The Empire Strikes Back? How Ethnic Violence Became a Part of Soviet Communism

At the height of the Great Terror (c. 1937-1938), Stalin’s secret police began systematic campaigns targeting certain ethnic minorities in the USSR. Poles, Latvians, Estonians, ethnic Germans, Romanians, Greeks, Afghans, Iranians, Chinese, Bulgarians, and Macedonians were arrested en masse, deported, or executed.

According to official statistics, 335,500 people were arrested and almost 250,000 killed in what became known as the National Operations. These were not soldiers, spies, or traitors; they were ordinary civilians. Before the Second World War, this was a high-point for repression of ethnic minorities in Russia and the USSR.

This event is almost as troubling analytically as it is morally. As Marxists, Soviet Communists should have (and generally portrayed themselves as doing so) judged socioeconomic class to be the principal identity determining treatment by the state.

When we teach Russian and Soviet History, it makes (some kind of) sense to explain to students that the USSR targeted the “rich” peasant kulaks, the bourgeoisie, and the old nobility. By contrast, campaigns targeting ethnic minorities seem distinctly out of place. It was in the Tsarist Russian empire before 1917, after all, that repression against non-ethnic Russians was committed as part of “Russification” campaigns.

So why did a Communist state target its ethnic minorities? It's tempting to view this as a return to age-old imperial policy, embodied in the Russification and persecution of Tsarist Russian Empire. But Soviet ethnic violence had its own logic and patterns of development.

This post traces Soviet ethnic violence back to the Russian Civil War and the little-known case, studied by historian Shane O'Rourke, of the Terek Cossacks, simultaneously linking this policy further back to the Tsarist imperial legacy and forward to the Stalinist "National Operations".

 

Ethnic Violence and Communism: “De-Cossackisation” during the Russian Civil War

Ethnic violence and class violence had been closely intertwined in Soviet policy in the years since 1917. One notably case, studied by several historians in the past few decades, has been that of the Cossacks.

Associated before the Russian Revolution with Tsarist repression (Cossack horsemen and soldiers represented an elite component of the Imperial Russian army) and sometimes with wealthy landownership, the Cossacks were viewed with suspicion and often outright hostility by Russian revolutionaries. During the Russian Civil War (c. 1918-1921), when some Cossacks led armed resistance and rebellions against the new Communist regime, violence against the Cossacks exploded in coordinated military campaigns which targeted not just Cossack soldiers, but also civilians.

The language used by leading Bolshevik commanders at this time verged on the outright genocidal. It was framed by the chilling term “de-Cossackization”, a policy that historian Peter Holquist notes, in the conditions of Civil War, sought “to eliminate the Cossacks as an entire social collectivity.” In one striking instance, from December 1918, Leon Trotsky issued a “final warning” to Cossacks of the Don region, stating: “More and more often we hear the voices of workers and peasants, saying: ‘we must exterminate all Cossacks…’.”

Trotsky’s choice of words is telling, not only for its stated threat to destroy the Cossacks as a collective group as such (rather than a military force), but also for its framing in the language of class. It serves as a reminder that the boundaries between class and ethnic violence in the USSR were never necessarily as firmly fixed as we might believe.

 

The Deportation of the Terek Cossacks, 1920-1921

These boundaries would become especially blurred in the Terek region (oblast) of the Caucasus.

In the spring of 1920, a brutal campaign against local Terek Cossacks was launched, leading in the space of some ten months to the forced deportation of 30,000 Cossack civilians.

The Terek region had been a centre of ethnic violence for decades between Cossacks and other groups. In the 1860s, the regime of Alexander II (often regarded as a relatively liberal reformer) had begun a campaign to remove local Chechen and Ingush peoples from their homes and settle in their place the supposedly more loyal and Russified Cossacks.

When revolution and then civil war broke out in 1917 and 1918, embittered Chechens and Ingush rallied to the side of the Bolsheviks (Communists), hoping they would return their ancestral lands and remove the Cossacks. By 1920, the situation had turned deadly. After Terek Cossacks launched an armed revolt against the Communists, five Cossack settlements (stanitsas) were destroyed and adult males were rounded up and deported.

Left without military protection, the remaining Cossack population faced attack from armed Chechen and Ingush groups. The Communist solution was to force – in many cases literally shoving – Cossack women, children, and the elderly onto trains and deport them from the region. The Communist forces in the region were commanded by the prominent Bolshevik, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a close ally of none other than Joseph Stalin, the future Soviet dictator who would oversee the ethnic terror of the National Operations in the late 1930s.

Historian Shane O’Rourke, who has studied the deportation of the Terek Cossacks, makes the connection to clear: “Deportation, which was to become emblematic of the Stalin years, was already a routine tool by 1921.”

 

Ethnic Violence, Class Violence

Why should this concern us when we teach about Stalin and the USSR? After all, it is possible to tell the story of Stalinism (and the preceding years of Communist rule) as one of class-based violence and repression. Why complicate this picture?

Firstly, as I have tried to suggest above, tracing ethnic violence back to the start of the Communist regime during the Russian Civil War indicates that the boundaries between ethnic violence and class violence were never absolute or entirely clear (this is a point I intend to make in future posts about Civil War pogroms against Jews).

Secondly, it offers an opportunity to consider elements of continuity in ethnic policies in Russia and the USSR. It would be a misnomer to attribute ethnic repression solely to Russia’s Tsars; Communists (as well as anti-Communists) in the Civil War and after had their own reasons for targeting particular ethnic minorities. The case of the Terek Cossacks suggests, indeed, that existing ethnic conflicts sparked under the Tsars could roll on into and beyond 1917, being repackaged by Russia’s new rulers in order to pursue their own revolutionary agendas.

This year, I have tried to make these ideas explicit to my A-Level students, introducing them to the case of the Terek Cossacks ahead of their study of 1930s Stalinist terror and the “National Operations”.

A resource, based on Shane O’Rourke’s brilliant and terrifying chapter which is referenced in this post, can be found here.

References

David L. Hoffmann, The Stalinist Era, Oxford University Press (2018), pp. 112-116 ("The National Operations")

Peter Holquist, Making War, Forcing Revolution: Russia's Continuum of Crisis, 1914-1921, Harvard University Press (2002)

Shane O'Rourke, "Trial Run: The Deportation of the Terek Cossacks, 1920" in Richard Bessel and Claudia B. Haake (eds.), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World, Oxford University Press (2009), pp. 255-279