Repatriation of Cossacks after World War II
The Repatriation of Cossacks occurred when Cossacks, ethnic Russians and Ukrainians who were against the Soviet Union were handed over by British and American forces to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. The repatriations were agreed to in the Yalta Conference; Joseph Stalin claimed the repatriated people were Soviet citizens as of 1939, although many of them had left Russia before or soon after the end of the Russian Civil War or had been born abroad.
Most of those Cossacks and Russians fought the Allies, specifically the Soviets, in service to the Axis powers, specifically Nazi Germany, yet the repatriations included non-combatant civilians as well. General Poliakov and Colonel Chereshneff referred to it as the "massacre of Cossacks at Lienz".
Background
During the Russian Civil War, Cossack leaders and their governments generally sided with the White movement. As a result, the majority of Cossack soldiers were mobilized against the Red Army. As the Soviets emerged victorious in the civil war, many Cossack veterans, fearing reprisals and the Bolsheviks’ de-Cossackization policies, fled abroad to countries in Central and Western Europe. In exile, they formed their own anticommunist organizations or joined other Russian émigré groups such as the Russian All-Military Union.The Cossacks who remained in Russia endured more than a decade of continual repression, e.g., the portioning of the lands of the Terek, Ural and Semirechye hosts, forced cultural assimilation and repression of the Russian Orthodox Church, deportation and, ultimately, the Soviet famine of 1932–33. The repressions ceased and some privileges were restored after publication of And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov.
The Second World War
After Adolf Hitler launched the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, several anticommunist Cossack leaders, including Kuban ataman Naumenko, Terek ataman Vdovenko, former Don ataman Pyotr Krasnov and the Cossack National Center chairman Vasily Glazkov, all publicly praised the German campaign. Despite this outpouring of support, Hitler and other top officials initially denied Cossack émigrés from having any military or political role in the war against the USSR. It was not until 1942 when Ostministrium openly began employing Cossack émigrés for propaganda and administrative purposes.While top Nazi officials were slow to embrace anticommunist Cossacks, some Wehrmacht field commanders had utilized Cossack defectors from the Red Army since the summer of 1941. In early 1943, most of the Cossack units fighting with the German Army were consolidated into the First Cossack Cavalry Division under the command of General Helmuth von Pannwitz. Later that year, the Cossack cavalry division was deployed to Axis-occupied Yugoslavia to fight Tito's Partisans. In late 1944, the division was incorporated into the Waffen-SS and expanded into the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps.
Another Cossack group whose fate became tied with the Germans consisted of approximately 25,000 Cossack refugees and irregulars who evacuated the North Caucasus alongside the Wehrmacht in 1943. This group, known as “Cossachi Stan” migrated between southern Ukraine, Novogrudek, Tolmezzo and was forced to withdraw to Lienz in Allied-occupied Austria, at the close of the war.
Yalta and Tehran Conferences
The agreements of the Yalta and Tehran Conferences, signed by American President Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Churchill, determined the fates of the Cossacks who did not fight for the USSR, because many were POWs of the Nazis. Stalin obtained Allied agreement to the repatriation of every so-called "Soviet" citizen held prisoner because the Allied leaders feared that the Soviets either might delay or refuse repatriation of the Allied POWs whom the Red Army had liberated from Nazi POW camps.Although the agreement for the deportation of all "Soviet" citizens did not include White Russian emigres who had fled during the Bolshevik Revolution before the establishment of the USSR, all Cossack prisoners of war were later demanded. After Yalta, Churchill questioned Stalin, asking, "Did the Cossacks and other minorities fight against us?" Stalin replied, "They fought with ferocity, not to say savagery, for the Germans".
In 1944 Gen. Krasnov and other Cossack leaders had persuaded Hitler to allow Cossack troops, as well as civilians and non-combatant Cossacks, to permanently settle in the sparsely settled Carnia, in the Alps. The Cossacks moved there and established garrisons and settlements, requisitioning houses by evicting the inhabitants, with several stanitsas and posts, their administration, churches, schools and military units. There, they fought the partisans and persecuted the local population, committing numerous atrocities. The measures consisting of clearing the Italian inhabitants of the area from their homes and taking stern measures to not allow partisans from the hills to “pass through alive” in the area lead the Italians to the use of the epithet “Barbarian Cossacks.”
When the Allies progressed from central Italy to the Italian Alps, Italian partisans under Gen. Contini ordered the Cossacks to leave Carnia and go north to Austria. There, near Lienz, the British Army interned the Cossacks in a hastily established camp. For a few days the British fed them; meanwhile, the Red Army's advance units approached to within a few miles east, rapidly advancing to meet the Allies. On 28 May 1945 the British transported 2,046 disarmed Cossack officers and generals--including the cavalry Generals Pyotr Krasnov and Andrei Shkuro--to a nearby Red Army-held town and handed them over to the Red Army commanding general, who ordered them tried for treason. Many Cossack leaders had never been citizens of the Soviet Union, having fled revolutionary Russia in 1920; hence they believed they could not be guilty of treason. Some were executed immediately. High-ranking officers were tried in Moscow, and then executed. On 17 January 1947 Krasnov and Shkuro were hanged in a public square. Gen. Helmuth von Pannwitz of the Wehrmacht, who was instrumental in the formation and leadership of the Cossacks taken from Nazi POW camps to fight the USSR, decided to share the Cossacks' Soviet repatriation and was executed for war crimes, along with five Cossack generals and atamans in Moscow in 1947.
