by James Millar
DENMARK, RELATIONS WITH
Fronts. In September 1917, however, he and a number of other officers were arrested as associates of Commander-in-Chief General Lavr Kornilov in the latter’s conflict with Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky. Denikin was released from prison following the Bolshevik coup. He headed to Novocherkassk, where he participated in the formation of the Anti-Bolshevik (White) Army together with Kornilov and General Mikhail Alexeyev. Following the death of Kornilov in April 1918, Denikin took command of the White Army, which he led out of its critical situation in the Kuban Cossack territory. General Alexeyev’s death in September of that year left him with responsibility for civil affairs in the White regions as well. With the subordination to him of the Don and Kuban Cossack armies, Denikin assumed the title Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of South Russia (December 1918).
By early 1919, the White Army controlled a territory encompassing the Don and Kuban Cossack territories and the North Caucasus. During the spring and summer, the army advanced in all directions, clearing the Crimea, taking Kharkov on June 11 and Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd) on June 17. On June 20, 1919, Denikin issued the Moscow Directive, an order which began the army’s offensive on Moscow. After taking Kiev on August 17, Kursk on September 7, and Orel (some two hundred miles south of Moscow) on September 30, the overextended White Army had reached the limits of its advance. A Bolshevik counteroffensive initiated a retreat that ultimately resulted in the army’s evacuation of all its territory with the exception of Crimea. This retreat was accompanied by epidemics of typhus and other diseases, which decimated the ranks of soldiers and the civilian population alike. Denikin handed over command to General Pyotr Wrangel on March 22, 1920, and left Russia for Constantinople (Istanbul), and then France, where he lived until November 1945. His final year and nine months were spent in the United States. He died on August 7, 1947, in Michigan.
The ill-fated Moscow offensive has colored Denikin’s reputation, with some, such as General Wrangel, arguing that the directive initiating it was the death knell of the White movement in South Russia. Wrangel advocated a junction with Admiral Kolchak’s forces in the east. Denikin himself felt that the conditions of the civil war were such that only a risky headlong rush could unseat the Bolsheviks and put an end to the struggle.
General Anton Denikin, commander of the White Army. © CORBIS See also: CIVIL WAR OF 1917-1922; WHITE ARMY; WRANGEL, PETER NIKOLAYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Denikin, Anton I. (1922). The Russian Turmoil: Memoirs, Military, Social, and Political. London: Hutchinson. Denikin, Anton I. (1975). The Career of a Tsarist Officer: Memoirs, 1872-1916. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lehovich, Dimitry V. (1974). White Against Red: The Life of General Anton Denikin. New York: Norton.
ANATOL SHMELEV
DENMARK, RELATIONS WITH
The earliest evidence of Danish-Russian interaction consists of discoveries in Russia of tenth-century
381
DENMARK, RELATIONS WITH
Danish coins and an eleventh-century chronicle reference to trips by Danish merchants to Novgorod. There are further mentions of Russian vessels to Denmark in the twelfth century. However, the available data is extremely fragmentary, and we have no indication of any direct commerce in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries.
Danish-Muscovite political relations were first established under a 1493 treaty between King Hans and Ivan III, designed as an offensive agreement against Sweden and Lithuania. The temporary Danish takeover of Sweden in 1497 made the Finnish border a source of contention, yet closer ties were pursued through discussions about a dynastic marriage. Frequent Danish embassies were sent to Russia in the early years of the sixteenth century, at which time Danish merchants also began to visit the Neva estuary and Ivangorod. A Russian embassy attended the coronation of Christian II in 1514 and negotiated a new treaty, again for the purpose of bringing about a Russian attack on Sweden.
Relations began to deteriorate in the second half of the sixteenth century due to Danish interest in Livonia during the Livonian War and intensifying border disputes between northern Norway and Russia. However, the Moscow treaty of 1562 recognized the Danish acquisition of the island of ?sel/Saaremaa off the Estonian coast in 1559. In 1569 Duke Magnus was made the administrator of Russian Livonia and married with Ivan IV’s niece, although the couple subsequently was forced to flee to Poland. Further problems were created by Danish efforts to control and tax Western European shipping with Russia’s Arctic Sea coast. Nonetheless, Boris Godunov in 1602 proposed a marriage between his daughter and the Danish Prince Hans who, however, died in Moscow soon after his arrival.
