.

When the Romanov Red Army, with the help of their allies, staged an intervention in Russia and colluded with the Bolsheviks, the Red Army soldiers Kolchak, Denikin and others betrayed their own Cossacks. They disbanded all the Cossack troops and ordered them to disarm.
And all this was under the slogan of stopping the bloodshed of the lads in the Civil War. That is, the substitution of concepts has begun again. Because the Wars are named after the military opponent of the State. And the State was the White Army of Condé, "Rus is coming."
And our civilians: the Red Army soldiers of Romanov, Lenin and Stalin, were a military opponent of the State Army of Conde and fought with the State Army of Conde, the troops of the Government.

The Cossacks left the front and returned home, of course, without weapons. They were forced to disarm. Because the railroad trade unions did not let trains with demobilized soldiers pass if they did not leave their weapons in the steppe.

As soon as the Cossacks went home, this is where it began. The punitive troops of the Red (Soviet) Army rushed all over Russia.

In 1922, my paternal grandfather was beaten to death by Belarusian peasants. But ask the Belarusians yourself: why did they do it? Once a peasant, a Slav, and even a Russian, then God himself ordered him to kill anyone. He is Russian: a Slav, a Soviet Christian!
It was generally creepy. I can tell those who wish to the whole planet: how Belarusian peasants “Russians” killed my grandfather: a professional Military man who went through the entire war of 1914-1921: They beat him to death, in front of his wife and small children? And what did they do then?

But I promised to tell how the Petrograd intellectuals and Soviet Slavic peasants killed my other grandfather: a Cossack, mother's father?

When the Cossacks returned home from the front, to Stanitsa, because Kolchak, Yudenich and others had betrayed the army, having agreed with the Bolsheviks, the red (Soviet) worker-peasant army immediately rushed after them. There were shootings, robberies, murders and rapes. The Cossacks grabbed their weapons, but it was already too late. There were a lot of red ones. The forces were not equal.
My grandfather and seventeen other people were arrested by the Reds, tied up, and driven along the stage to Armavir. 250 kilometers of the Cossacks were driven on foot.
At first, the Cossacks were kept under arrest. And then they were driven to Kutan, the steppe near Armavir.
My grandfather was put on the blockhouse of the well. A St. Petersburg intellectual in glasses rode up to him on a horse and said to him:
- Ask for forgiveness from the Soviet authorities and go to serve in our Red Army.
The grandfather silently spat in his eyes. The intellectual wiped himself off after spitting and waved his hand. Immediately, another St. Petersburg intellectual flew up on a horse and at full gallop cut off his grandfather's head with a saber. Grandfather silently collapsed into the well.
A second Cossack was placed on the log house of the well. And I must say that these were the Drozdovites, who smashed the Bolsheviks so much that they were afraid to remember all the years of their Soviet power.
And again, the same St. Petersburg intellectual in glasses drove up to him and again said the same thing: "Ask forgiveness from the Soviet authorities and go serve us in the Red Army." And - again, a spit in the face, and again, an equestrian Red Army intellectual from St. Petersburg, at full gallop, cut off his head with a saber. Another Cossack flew into the well.
And - so: 18 times. The commissar was patient. Until everyone spat in his face, he did not calm down.

Drozdovtsy. For some reason, in the same ranks with the Drozdovites, Marshal Zhukov

The Cossacks were buried. And all the years of Soviet power, at the place of their execution, a modest granite obelisk stood. On the obelisk was the inscription: "To those who did not bow their heads." And - all eighteen names. My grandfather's last name came first.

What did the Bolsheviks do in the Kuban, killing the Cossacks and their families? It's so scary that it's scary to write about it, scary to talk about it and scary to listen to.
The extermination of registered Kuban Cossacks (Army) was of such magnitude that after the Second World War there were no Cossacks in the Cossack Stanitsa-Polka. Almost all of them were exterminated. Cut out at the root.
And when our Soviet Red Army soldiers so glorify their Soviet power and tell how they felt good there under their Soviet power at the expense of the people they killed, let them not forget that the “Whites” were Russians: “Army” - Soldier or Officer in line "Come Rus' to Tsargrad."
Let them talk about how they built their happiness on blood. And that they still forbid those whose families they killed to even talk about their murdered relatives.

New Cossacks

In Russia, captured by the Soviet army, the entire White (Russian) Army Aryan Race turned out to be outside the Law: “Angels of Karusy” - Rus' came to Tsargrad.

And if we are outside the Law in our own Country? No problem. The fourth part of the Marlezon ballet: "The French Revolution" performed by these accursed Frenchmen with their Kutuzov: Hohenzollern, Holstein, Bronstein and Blank, the Social Democrats chaps:
- Trizna of the Etruscans.

And never mind the frost that the Soviet memory repulsed the year 1917 and its revolution in Petrograd. On their Soviet power. In war, as in war. It has been going on with us only since 1853, without stopping.
For how many years of revolution until the Middle Ages did the Slavs have enough of the Atlantean civilization they captured in St. Petersburg? said about two hundred? So they will end soon. Especially if we take into account that the French revolution among Pushkinists did not begin in 1853, as it did all over the planet, but in 1812, personally.

It's time to prepare for the apocalypse. As before the Middle Ages ...

1919 Bolsheviks exterminate the Cossacks

Red terror. Cossack genocide.

Rus

On January 24, 1919, a "directive on decossackization" was adopted in Russia, after which mass terror began against the Cossacks.

