The peasant uprising in the Orsky district (Orenburg Province) began in November 1920 as a protest against Bolshevik grain requisitioning during the Civil War. The rebels took over local district centres and in early January 1921 the uprising spread into Bashkiria (Bashkortostan) where the centre of activity was the village of Zilair, then called Preobrazhenskoe.
That month the uprising was crushed by units of the Red Army and those who had taken part were shot. One site of execution was on the outskirts of the village. In 2011 a monument to the executed was erected there.
NOTE The article below draws a parallel with Kronstadt, the violently-suppressed March 1921 rebellion by sailors at the base of the Baltic Fleet not far from Petrograd / St Petersburg.
A Book in Remembrance of the Victims of Political Repression in the Bashkortostan Republic (7 vols, 1997-2011) contains over 50,000 biographical entries. Its records for those shot (6,014), mainly but not exclusively during the Great Terror (1937-1938), go back to 1918 but do not seem to include Zilair.
| State of burials | Area | Boundaries |
|---|---|---|
|
have not survived
|
not measured
|
not delineated
|
[ original texts and hyperlinks ]
R. Vostrikova and V. Nikitin, “Kronstadt in the Kuvandyk district”, South Urals (Orenburg), 21 & 26 January 2011
Remembrance Day, 10 December 2016 [retrieved 26 May 2022]
