User:Nikola Smolenski/cossacks

A Brief History of the Kozaks Centuries ago the forefathers of the present day Zaporojni Kozaks settled on the lower bends of the river Dnieper, sandwiched between Russia, Poland and the Tartars of the Crimea while the forefathers of Don Kozaks settled in the steppes of the southeastern corner of Europe, bordering on the Black Sea and the Caucasian Mountains on the south, the Caspian Sea and the river Volga on the east, the forests of the Great Russian Plain on the north and the river Dniester on the west. Since the dawn of civilization these steppes had been crossed again and again by the peoples of the Great Migration. The original Kozaks were the product of an intermixture of all these peoples with the previous settlers of the Slavic race. Byzantine writers of the Tenth Century described the Kozaks as a separate people who lived on the river Don, and called them "the brave and strong people." In old Russian chronicles they were similarly described for the first time in 1261. The Don Kozaks fought on the side of the Russian Grand Duke Dimitry against the Tartars in 1380. In all the records of that period the Kozaks were described as a series of independent communities, loosely bound into larger units of a military character, entirely separate from the Russian State. The Russian historian Karamzin wrote: "Where the Kozaks came from cannot be said with certainty, but, in any event, it [their State] existed prior to the Tartar invasion of 1223. These knights lived separately, without pledging allegiance to the Russians, the Poles or the Tartars." Their tribal units, organizations similar to Scottish clans, occupied the whole area between the rivers Dniester on the West and the Volga on the East.

At the head of each tribe was an Don Ataman, or Zaporojni Hetman, elected by the people; the people also elected, for a specifically limited term, the other administrative officers of the tribe: the judge, the scribe, the lesser officials, and even the clergy. Supreme legislative authority rested in the Tribal Assembly (the King, or the Rada). Executive powers were vested in the Ataman; at time of war he was the supreme commander in the field. In the absence of written laws, the Kozaks were governed by the "Kozak Traditions," the Common, unwritten law.

In the Sixteenth Century these numerous Kozak clans consolidated into two large republics: one, known as the Zaporojni, under the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, on the lower bends of the river Dnieper, sandwiched between Russia, Poland and the Tartars of the Crimea. The other republic was under the Russian Orthodox Church, called the Don Kozak State, on the river Don, separating the then weak Russian State from the Mongol and Tartar tribes, which were at that time vassals of the powerful Sultan of Turkey. Numerous Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Turkish and other historical documents of that period contain mentions of these two states, always referring to them as sovereign republics. For instance, in 1549 the famous Czar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible, replying to a request of the Turkish Sultan to stop the aggressive actions of the Don Kozaks, stated, "The Kozaks of the Don are not my subjects, and they go to war or live in peace without my knowledge." Ten years before that, in a reverse situation, when Czar Vassily the Third asked the Sultan to curb the Kozaks, the Sultan replied. "The Kozaks do not swear allegiance to me, and they live as they themselves please."

This was the period during which the expansion of Russia intensified and the consolidation of Poland took place. Both states were enforcing the feudal system which attached peasants to the land and made them the property of the nobles. This policy, coupled with the territorial expansion of these two states and their conquest of their weaker neighbors, created a condition in which all men who did not relish the idea of becoming somebody's slave, and all who valued personal freedom, fled to the southeast and found refuge in the land of the Kozaks where they could be free. All protests and ultimatums of the Czars and the Kings to return their subjects were of no avail; the Kozaks then coined their famous motto: "There is no extradition from the Don."

Incidentally, this exodus of freedom-loving people from medieval Russia to the land of the Kozaks is the foundation for the official Russian historians' assertion that Kozakdom originated in that period, and that the Kozaks were nothing more than the hordes of Russian peasants who had run away from their masters, the Russian boyars. On this ground some Russian politicians of the later Imperial period refused to recognize the Kozaks as separate and distinct from the Russians proper as an ethnical group. At the present moment, however, this theory is supported only by the most reactionary circles of the Russian emigration, who in this respect are in perfect accord with the Kremlin. All other historians and political leaders recognize that the Kozaks, as an independent ethnic and political entity, existed long before this exodus of the freedom loving element from Muskovite Russia and the Poland of the Nobles. It should be noted, in passing, that the very word "Kazak" (Kozak) means, in Tartar "The Freeman."