Repressions and economic terror did not pass without a trace: the number of the Don Cossacks was halved.

Decossackization- the policy pursued by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War and in the first decades after it, aimed at depriving the Cossacks of independent political and military rights, liquidation of the Cossacks as a social, ethnic and cultural community, estates of the Russian state.

The policy of decossackization ultimately resulted in a massive red terror and repressions against the Cossacks, expressed in mass shootings, hostage-taking, burning of villages, inciting non-residents on the Cossacks. In the process of decossackization, requisitions of livestock and agricultural products were also carried out, the resettlement of poor people from among non-residents to lands that previously belonged to the Cossacks.

On the issue of fighting the Bolsheviks, the Cossacks did not have a single opinion. Some of them even had anti-volunteer sentiments. The army of General A. I. Denikin was perceived by the Cossacks as not a completely democratic institution, encroaching on their Cossack liberties, an instrument of big politics, which they did not care about. Poorly known by the entire Cossack population, the Bolsheviks, on the contrary, seemed to be something like a lesser evil for the Cossacks. Most of the Cossacks believed the Soviet propaganda and hoped that the Bolsheviks would not touch them. According to General M. V. Alekseev, the Cossacks at that time were "deeply convinced that Bolshevism is directed only against the rich classes - the bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia ..."

However, the Resolution of the Donburo of the RCP (b) of April 8, 1919 considers the Cossacks as the base of the counter-revolution and suggests its destruction as a special economic group:

"All this raises the urgent task of the complete, rapid, decisive destruction of the Cossacks as a special economic group, the destruction of its economic foundations, the physical destruction of the Cossack officials and officers, in general, all the tops of the Cossacks, actively counter-revolutionary, dispersal and neutralization of the ordinary Cossacks and the formal liquidation of the Cossacks "

Similarly, the situation developed in the Southern Urals, where confusion in the minds of the Cossacks was brought about by rumors about the Bolsheviks' economic successes allegedly available throughout Russia, about giving the population unprecedented freedoms before. Bolshevik agitators who came from Central Russia to the location of the Orenburg Cossack Host tried to inspire the Cossacks with the idea that the Bolsheviks were fighting not with the Cossacks, but with their superiors, who “sold out to the bourgeoisie” and allegedly defended its interests with the heads of the Cossacks.

The agitators sought to turn the Cossacks against the officers. Much of what the agitators reported to the Cossacks was taken at face value, many were inclined to believe this, especially since there were no people in the villages who exposed the Bolshevik lies at that time.

After that, all the delegates of the Cossack circle were arrested by the Reds, and Soviet power was proclaimed in the city. Following Golubov's Cossacks who had gone over to the side of the Bolsheviks, Chekists arrived in the city and began beating the city's intelligentsia and officers.

Over the corpses of the executed punishers from the Cheka for a long time and fiercely scoffed: they kicked them with their feet, stabbed them with bayonets, crushed the skulls of those killed with rifle butts. Even Golubov himself could not endure such a turn of events in the Cossack capital, whose red Cossacks began to oppose the red punishers from the Cheka.

The introduction of Soviet power in the Don and Kuban was accompanied by the capture of an alien element of local government, robberies, requisitions, arrests, executions, murders (only one officer was killed by the Bolsheviks on the Don about 500 people), punitive expeditions against the protesting villages and villages.

In accordance with the documents of the Special Investigative Commission to investigate the atrocities of the Bolsheviks in the Don cities, villages and villages, another two thousand people fell victim to the punitive measures of the Soviet power established on the Don

An important factor contributing to the policy of decossackization were internal splits in the Cossacks, as well as conflicts between the Cossack and non-Cossack population, which were more actively manifested during the period of ideological and political confrontation during the Civil War.

The historian A. Kozlov cites the following information: “Breaking into the borders of neighboring provinces, the White Cossack units were hanged, shot, hacked, raped, robbed and flogged. These atrocities were then recorded by the Saratov and Voronezh peasants and workers at the expense of all the Cossacks, giving rise to fear and hatred. The spontaneous response resulted in revenge also on all Cossacks, indiscriminately. It was the innocent and defenseless who suffered first.”

According to historian Peter Kenez, to do what Ataman Kaledin failed to do - to force the Don Cossacks to revolt against Bolshevism - helped carry out the communist experiment- Don Soviet Republic. In order to establish contact with Moscow, the leadership of the Bolsheviks sent their representative to the Don - Commissar Voetsehovsky, who, together with Sievers, really controlled the region and organized the nationalization of mines and factories, the seizure of food, extortion of money from the bourgeoisie and was known as the "king of terror". During the two months of Bolshevik domination, for the inhabitants of the South, the Soviet regime became a symbol of terror and anarchy, The most punitive measures were manifested in the two main strongholds of the Bolsheviks: in Rostov and Taganrog.

