Civil war and terror
Winter 1920–21
The Crimean massacre
After the last large White army evacuated, registration became a death list.
Wrangel left Crimea in November 1920. Posters and orders told remaining officers and officials to register, and implied that those who had not “drenched their hands in blood” would be spared. Rosalia Zemlyachka and Béla Kun directed a wave of shootings that went on for months.
Counts vary from the low tens of thousands upward. The uncertainty is real and is not a reason to teach the event as a rumor. It is the civil war’s epilogue: terror after the front had moved on, against people who had complied with a promise.
Where to check it · Histories of the end of the civil war by Mawdsley and others; émigré commission material; post-Soviet archival reporting on Crimea.