Putin Regime’s Use of Its Cossacks Blurs the Limits of Legality and Sets Cossacks Against Cossacks

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 29 – The Putin regime’s use of its officially registered Cossacks as supplements to law enforcement units in the North Caucasus and elsewhere is blurring the division between what is legal and what is not and further dividing the registered Cossacks from unregistered ones, Sergey Romanov, a rights activist in Krasnodar, says.

            Over the last two decades, the Putin regime has sought to rope in Cossacks who are willing to support the regime in various ways such as serving as aides to police especially when it comes to crowd control and isolate the much larger share of Cossacks in Russia who refuse to follow the Kremlin’s line (jamestown.org/program/cossackia-no-longer-an-impossible-dream/).

            These divisions are having three consequences. First, the use of the Cossacks as paralegal operatives who have some but not all the powers of the police is blurring the line between what is legal and what is not, according to the rights activist in Krasnodar (kavkazr.com/a/31326674.html).

            Second, it is deepening the divide between the “registered” Cossacks and the independent ones, often as a result of cases in which independent Cossacks complain against violations of their rights and those of Russians by “registered” ones, a development that reduces the likelihood of any future expansion of the registered Cossacks or a union of the two.

            And third, this division has the effect of complicating Russian policy regarding the Cossacks because what it hopes to achieve with its pocket, “registered” Cossacks is compromising its ability to influence the unregistered Cossacks and leading to the further radicalization of that three to five million strong nation.

            This division between the two kinds of Cossacks is already creating serious problems in Ukraine as well, where the authorities have tried to copy the Russian approach in order to generate support but have found themselves in the same dilemma Moscow now faces (jamestown.org/program/cossack-divisions-now-threaten-kyiv-the-way-they-already-do-moscow/).

            And this division is especially critical to the Russian authorities now because the 2020 census now scheduled for this October will allow people to identify as Cossacks, something unregistered Cossack groups are promoting and that Moscow opposes because it will reduce the number of ethnic Russians still further (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2020/01/a-century-after-soviets-began-genocide.html).

            The Russian authorities are fighting back by promoting multiple Cossack identities, drawing on the history of the 13 Cossack hosts of tsarist times, and by promoting the idea that Cossacks should identify themselves as both Cossack and Russian, something that will allow the authorities to decide how many of them there are (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/04/to-keep-number-of-cossacks-from-growing.html).

            How well these official efforts work remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: those Cossacks who see themselves as an independent nation unprepared to do the Kremlin’s dirty work almost certainly will view any census results the government releases as fraudulent – and that too will strengthen Cossack identity among the unregistered kind.