Peter Kenez wrote:

In the last months of the Kaledin regime, the Bolsheviks received enormous support in these cities of the Don. The population was waiting for the troops of the Red Army as liberators. The arrival of the troops destroyed this illusion in a short time, and sympathy was replaced by fear. Arrests and executions began immediately

The Soviet regime, with its inevitable methods - murders, robberies and violence, already in the Cossack environment began to arouse the will to active resistance. It arose in many places spontaneously, unorganized and scattered. Thus, in addition to the Yeysk district, serious uprisings broke out in the regions of Armavir and the Caucasus, bloodily suppressed by the Bolsheviks, who, fully armed with military equipment, attacked the almost unarmed Cossack militias. In many larger centers, along with the Cossack revolutionary democracy, which was still looking for ways to reconcile with the Soviet regime, along with the passive philistine and a fairly significant number of "neutral" officers, hidden leadership activities and active elements were created: secret circles and organizations were created, in the composition which, in addition to energetic officers and more prominent Cossacks, included representatives of the urban bourgeoisie and democracy. Without any skill for such work, all these organizations already had their long martyrologies issued and tortured. But most of the Kuban villages were left to their own devices. All their intelligentsia - a terrorized priest, a neutral teacher and an officer in hiding - cautiously avoided participation in the movement, not fully trusting its sincerity and seriousness. Moreover, the Soviet authorities instigated a cruel persecution against this particular intelligentsia, especially against the clergy.

... given the experience of the year of the civil war with the Cossacks, to recognize the only right thing is the most merciless struggle against all the tops of the Cossacks through their total extermination.

No compromises, no half-heartedness of the path are unacceptable. Therefore it is necessary:

1. Carry out mass terror against the rich Cossacks, exterminating them without exception; to carry out merciless mass terror against all Cossacks in general who took any direct or indirect part in the struggle against Soviet power. It is necessary to apply to the average Cossacks all those measures that give a guarantee against any attempts on their part to new actions against the Soviet power.
2. To confiscate grain and force it to dump all surpluses at the indicated points, this applies both to bread and to all other agricultural products.
3. Take all measures to help the relocating immigrant poor, organizing resettlement where possible
5. Carry out complete disarmament, shooting everyone who is found to have a weapon after the deadline for surrender ...

According to the studies of historians, the ideologist and compiler of this directive is I. V. Stalin

The author of The Quiet Flows the Don wrote about the events of 1919 in the third book of the novel, where he initially placed the document of the circular letter and described the persons guilty of lawlessness. Because of these details, the publication of the work in 1930 was suspended. To get the "go-ahead" Sholokhov turned to Serafimovich, Gorky and even Stalin. The "Leader of the Peoples" ordered the editors to publish the continuation of the novel. By the way, Sholokhov described Commissar Malkin like this: “... they have a commissar with a detachment, Malkin’s last name ... He collects old people from farms, leads them into brushwood, takes out their souls there, teleshits them beforehand and buries them, does not tell relatives. ..". The text of the letter of the Orgburo and the name of the Deputy Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars S. Syrtsov are also mentioned in the Quiet Don.

Between the Soviet state and the Russian Cossacks initially tense relations were established. The Bolsheviks, as true revolutionaries, even before they came to power in October 1917, got used to calling the Cossacks “buffers”, “satraps”, “support of the autocracy”. The apogee of the anti-Cossack policy of the Bolsheviks was the period of the civil war, when cruel measures were taken against the Cossacks, and one of the leaders of the ruling party, L.D. Trotsky called on his comrades-in-arms in the “red camp”: “Destroy as such, de-Cossack the Cossacks - that is our slogan! Remove stripes, forbid being called a Cossack, evict en masse to other regions. During the NEP period, despite the normalization of relations between the Cossacks and the Soviet government, the focus on “decossackization”, the dissolution of the Cossacks among the mass of the rural population persisted (although due to the multidimensionality of the historical process during the 1920s, there were also cases of strengthening the positions of local Cossack communities in the level of the villages, which allowed contemporaries to talk about "providing"). The anti-Cossack orientation of the Bolshevik policy also manifested itself during complete collectivization, when in the South of Russia the Don, Terek, Kuban Cossacks became the primary object of “dispossession”, repressions, and deportations. It was during the years of collectivization, according to a number of experts, that the tragic process of “decossackization” received its natural conclusion.

In the scientific literature, polar points of view have developed in relation to “decossackization”. So, S.A. Kislitsyn, who devoted a number of serious works to this topic, identifies four stages in the process of "decossackization": civil war (decossackization through the physical liquidation of representatives of the Cossack estate), the stage from 1921 to 1924. (pressure on the Cossacks, restriction of their rights), hidden decossackization 1925 - 1928. and, finally, “the stage of persecution of opposition-minded elements of the Cossacks by the methods of “dispossession”, the fight against “pests” and “saboteurs” of grain procurements and direct repressions against members of the “rebel organizations” of 1929-1939.

On the contrary, according to V.E. Shchetnev, collectivization in relation to the Cossack regions cannot be characterized as decossackization, because "by this time the Cossacks had lost a significant part of their class and ethnic characteristics" as a result of previous actions of the authorities. Collectivization can be called, believes V.E. Shchetnev, "finishing off" the Cossacks, but by no means the final stage of decossackization. Actually, E.N. wrote about the same thing. Oskolkov, pointing out that the attempts of the leaders of the CPSU (b) and the Soviet state in the early 1930s. to give their violent actions in the North Caucasian region an anti-Cossack character were doomed to failure in advance: “the failure of this line was that the Cossacks as an estate by the beginning of the 30s. was no longer there."

Within the framework of the above discussion, we fully share the position of those researchers who believe it is impossible to interpret collectivization as the final stage of “decossicization”. At the same time, in our opinion, this position needs a more serious substantiation, and in the course of attracting and analyzing specific historical materials, a number of provisions can be adjusted. For example, one can think about the extent to which the Cossacks were “finished off” during the “kolkhoz construction” in the villages and villages of the South of Russia during the 1930s. In the presented publication, we intend to document the hypothesis that collectivization was not the final stage of “decossackization”, despite all the anti-Cossack actions of the Soviet government (more precisely, the Stalinist regime) that took place in the late 1920s - 1930s.

