Red Cossacks (Ukraine)
붉은 카자크 (우크라이나)
The Red cavalry formation raised by Vitaly Primakov for the Soviet Ukrainian government in Kharkov during the Russian Civil War. It began in January 1918 as a regiment set against the Central Rada's "Free Cossacks", grew into a cavalry division in 1919 and a cavalry corps in 1920, and made its name with raids into the rear of Denikin's and Wrangel's armies and the Polish army. The "Cossack" in the name borrowed the tradition of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ukrainian Cossacks rather than describing the men's estate.
In depth
In December 1917 the All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets in Kharkov proclaimed Soviet power, and on the night of 9–10 January 1918, when the Central Rada's 2nd Ukrainian Reserve Regiment was disarmed, its 3rd Battalion, which came over, and Red Guards from the Kharkov Locomotive Works and other factories formed the 1st Red Cossack Regiment. On 2 February the People's Secretariat of Ukraine issued a decree organising the Red Cossacks as a "people's revolutionary socialist army", on a voluntary basis and a worker-and-peasant class principle. As part of Antonov-Ovseyenko's and Muravyov's Southern Revolutionary Front the regiment took part in taking Poltava and Kiev, but after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk brought in German and Austrian troops it withdrew into Russia. Back in Ukraine at the end of 1918 it fought the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, and in May 1919 it helped suppress Hryhoriv's revolt.
Expanded into a brigade in July and August 1919 and a cavalry division in September, Primakov's Red Cossacks formed the shock group with the Latvian Rifle Division in the Orel-Kromy operation in October and helped break Denikin's advance on Moscow; in November they raided the rear of the Armed Forces of South Russia, and in December the division was named the 8th Red Cossack Cavalry Division. In 1920 they fought Wrangel in Northern Taurida and then the Poles in the Soviet-Polish War, reaching Stryi before they were encircled and badly mauled on the Zbruch during the retreat. With the 17th Cavalry Division added in September 1920 they became Primakov's 1st Red Cossack Cavalry Corps in October, a name kept until it was renamed the 4th Cavalry Corps in 1938. Most of the men were Ukrainian workers and peasants, with Russians and Jews among them. Its founder Primakov was shot in 1937 with Tukhachevsky and others in the "anti-Soviet military organisation" case.