The Cossack regiments, headed by the Council of the Alliance of Cossack Troops, were regarded by the counter-revolutionaries as their most reliable support.
At the time of the Kornilov revolt, Dutov, Ataman of the Orenburg Cossacks, had been instructed to stage a “Bolshevik rebellion” in Petrograd and to use this provocative act to smash the Bolshevik Party. Simultaneously, Kaledin, the Ataman of the Don Cossacks, was to strike at Moscow by way of the Donbas.
When the Kornilov revolt collapsed, the Provisional Government hastened to cover up its tracks and gave orders for the arrest and trial of Kaledin for complicity in the Kornilov conspiracy.
A preliminary conference of the Cossack Grand Council, which met in Novocherkassk on September 3, resolved not to surrender the Ataman. Kerensky immediately came to heel and agreed to revoke the order for his arrest, but demanded that Kaledin should appear at General Headquarters and testify before the Investigation Commission. The ease with which Kerensky switched from rage to clemency only served to show that the stern words and “revolutionary” gesture of the Provisional Government were mere camouflage. On September 5 the Cossack Grand Council accorded Kaledin an ovation and resolved to hear his speech standing. The Grand Council characterised the accusation brought against Kaledin as “the fruit of the disturbed imagination of cowards.”(1)
Kaledin was supported by all the counter-revolutionary organisations. A Cossack delegation visited Kerensky and members of the cabinet and insisted on Kaledin’s complete exoneration. A delegation from the Don Cossacks and representatives from the Council of the Cossack Alliance even visited the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan. The Ambassador informed the delegation that Great Britain valued the services of the Cossacks very highly.
The bourgeoisie designed Kaledin for a new dictator. “Kaledin is the Man of the Hour,” declared the New York Times, expressing the general hope of the counter-revolutionaries.
On the eve of the October Revolution the Commission appointed by the government to investigate the Kornilov affair announced that Kaledin was absolutely innocent of all complicity in the revolt.
The proposed dictator was left entirely free to devote himself to the organisation of the forces of counter-revolution. A new state was set up under his leadership, known as the South-Eastern Alliance of the Cossacks of the Kuban, Terek, Don and Astrakhan, the Gortsi of the North Caucasus and the steppe peoples of the Don Region and Astrakhan Province.
Kerensky was immediately informed that the Land Committees were not acceptable to the Cossack regions. The Cossack leaders demanded that the formation of Land Committees should be discontinued and that the representative of the Ministry of Agriculture in Novocherkassk should be recalled to Petrograd. At the same time, the non-Cossack population of the region was promised that its representatives would be invited into the new administration.
On the pretext that cavalry could not be maintained in the war area owing to the shortage of fodder, the Cossack and Gortsi troops were transferred from the front to the Don and the Kuban. On the other hand, the reserve infantry regiments, whose revolutionary sentiments hampered the preparations for a counter-revolution, were removed from the Cossack regions.
General Headquarters, in its preparations to crush the revolution, bared whole sections of the front.
The Provisional Government willingly supported the measures of the counter-revolutionaries in the Don region. The head of the government wired Dukhonin in reference to the reserve infantry regiments:
“I request you to give instructions to evacuate the reserve infantry regiments from the Cossack regions and to inform the Cossack administration and the Cossack units at the front of this, and especially the scouts, so that they may perform their duties with an easy mind.”(2)
Thus Kerensky directly admitted that the reserve regiments were being withdrawn from the Cossack regions in order to reassure the Cossacks.
Even General Dukhonin, who cannot be accused of even the slightest trace of liberalism, hesitated to transmit Kerensky’s telegram in full. Dukhonin conveyed the instructions of the head of the government in the following terms:
“In view of the proposed reduction of reserve units, the Supreme Commander requests the immediate withdrawal of the reserve infantry regiments from the Cossack regions.”(3)
The “conscience-stricken” general only slightly veiled the garrulous frankness of the over-zealous protector of the counter-revolutionaries by giving a reduction of reserve units as a reason for the withdrawal. But he himself was very energetic in clearing the Cossack territories and in helping to concentrate counter-revolutionary forces in the Don Region. Cossack troops were moved into the Don and Kuban Regions, and thither too officers implicated in the Kornilov affair were smuggled and tens of thousands of rifles and whole trainloads of artillery consigned.
As the industrial areas of Central Russia grew to be centres of revolution, the Cossack territories became nests of counter-revolution.
“At the very beginning of the October Revolution,” Stalin says, “a certain geographical demarcation between revolution and counter-revolution was to be observed. As the Civil War developed, the regions of revolution and counter-revolution became fully defined. Interior Russia, with its industrial, cultural and political centres (Moscow and Petrograd), with its nationally homogeneous population, consisting principally of Russians, became the base of revolution. The border regions of Russia, on the other hand, chiefly the southern and eastern border regions, which have no important industrial, cultural and political centres, whose population is nationally heterogeneous to a high degree, consisting of privileged Cossack colonisers, on the one hand, and unfranchised Tatars, Bashkirs, Kirghiz (in the east), Ukrainians, Chechens, Ingushes and other Mohammedan peoples, on the other, became the base of counter-revolution.
“It should not be difficult to understand that there is nothing unnatural in such a geographical division of the warring forces of Russia. For, indeed, who should serve as the base of the Soviet government if not the proletariat of Petrograd and Moscow? Who else should be the bulwark of the Denikin-Kolchak counter-revolution if not the age-long weapon of Russian imperialism, privileged and organised into a military caste—the Cossacks—who had long exploited the non-Russian peoples!”(4)
[1] “Ataman Kaledin, Resolution of the Cossack Grand Council. Ataman’s Plume Presented to General Kaledin,” Utro Rossii, No. 220, September 12, 1917.
[2] Central Archives of Military History, Records of General Headquarters of the Supreme Commander—Adjutant-General’s Office, File No. 80-097, folio 139.
[3] Ibid., folio 140.
[4] J. Stalin, “The Military Situation in South Russia,” Pravda, No. 293, December 28, 1919.
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