Before proceeding to a detailed substantiation of our position, it is necessary to determine the semantic content of “decossicization” as the basic concept of this work, since it is precisely the features of the interpretation of this concept that ultimately anticipate certain author’s judgments and hypotheses. What is the meaning of this concept? Historiographic analysis allows us to identify several approaches to the interpretation of "decossackization" and indicate several of its meanings that are different from each other.

According to one of the interpretations, “decossackization” is the process of eliminating the Cossacks as a special social group in Russian society, “the abolition of the essential features of the Cossacks as a military service class: almost lifelong military service, allotment of a land share for service, the abolition of Cossack equipment for service for his account, the abolition of benefits to the Cossack, his equalization with the peasantry. Actually, this is the original meaning of “decossackization”, which arose simultaneously with the beginning of this process in the second half of the 19th century, when, as the genesis of capitalism, the Cossack communities began to gradually dissolve into other social strata (for example, by the beginning of the 20th century, about 8 thousand Don Cossacks worked in the factory industry and in transport). At that time, “decossackization” was an evolutionary process, a kind of response of the Cossacks to the changed socio-economic conditions, in which the privileges of their estate status no longer compensated for the costs and losses that accompanied the performance of duties. As rightly noted by V.P. Trut, "at that time no one even stuttered about any violent measures of influence on the Cossacks." In our opinion, such an interpretation of “decossackization” corresponds to historical reality.

According to another, more extended interpretation, "decossackization" was nothing more than "the process of destroying the Cossacks as a special social community." In this case, we are talking not only about the elimination of the Cossacks as an estate, but also in general about the elimination of the Cossacks as a social group that has (like any other social group) certain traditions, features of life, collective psychology, etc. , understood as the liquidation of the military service class, has more or less clear chronological boundaries (the second half of the 19th century - the 20s of the 20th century), then “decossackization” as the destruction of the “special social community” of the Cossacks can be extended and for the pre-Soviet, and for the entire Soviet period of time (because in this case, almost any anti-Cossack action can be summed up under "decossackization", no matter what government it is undertaken). The lack of specificity makes this definition of "scocking" inherently vulnerable.

Finally, according to another fairly common interpretation, “decossackization” (in the Soviet period) was “the elimination of the Cossacks as a socio-ethnographic community in general”, the elimination of “characteristic features, features, properties, signs of the Cossacks as a paramilitary estate, a layer of wealthy landowners and partly as a separate sub-ethnos”, “the transformation of the Cossacks into ordinary citizens”. This interpretation of “decossackization” is close to the one given above, but concretizes it and seriously supplements it with an indication that in the Soviet period the authorities set themselves the goal of partially eliminating the Cossacks, not just as an estate and even a social community, but as a sub-ethnos. In other words, in this case we are talking about the intentions of the authorities to completely (or almost completely) dissolve the Cossacks with their special culture, psychology, etc. in the mass of the population of Soviet Russia.

So, there is no unity of approaches to understanding the essence and characteristic features of “decossackization” (as a process and as a policy) among specialists. Naturally, the difference in approaches to the interpretation of "decossackization" directly affects the establishment of the chronological boundaries of this historical phenomenon. Above, we have already cited the statements of researchers that “decossackization”, if it is understood as the elimination of the special estate status of the Cossacks, ended in the 1920s, when the Soviet authorities denied autonomy to the Cossacks and equalized their rights with the peasants. Consequently, within the framework of such a position, collectivization could not represent the final stage of "decossackization", since the Cossacks as a military service class by the beginning of the 1930s. no longer existed (despite the fact that in economic and property terms, the Cossacks of the South of Russia in the pre-collective farm period nevertheless stood out from the mass of peasants).

In contrast to this interpretation, researchers who define “decossackization” as the elimination of the Cossacks either as a “special social community” or as a “socio-ethnographic community”, sub-ethnos, have the right to expand the chronological boundaries of this process (politics). Indeed, in this case, almost all the anti-Cossack measures of the Bolsheviks, from mass repressions to the ban on wearing trousers with stripes, can be attributed to the policy of “decossackization”, because, ultimately, they aimed to eliminate the Cossacks as such. From these positions, it is quite possible to characterize collectivization as the final stage of “decossackization”.

In our opinion, the policy of “decossackization” in the North Caucasian region ended in the 1920s. equalization of the rights of Cossacks and non-residents. The Cossacks as an estate disappeared after the transformations of the 1920s, although the Cossacks, as a special ethno-social group, to a certain extent retained their positions (both economic and social) in the South of Russia by the time the NEP was broken. In particular, despite the “average” of the Russian village in the 1920s. (and, despite the equalizing land redistribution of the early 1920s), the Cossacks still remained more prosperous than most of the peasants around them. According to the fair remark of N.A. Tokareva, in relation to the conditions of the Don and the North Caucasus, the criteria for delimiting peasant and kulak farms did not work. If, on average, in Russia, a farm without sowing or with a crop of up to 4 acres was considered poor, then on the Don in the 1920s. The allotment of an average Cossack family was 12-15 acres. In addition, under the NEP, the Cossacks continued to maintain a strong position in the countryside. The Cossacks did not lose their culture, customs, they were aware of their commonality and dissimilarity to local peasants.

