Posted on 12/14/2003 5:25:05 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
As a wave of terror attacks sweeps the country, Russia's warrior caste, the Cossacks, are reviving their role as guardians of the south, reports Tom Parfitt in Moscow
Eyes ablaze, Oleg Tishenko runs a finger down the pitted blade of a 19th-century sabre.
"We are ready to fulfil our historic duty," he says, making a slash through the air. "We have never been afraid of anyone. It is genetically impossible for a Cossack to experience fear. We must protect the borders of the motherland."
Here on Russia's fringe in the Caucasus, a rebirth is taking place. Under threat from Chechen terrorists, Russia has called on its "untamed horsemen" - the Cossacks - to resurrect their historic role as defenders of its southern frontier.
Once members of the most feared fighting force in the world, the Cossacks' very survival was threatened after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. Many sided with the White Army and were driven into exile. Suppressed in the Soviet era, they quietly began a revival in the early 1990s.
Now, worried by the rising number of terrorist strikes near Chechnya, President Vladimir Putin is backing a new law that will formalise the Cossacks' security role.
Last week, the interior ministry drafted more than 3,000 Cossacks to maintain security during parliamentary elections in Stavropol, which borders Chechnya. It followed the suicide bombing of a train in the region, in which 44 people were killed, two days before the poll. A second explosion in Moscow on Tuesday left six dead.
The armed Cossacks, these days riding in Lada cars with blacked-out windows rather than on white chargers, patrolled streets, polling booths and railway stations. For many, their presence was a welcome boost to Russia's hapless police force, the "militsiya" - although some ethnic minority groups were nervous of the roaming units.
There are more than 600,000 registered Cossacks in Russia, many descendants of the mustachioed warriors of the Steppes who lived for centuries in semi-autonomous clans between the Black and Caspian seas. They have preserved a fierce pride in their fighting prowess and strong Orthodox faith.
About 20,000 serve in the armed forces, but thousands more are members of loosely defined defence units and volunteer patrols. "What we need is official status," said Mr Tishenko, 38, a sotnik (lieutenant) who lives at Novopavlovsk, a small town 900 miles south of Moscow. "That would bring us funding, pensions and support for our families."
The government is backing his calls. Boris Gryzlov, the interior minister, announced last month that new legislation to strengthen the Cossacks' security role would be pushed through the State Duma by autumn next year. "The potential of Cossacks who have always served Russia faithfully must be fully used by the state," he said.
Mr Tishenko's sabre, or shashka, is a museum piece, but the town's Cossack headquarters is geared up for active service. The Cossack community is setting up a security firm and patrols its land on horseback.
Chechnya, from where militants launch terrorist attacks on the rest of Russia, is just a few miles down the road. "The authorities need more vigilance to catch the Chechen infiltrators," said Mr Tishenko. "We can provide that."
Further north in Mineralniye Vodi, ataman (chieftain) Oleg Gubenko greets visitors at a desk surrounded by Orthodox icons and a portrait of Tsar Nicholas I. Mr Gubenko, a descendant of the legendary Zaporozhian Cossacks who wrote a mocking letter to the Turkish Sultan in the 17th century calling him "a swine's snout and a mare's backside", was one of a few elite troops drafted into a new Cossack battalion in the Russian Army in 1996.
The battalion lasted only a few months after a fierce but controversial campaign in Chechnya. "That was a high point for us," said Mr Gubenko, 36. He dismissed suggestions that creating purely Cossack units could inflame tensions among the patchwork of Russia's Caucasian nations, many of them Muslims.
"Chechens, Dagestanis, Ingush, Cherkessians - we've lived with them all and absorbed their traditions. We respect the mountain peoples and they respect us."
Others remain sceptical that the Cossacks can suppress the fondness for pogroms and drunken rampages that led Napoleon to call them "a disgrace to the human species". During the first international Cossack congress in Novocherkassk earlier this year, for example, one angry ataman branded immigrants in southern Russia "weeds and locusts", saying it was necessary "to jump in and scare them a bit".
Yet at the Cossack Cadet School in Stavropol, new recruits are taught to be patriotic, not racist. Founded last year, the school has 600 pupils - almost 200 of them girls - aged 11 to 17.
Under glowering portraits of Russia's famous generals, the pupils, all Cossacks, learn the history of their ancestors.
"We have a tradition of protecting the motherland," said Aleksei Milaslavskiy, 16. "Whatever the country asks of us, we must do it."
Who are the Cossacks? Are they a people, a party, a military group? Are they part and parcel of the Russian people, or are they an independent nation, entitled to recognition as such?
