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Држава против соопствениот
народ: Репресалии и терор во Советскиот сојуз
4. ПРЉАВАТА
ВОЈНА
Nicolas Werth
…
Among the episodes in the
struggle between peasants and the Bolshevik authorities, “de-Cossackization” –
the systematic elimination of the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban
as social groups – occupies a special place. For the first time, on the
principal of collective responsibility, a new regime took a series of measures specially
designed to eliminate, exterminate, and deport population on a whole territory,
which Soviet leaders had taken to calling the “Soviet Vendee”. These operations
were plainly not the result of military excesses in the heart of battle, but
were carefully planed in advance in response to decrees from the highest level
of state authority, directly implicating numerous top-ranking politicians,
including Lenin, Sergo Ordzonikinze, Sergei Syrtsov, Grigori Sokolnikov and
Isaac Reingold. Momentarily halted in the spring of 1919 because of military
setbacks, the process of de-Cossackisation resumed with even greater cruelty in
1920, after Bolshevik victories in the Don and the Kuban .
The Cossacks, who since December
1917 had been deprived of the status they had enjoined under the old regime,
were classified by the Bolsheviks as “kulaks” and “class enemies”; and as a
result they joined forces with the White armies that had united in southern Russia in the
spring of 1918 under the banner of Ataman Krasnov. In February 1919, after the
general advance of the Bolsheviks into Ukraine
and southern Russia ,
the first detachments of the Red Army penetrated the Cossack territories along
the Don. At the outset the Bolsheviks took measures to destroy everything that
made Cossacks a separate group: their land was confiscated and redistributed
among Russian colonizers or local peasants who did not have Cossack status;
they were ordered on pain of death, to surrender all their arms (historically,
as the traditional frontier soldiers of the Russian empire, all Cossacks had a
right to bear arms); and all Cossack administrative assemblies were immediately
dissolved.
All these measures were part of
the pre-established de-Cossackization plan approved in a secret resolution of
the Bolshevik Party’s Central committee on 24 January 1919: “In a view of the
experiences of the civil war against the Cossacks, we must recognize as the
only politically correct measure massive terror and the merciless fight against
the rich Cossacks, who must be exterminated and physically disposed of, down to
the last man”.
In practice, as acknowledged by
Reingold, the president of the Revolutionary Committee of the Don, who was
entrusted with imposing Bolshevik rule in the Cossack territories, “what was
carried out instead against the Cossacks was an indiscriminative policy of mass
extermination”. From mid-February to mid-March 1919, Bolshevik detachments
executed more than 8,000 Cossacks. In each stanitsa
(Cossack village) revolutionary courts passed summary judgements in a matter of
minute, and whole lists of suspects were condemned to death, generally for
“counterrevolutionary behavior”. In the face of this relentless destruction,
the Cossacks had no choice but to revolt.
The revolt began in the district
of Veshenskaya on March 1919. The well-organized rebels decreed the general
mobilization of all males aged sixteen to fifty-five and sent out telegrams
urging the whole population to rise up against the Bolsheviks throughout the
Don region and as far as the remote province
of Voronezh
“We, the Cossacks,” – they
explained “are not anti-Soviet. We are in favor of free elections. We are
against the Communists, collective farming, and the Jews. We are against the
requisitioning, theft, and the endless round of executions practiced by the
Chekas”. At the beginning of April, the Cossack rebels represented a well-armed
force of nearly 30,000 men, all hardened by battle. Operating behind the lines
of Red Army, which, further south, was fighting Denikin’s troops together with
Kuban Cossacks, these rebels of Don, like their Ukrainian counterparts,
contributed in no small measure to the huge advance of the White Army in May
and June 1919. At the beginning of June, the Cossacks of the Don and the Kuban joined up with the greater part of the White
armies. The whole of the “Cossack Vendee” was freed from the dreaded power of
“Muscovites, Jews and Bolsheviks”.
