De-Cossackization
탈카자크화
The policy of systematic repression by which the Bolshevik regime, during and after the Russian Civil War, tried to eliminate the Cossacks, above all the Don and Kuban Cossacks, as a distinct group. A secret directive of the party Orgburo on 24 January 1919 ordered "mass terror" against wealthy Cossacks and against all Cossacks who had fought Soviet power. The executions and deportations provoked the Vyoshenskaya uprising on the upper Don in March, which tied down the rear of the Red Southern Front, and on 16 March a plenum of the party Central Committee suspended the policy.
In depth
The directive ordered "mass terror against wealthy Cossacks, exterminating all of them; merciless mass terror against any and all Cossacks taking part in any way, directly or indirectly, in the struggle against Soviet power", and on 7 February the Southern Front issued instructions that stanitsa atamans be executed unconditionally. In mid-March alone the Cheka condemned more than 8,000 Cossacks to death. On the upper Don revolutionary tribunals began drawing up execution lists, and after some 300 Cossacks had been shot an uprising led by Pavel Kudinov broke out on 11 March, its roughly 30,000 insurgents tying down about as many Red troops. The insurgents joined the Don Army at Vyoshenskaya in June, and Denikin's advance on Moscow began through this gap. Who drafted the directive and whether the Orgburo minutes are genuine are disputed among Russian historians, and an objection by Sokolnikov, a member of the Southern Front's Revolutionary Military Council, led to the suspension of 16 March.
Repression continued in places after the suspension. After the Crimea was retaken in 1920, special de-Cossackization commissions condemned more than 6,000 people to death in October alone, and more than 45,000 Cossacks were deported from the Terek. Estimates of the victims range from thousands to hundreds of thousands. Holquist puts the deaths of 1919–1920 in the thousands or tens of thousands and stresses regional variation, while Gellately estimates 300,000 to 500,000 killed or deported. Some scholars classify it as genocide, while other historians reject the classification because the figures are so uncertain. The English source dates the policy broadly to 1919–1933.