page_title: Repatriation of Cossacks after World War II
section_title: Yalta and Tehran Conferences
hierarchical_section_title: Repatriation of Cossacks after World War II / Yalta and Tehran Conferences
caption_attribution_description: Yalta Conference, February 1945. Original caption: "Conference of the Big Three at Yalta makes final plans for the defeat of Germany. Here the "Big Three" sit on the patio together, Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Premier Josef Stalin. Behind them stand, from the left, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Fleet Admiral Ernest King, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, General of the Army George Marshall, Major General Laurence S. Kuter, General Aleksei Antonov, Vice Admiral Stepan Kucherov, and Admiral of the Fleet Nikolay Kuznetsov. February 1945. (Army) Exact Date Shot Unknown NARA FILE #: 111-SC-260486 WAR &amp; CONFLICT BOOK #: 750"
context_page_description: The Repatriation of Cossacks occurred when Cossacks, ethnic Russians and Ukrainians who were against the Soviet Union were handed over by British and American forces to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. The repatriations were agreed to in the Yalta Conference; Joseph 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, specifically the Soviets, in service to the Axis powers, specifically Nazi Germany, yet the repatriations included non-combatant civilians as well. General Poliakov and Colonel Chereshneff referred to it as the "massacre of Cossacks at Lienz".
context_section_description: The agreements of the Yalta and Tehran Conferences, signed by American President Roosevelt, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Churchill, determined the fates of the Cossacks who did not fight for the USSR, because many were POWs of the Nazis. Stalin obtained Allied agreement to the repatriation of every so-called "Soviet" citizen held prisoner because the Allied leaders feared that the Soviets either might delay or refuse repatriation of the Allied POWs whom the Red Army had liberated from Nazi POW camps.
  Although the agreement for the deportation of all "Soviet" citizens did not include White Russian emigres who had fled during the Bolshevik Revolution before the establishment of the USSR, all Cossack prisoners of war were later demanded. After Yalta, Churchill questioned Stalin, asking, "Did the Cossacks and other minorities fight against us?" Stalin replied, "They fought with ferocity, not to say savagery, for the Germans".
  In 1944 Gen. Krasnov and other Cossack leaders had persuaded Hitler to allow Cossack troops, as well as civilians and non-combatant Cossacks, to permanently settle in the sparsely settled Carnia, in the Alps. The Cossacks moved there and established garrisons and settlements, requisitioning houses by evicting the inhabitants, with several stanitsas and posts, their administration, churches, schools and military units. There, they fought the partisans and persecuted the local population, committing numerous atrocities. The measures consisting of clearing the Italian inhabitants of the area from their homes and taking stern measures to not allow partisans from the hills to “pass through alive” in the area lead the Italians to the use of the epithet “Barbarian Cossacks.” 
  When the Allies progressed from central Italy to the Italian Alps, Italian partisans under Gen. Contini ordered the Cossacks to leave Carnia and go north to Austria. There, near Lienz, the British Army interned the Cossacks in a hastily established camp. For a few days the British fed them; meanwhile, the Red Army's advance units approached to within a few miles east, rapidly advancing to meet the Allies. On 28 May 1945 the British transported 2,046 disarmed Cossack officers and generals--including the cavalry Generals Pyotr Krasnov and Andrei Shkuro--to a nearby Red Army-held town and handed them over to the Red Army commanding general, who ordered them tried for treason. Many Cossack leaders had never been citizens of the Soviet Union, having fled revolutionary Russia in 1920; hence they believed they could not be guilty of treason. Some were executed immediately. High-ranking officers were tried in Moscow, and then executed. On 17 January 1947 Krasnov and Shkuro were hanged in a public square. Gen. Helmuth von Pannwitz of the Wehrmacht, who was instrumental in the formation and leadership of the Cossacks taken from Nazi POW camps to fight the USSR, decided to share the Cossacks' Soviet repatriation and was executed for war crimes, along with five Cossack generals and atamans in Moscow in 1947.
  On 1 June 1945 the British placed 32,000 Cossacks (with their women and children) into trains and trucks and delivered them to the Red Army for repatriation to the USSR; similar repatriations occurred that year in the American occupation zones in Austria and Germany. Most Cossacks were sent to the gulags in far northern Russia and Siberia, and many died; some, however, escaped, and others lived until Nikita Khrushchev's amnesty in the course of his de-Stalinization policies (see below). In total, some two million people were repatriated to the USSR at the end of the Second World War.
caption: The Big Three: Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta conference.
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