Nevertheless, the deprivation of the Cossacks of a special social and legal status, class privileges contributed to the normalization of their relations with non-residents, the merging of the peasant and Cossack populations. In any case, in the late 20's. such trends were notable. According to the members of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, in the Kuban by the end of the 20s. 20th century one could talk about "weakening, in general, thanks to the policy of the Soviet government, class strife between the Cossacks and non-residents." Part of the Cossacks, even before the deployment of forced collectivization, entered the collective farms. Already in 1928, according to a survey of 102 collective farms of the North Caucasus Territory, in the Kuban district among the members of these collective farms, Cossacks accounted for 40.1%, in the Terek district - 45.6%, in the Don district - 17.7%. Moreover, in the survey materials it was noted that “analysis of data on various forms [of collective farms] shows that the Cossacks in this case (that is, those who entered the collective farms - ed.) is no different from other cities.

Taking into account the socio-political results of the NEP, during collectivization there was already no one to “talk about”. It could no longer be about the elimination of the Cossacks as an estate. But even if we define “decossackization” as a policy of eliminating Cossack communities in general (and not only as a policy of eliminating estate remnants), then in this case, the analysis of specific historical materials does not allow either to identify collectivization and “decossackization”, or to consider the process of “collective-farm construction "the final crushing blow to the Cossack nature.

Of course, there are a lot of materials that allow us to assert that within the framework of collectivization, anti-Cossack actions were voluntarily or involuntarily undertaken, aimed at eliminating the Cossack communities, involving the Cossacks in collective farms and dissolving them in the faceless mass of collective farmers (and those who persisted were expected to be evicted from their native villages or in general the North -Caucasian region, or simply physical destruction). “Belonging to the Cossacks, participation in the years of the civil war on the side of the Whites could serve as a basis for enrolling the middle peasants, who rejected collectivization, into the category of kulaks,” V.V. rightly points out. Gatashov. It is obvious that during the "collective farm construction" in the North Caucasus region (since 1934 in the Azov-Chernomorsky and North Caucasian regions), the Cossacks suffered no less seriously than the peasantry, and often on the ground took the brunt of the Stalinist repressive machine.

Indeed, in the Cossack regions, collectivization in its series of social conflicts strongly resembled the times of the civil war. The fact is that the civil war (if we talk about public consciousness) did not end during the NEP period; distrustful and often hostile attitude towards the Cossacks on the part of the poor, rural outcasts, non-residents, radical Bolsheviks persisted. V.S. In this regard, Sidorov subtly remarked that "the military-communist consciousness succumbed under the efforts of the New Economic Policy, but only like a compressed spring." As the chairman of the central Cossack commission S.I. Syrtsov at the April plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1925, “the Cossacks perceived the victory of the Soviet power as a victory for non-residents, and non-residents perceived a change in the situation in the sense that the Cossack power was over, that now the power of non-residents and in many places began to show a tendency put the Cossacks in such a powerless position, in which in the recent past there was the non-resident population itself. If during the time of the NEP, with such sentiments, the authorities, preoccupied with the search for civil peace, tried to fight, then during the period of collectivization they became widespread and were actually approved by the country's leadership.

As a result, from the end of the 1920s. - in the first half of the 1930s. in the North Caucasus region, in connection with the deployment of complete collectivization, de facto anti-Cossack measures followed. Already on January 8, 1930, at the bureau of the North Caucasian Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, in a draft special resolution on collectivization and dispossession, among the “kulaks” subject to administrative eviction from the region, first of all, were named “Cossack ideologists and authorities”, “former whites officers”, “punishers”, “repatriates”, “former white-and-green bandits with sons-officers in exile”, etc. thousand farms) suffered a lot of Cossacks, because, as already noted, their farms in terms of their economic indicators often surpassed the farms of the peasants. In addition, it was the wealthy Cossacks (as well as wealthy peasants) and the Cossack intelligentsia, including the military, who were most socially and politically active and were most dangerous for "collective farm construction."

The information reports and indictments of the OGPU almost always emphasize the belonging of certain "counter-revolutionaries" to the Cossack class. Moreover, often the documents of the OGPU are drawn up in such a way that the very fact that the accused or suspect belongs to a Cossack corporation is an accusation or proof of guilt (that is, the Cossacks were again considered the class of “reactionaries”, the most dangerous for the “cause of socialism”). An even more serious accusation for a Cossack who came to the attention of the OGPU was his belonging to the number of re-emigrants, that is, to the number of Cossacks who returned to their homeland from abroad in the 1920s. under the amnesty granted by the Soviet authorities. Re-emigrant Cossacks (or, as the compilers of the OGPU reports often wrote, “repatriates”) were almost automatically considered “enemies”, since they once had the misfortune to hide in other countries from the advancing Red Army (and then had even greater misfortune to return to Motherland, who actually turned out to be a stepmother). The logic here is simple: if he emigrated, he felt guilty about himself, which means that he was a real enemy of the Soviet government, and therefore could again become its enemy. The fact that in this situation the Cossacks, according to the figurative expression of A.I. Kozlov, "hung dead dogs" (that is, they recalled past sins, in the absence of illegal acts in the present), the OGPU did not bother at all.

