![]() ![]() About the same number could legitimately now claim to be Cossacks. At their height, in the late 19th century, the Cossack people numbered 2.5 million, with 300,000 men fit to bear arms. They are often depicted in Russian literature as swashbuckling pioneers and defenders of the faith. (Their name derives from the Russian word "kazak," which in turn derives from a Turkic word meaning wandering soldier or freebooter, and they use the Tatar word for chief, "ataman.") They were superb horsemen and fighters whose education in the arts of war began at the age of 3. The first Cossacks were probably renegade Tatar warriors, descendants of the Mongols who swept through Asia Minor and Russia in the mid-13th century. And yet, in a time of great instability and little or no authority, many Russians welcome the Cossacks as defenders of traditional values and enforcers of law and order. Their re-emergence horrifies people who remember family tales of Cossack terror. If Czar Nicholas were sitting there, I would take the oath and devote my life to him and to the motherland." "We want the Cossacks to defend Russia, first of all. "We are reviving the Cossack way of life," says Sergei, a 40-year-old Cossack who refuses to give his last name. Military units are being trained and Cossacks have already fought in Moldova and Nagorno-Karabakh they are now aiding Abkhazian separatists in Georgia. Grandpa's medals are being polished and Cossack schools established. The reappearance dates from a November 1990 rally in Novocherkassk, when Cossack leaders felt sufficiently emboldened by glasnost to emerge from 50 years underground.ĭusty uniforms have come out of closets. ![]() Now, they are appearing once again in Russia, particularly in the towns along the southern reaches of the Don River around Novocherkassk, the old Cossack heartland. Before the Revolution, they had become infamous as the nail in the czarist boot, putting down peasant and worker uprisings and leading pogroms against the Jews and other minorities. When last seen, they were being obliterated in the bloody Soviet collectivization drives of the 1930's a million of them died. Those fearsome horsemen once again stalk the Russian steppes, whips stashed in their boots and swords tucked in their belts, defending God and country and longing for the restoration of the Romanov dynasty. The Cossacks are coming, straight out of some 19th-century nightmare. ![]()
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