But the Bolsheviks were back in
February 1920. The second military occupation on the Cossack lands was even
more murderous than the first. The whole Don was forced to make a grain
contribution of 36 million pudy, a
quantity that easily surpassed the total annual production of the area; and the
whole local population was robbed not only of its meager food and grain
reserves but also of all goods, including “shoes, bedding, and samovars”,
according to a Che-ka report. Every man who was still fit to fight responded to
this institutionalized pillaging by joining the groups of rebel Greens, which
by July 1920 numbered at least 35,000 in the Kuban
and the Don regions. Trapped in the Crimea
since February, General Wrangel decided in a last desperate attempt to free
himself from the Bolsheviks’ grip on the region by joining forces with Cossacks
and the Greens of Kuban. On 17 August 1920, 5,000 men landed near Novorossiysk . Faced with
the combined forces of the Whites, Cossacks, and Greens, the Bolsheviks were
forced to abandon Ekaterinodar, the main city of the Kuban
region, and to retreat from the region altogether. Although Wrangel made
progress in the south of Ukraine ,
the Whites’ successes were short-lived. Overcome by the numerically superior
Bolshevik forces, Wrangel troops, hampered by the large number of civilians
that accompanied them, retreated in total disarray toward the Crimea
at the end of October. The retaking of Crimea
by the Bolsheviks, the last confrontation between the Red and White forces, was
the occasion of one of the largest massacres in the civil war. At least 50,000
civilians were killed by the Bolsheviks in November and December 1920.
Finding themselves again on the
losing side, the Cossacks were again devastated by the Red Terror. On of the
principal leaders of Cheka, the Latvian Karl Lander, was named “Plenipotentiary
of the Northern Caucasus and the Don”. One of
his first actions was to establish troiki,
special commissions in charge of de-Cossackization. In October 1920 alone these
troiki condemned more than 6,000
people to death, all of whom was executed immediately. The families, and
sometimes even the neighbors, of Green partisans or of Cossacks who had taken
up arms against the regime and had escaped capture, were systematically
arrested as hostages and thrown into concentration camps, which Martin Latsis,
the head of the Ukrainian Cheka,
acknowledged in a report as being a genuine death camps: “Gathered together in
a camp near Maikop, the hostage, women, children, and old men survive in the
most appalling conditions, in the cold and mud of October… They are dying like
flies. The women would do anything to escape death. The soldiers guarding the
camp take advantage of this and treat them as prostitutes:
All resistance was merciless
punished. When its chief fell into an ambush, the Pyatigorsk Cheka organized “a
day of Red Terror”, that went well beyond instructions from Lander, who had
recommended that “this act of terrorism should be turned to our advantage to
take important hostage with a view of executing them, and as a reason to speed
up executions of White spies and counterrevolutionaries in general”. In
Lander’s words, “The Pyatigorsk Cheka decided straight to execute 300 people in
one day. They divided up the town into various boroughs and took a quota of
people from each, and ordered the Party to draw up execution lists… This rather
unsatisfactory method led to a great deal of private settling old scores… In
Kislovodsk, for lack of a better idea, it was decided to kill people who were
in the hospital”.
One of the most effective means
of de-Cossackization was destruction of Cossack towns and the deportation of all
survivors. The files of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who was president of the
Revolutionary Committee of the Northern Caucasus
at that time, contain documents detailing one such operation in late October
and early November 1920. On 23 Ocktober Ordzhonikidze ordered:
1.The town of Kalinovskaya
to be burned
2.The inhabitants of
Ermolovskaya, Romanovskaya, Samachinskaya, and Mikhailovskaya to be driven out
their homes, and the houses and land redistributed among poor peasants,
particularly among the Chechens, who has always shown great respect for Soviet
power
3.All males aged eighteen to
fifty from the above mentioned towns to be gathered into convoys and deported
under armed escort to the north, where they will be forced into heavy labor
4.Women, children, and old people
to be driven out of their homes, although they are to be allowed to resettle
farther north
5.All the cattle and goods of the
above-mentioned towns to be seized
Three weeks later, Ordzhonikidze received a
report outlining how the operation had progressed:
Kalinovskaya: town razed and the
whole population (4,220) deported or expelled
Ermolovskaya: emptied of all
inhabitants (3,218)
Romanovskaya: 1,600 deported,
1661 awaiting deportation
Samachinskaya: 1,018 deported,
1,900 awaiting deportation
Mikhailovskaya: 600 deported,
2,200 awaiting deportation
In addition, 154 carriages of
foodstuffs had been sent to Grozny .
