The Dirty War page 99
In February 1919, after the general advance of the Bolsheviks into Ukraine and southern Russia, the first detachment of the Red Army penetrated the Cossack territories along the Don. At the outset the Bolsheviks took measures to destroy everything that made the 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 preestablished de-Cossackization plan approved in a secret resolution of the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee on 24 January 1919: "In view of the experiences of the civil war against the Cossacks, we must recognize as the only politically correct measure massive terror and a merciless fight against the rich Cossacks, who must be exterminated and physically disposed of, down to the last man." 34
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 indiscriminate policy of massive extermination." 35 From mid- February to mid-March 1919, Bolshevik detachments executed more than 8,000 Cossacks. 36 In each stanitsa (Cossack village) revolutionary courts passed summary judgments in a matter of minutes, 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.