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. It was not until 1942 when Ostministerium openly began employing Cossack émigrés for propaganda and administrative purposes. 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. The Second World War Īfter 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. The repressions ceased and some privileges were restored after publication of And Quiet Flows the Don (1934) by Mikhail Sholokhov. 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. In exile, they formed their own anticommunist organizations or joined other Russian émigré groups such as the Russian All-Military Union (ROVS).
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. As a result, the majority of Cossack soldiers were mobilized against the Red Army. 5.3 Fort Dix, New Jersey, United Statesĭuring the Russian Civil War (1917–1923), Cossack leaders and their governments generally sided with the White movement.
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