Southern Kazakhstan Honors the Memory of Cossacks Victimized During 20th-Century Repressions

On January 24, 1919, the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) adopted the “Circular Letter of the Central Committee on Attitudes Towards the Cossacks,” marking the beginning of a horrific and bloody chapter in Cossack history. The policy of “de-Cossackization” involved the mass deportation of citizens: all Cossacks aged 18 to 50 were to be removed from the Don, Kuban, Terek, and Ural regions to the North. However, logistical shortages of railway wagons led to the decision to eliminate them “on-site.” Rivers such as the Don, Kuban, Terek, and Ural were stained with Cossack blood. The letter classified the Cossacks as a “defeated enemy,” effectively placing them outside the law. Developing these grim plans of genocide, Trotsky declared at a meeting of commissars of the Southern Front in Voronezh: “Destroying the Cossacks as such is our slogan. Remove their stripes, prohibit them from calling themselves Cossacks, and mass resettle them to other regions.” Almost no Cossack families were left untouched by the genocide policy. Entire civilian populations of stanitsas and farms—elderly, women, and children—were burned alive, executed, or deported to Siberia. A document signed by Yakov Sverdlov claimed the lives of more than 2 million Cossacks, with half a million forced to leave their homeland. By 1926, only 45% of the Cossack population remained in the Don region; in other regions, the numbers dwindled to 25%, and in the Ural Host, only 10%. Many Cossacks older than 50—guardians of tradition—were destroyed or exiled. As the renowned publicist and writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarked in his 1995 address: “We are all deeply guilty before the Cossacks. The genocide of the Cossacks is the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.” The Semirechye Cossacks endured this tragic fate to the fullest.