Danish economic interests in northern Russia increased after the establishment of the Romanov regime, and shipping on a fairly modest scale was almost annual. A diplomatic crisis ensued from Christian IV’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to set up a special company for illegal direct trade with the fur-rich areas to the east of Arkhangelsk. The Danish navy even raided Kola in 1623. The Danes further rejected overtures for a dynastic marriage in the early 1620s. Relations soon warmed again during Danish involvement in the Thirty Years’ War, and the Muscovite government provided grain as a subsidy from 1627 to 1633. The most serious effort at linking the Danish and Russian ruling families came between 1643 and 1645 when Prince Valdemar Christian was to be married with Tsarevna Irina Mikhailovna. However, differences over relations with Sweden and the refusal of Valdemar to convert to Orthodox ultimately scuttled the project. Attempts to contain Sweden again led to a rapprochement in the 1650s. The same considerations prompted Denmark to join Peter’s anti-Swedish alliance to participate-with limited success-in the Great Northern War in 1700. Peter I visited Denmark in 1716 for discussions about a planned reconquest of southern Sweden. Relations deteriorated when the plans remained on paper and the Danes rejected a royal marriage proposal.
The Russian marriage-based alliance in 1721 with the ducal house of Gottorp-an independent-minded Danish vassal-evolved into a lasting source of tension between the two countries, especially under the long reign of Elizabeth Petrovna, who appointed the Gottorpian future Peter III as her successor. Open warfare between the two countries was only averted by Catherine II’s coup d’?tat. During her reign, Denmark became a key link in Nikita Panin’s Northern system. An alliance was established in 1773, and the end of the century saw a sharp increase in Danish-Russian commerce, making Russia one of Denmark’s leading trade partners. Tsar Pavel’s desire to seek Swedish support against England constituted the main threat to this alliance.
Denmark reacted to the rise of Napoleon by adopting a neutral position and refused to join in offensive action in northern Germany, fearing the safety of its possessions. Russia diplomatically supported Denmark against English aggression, but Swedish willingness to support Russia in return for the annexation of Norway from Denmark led to a cooling of Danish-Russian relations. Denmark was eventually forced to join the anti-French coalition and to accept the loss of Norway in 1814. Russian efforts to compensate Denmark ultimately resulted only in the acquisition of the small northern German city of Lauenburg.
Political relations in the nineteenth century were to a significant degree driven by a Russian desire to ensure free access to the Baltic through the Danish Sound and to balance off Sweden and Denmark against each other. The rise of Scandinavism was often associated with anti-Russian sentiment, which the government sought to control. In 1849,
DEPORTATIONS
Russia put pressure on Prussia to end an occupation of Jutland in order to prevent a Scandinavian alliance. The Russians considered various ultimately unsuccessful plans to neutralize Denmark toward the end of the century. Relations in the second half of the century benefited from a close relationship between the two royal families. Nicholas I in 1852 gave up the Russian claim on Gottorp and a dynastic marriage between Christian IX’s daughter and the future Alexander III in 1866. The tsar and his family visited Denmark at least once a year. Russia also sup
ported Denmark against Germany after 1864, following the loss of Schleswig-Holstein and Lauenburg to Prussia and Austria.
Economic ties between the two countries acquired a new dimension with growth in Danish investment and entrepreneurship starting in the late nineteenth century. By 1917, Danish direct investment in Russia was comparable to the kingdom’s annual budget. The Danes were especially active in the agricultural and food sector. A Dane-Carl Andreas Koefoed-was one of the driving forces behind the Stolypin reforms. Russia was Denmark’s third or fourth most important trade partners and accounted for one-tenth of total Danish imports. Before World War I, Russia was the leading export market for Danish industry.