Not long ago a traffic officer in Brooklyn gave a ticket to an offending motorist. As usual, the latter was full of indignation and, to express his disdain, called the officer a Cossack. The patrolman hauled the motorist into traffic court, where the judge immediately passed the following, sentence: "Present your apology to the officer for calling him a Cossack and pay a fine of five dollars for the traffic violation; otherwise — ten days in jail. To this judge and to the many others who have had no opportunity of learning about the Cossacks, the author dedicates this article.
It is doubtful if anyone could be found who doesn't think he knows something about the Cossacks. But it is just as doubtful if one could find two persons, not themselves Cossacks, whose conception about them is the same. The reason for such divergent views is that they are based on different sources of information, on different historical periods and events, on biased approaches and the prejudiced opinions of those who by chance have learned about one narrow phase or a short period of Cossack life.
Some people, such as the French, remember the Cossacks as the superb cavalry of the Russian Emperor, the conquerors of Napoleon, the unique troops who proved to be so unexpectedly kind and chivalrous during their occupation of Paris in 1814.
The Chinese still think of the Cossacks as the vanguard of the Russians, the horsemen who "carried the borders of the Russian Empire on the pommels of their saddles.
Military men throughout the world admire the Cossacks for their high "esprit de corps, for their valor, tenacity and habit of always performing acts beyond the call of duty, of always reaching for the impossible.
Students of the Imperial Period of Russia admire the Cossacks for their part in establishing the House of Romanoff as the rulers of Russia. On the other hand, Cossack leaders such as Razin and Pugachov were the patron saints of the liberals and revolutionists who fought against the Romanoffs,
To geographers the Cossacks are the intrepid explorers and discoverers who opened to civilization the vastness of Northern Asia, who discovered Kamchatka and the Bering Strait, who were the first to cross, that strait in modern times, who made the first permanent settlements in Alaska and along the West Coast of the North American continent, penetrating and establishing forts and settlements as far south as the present city of San Francisco.
Russian schoolboys of pre-revolutionary Russia learned about the Cossacks as the frontiersmen of the Russia State, who conquered and presented Siberia to the Czar of Russia and opened this vast land for subsequent colonization; to that schoolboy the Cossacks were for centuries protectors of the remote and long land frontier of Russia. To his counterpart of today, the schoolboy in the Soviet Union, the Cossacks are presented as class enemies of the true Bolsheviks, as the people who refused to accept the doctrines of Communism and the so-called benefits of the Soviet State and who, because of their "backwardness and stubbornness," had to be liquidated one and all.
Descendants of political refugees from the Czarist regime picture Cossacks as the trusted guardians of the Czars, brutal "gendarmes" too often employed by the Imperial Government in the suppression of popular protests, revolts and manifestations of a liberal character. For them the Cossacks were a military caste, part of the Russian people, and not the very best part either.
Immediate neighbors of the Cossacks, who were in a position to learn about the Cossacks at first hand by personal observation, knew them for their loyalty and patriotism, their eternal struggle for freedom, their heroic stand against Bolshevist aggression and tyranny, their free and easy way of living, and, finally, for their passionate love for their Cossack land. To them the Cossacks were a separate people, and their land the refuge for the oppressed.
To the Cossacks themselves there has never been any question as to their identity. They have their own national history, their own way of life, their traditions and usages, their particular linguistic originality, the proud knowledge of their part in shaping the destiny of humanity, and the inner consciousness that they are a separate ethnic and social group. Yet, at the same time, with a few fringe exceptions, the solid core of the Cossacks do not conceive of existing outside the Commonwealth of Peoples who in pre-revolutionary times composed the Russian Empire. The fringes are, on one hand, a very small group of Cossacks, for the most part former generals and high officials under the Czars, who deny a separate existence to the Cossacks and consider them just an odd and picturesque part of the Russian Army; at the other extreme is also a small, but highly vocal group of Cossacks, primarily of the younger generation, who claim that the Russians have always been the oppressors of the Cossacks, and that in the future all Cossacks shall and will live under the banner of the free and independent nation "Kazakia."
Although the author realizes the utter impossibility of giving in a few words a comprehensive history of the Cossacks., a description of their present social, political and economic situation, and the reasons and motives for their aspirations and claims to recognition, the author, himself a Cossack, presents the Cossacks to the general public as they see themselves, hoping in this brief sktech to correct some of the more common misconceptions about them.
I wonder if Russia would send us some Cossacks to protect our southern frontier?
Not quite, actually Cossak from central Ukraine to east Siberia.
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