Repatriation of Cossacks after World War II

During the Russian Civil War (1917–1923), 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 (ROVS). [6]

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 (1934) by Mikhail Sholokhov.[7]

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.[8] 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. [9]

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 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. [10]

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 the southern Ukraine, Novogrudek (Byelorussia), Tolmezzo (Italy) and was forced to withdraw to Lienz in Austria, at the close of the war. [11]

The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta conference.

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.[12]

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".[12]

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.[13] There, they fought the partisans and persecuted the local population, committing numerous atrocities.[14] 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.” [15]

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[16]; 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.[17]

On 1 June 1945 the British placed 32,000 Cossacks (with their women and children) into trains and trucks and delivered them to the Red Army for repatriation to the USSR;[18] 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 (see below). In total, some two million people were repatriated to the USSR at the end of the Second World War.[19]

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.[19] 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".[19] 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."[19] Julius Epstein describes the scene thus:

The first to commit suicide, by hanging, was the Cossack editor Evgenij Tarruski. The second was General Silkin, who shot himself...The Cossacks refused to board the trucks. British soldiers [armed] with pistols and clubs began using their clubs, aiming at the heads of the prisoners. They first dragged the men out of the crowd, and threw them into the trucks. The men jumped out. They beat them again, and threw them onto the floor of the trucks. Again, they jumped out. The British then hit them with rifle butts until they lay unconscious, and threw them, like sacks of potatoes, in the trucks.[20]

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.

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;[12] 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 (e.g., Germany, Austria, France and Italy). Most Cossacks hid their true national identity until the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991.

• Andrey Vlasov
• Collaboration with the Axis Powers during World War II
• Cossackia
• Operation Keelhaul
• Russian Liberation Army
• Russian Monument (Liechtenstein)
• The Red Danube
• Western betrayal
• Forest brothers
• Aftermath of World War II
• Swedish extradition of Baltic soldiers

• Tolstoy, Nikolai (1986). The Minister and the Massacres. Hutchinson. ISBN 978-0-09-164010-1.
• Dizdar, Zdravko (December 2005). "Prilog istraživanju problema Bleiburga i križnih putova (u povodu 60. obljetnice)" [An addition to the research of the problem of Bleiburg and the Way of the Cross (dedicated to their 60th anniversary)]. The Review of Senj (in Croatian). Senj, Croatia: City Museum Senj - Senj Museum Society. 32 (1): 117–193. ISSN 0582-673X. Retrieved 28 May 2012.
• Vuletić, Dominik (December 2007). "Kaznenopravni i povijesni aspekti bleiburškog zločina". Lawyer (in Croatian). Zagreb, Croatia: Pravnik. 41 (85): 125–150. ISSN 0352-342X. Retrieved 28 May 2012.
• Naumenko, Gen. V. G. (2011). Great Betrayal. (Translation by William Dritschilo of (1962) Великое Предательство, All Slavic Publishing House, New York) ISBN 978-1511524179.
• Naumenko, Gen. V. G. (2018). Great Betrayal. Volume 2. (Translation by William Dritschilo of (1970) Великое Предательство, Том ІІ, All Slavic Publishing House, New York) ISBN 978-1986932356.

• Catherine Andreyev (1987). Vlasov and the Russian Liberation Movement: Soviet Reality and Émigré Theories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; ISBN 0-521-30545-4.
• Brent Mueggenberg (2019). The Cossack Struggle Against Communism, 1917 - 1945 Jefferson: McFarland & Company; ISBN 978-1-4766-7948-8
• Nikolai Tolstoy (1978). The Secret Betrayal. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons; ISBN 0-684-15635-0.
• Nikolai Tolstoy (1981). Stalin's Secret War. London: Jonathan Cape; ISBN 0-224-01665-2.
• John Ure (2002). The Cossacks: An Illustrated History. London: Gerald Duckworth; ISBN 0-7156-3253-1.
• Samuel J. Newland (1991). Cossacks in the German Army 1941–1945, London: Franc Cass; ISBN 0-7146-3351-8.
• Ian Mitchell (1997). The cost of a reputation. Lagavulin: Topical Books; ISBN 0-9531581-0-1.
• Józef Mackiewicz (1993). Kontra. London: Kontra; ISBN 0-907652-30-1.
• Harald Stadler/Martin Kofler/Karl C.Berger (2005). Flucht in die Hoffnungslosigkeit-Die Kosaken in Osttirol. Innsbruck; ISBN 3-7065-4152-1 (in German)

• Return to the scene of the crime Gordon Dritschilo, rutlandherald.com, 30 June 2005
• A footnote to Yalta Jeremy Murray-Brown, Documentary at Boston University (Describes the extradition event in great detail, focusing on a 7-minute film-clip of the event.)