Much about Cossack Genocide Remains Unanswered a Century After It Began, Soshin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 4 – One hundred years after the Soviet government launched its efforts to liquidate the Cossacks, many questions about that genocide remain unanswered, Yury Soshin says. There is no agreement on how many Cossacks were killed or even whether what happened to them constitutes a genocide.

            But, the Moscow commentator who was born in Kabardino-Balkaria says, he has no doubts about the appropriateness of that term and the need to keep the issue alive so that all the questions will be answered and justice will be restored. His family, he continues, “also experienced ‘de-Cossackization’” -- and it was a genocide (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=37815).

            To this day, no one has established exactly who in the Bolshevik leadership wrote the January 24, 1919 decree that formalized Moscow’s murderous attacks on the Cossacks which in fact had begun more than a year earlier. But whoever it was is guilty of promoting “’social eugenics’” through the liquidation of an entire people, Soshin says.

            Other decrees were even worse, but now, communists and their supporters like to point to a Bolshevik document from March 16, 1919, which supposedly “softened” the January decree. In fact, however, the analyst continues, the violence against the Cossacks continued even as Moscow as is its wont acted as if it was above all this.

            Less than a month later, he recounts, the Donburo of the Central Committee declared that it was essential that there be “the complete, rapid and decisive destruction of the Cossacks as a special economic group, the destruction of its economic base, the physical destruction of the Cossack bureaucracy and officers, and in general of all Cossack leaders” in order to achieve “the liquidation” of the Cossacks as a group.

            That is genocide according to any reasonable definition, Soshin suggests.

            The Bolshevik war against the Cossacks continued for the next two decades, with some Bolsheviks arguing that “the Cossacks are not people but human formed beasts who must be destroyed” and others saying that “’the toiling Cossacks’ are people but those above them above all the offices are non-persons.”

            That has allowed the defenders of the Bolsheviks to say that they were pursuing a class approach rather than an ethnic one, but on the ground, they killed Cossacks of all ranks.  Indeed, the situation deteriorated in the second half of the 1920s when Moscow launched what can be called “the second wave” of the Cossack genocide.

            In 1927-1928, Soshin continues, “there occurred a planned and intentional campaign (like the one applied to the last SRs in 1937-1938) for the complete liquidation of the educated part of the Cossacks, above all former officers and officials and also ordinary Cossacks who had served in the White Army.” 

            This Bolshevik crime was obscured by “larger events – the disbanding of NEP, collectivization and the famine of 1933.” But it was a crime of genocide, as Soshin shows by documenting case after case of mass murder of Cossacks as such. Such documentation is especially necessary now because the Kremlin wants to sweep all this under a rug.

            The current regime talks about the conflict of the Reds and the Whites as it if weren’t a part of it and thus seeks to “kill real historical memory” about crimes like the genocide of the Cossacks.