Vyoshenskaya Uprising
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The rising of the Cossacks of the Upper Don district against the Red Army's occupation authorities, centred on the stanitsa of Vyoshenskaya and begun on 11 March 1919. Its immediate cause was the executions and requisitions that followed the decossackization directive adopted by the Orgburo of the Russian Communist Party's Central Committee on 24 January, and the insurgents' slogan was "Soviets without communists". About 30,000 insurgents under Pavel Kudinov tied down forces of the Red Southern Front, and when the Don Army broke through to join them in early June the way opened for Denikin's drive north.
In depth
When the Don Army's front collapsed at the end of 1918, many Upper Don Cossack regiments made their peace with the Reds and went home, and between January and March 1919 the district was occupied by units of the Southern Front. On 24 January the Orgburo adopted a secret circular ordering mass terror against wealthy Cossacks and merciless reprisals against every Cossack who had taken any part, direct or indirect, in the struggle against Soviet power, sent out over Yakov Sverdlov's signature. Grigory Sokolnikov, fearing armed revolts, argued against mass repression, but Sverdlov sided with Sergei Syrtsov, who proposed executing everyone who had fought the Reds. On 9 February the Cossacks were ordered to surrender all weapons within a day on pain of death, tribunals from outside drew up execution lists, and some 300 Cossacks had been shot by the eve of the rising. The revolt broke out on 11 March around Vyoshenskaya, Kazanskaya, Migulinskaya and Yelanskaya, and Kudinov took command. On 16 March a plenum of the Party Central Committee attended by Lenin, acting on a statement by Sokolnikov, now a member of the Southern Front's military council, decided to suspend the merciless terror against Cossacks as a whole, but by then the rising had spread.
The Reds detached 14,000 men from the 8th and 9th Armies to put it down, but the 204th Serdobsk Regiment went over to the insurgents entire, and the rebels tied down a similar number of Red troops. At the end of May the Don Army attacked along the whole front, taking Millerovo and, on 1 June, Lugansk, and Alexander Sekretev's cavalry group broke through the Red lines to link up with the insurgents at Kazanskaya. The rising is dated as ending on 8 June, and by the end of June the Reds had been driven from the Don region, opening Denikin's advance on Moscow. Mikhail Sholokhov made the rising the central event of the third book of And Quiet Flows the Don. Who wrote the January directive, how far it was actually carried out and whether decossackization should be called genocide remain matters of debate among historians.