In the three towns where the process of deportation is not yet complete, the
first people to be deported were the families of Whites and Greens and anyone
who participated in the last uprising. Among those still awaiting deportation
are the known supporters of the Soviet regime and the families of Red Army
soldiers, Soviet officials, and Communists. The delay is to be explained by the
lack of railway carriages. On average, only one convoy per day can be devoted
to these operations. To finish the operation as soon as possible, we urgently
request 306 extra railway carriages.”
How did such “operations” come to
an and? Unfortunately, there are no documents to provide an answer. It is clear
that they continued for a considerable time, and that they almost always ended
with deportations not to the great northern regions, as was to be the case for
many years to come, but instead to the mines of Donetsk, which were closer.
Given the state of the railways in 1920, the operation must have been fairly
chaotic. Nonetheless, in their general shape and intention, the
de-Cossackization operations of 1920 prefigure the large-scale de-kulakization
operations of ten years later. They share the same idea of collective
responsibility, the same process of deportation in convoys, the same
organizational problems, the same unpreparedness of the destination for the
arrival of prisoners, and the same principle of forcing deportees into heavy
labor. The Cossack regions of the Don and the Kuban
paid a heavy price for their opposition to the Bolsheviks. According to the
most reliable estimates, between 300,000 and 500,000 people were killed or
deported in 1919 and 1920, out of a population of no more than 3 million.
Among the atrocities whose scale
is the most difficult to gauge are the massacres of prisoners and hostages who
were been taken simply on the basis of their “belonging to an enemy class” or
being socially undesirable”. These massacres were part of the logic of the Red
Terror in the second half of 1918, but on even larger scale. The massacres on
the basis of class were constantly justified with the claim that the new world
was coming into being, and that everything was permitted to assist the
difficult birth, as an editorial explained in the first issue of Krasnyi mech (The Red sword), the
newspaper of the Kyiv Cheka:
“We reject the old system of
morality and ‘humanity’ invented by the bourgeoisie to oppress and exploit the
‘lower classes’. Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute
because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression
and violence. To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the
sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity
from its shackles… Blood? Let blood flow like water! Let blood stain forever
the black pirate’s flag flown by the bourgeoisie, and let our flag be blood-red
forever! For only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves
forever from the return of these jackals!”
Such murderous calls found many
ready to respond, and the ranks of the Cheka were filled with social elements
anxious for revenge, recruited as they often were, as the Bolshevik leaders themselves
acknowledged and eve recommended, from the ranks of “the criminals, and the
socially degenerated”. In a letter of 22 March to Lenin, the Bolshevik leader
Serafina Gopner described the activities of the Ekaterinoslavl Cheka: “This organization
is rotten, to the core: the canker of criminality, violence, and total
arbitrary decisions abounds, and it is filled with common criminals and the
dregs of society, men armed to the teeth who simply execute anyone they don’t
like. They steel, loot, rape, and throw anyone into prison, forge documents,
practice extortion and blackmail, and will let anyone go in exchange for huge
sums of money”.
The files of the Central
Committee, like those of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, contain innumerable reports from the
Party leaders or inspectors from the secret police detailing “degenerated acts”
of local Chekas “driven mad by blood and violence”. The absence of any
juridical or moral norm often resulted in complete autonomy for local Chekas.
No longer answerable for their actions to any higher authority, they become
bloodthirsty and tyrannical regimes, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Three
abstracts from dozens of almost identical Cheka reports illustrate the slide
into almost total anarchy.
First, a report from Smirnov, a
Cheka training instructor in Syzran , in Tambov province, to
Dzerzhinsky, on 22 March 1919:…”
(“The Black Book of Communism –
CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESION” by Stephane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, Jean-Louis
Panne, Andrzej Paczkowsky, Karel Bartosek, and Jen-Louis Margolin; Harvard
University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, London, England 1999)
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