Following unsuccessful efforts to gain compensation for economic losses in connection with the Bolshevik Revolution, Denmark recognized the Soviet regime in 1923. However, a Bolshevik propaganda representation had operated in Copenhagen already in 1918 and 1919. Danish observance of political neutrality made relations with the communist regime relatively problem-free, in spite of Soviet sponsorship of the Danish Communist Party (DCP) and other revolutionary organizations. The DCP, however, remained throughout a relatively marginal factor in Danish internal politics. Adhering to its neutrality Denmark in 1939 refused to support the expulsion of the Soviets from the League of Nations and refused to join a Nordic defensive alliance thereafter.
The Red Army occupied the Island of Bornholm in 1945 with a view to ensuring free access to the Baltic. The British promise not to continue with the occupation of Denmark led to a Russian departure in 1946. The postwar government, committed to neutrality, sought to acquire a role as a bridge-builder between the East and the West. However, following Norwegian NATO accession in 1949, Denmark followed suit to face a virulent Soviet reaction. The Soviets sought to foster forces opposed to Danish NATO membership and advocated the neutralization of Scandinavia or, at least, guarantees against the stationing of nuclear weapons there. A gradual rapprochement began under Nikita Khrushchev, but the Brezhnev regime sought to convince Denmark of the new geopolitical realities created by its active armament campaign. The Soviets were particularly enthusiastic about the emergence of a grassroots peace movement in the 1980s, which was viewed as a way of weakening Danish-U.S. ties. The ruling Social Democrats in Denmark became more favorable to a nuclear-free Scandinavia by the mid-1980s, and relations were fairly cordial thereafter, fully normalized after the collapse of the Soviet Union. See also: GREAT NORTHERN WAR; NORWAY, RELATIONS WITH; SWEDEN, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Kirby, David. (1990). Northern Europe in the Early Modern Period: The Baltic World, 1492-1772. London: Longman. Kirby, David. (1995). The Baltic World, 1772-1993: Europe’s Northern Periphery in an Age of Change. London: Longman. Lauring, Palle. (1995). A History of Denmark, 3rd ed. Copenhagen: H?st.
JARMO T. KOTILAINE
DEPORTATIONS
The term deportation does not have an exact Russian equivalent (vyselenie is the most common, with deportatsiya also coming into use in the twentieth century). The term refers to the forced removal of a defined group from a certain territory. The largest cases of mass deportation occurred during the two world wars and were linked in many ways to the practices of ethnic cleansing and nationalist politics that swept through Europe during the dark years of the first half of the century.
But the practice can also be traced to precedents in earlier Russian history. Some of the best-known early attempts to use deportation as an official policy involved repressions of elites after conquest of new regions or in the aftermath of rebellions. After the conquest of Novgorod in the late fifteenth century, the Prince of Muscovy expropriated the
DEPORTATIONS
Major Ethnic Deportations, 1937-1944 Nationality Number Deported Date of Deportation
Place of Resettlement Koreans
171,781
8/21/37-10/25/37
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan Finns
89,000
8/31/41-9/7/41
Kazakhstan Germans
749,613
9/3/41-10/15/41
Kazakhstan, Siberia Kalmyks
93,139
12/28/43-12/29/43
Siberia, Kazakhstan Karachais
69,267
11/6/43
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan Chechens
387,229
2/23/44-2/29/44
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan Ingush
91,250
2/23/44-2/29/44
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan Balkars
37,713
3/8/44-3/9/44
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan Crimean
Tatars
183,155
5/18/44-5/20/44
Uzbekistan, Molotov Crimean
Greeks
15,040
6/27/44-6/28/44
Uzbekistan, Mari ASSR Meskhetian Turks,
Kurds, and
Khemshils
94,955
5/11/44-11/26/44
Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan Total
1,982,142
SOURCE: Based on Pohl, J. Otto. (1999). Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937-1949. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. lands of leading boyars and forcibly took them to Moscow. When Russia conquered the Crimea, there was a mass exodus of Tatars in which the role of Russian officials remains in dispute among historians. During the conquest of the Caucasus in the nineteenth century, the regime turned to extremely violent methods of driving the entire population from given regions, and encouraged mass emigrations of Adygy, Nogai, and other predominantly Muslim and Turkic groups. In the aftermath of both the 1831 and 1861 rebellions the authorities confiscated estates and deported thousands of Polish gentry it accused of participating to Siberia and the Caucasus.
