Betrayal of the Cossacks

Repatriation of Cossacks
Part of the Aftermath of World War II
Date 28 May 1945 Location Lienz and elsewhere in Austria Result 45,000 – 50,000 repatriated Cossacks
Belligerents
Don Cossacks	Allied Forces
Strength
>50,000
Casualties and losses
45,000 – 50,000 repatriated

The Repatriation of Cossacks happened when Cossacks and ethnic Russians and Ukrainians who had collaborated with Nazi Germany were handed over to the USSR after the Second World War.

The repatriations were agreed to in the Yalta Conference; Stalin claimed the repatriated people were Soviet citizens as of 1939, although many of them had left Russia before or soon after the end of the Russian Civil War, or had been born abroad. Most of those Cossacks and Russians fought the Allies in service to the Axis powers, yet the repatriations included non-combatant civilians as well.

General Poliakov and Colonel Chereshneff referred to it as the "Massacre of Cossacks at Lienz".

During the Russian Civil War (1917–23), thousands of Russians integral to the Volunteer Army and the White Movement fought the Bolshevik Red Army.Cossack Hosts (of which there were eleven at the start of the First World War, 1914–18) composed much of the White Movement, and so were the strongest counter-revolutionary force against the Bolshevik Government. During the Civil War Leon Trotsky imposed decossackization on the Cossacks, leading to many, especially the Don Cossacks and the Kuban Cossacks, to escape Russia for the Balkans where they established the Russian All-Military Union, the ROVS.

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