The most famous and large-scale of the anti-Cossack actions of the period of collectivization is carried out in late 1932 - early 1933. deportation of the population of a number of “black-dashed” villages of the North Caucasus Territory (residents of the South of Russia sometimes called these villages “black-dashed”; such a Ukrainized version of the name is found in the sources). According to E.N. Oskolkov, who was the first to thoroughly investigate this tragic page in the history of the Cossacks and the peasantry of the South of Russia, in total, more than 61.6 thousand inhabitants of the "Chernodosochny" villages were deported. The villages of Poltavskaya, Medvedovskaya, Urupskaya (Armavir district) suffered the most: out of 47.5 thousand of their inhabitants, 45.6 thousand were evicted. Taking into account the prevalence of the Cossacks in the population of these villages, E.N. Oskolkov reasonably believed "that the leadership of the party and the state sought to give their violent actions in the North Caucasus region an anti-Cossack character."

It is no coincidence that before the deportation, the leaders of the ruling party appealed to the experience of the civil war and deliberately focused on the ideological and political continuity of this action with the policy of “decossackization”. I recall the well-known statement of L.M. Kaganovich, who actually led the deportation: “... it is necessary that all Kuban Cossacks know how in 21 the Terek Cossacks were resettled, who resisted Soviet power. So it is now - we can’t have the Kuban lands, the golden lands, so that they are not sown, but clogged, so that they do not care about them, so that they are not considered ... we will resettle you.

It is characteristic that even after the eviction of the inhabitants of the "Chernodosochny" villages, the local population, especially the Cossacks, expected a repetition of the deportations and therefore willingly trusted the numerous rumors that were spreading. So, when in May 1934, on the collective farm "Socialist Agriculture" of the Kushchevsky District of the Azov-Chernomorsky Territory, talk suddenly began about the eviction of all Cossacks to the North, the population reacted immediately. Employees of the OGPU reported that “individual collective farmers”, on the wave of rumors about eviction, were preparing “to leave the village, selling property, preparing crackers and other products for the road, up to digging up newly planted potatoes.” This means that not only representatives of the authorities, but also local residents, regarded the deportations not only as episodic random actions, but as a return to the systematic policy of “decossackization”.

Following the deportation of the inhabitants of the "Chernodosochny" villages, the actions of the central and regional leadership to resettle new collective farmers from other regions of the country, often from among the demobilized Red Army soldiers, followed. According to E.N. Oskolkov, by mid-February 1933, approximately 50,000 peasant households were resettled in place of the deported Cossacks, including about 20,000 Red Army peasants with their families. The settlers were mainly residents of other regions of the country. As of November 9, 1933, most of the Red Army soldiers (about 60 echelons) arrived from the northern, northwestern and northeastern military districts: Leningrad, Moscow, Belorussian, etc. Since the Kuban suffered the most during the deportations, the main the flow of settlers was sent here, to the villages of Armavir, Kanevsky, Slavyansky, Staro-Minsky, Tikhoretsky, Ust-Labinsky and other regions (in total, the sources indicate 17 Kuban regions where the Red Army men were sent). A small part of the settlers settled in the regions of Stavropol (Blagodarnensky, Vorontsovo-Aleksandrovsky, etc.) and the Don (Taganrog, Kamensky, etc.). By April 10, 1934, there were about 48.2 thousand Red Army settlers and members of their families in the Azov-Black Sea Territory (mainly in the Kuban), and only 572 people in the North Caucasian Territory. The deportation of the inhabitants of the “Chernodosochny” villages (most of them were Cossacks) and the resettlement of Red Army soldiers in their place (mainly from the western and central regions of the USSR) inevitably resurrected typical civil war scenarios in social memory, when, for example, A. Frenkel called for the eviction of the Cossacks from Don and populate the Region of the Don Army with peasants and workers (“labour element”).

Subjected to economic and administrative pressure, political repression, the Cossacks in the South of Russia tried to protect their interests and entered into a struggle with the authorities. In May 1929, in the Rodnikovsky farm of the Armavir region of the North Caucasus region, a middle Cossack said to the villagers: “This is the moment when the Cossacks should rise. If the Cossacks had risen now, then in two months they would have gone through all of Russia, not like in 1918, when no one knew what kind of Soviet power. The Cossack of the Maikop district then admitted to his acquaintances: “I can’t wait for the war, then I would have amused myself. To kill all the communists and save the people from torment.

In the North Caucasus region, during collectivization, the OGPU eliminated a number of "counter-revolutionary" "organizations" and "groups", which consisted mainly of Cossacks. So, in February 1930, in the Armavir district, OGPU officers arrested 47 people from an organization called “samzak” - “self-defense of the Cossacks” (headed by a remigrant Malakhov). In July 1930, a secret organization was liquidated in the Veshensky district under the leadership of the former Yesaul A.S. Senin (the prototype of Yesaul Polovtsev from Virgin Soil Upturned), which had its own cells in settlements even in adjacent areas, with a total of 98 participants. In March - April 1933, the OGPU bodies revealed the organization of the former military foreman V.V. Semernikov, based in the city of Shakhty and adjacent villages, and prosecuted 115 people.

Ruined and "dispossessed" Cossacks, often expelled, but who fled from exile to their native lands, joined the criminal communities ("gangs"), the very process of formation of which is a direct consequence of collectivization (which destabilized the situation in the village). Moreover, according to a number of reports, some Cossacks radically changed the nature of the activities of such communities. If the "gangs" were usually engaged in robberies and robberies, then under the influence of the Cossacks they sometimes switched to terror against representatives of the Soviet authorities and activists. So, at the end of March 1934, in the area of ​​​​the village of Ivanovskaya in the Kuban, a “gang” of I.S. Kerman (“26 years old, Cossack of Ivanovskaya station, individual peasant, without fixed occupation, convicted in 1929 for the murder of an activist, escaped from exile”). The activities of this group (consisting of 8 people, "mostly fugitives from exile") "manifested themselves in systematic robberies, thefts and terrorist attacks against the local Soviet party activists." It is curious that, according to the report of the OGPU employees, Kerman's "gang" "in some cases, when robbing collective farmers, used suffocating agents made in a handicraft way from sulfur" (apparently, one of its members was related to chemistry).