Another important precedent for the twentieth-century deportations was the Russian punitive system, which relied heavily upon the exile of individuals to Siberia and other locations and thereby created a template for officials to apply to entire groups in extraordinary circumstances. Likewise, the myriad of regulations on Jewish rights of residence resulted in a constant stream of forced expulsions of Jews from areas declared off-limits, including the mass expulsion of Jews from Moscow in 1891-1892.
Important as these precedents were, the mass deportations of the period from 1914 to 1945 stand in a category apart. The first major deportations of this period occurred during World War I. In the first months of the war, the regime interned enemy citizen males to prevent them from departing the country to serve in enemy armies. By the end of 1915, the regime had expanded these operations to include large numbers of women, children, and elderly, and by 1917, over a quarter million enemy citizens had been deported to the Russian interior. In a series of other operations, the army extended the mass deportations to Russian subjects. The largest of these operations resulted in the deportation of roughly 300,000 Germans and the expulsion of a half million Jews from areas near the front. In addition to these groups, ten thousand Crimean Tatars and several thousand Adzhars, Laz, gypsies, and others were swept up in the operations.
The motives and explanations for these operations include many different variables, of which two stand out. First were security concerns: The deported groups were accused of disloyalty or potential disloyalty if allowed to fall under enemy occupation. The second was economic nationalism. Demands among local populations to expropriate the lands and businesses of the foreigners, Germans, and Jews resonated with more general campaigns led by Russians during the war to nationalize and nativize the economy. As the war dragged on, security motives tended to give way to the nationalist ones. This was reflected in a series of administrative and legal decisions in 1915 that effectively ensured that the ownership of properties of deported groups would be permanently transferred to Russians, to other favored nationalities, or to the state.
DEPORTATIONS UNDER THE BOLSHEVIKS
After 1917, the Bolshevik regime attempted to use deportation to achieve revolutionary aims. The practice of deporting criminals to Siberia greatly e
xpanded, and several campaigns resulted in attempts to deport entire social population categories. Most dramatic was the 1919-1920 “decossackiza-tion” campaign during the civil war, and the
DEPORTATIONS
Russian Jews gather at the Baltic Railway Station in St. Petersburg, bound for the Pale of Settlement. © BETTMANN/CORBIS 1930-1933 deportation of kulaks (in theory, the relatively affluent peasants in each village).
The next wave of mass deportations was closely linked to World War II, and the international tensions that preceded its outbreak. Fears of foreign influence, hostility toward foreign capitalist states, and insecurity about the loyalty of certain ethnic groups that straddled the border led the Bolsheviks to turn to mass ethnic deportations. Already in 1934, operations to clear the border regions of “unreliable elements” began with a deportations of Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Germans, and Poles from Leningrad, which was considered to be a strategic border city. In February and March 1935, authorities deported more than 40,000 “unreli-ables” (mostly ethnic Germans and Poles) from Ukrainian border regions. This was the first of a series of mass deportations from border areas, including about 30,000 Finns sent from the Leningrad border regions in 1936 and 170,000 Koreans deported from the Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The latter was the first ethnic cleansing of an entire nationality.
During the Great Purge of 1937-1938, deportation to the Siberian camps was a major part of the operations, which targeted former kulaks, criminals, “anti-Soviet elements,” and in a separate set of “national operations,” a series of ethnic groups, including: Koreans, Poles, Germans, Greeks, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Afghans, and Iranians. In all, according to Terry Martin (1998, p. 858), approximately 800,000 individuals were arrested, deported, or executed in the national operations from 1935 to 1938. The regime seems to have been motivated in this wave of peacetime mass ethnic deportations by an attempt to secure the border zones in preparation for war, and by the failure of its attempt to spread revolution beyond the Soviet Union by granting wide cultural autonomy and support to ethnic groups that were divided by the Soviet
