Decossackization

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In 1919 the Soviet engaged in a policy to eliminate the "Cossack threat to proletarian power" by de-Cossackization: "extirpating the Cossack elite"; terrorizing all other Cossacks; and bringing about the "formal liquidation of the Cossackry.".

• "The suppression of the Don Cossack revolt in the spring and summer of 1919 took the form of genocide. One historian has estimated that approximately 70 percent of the Don Cossacks were physically eliminated."- Utopia in Power by Heller & Nekrich , pg 87

• “The policy of "de-Cossackization" begun in 1920 corresponds largely to our definition of genocide: a population group firmly established in a particular territory, the Cossacks as such were exterminated, the men shot, the women, children and the elderly deported, and the villages razed or handed over to new, non-Cossack occupants. Lenin compared the Cossacks to the Vendée during the French Revolution and gladly subjected them to a program of what Gracchus Babeuf, the "inventor" of modern Communism, characterized in 1795 as "populicide." – The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois et al, pg 8-9