Just to tell, I support the Cossacks as much as the Serbians.
I don't deny they killed Jews during history.
"If Napoleon had had Cossacks in his army
he'd have been Emperor of China long ago."
- Cossack officer to Caulaincourt in 1812
"Cossacks are the best light troops among all that exist.
If I had then in my army, I would go through all the world with them."
- Napoleon
"These organised bandits are wily. They do not like infantry fire very much
they detest artillery, but when they are three to one they become impudent."
- Schwarzenberg, Austrian commanderCossacks vs. Bolchevicks
This war lasted for more than three years, from 1917 to 1920, and it was conducted with great ruthlessness on both sides. The Cossacks fought with desperate courage against an enemy twenty-two times superior in number. The position of the Cossacks was made all the more difficult because they possessed practically no war industry and no arsenals. Particularly in the first phase of this war, the Cossacks knew of only one method of arming themselves — it was to capture arms from the enemy. Literally the entire population of the Cossack states, including the women, took part in defending their land and freedom from the Bolsheviks. The Cossacks suffered tremendous losses in that war; every Cossack home had its share of dead and maimed. As a rule the Reds burned every Cossack farm and house that offered them resistance. After three years of a desperate and hopeless struggle, the Cossacks and their allies, the "White," their resources exhausted, were defeated. Their land was occupied by their mortal enemies, the Communists.
http://www.armymuseum.ru/kaz1_e.htmlUnder the Sickle and Hammer
Those Cossacks who had remained in Russia after their defeat in 1920, the families, the kin of those few who had managed to escape, and all those who had been in the ranks and whose regiments were cut off from the ports of embarkation, had to live under the stiff yoke of their conquerors. Their leaders and the heads of families were the first to be liquidated in the dreaded chambers of the Gheka and the OGPU; their families were split and dispersed; newcomers, faithful followers of Lenin and veterans of the Red Guard, were settled in Cossack homes. All who were allowed to stay in their stanitzas were forced to become virtual slaves in the collective farms and factories; they were forbidden to wear their traditional dress; their regiments were disbanded and their young men had to serve in Red Army units. The pressure on them was terrific, but even then the Cossacks refused to give I'n and continued their usually passive, but at time violently active resistance to the masters of the Russian people. They became experts in sabotage and hiding their identities. From time to time such passive resistance would erupt into a violent revolt, with public executions of the most hated members of the secret police and the special punitive units.
As a result of repeated uprisings from 1922 to 1937, the Cossacks were officially decreed by the Kremlin to be enemies of the Soviet State, and as such, subject to an absolute and complete liquidation. Every means were used by the Bolsheviks to exterminate the Cossacks, including a famine, artificially created by trusted lieutenants of Stalin in 1922 and again in 1933. In consequence, close to four million Cossacks perished or disappeared in the years between 1920 and 1940, from famine and privation, in resisting forced collectivization, in rebellions and riots, and in the slave labor camps of Siberia and the Far East.
And yet their spirit could not be crushed, and those Cossacks who managed to survive the terror and escape the clutches of the Soviet secret police, held high the torch of their determination to win back their freedom and their independent way of life. They beliwed that their hour had come when
Hitler's armies in 1940 advanced toward the lands of the Cossacks as liberators of Russia from the tyranny of Communism. Town after town and village after village greeted the Germans with flowers and the traditional Russian "bread and salt." The Red Army soldiers surrendered by whole divisions, without offering any resistance to the advancing German patrols. By the thousands the younger Cossacks joined the ranks of Hitler's auxiliaries "to get even with the Communists." Alas, very soon they saw the true face of Hitler's "supermen/ but it was already too late for them to turn back. When the Germans began their frozen exodus from the Cossack steppes, the whole Cossack population left their homes and., with women and children, on foot and in horse carts, went into exile. Nearly 150,000 Cossacks retreated with the Germans from Russia. The price they paid for the paradox of having their sympathy with the Western Allies and actually fighting alongside Hitler's regiments was truly appalling;
thousands upon thousands of these unfortunates fell into the hands of the rapidly advancing units of the Red Army; their fate invariably was exile to the concentration camps in the Far North, and systematic, planned extermination by cold and starvation. Others died from huger and from the bullets of red partisans in the forests of White Russia and Poland. The survivors, who fled to sections of Austria and Germany, which fell to the advancing allied divisions, finally found themselves interned in the former camps for Hitler's forced labor. There a great many of these Germans found their fathers and older friends who had escaped from the Reds twenty-two years before, at the end of the civil war against the Bolsheviks.BETRAYAL OF COSSACKS AT LIENTZ, Austria, June 1945. Painting by S.G.Korolkoff
Three days later, on June 1, 1945, the rank and file of this group of Cossacks,
32,000 men, women and children(!), were similarly bayonetted by the British into cattle cars and camions, and delivered to the Bolsheviks, by them to be taken back to the Soviet Union, there to work and die as slaves of the "Great Father of the Peoples," Joseph Stalin. Similar scenes were enacted in the same year, 1945, in the American Zone of Occupation, in Austria and Germany. Many more thousands of Cossacks were beaten by rifle butts into waiting Soviet trucks and trains. Close to
45,000 Cossacks were in this manner "repatriated" into the land of their executioners. However, a great many Cossacks succeeded in fleeing these extraditions and hid themselves in the forests and mountains; many were saved by the local German population; but the greatest number of the escapees found safety and salvation in changing their identity, disguising themselves as Ukrainians, Latvians, Poles, Yugoslavians, Turks, Armenians and even Ethiopians.
Topic: Cyrillic or Latin as standard for serbian people? (Read 12758 times)