Paul
Goble
Staunton, January 25 – Ninety-six
years ago this weekend, the Soviet government launched what became a
decade-long campaign to “de-Cossackize” Russia, a campaign that Cossacks
remember as “yet another genocide” in the Caucasus and a reminder that
relations between the Cossacks and the state are more complicated and
conflicted than most assume.
As portrayed in Hollywood movies and
assumed by many Russian nationalists even now, the Cossacks are viewed as the
defenders of order above all and the advance guard for authoritarianism, but in
reality, they have their roots in a flight from authority and a tradition of
Cossack freedom that makes them anything but comfortable allies of such
regimes.
But a full and honest discussion of
the Soviet genocide of the Cossacks is blocked today not only by the measures
the Soviets themselves took to hide what they had done but by fears that any
recollection of conflicts between the Cossacks and the non-Russians in the
North Caucasus could undermine Moscow’s use of members of the two communities
in Ukraine.
During the Russian Civil War, they
were among the most fervent opponents of the Bolsheviks, even though they often
proved anything but easy allies for other White Russian movements. And
consequently, it should come as no surprise that the Bolsheviks viewed them as
an enemy to be exterminated.
On January 24, 1919, the Bolshevik
leadership issued a decree sanctioning “mass terror against rich Cossacks,” a
nominally class action that in fact became an attack on Cossacks as a whole and
led to the wiping out of entire Cossack settlements and the deaths of thousands
over the next decade, something surviving Cossacks have never forgotten or
forgiven.
In an article on this anniversary, Svetlana
Bolotnikova of “Kavkazskaya politika” notes that memorial services are being
held in Cossack regions in honor of those innocents who were killed by the
Soviets almost a century ago and who have not been fully rehabilitated even now
(kavpolit.com/articles/istorija_esche_odnogo_genotsida_na_kavkaze-13302/).
Although most Cossacks were anything but
wealthy, they were infuriated by Soviet policies concerning an end to social
strata, one of which was their own, and confiscation of property and of their
weapons. Moreover, many of them felt that the Bolsheviks had declared open
season on them in order to help nearby non-Russian groups.
Many of them revolted against Soviet
power, and those actions provided all the justification Moscow needed to
repress them. Indeed, as Bolotnikova says, local Bolsheviks didn’t need a
Moscow decree to do so, and one can say that “a real Cossack genocide” began in
the North Caucasus “long before Sverdlov’s directive.”
The situation rapidly got out of hand,
with non-Russians attacking the Cossacks in order to seize their lands for
themselves, something that forced Stalin to intervene at the end of 1920 and declare
that mountaineers who thought they had the right to take the land for
themselves rather than for the common use were “deeply confused.”
But the wholesale expulsion of Cossacks
continued until April 1921, and attacks on the Cossacks continued for years
thereafter because it was always easy for Soviet officials to win popularity by
attacking those they could describe as “assistants of the gendarmes” and “enemies
of Soviet power.”
“If one considers the resettlement and
destruction of the Cossack communities from the point of view of humaneness
rather than revolutionary necessity,” Bolotnikova says, “then this was just as
inhuman an act as the deportation of the Caucasus peoples in 1944.”
But that is not a widespread view, and
there is little effort to talk about the Cossack genocide in films or other
forms of popular culture. And there are both longstanding and immediate reasons
for that, according to Aleksandr Kuznetsov, a press spokesman for the Terek
Cossack host which suffered more than any other Cossack group 90 years ago.
On the one hand, there are relatively few
survivors from those events, and their descendants in many cases are not
interested in putting in claims for restitution. And on the other, such claims
could create problems for Russia: Cossacks and Chechens are fighting in the
same ranks in Ukraine. Talking about the Cossack genocide could divide them.
Moreover, gathering information about
what happened is hard. Those who remember it are unwilling to talk, according
to Andrey Gordiyenko, an historian at the Stavropol State Regional Studies
Museum. Indeed, members of the older generation who know the most are “afraid
to talk about this” and have even hidden what happened from their children.
And the executors of this genocide, he
continues, worked hard to hide their tracks: They destroyed the old Cossack
cemeteries so that no one would be able to establish who lived where and when,
yet another way in which what was done to the Cossacks was an act of genocide.
Gordiyenko said that he found one gravestone in a trash heap.
Nonetheless, the Kavkazskaya politika
commentator says, “investigations of the history of those years are continuing
which confirm that the Soviet authorities intentionally sought to destroy the
Cossacks both as a social stratum and as an ethnos capable of self-organization”
on its own terms.
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