The two great Kozak States of that period, the Zaporojie and the Don, constituted unique military orders whose main raison d'etre was to protect the Eastern Catholic Churchs from Roman Catholicism and Mohammedanism. It can be truly said that but for the fanatical resistance of the Kozaks of Zaporojie, militant Roman Catholicism would have taken over and conquered the whole of Eastern Europe, while at the same time, unless the Don Kozaks had been in its way, Mohammedanism might have become the dominant religion everywhere east of Poland.

In the course of time the Kozaks grew in numbers and became a nation of professional soldiers; they established an endless chain of posts and settlements, protecting Russian towns and villages from the raids and invasions of the militant Mongol and Tartar tribes from the south and the east. The Kozaks knew that passive defense alone could not stop and prevent these raids, and they often carried the war to the enemy. Afoot and on their swift horses, and quite often in their crude boats, they raided the settlements and camps of the neighboring Tartars of Crimea and Astrakhan; they sacked border towns and fortresses of Polcfid; at times they joined with the Poles and Crimean Tartars and waged war against various Russian Principalities; they pillaged and burned the Black Sea ports of Turkey and those of Persia on the Caspian Sea. As an example of their daring and prowess, historians recite the exploits of a band of Zoporajni Kozaks who in the Sixteenth Century penetrated the Straits of the Bosphorus, crossed the Sea of Marmora, squeezed through the Dardanelles, sailed the long Mediterranean Sea, captured the Spanish city of Saragossa, and held it against all comers for a full two years. Again, in 1696, the Don Kozaks, sailing the Sea of Azov in their flimsy rowboats, in the presence of the Russian Czar Peter the Great, met and destroyed the powerful Turkish fleet. Similarly, though much later, in 1828 the Kozaks of Zaporojie, in the war of Russia against Turkey, sailed the Black Sea in their light boats (they called them "chaikes," the seagulls) and took by assault the powerful Turkish fortress Brailov.

As mentioned before, during the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries the principal role of the Kozaks consisted of the protection of Russia and, occasionally, of Poland from the aggressive Mohammedan peoples. The next, the Seventeenth Century, was for them an era of colonization when the frontiers of Russia were moved southward and eastward. Originally their penetration was at the expense of the Tartars, who lived along the northern shores of the Black Sea; then they crossed the Volga and built their towns and forts in the foothills of the Urals; then the famous Ataman of the Don Kozaks, Ermak, crossed the Urals, conquered the Tartars of Siberia and "presented" that vast land to Ivan the Terrible. At the same time other Kozaks moved southward and established the Terek clan on the northern slopes of the Caucasian mountains. Following Ermak, who was killed in a skirmish with the nomads, roving Don Kozak bands continued their penetration eastward, until finally they discovered and colonized for Russia the remote provinces of the Far East. This process of penetration and discovery, of scouting and acquisition, is similar to the "Westward Ho" expansion in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in America: the same wilderness, hostile natives, hardships, and the urge to get a little further and to see what lies beyond each successive hill. Just as the discovery of the American West was made possible through the toil and sweat and blood of the intrepid bands of frontiersmen, whose names were often unknown to the settlers who followed them, so the discovery and conquest of Siberia and the Far East called for superhuman efforts — to cross mile-wide rivers, to penetrate virgin taiga forests, always short of food and amunition. It should be noted that for the most part this drive toward the broad Pacific was on the Don Kozaks own initiative; all they got (and that infrequently) from the Russian power was some lead and powder. Yet every newly discovered land was taken by the Kozaks in the name of the Russian Czar and "presented" to him by the conquerors. Without written commissions these men served the Czar as his diplomats, settlers and border guards.

In this process of moving the borders of the Russia State outward, the to camp on frozen tundra, always facing resistance from the aborigines, Kozaks customarily set military posts and forts, garrisoned by a few wounded and crippled men and some friendly natives; soon they would get themselves wives from among the local belles; then a town would be built around the fort, roads be laid out to the nearest forts (stanitzas) ; and finally, a new clan (voisko) would be established, guarding the new subjects of the Russian Czar and protecting the new border. Eleven such clans existed in Russia before the revolution of 1917, strung from the Black Sea to the shores of the Pacific, "eleven pearls in the crown of the Russian Emperor."