After the resettlement of the demobilized Red Army soldiers to the “Chernodosochny” villages, a confrontation began between them and the local Cossacks (reminiscent of the times of the civil war), often provoked by the actions of the authorities and the settlers themselves. The authorities showed increased concern for the Red Army men (their social support in the Cossack villages) and resisted their mixing with the local population, ordering the creation of separate collective farms and brigades from them and warning that "the organization of mixed brigades should in no case be allowed." Some settlers allowed themselves openly hostile statements: “We will achieve that there will be no Cossack spirit here either. All Cossacks will be sent out of here. First individual farmers, and then collective farmers. Naturally, the locals perceived the Red Army as invaders who came with the goal of finally surviving (destroying, evicting) the surviving Cossacks.

There is a lot of evidence of threats to the Red Army by local Cossacks, of attempts to rob their houses, pilfer property, sometimes ending in injuries or even killings of the Red Army and their families. Evidence of premeditated murders (or attempted murders) and beatings of Red Army soldiers was recorded, and these excesses were sometimes accompanied by shouts of "beat the Katsaps, why did they come here in large numbers." In a number of districts and villages of the Kuban (Korenovsky, Staro-Minsk, etc.), vigilant employees of the OGPU identified and liquidated "counter-revolutionary groups", which set as their "task the decomposition and removal of the Red Army settlers from the village" and for this purpose "systematically processed Red Army soldiers, causing them to flee." In particular, at the beginning of 1934, in the village of Novo-Myshastovskaya, Krasnodar District, Azov-Chernomorsky Territory, a group of 13 individual Cossacks (“former kulaks, former White Guards”), led by the “former kulak” Klinov, was liquidated. The grouping aimed at the moral decay of the settlers with their subsequent removal from the village. In addition, as the OGPU agents claimed, Klinovoy created a terrorist group and supplied it with weapons (sawed-off shotguns). The group was supposed to beat and kill the IDP activists "so that they would remember the Kuban for a long time."

Representatives of the grassroots Soviet apparatus and employees of various organizations of the Kuban (also often coming from among the Cossacks) were not free from open hostility towards unwanted migrants. They allowed themselves rude attacks and statements against the settlers (up to prohibitions to draw water from the village wells). Moreover, the local police and the prosecutor's office looked at these offenses with indifference, which allows us to speak of their solidarity with those who opposed the settlers.

The above materials show that in relation to the Cossacks in the South of Russia, collectivization really resurrected social stereotypes and scenarios from the time of the civil war. All this gives researchers grounds to interpret the process of "collective-farm construction" as the final stage of "decossackization", as "hidden decossackization".

However, despite these (rather numerous) examples, collectivization, in our opinion, cannot be characterized as the time of completion of the “decossicization”. Moreover, in this case, it is not so important what content we endow the term “decossackization”. Are we talking about decossackization as the elimination of estate remnants, or as the destruction of a special social community of the Cossacks, or as the elimination of the socio-ethnographic characteristics of the Cossacks (the elimination of the Cossacks as a sub-ethnos).

First of all, it should be noted that there is not a single document where one of the objectives of the collectivization policy would be proclaimed the elimination of the Cossacks as a social group or sub-ethnos. On the other hand, the resolution of the Bureau of the North Caucasian Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On work among the Cossack population of the North Caucasus” dated April 11, 1930, is widely known, which stated that “non-Bolshevik and most harmful is the mood among a part of local workers of a biased, distrustful attitude towards the Cossack only because part of the Cossacks was deceived by the generals and kulaks, participating in the white armies. Here it was proposed to strengthen the representation of Cossacks in the composition of the collective farm leadership in the Cossack districts of the region, bringing their share to at least 50%. Of course, these were only words (often, indeed, at odds with deeds), and this document can be considered a simple declaration. However, the implementation of this decree still contributed to the normalization of the situation in the Cossack regions and led to a sharp increase in the number of Cossacks in local councils.

The most important thing is that today we have archival documents (which also dealt with the Cossacks), adopted by the party leadership of the North Caucasus region, not for publication, but, as they say, “for a narrow circle of people” and were in the nature of tough instructions. We are talking, in particular, about a letter of instruction signed by the First Secretary of the Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of the North Caucasus Territory B.P. Sheboldaev, sent to individual district committees on January 18, 1931. The letter ordered the eviction of 9,000 kulak households "in order to cleanse the coastal-flooded and forest-mountainous strip of the Kuban and the Black Sea." Moreover, Sheboldaev warned specific executors that "it is necessary to observe a strict class approach in the selection of farms to be evicted, and in particular, a cautious attitude towards the middle peasant Cossack, a former ordinary participant in the white movement, is necessary." Further, the letter noted that "particular attention should be paid to district party organizations to involve in the discussion of the lists of [evicted] masses of Cossack collective farmers, poor peasants and middle peasants."

