Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 9 – In the 1990s, many
clever Russians observed that democratization [demokratizatiya] is to democracy [demokratiya] what a water pipe [kanal]
is to sewage lines [kanalizatsiya],
things ostensibly and superficially similar but in fact radically different in
their content and meaning.
Now, Dmitry Temerev, a Don Cossack,
has employed the same analogy to distinguish between Putin’s thugs who claimed
to be “Cossacks” and real Cossacks. “The Cossacks are a people who live on the
historical territories and after three waves of genocide have been made into a
national minority” (facebook.com/avraham.shmulevich/posts/10215865902781409).
The people who joined the
state-organized thugs who attacked the demonstrators on Saturday and whom Putin
and his followers insist on calling “Cossacks” are nothing more than the dregs of
society who have gone to stores, purchased Cossack regalia and imagined that by
putting on such clothes and using whips they become Cossacks.
“Between these two categories of
citizens of the Russian Federation, there is no connection,” Temerev says. And
Putinist propaganda about the Cossacks is simply false: the Cossacks did not
always and everywhere serve the Russian state; instead, they fought for
independence and many fled the country in the face of Soviet genocide.
After the Russian state conquered
the Cossacks of the Don in 1708, Russian forces killed approximately half of
all the Don Cossacks and exiled others, hardly an indication that the Cossacks
were loyalists. A century later they
were forcibly enrolled as a social stratum in the tsarist system. They remained
so for 82 years, “not the most significant period” of their history.
Following the Bolshevik revolution,
the Cossacks sought to recreate their own state, cooperated in part with the
White forces, and were the victims of the first Soviet-era genocide when Lenin
decreed that they were to be destroyed.
The second wave of such destruction occurred “under the cover of
collectivization,” Temerev continues.
Not surprisingly, some Cossacks
fought for the Germans during World War II, while others fought in the ranks of
the Red Army. But by the end of that conflict, they had been reduced to a
shadow of their former selves, continued to be discriminated against, and
looked forward to a day when they could recover.
Unfortunately, even as the genuine
Cossacks sought to recover their national patrimony, others in society began to
identify as Cossacks even though they shared none of the past. That includes
the pseudo-Cossacks Putin has used against the demonstrators. As real Cossacks
know, there was never such an organization as the Moscow Cossacks before 1991.
The modern history of Russian Cossackry
is even more ramified than Temerev outlines.
Historian Nikolay Syromyatnikov reports that the 1897 all-Russian census
counted approximately three million Cossacks who were organized into 11 Cossack
hosts. They formed 2.3 percent of the empire’s population (russian7.ru/post/kazachi-voyska-kotorye-bolshe-vsego-p/).
By the time of the
revolution, their numbers had grown to an estimated four to six million
organized not in 11 but 13 hosts from European Russia to the Pacific. During
the Civil War, some tried to restore a Cossack state; others fought for the Whites;
and still others fought for the Reds despite the latter’s suspiciousness and
then outright antagonism.
The
Bolsheviks ordered that not only Cossacks who served in the White Armies were
to be executed when captured but that all of their family members, including
women and children, were to be killed as well and that all of their property
was to be confiscated and distributed to the Russian peasantry.
More than
half of the Don and Urals Cossack hosts were destroyed; other hosts saw their
populations decline by 20 percent or more.
At the end of the Civil War, an estimated 300,000 Cossacks emigrated;
and by the end of the 1920s, some 200,000 more of them had left the Soviet
Union.
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