The Bolsheviks vs. the Tibetans? (and other claims of Bolsheviki national oppression)

[cantwealljustgetalong]

Did the Bolsheviks repress the Tibetans and try to "Russify" their culture? I did a quick google search and couldn't find shit. A friend of mine was swaying the Bolshies banned throat singing and burned temples.

Also, can someone give me more information about the Cossacks? I know they were a mostly right wing, tsarist faction of Russian society that were essentially racially targeted by the rank and file Bolsheviks, if not the leadership.

Any other examples? I'm trying to get my history straight and hear the other side of these stories.

[ind_com]

They crossed China and went to Tibet just for doing all that?

[Thirsty Crow]

Did the Bolsheviks repress the Tibetans and try to "Russify" their culture? I did a quick google search and couldn't find shit. A friend of mine was swaying the Bolshies banned throat singing and burned temples.

I don't think there existed any kind of a relation between the Russian regime and Tibet. Either your friend does not know what s/he's talking about or mistakes bolsheviks for the CP of China.
However, the reference to throat singing may mean that it's not Tibet but rather Mongolia as the country in question. I wouldn't know anything about it, though.

[Blake's Baby]

The reference in the OP to 'Cossaks' might imply that the question is about Tatars.

[l'Enfermé]

The Cossacks were not a separate ethnic group but a semi-militarized community of East Slavs. As for Tibet, after the Xinhai revolution, Tibet was more or less independent until China re-annexed it in 1951. The Bolsheviks never had anything to do with Tibet.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

That's what I thought about Tibet; sounds like Mao. I'd figured I would have found one million angry liberals from the 90s going off on it otherwise.
What interactions did they have with Mongolia?

As far as the Cossacks go, my main source was the Wikipedia (lol) article on Decossackization. Sounds like the Cossacks were a somewhat privileged ethnic group under the tsar and helped surpress the 1905 revolution. The wiki article details a pretty classic case of wholesale ethnic cleansing in retaliation.

This topic is of particular interest to me: I'm curious what the Bolsheviks did with national minorities, since they started with a pretty consistent line. I am aware of rank-and-file pogroms against the Jews, but that was harshly punished iirc.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Right after the revolution the Bolsheviks got rid of "state" relgion and the privilages of the official church, but did not take action against religious practice and worship itself. In fact there was a boom in conversion to other forms of Christianity during the early years.

On this question in general: Marxists are materialists and by and large athieists - but I think forcing people to stop beliving in their religions is anti-materialist and anti-marxist. If a religious organization is politically promoting or preaching counter-revolution, then it should be treated as other political organization that are acting or propaganizing against worker's power and for the restoration of the old regime. The same goes for other cultural practices that are not directly infringing on others.

[l'Enfermé]

That's what I thought about Tibet; sounds like Mao. I'd figured I would have found one million angry liberals from the 90s going off on it otherwise.
What interactions did they have with Mongolia?
The Mongolians had an anti-feudal revolution which the Soviets supported. After the Stalinists usurped power in the Soviet Union and isolated and later killed most of the Bolsheviks, Mongolian Stalinists came to power also and had their own purges and such. Afterwards, Mongolia was a puppet State of the USSR until Stalinism collapsed in the later 80s.



As far as the Cossacks go, my main source was the Wikipedia (lol) article on Decossackization. Sounds like the Cossacks were a somewhat privileged ethnic group under the tsar and helped surpress the 1905 revolution. The wiki article details a pretty classic case of wholesale ethnic cleansing in retaliation.
The Cossacks weren't an ethnic group though. They were a semi-militiary and social formation of mostly Russians/Ukrainians.



This topic is of particular interest to me: I'm curious what the Bolsheviks did with national minorities, since they started with a pretty consistent line. I am aware of rank-and-file pogroms against the Jews, but that was harshly punished iirc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korenizatsiya

[newdayrising]

Did the Bolsheviks repress the Tibetans and try to "Russify" their culture? I did a quick google search and couldn't find shit. A friend of mine was swaying the Bolshies banned throat singing and burned temples.


Maybe your friend was talking about ethnic minorities in Russia who practice Tibetan Buddhism, such as the Kalmyks.
I don't know anything about it to be honest, but you can begin your research with the wikipedia entry on Kalmykia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalmykia

[Comrade Marxist Bro]

Don't trust Wikipedia; for the most part, it's just too full of trolls, political axe-grinders, and fourteen-year-olds who think they're experts to be reliable on anything politically relevant.

The cossacks were an estate or military caste known for their devotion to the czar. They are well-known for their horseback-riding warrior lifestyle, but they are no more an ethnic group than the cowboys. The majority of the cossacks supported the anti-communists and served in the White Army during the Russian Civil War.

Decossackization was a policy that led to a lot of violence since most of the cossacks resisted relinquishing their status assimilating into Soviet society but it did not mean killing off all of the cossacks.

