Two Russian Military Innovations at End of Imperial Period Echo Today

Paul Goble

            Staunton, November 1 – Two military innovations at the end of the Russian imperial period – the creation of the Caucasus Native Cavalry Division and discussions about creating Cossack hosts in the Middle East -- are attracting attention, possibly because of the ways in which they may be informing Russian thinking about future possibilities.

            Yesterday, a meeting was held in Moscow to mark the 105^th anniversary of the Caucasus Native Cavalry Division. Consisting of soldiers drawn from Caucasus peoples, it was one of the most effective fighting forces and one of the least affected by revolutionary deterioration in 1917 (ingushetia.ru/news/v_moskve_proshel_vecher_posvyashchennyy_105_letiyu_dikoy_divizii/).

            What made the Savage Division unique was that its subordinate units were made up of men of the same nationality, something that contributed to unit cohesion and effectiveness. (For background, see vestnikkavkaza.net/articles/society/62369.html). Not surprisingly, as the share of non-Russians in the Russian army has risen, some have looked back to this precedent.

            The most prominent case involved Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov who in May 2018 called for the restoration of the Savage Division (jamestown.org/program/chechnyas-kadyrov-wants-to-revive-tsarist-era-savage-division/). What makes this week’s meeting intriguing is that it attracted not only Chechens and officials but representatives of other Caucasus nations as well.

            Further, in the course of the meeting, Zurab Tsereteli, president of the Russian Academy of Sciences and someone with close ties to the current regime in Moscow, called for the creation of a special order for those who promote knowledge about and thus the survival of traditions from the Caucasus, an indication that more than just those assembled are thinking about this.

            The second development involves suggestions by some Armenian historians that the Russian Empire was planning to establish Cossack units in portions of the Ottoman Empire that Russian forces had occupied during World War I and to that end was prepared to provoke conflicts among the Turks, Armenians and Kurds living there to clear space for them.

            They cite an April 1915 order by Count Vorontsov-Dashkov, commander of Russia’s Caucasus Army to the effect that Russian forces must clear areas that might eventually become part of the Russian Empire of their inhabitants and bring in Cossacks from the Kuban and Don to hold them (karabai96.livejournal.com/155624.html).

            According to a contemporaneous Armenian historian, Arakel Babkhanyan (1860-1932), this new force would be created “in the basin of the Eastern Euphrates and be called the Euphrates Cossacks.”  Given that the Russian state had often used Cossacks as its avantgarde in expanding its territory, the idea seems fully plausible although nothing came of it.

            Remarkably, there are precedents for this: In 1888, a group of Cossacks formed a short-lived colony in Africa. It named its settlement in what is now Djibouti “New Moscow,” but after French objections, the Russian government disowned it and the Cossack colony lasted less than a month (rferl.org/a/africa-sagallo-russian-colony/26934711.html).

            And in 1896, a Russian Cossack officer organized Ethiopian forces, using other Cossacks to train them to fight the Italians who were seeking to occupy that country. (On this little-known episode, see A. K. Bulatovich, Ethiopia Through Russian Eyes: Country in Transition, 1896-1898 (Trenton, 2000).

            Both these long-ago developments and the possibility that Moscow might draw on them again have provoked online discussions about the possibility that Cossacks “could carve out independent states outside the Russian empire” (alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/could-cossacks-carve-out-independant-states-outside-the-russian-empire.448110/).