On 1 June 1945 the British placed 32,000 Cossacks into trains and trucks and delivered them to the Red Army for repatriation to the USSR; similar repatriations occurred that year in the American occupation zones in Austria and Germany. Most Cossacks were sent to the gulags in far northern Russia and Siberia, and many died; some, however, escaped, and others lived until Nikita Khrushchev's amnesty in the course of his de-Stalinization policies. In total, some two million people were repatriated to the USSR at the end of the Second World War.
Lienz
On 28 May 1945 the British Army arrived at Camp Peggetz, in Lienz, where there were 2,479 Cossacks, including 2,201 officers and soldiers. They went to invite the Cossacks to an important conference with British officials, informing them that they would return to Lienz by 6:00 that evening; some Cossacks were worried, but the British reassured them that everything was in order. One British officer told the Cossacks, "I assure you, on my word of honour as a British officer, that you are just going to a conference". By then British–Cossack relationships were friendly to the extent that many on both sides had developed feelings for the other. The Lienz Cossack repatriation was exceptional, because the Cossacks forcefully resisted their British repatriation to the USSR; one Cossack noted, "The NKVD or the Gestapo would have slain us with truncheons, the British did it with their word of honour." Julius Epstein describes the scene thus:The British transported the Cossacks to a prison where the Soviets assumed their custody. In the town of Tristach, Austria, there is a memorial commemorating Gen. von Pannwitz and the soldiers of the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps who were killed in action or died as POWs.
Other repatriations
Judenburg, Austria
On 1–2 June 18,000 Cossacks were handed over to the Soviets near the town of Judenburg, Austria; of those in custody, some ten officers and 50–60 Cossacks escaped the guards' cordon with hand grenades, and hid in a nearby wood.Near Graz, Austria
The Russian Cossacks of XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps, stationed in Yugoslavia since 1943, were part of the column headed for Austria that would take part in the Bleiburg repatriations, and they are estimated to have numbered in the thousands. Nikolai Tolstoy quotes a telegram by General Harold Alexander, sent to the Combined Chiefs of Staff, noting "50,000 Cossacks including 11,000 women, children and old men". At a location near Graz, British forces repatriated around 40,000 Cossacks to SMERSH.Fort Dix, New Jersey, United States
Although repatriations mainly occurred in Europe, 154 people were repatriated to the USSR from Fort Dix, New Jersey, in the United States; three committed suicide in the US and seven were injured. Epstein states that the prisoners put up considerable resistance:Marseilles, France
Cossacks were included in the hundreds who were repatriated to the Soviet Union from Marseilles in 1946.Rimini and Bologna, Italy
Several hundred Cossacks were repatriated to the Soviet Union from camps close to Venice in 1947. Some 100 Cossacks perished in resistance to forcible repatriations at Rimini and Bologna.Liverpool, England
Thousands of Russians, many of them Cossacks, were transported at the height of armed hostilities in 1944 to Murmansk in an operation that also led to the sinking of the German battleship Tirpitz.Aftermath
The Cossack officers, more politically aware than the enlisted men, expected that repatriation to the USSR would be their ultimate fate. They believed that the British would have sympathised with their anti-Communism, but were unaware that their fates had been decided at the Yalta Conference. Upon discovering that they would be repatriated, many escaped, some probably aided by their Allied captors; some passively resisted, and others killed themselves.Of those Cossacks who escaped repatriation, many hid in forests and mountainsides, some were hidden by the local German populace, but most hid in different identities as Ukrainians, Latvians, Poles, Yugoslavians, Turks, Armenians and even Ethiopians. Eventually they were admitted to displaced persons camps under assumed names and nationalities; many emigrated to the US per the Displaced Persons Act. Others went to any country that would admit them. Most Cossacks hid their true national identity until the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991.
Amnesty
After the in 1953, partial amnesty was granted for some labor camp inmates on 27 March 1953 with the end of the Gulag system, then extended it on 17 September 1955. Some specific political crimes were omitted from amnesty: people convicted under Section 58.1 of the Criminal Code, stipulating that in the event of a military man escaping Russia, every adult member of his family who abetted the escape or who knew of it would be subject to five to ten years' imprisonment; every dependent who did not know of the escape would be subject to five years' Siberian exile.Legacy
In literature
The event was documented in publications such as Nicholas Bethell's The Last Secret: The Delivery to Stalin of Over Two Million Russians by Britain and the United States.Nikolai Tolstoy describes this and other events resulting from the Yalta Conference as the "Secret Betrayal", for going unpublished in the West.
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn describes the forced repatriation of the Cossacks by Winston Churchill as follows: "He turned over to the Soviet command the Cossack corps of 90,000 men. Along with them, he also handed over many wagonloads of old people, women and children who did not want to return to their native Cossack rivers. This great hero, monuments to whom will in time cover all England, ordered that they, too, be surrendered to their deaths." The man who led and supervised the entire operation was Major Davies.
William Dritschilo described the events at Lienz in Lienz Cossacks, his novelization of the Cossack experience of the 20th century.