Georgy Mirsky, a highly-reputed historian with the Russian Academy of Sciences, gives a good description of the cossacks as a distinct Russian elite:



Spearheading the Russian military expeditions in the Caucasus were the Cossacks, a trusted and loyal component of the Russian army throughout the centuries. Cossacks are not easy to define in usual ethnographic terms. They are certainly not an ethnic or national group. They are ethnic Russians and speak only Russian. Largely the descendants of serfs who had fled from feudal landowners some centuries ago, the Cossacks were gradually co-opted into the state structure and became a special, privileged community in Tsarist Russia. There were thirteen Cossack voisko (armies) on Russia's periphery, mainly in southern areas (Don, Kuban, Terek, and others), but also in Siberia, the Far East, and Kazakh steppes. The term voisko could be misleading in translation, however; each voisko was a large agricultural area inhabited by Cossack peasants who cultivated some of the best, most fertile land in Russia. Male Cossacks, while not different from ordinary peasants in peacetime, constituted a special army elite formation. They were generally regarded as irregulars, although the term is doubtful in this case: the Cossacks did regular military service, mostly in the cavalry, and were instantly mobilized in wartime. A highly respected and privileged military elite, the Cossacks, notorious for their redoubtable professional skill, courage, and unbounded loyalty to the throne, possessed a formidable esprit de corps and a manifest superiority complex vis-a-vis the common Russian peasanty. In peacetime, Cossacks served as frontier guards, also taking part in punitive expeditions and repressive actions against "enemies of the monarchy."

(Georgy Mirsky (1997). On Ruins of Empire: Ethnicity and Nationalism in the Former Soviet Union. Westport, CT: Greenwood. p. 79)

There were also plenty of cossacks in the Red Army who voluntarily assimilated into Soviet society.

The Soviet Union had nothing to do with Tibet.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

The USSR was never in Tibet, but it DID occupy vast swaths of Siberia which were populated by various tribes which shared Tibetan Buddhism or Mongolian Shamanism. While the early Bolsheviks did not mistreat these folks, from what I've read many came to suffer during the 30s and 40s from various forms of state maltreatment.

[Zostrianos]

The USSR was never in Tibet, but it DID occupy vast swaths of Siberia which were populated by various tribes which shared Tibetan Buddhism or Mongolian Shamanism. While the early Bolsheviks did not mistreat these folks, from what I've read many came to suffer during the 30s and 40s from various forms of state maltreatment.

Mongolian Buddhists were subjected to monstrous repression during the Stalinist era, nearly all monasteries were shut down or destroyed, and most monks were executed:

This encounter was made public through the testimony of the Jongzin Qambu himself, during a trial of “reactionary head lamas” who confessed to betraying their country and plotting to overthrow the government. It took place the first week of October 1937. Announcements had been posted, inviting men and women over the age of 18 to attend the trial, which played to packed audiences inside the theater where it was held, and crowds listened to it on loudspeakers in the main square outside. The trial was a turning point in the history of violence in Mongolia, as it laid the groundwork for the wave of repression and violence that, over a period of 18 months, was to leave upward of 36,000 people dead and over 700 Buddhist monasteries in ruins...

An undeniable degree of randomness characterized the violence. Accounts tell of herders being arrested and executed merely because someone had escaped custody, leaving the secret police short of their quota of arrests. But there was also an organized ruthlessness to much of what took place. By the end of the violence, most of Mongolia’s more than 700 monasteries lay in ruins, and countless religious and cultural artifacts were
destroyed. The destruction was carried out by a combination of troops from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Mongolian and Soviet armies. In addition to Buddhist lamas and political figures, ordinary herders, Buryats—an ethnic group living largely along the Russian border and suspected of White Russian sympathies—and other minorities were arrested, sentenced, and shot. The violence was total. D. Olziibaatar (2004:294), one of the handful of Mongolian scholars of the repressions, notes that, of the almost 26,000 prosecuted by the Extraordinary Plenipotentiary Commission, only seven were found innocent.
The exact number of people arrested and killed will probably never be known. According to D. Dashdavaa (2004:7), in the two-year period that followed the show trial, almost 57,000 people were arrested. He also claims that three out of every four people arrested were shot, which would suggest a figure of close to 43,000 people killed.16 A June 2007 symposium suggested a figure of 36,000 repressed but noted that this number was not definitive (M¨ong¨ontsetseg 2007). Whatever the final total, a large number—perhaps even a majority—were Buddhist lamas. ¨ Olziibaatar (2004:294), although citing a lower overall number, notes that lamas constituted over half of the people repressed in the decade from 1937 to 1947.

(Prelude to violence: Show trials and state power in 1930s Mongolia)
http://www.chriskaplonski.com/downloads/PreludeToViolence.pdf

[Grenzer]

I had always been under the impression that the Cossacks were merely ethnic Russians who were used by the feudal rulers of Russia to colonize the frontier regions and gained a reputation for being fierce fighters.