PETER HOLQUIST

'CONDUCT MERCILESS MASS TERROR'

DECOSSACKIZATION ON THE DON,

19191

"Rubashov shook his head. 'Your examples are all

drawn from war — that is, from abnormal

circumstances.'

'Since the invention of the steam engine,' replied

Ivanov, 'the world has permanently been in an

abnormal state; the wars and revolutions are just

visible expressions of this state.'"

Arthur Koestler, Darkness at пост (New York: Time, 1962): 126.

The Civil War has been portrayed as a "formative experience" for the Bolshevik regime, indeed for all Soviet society. As a formative event, it is then the Civil War, rather than the Bolsheviks themselves or their ideology, that becomes responsible for the regime's more extreme policies, both during the Civil War proper (e.g., war communism) and even well after it (e.g., dekulakization).2 This article argues, however, that the Soviet regime's 1919 policy of "decossackization" benefits from a comparison with the later 1929 policy of dekulakization at least as much as dekulakization benefits from comparison to some generic Civil War experience. For, in light of the Soviet state's 1929 drive "to eliminate kulaks as a class," decossackization appears to be less a Civil War policy than a reflection of a fundamental Bolshevik desire to foster an idealized image of the body politic by excising various malignant elements: Cossacks in 1919, kulaks in 1929. This article therefore presents decossackization, pursued in 1919 at the height of the Civil War, not as a war policy, but as a state policy that happened to be pursued during war. In other words, the years 1917- 1 92 1 were not merely the antechamber of Soviet power, its formative period; the policies of this period were Soviet power in practice, albeit in a war environment.3

So the Civil War policy of decossackization is an early demonstration of the Soviet regime's dedication to social engineering. It preceded dekulakization by over a decade and in some ways represented an even more radical attempt to eliminate undesirable social groups (dekulakization did not call for "extirpation" and "mass

Cahiers du Monde russe, 38(1-2), janvier-juin 1997, pp. 127-162.