Within the framework of the problem we have raised, one of the paragraphs of the letter deserves special attention, which emphasizes: “with special care it is necessary to achieve complete cleansing of these areas from the kulak-White Guard element from the so-called out-of-town population, which is especially important in connection with the presence of attempts on the part of class-hostile elements to interpret the Party's slogan on the liquidation of the kulaks as "liquidation of the Cossacks", and measures to evict the kulaks as a measure of decossackization. As you can see, not only Cossacks, but also non-residents should have been evicted if they posed a danger to collective farms and the Soviet government.

It is important that the archival file contains both a draft letter with amendments personally made by Sheboldaev and its final version. So, Sheboldaev added to the paragraph quoted above the words "and measures to evict the kulaks, as a measure of decossackization." Apparently, the secretary of the regional committee of the ruling party had information about the interpretation of the “dispossession” by the population as persecution of the Cossacks and wanted to get the secretaries of the district committees and employees of the OGPU to eliminate all rumors and make it clear to the population that we are not talking about decossackization.

Since this letter is classified as “strictly secret” and was intended “for insiders”, it can be safely stated that its content is not a declaration, but the real intentions of the authorities. This instructive letter clearly proves that the regional authorities of the North Caucasian region were guided in their policy towards the Cossacks not by estates, but by class principles. The regional leadership did not pursue a policy of “decossackization”, did not set out to liquidate the Cossack communities (the exception is the deportation of the inhabitants of the “chernodosochny villages; however, this action was carried out with the support and under pressure from Moscow and remained isolated). But, nevertheless, all the "class-hostile", "counter-revolutionary-minded" Cossacks, who posed a danger to the authorities, were subjected to repression (along with the same categories of the peasant, nonresident population, which is clearly stated in the letter).

Another thing is that among the Cossacks, compared with non-residents, there were more “prosperous” and “counter-revolutionaries”, that historically the Cossacks were regarded by the Bolsheviks as opponents of the Soviet regime (and therefore the belonging of the “kulaks” to the Cossacks or Cossack repatriates in the eyes of the Stalinist regime aggravated their guilt) . And on the ground, specific performers who remembered the times of the civil war often saw potential counter-revolutionaries in the Cossacks and acted accordingly in relation to them. But, unlike during the civil war, during the period of collectivization, such anti-Cossack actions, although encouraged by the authorities, were still not the implementation of a clear, well-thought-out policy of genocide of the Cossacks.

Resistance to the policy of collectivization was also not subdivided in most cases into "peasant" or "Cossack" resistance. Both the Cossacks and the peasants equally suffered from collectivization and jointly opposed the forcible creation of collective farms, grain procurements, and "dispossession". A striking example in this case is the activities of the "Union of Grain Growers", which arose on the basis of the publishing house of the journal "The Way of the North Caucasian Grain Grower" and was headed, according to the OGPU, by the head of the publishing house Kravchenko, "an active participant in the civil war on the side of the Soviet power." The organization had its own charter, program and issued a manifesto, where it was about protecting the interests of grain growers. Moreover, in the manifesto, the "Union of Grain Growers" was called "a peasant-Cossack political party to protect the interests of the working peasantry, Cossacks and workers." The anti-Cossack actions of the government in the early 1930s, aimed at splitting the peasant-Cossack camp of opponents of collectivization, separating the Cossacks, strengthening class enmity, were not successful. According to the fair remark of E.N. Oskolkov, the Stalinist regime failed to "galvanize class strife." The failure of such attempts can only be explained by the fact that during the years of NEP, the Cossacks really ceased to exist as an estate.

At the same time, taking into account new data, it seems possible to talk about the rallying of the Cossacks during the period of collectivization in response to the actions of the authorities. Mentioned by A.V. Baranov reports on clashes between Cossacks and non-residents in the late 1920s. can be interpreted not only as a conflict of the poor and rural outcasts with the wealthy sections of the village, but also as evidence of the revival of Cossack "nationalism".

In the 1930s the processes of ethno-cultural consolidation of the Cossacks were spurred on by inadequate political and administrative pressure from the authorities. The most notable example in this case is the position of the Kuban Cossacks (including those who were on collective farms) and the indigenous non-residents, which they took in relation to the settlers who arrived instead of the evicted residents of the “Chernodosochny” villages and the repressed “kulaks”. This topic deserves a separate study, but even now, based on the reports of the OGPU, we can state the fact that the Kuban Cossacks clearly separated themselves from the newcomers - "Muscovites", "Katsaps". The Cossacks of the village of Novo-Derevyankovskaya directly declared to the Red Army men: “there is no place for lapotniks here, we were and are Cossacks"(our italics - ed.) (considering that the Red Army soldiers in the Kuban were called "bast shoes", the political department of the Leningrad MTS did them a truly disservice by purchasing "several thousand bast shoes" for them!). So collectivization to some extent resurrected and strengthened the processes of consolidation somewhat weakened during the years of NEP in the local communities of the Don, Kuban, Terek Cossacks. True, in these times the Cossacks did not act as an estate, they positioned themselves as a special community (“the people”) as part of the rural population, and later as part of the collective farm peasantry (“collective farm Cossacks”).

Finally, we note the well-known fact of a change in state policy towards the Cossacks, actually from the mid-1930s. (campaign "for the Soviet Cossacks"). Despite the fact that even at that time the Cossacks often aroused hostility among orthodox Bolsheviks or radical non-residents (this circumstance was sadly admitted by the Secretary of the Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of the Azov-Chernomorsky Territory B.P. Sheboldaev in November 1935 in his article “ Cossacks in collective farms"), the Stalinist regime decided to establish allied relations with the Cossacks.