COSSACK ISSUE IN SIBERIA DURING THE REVOLUTION AND CIVIL WAR IN RUSSIA

Abstract

The paper presents the problem of the Siberian Cossacks crisis in the period of socio-political upheavals of the revolution and Civil War in 1917–1920. The aim of the paper is to examine the reasons and the essence of the regional community crisis in the course of the 1917 revolution and the Civil war as well as to identify the options and results of its resolution. The problem is investigated on the basis of the dialectical-materialistic method of cognition: each position is examined through the light of historicism, in connection with other historical events of the era and with specific historical experience. The Cossack took shape in the early XXth century amid the civil transformation of the Russian society. In Siberia the issue received internal and external content. The internal content of the issue is made up of the contradictions between the rank-and-file Cossacks and the officers due to the inequality of landholdings, as well as between the mainstream, on the one hand, and the troops’ lieutenant colonels, on the other, because of the problem of the land reserve exploitation and compliance with the rights and obligations equivalence in the community. The external constituent is made up of the contradictions between the privileged community in Siberia and the peasantry and minority peoples of the region concerning the land issue. Moreover, the Cossack included also a general historical tendency – the search for optimal ways to abolish the class privileges and to equalize them in rights and responsibilities with the rest of the population of Russia. Since in this period there was no class-caste unity of the Cossacks de facto, this fact was to be established de jure. And it was the 1917 revolution that was responsible for it. The Cossack resolution resulted in the acute social-political opposition both within the regional community and in the civil war of the Siberian Cossacks with the bulk of the Siberian population. The results of the study can be used when writing generalized works on the history of Siberia, lecturing on Russian history of this period, teaching courses on the history of the 1917 revolution and the Civil war.