It was in 1646 that the Kozaks came to the shores of the Pacific Ocean; two years later Dejnev, a Kozak ataman, discovered the Bering Strait; within a few years the Kozaks had crossed this ribbon of water and established settlements in Alaska, Kamchatka and all through the Pacific Northwest. Still later the Kozaks, moving southward toward China, took for Russia the rich Amur, Ussuri and Maritime Provinces., establishing contact with China, Korea and Japan.

In the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries the Kozak regiments were incorporated in the Russian Army, and as part of it fought against Napoleon and in the Crimea and four Turkish Wars. They bore the brunt of the struggle for conquest and possession of the Caucasus and Turkestan. When the major wars with the neighboring states were over and the borders of the Empire had become stabilized, the Kozaks were given another, not less arduous, task: to keep the new frontiers inviolate and to protect peaceful settlers from hostile actions by Turks, Persians, Afghans, Mongols and Manchus. Other Kozak regiments were strung along the borders separating Russia from her western neighbors, the Austrians and Germans. The exploits of the Kozaks in World War I are too well known to be dwelt upon here. It will suffice to state that the Don Kozaks were in the vanguard of the Russian Army when it was advancing and the same Kozaks were covering the army at the time of retreats. Notwithstanding such exposure, Kozak prisoners of war were so rare an event, that in 1914 and 1915 the few captured Kozaks were carried in special cages through distant Hungarian towns to show people that even Kozaks could be taken prisoners.

The Fight for Freedom and Liberty Important was the part the Don Kozaks played in building the Russian Empire. Just as important for them was their resistance and fight for freedom whenever that mighty empire attempted to curb the Kozak liberties.

To begin with, the original settlers, the aborigines of the "Wild Steppes," the region between the rivers Dnieper and Volga, were free men, owing allegiance to no one. With the exception of a short period in the Fourteenth Century when the Kozaks were compelled to recognize the sovereignty of Genghiz Khan and Tamerlane, the Kozaks were left to shift for themselves. They were too troublesome for any potentate to claim them for his own. This situation ended in the Sixteenth Century when the rivalry of the neighboring great states of Russia, Poland and Turkey pulled the Kozaks into the repeated wars between those nations. Each of these giants wanted to get the warlike Kozaks on its side, and each claimed them as subjects. There was another reason for the rulers of Russia and Poland to show interest in the internal affairs of the Kozaks. The end of the Seventeenth Century is known as a period of social upheaval in these states, particularly in Russia. It was a period when the serfs repeatedly revolted against their masters, the boyars and the nobles, the Church and the State. The Kozaks, who themselves never knew slavery, always supported and aided those who fought to remain free, or to throw off the yoke of slavery. By this time the State had become powerful and was strong enough to suppress every such revolt of the masses. Each time this happened the Kozaks had to pay with their lives for taking the side of the oppressed. The Czars on many occasions sent their troops to "bring order into the Kozak lands."

Still, up to the Seventeenth Century the Kozak states remained free, only at times and for short periods acknowledging the (agreed to an alliance with) sometimes of Poland and sometimes of Russia. But at that time the Kozaks of Zaporojie, forced by military expediance to ally themselves with a strong power, and finding themselves in a squeeze in the higher politics of Russia, Turkey and Poland, had to seek a firmer alliance with one of these powers, and their choice was the people of the same (similar) religious faith, Russia. Of their free will, with solemn pomp and circumstance, the Zoporajni Kozaks, together with the people of Eastern Ukraine, led by their Hetman Bogdan Chmielnitsky, recognized the sovereignty (agreed to an alliance with) of the Russian Czar Alexis. Ironically, starting with this ruler of Russia, all his successors promulgated and pursued a definite policy of reducing the Kozaks to the status of a military caste. The Kozaks revolted, and Czar Alexis was the first to send a military expedition of major size to crush the rebellion. Stenka Razin, the leader of that rebellion, was captured and executed on the famous Red Square in Moscow, and his men, who wanted to set all Russian serfs free, were dispersed. Czar Alexis' son, Peter the Great of Russia, had to deal with a similar uprising on the Don, when the Kozaks, under their Ataman Boulavin, protested against Peter's sending regiments of the regular army "to keep the Kozaks in check." The rebellion was crushed and Boulavin committed suicide; thousands of Kozaks were hanged; and scores of their towns wiped out. To put an end to the unreliable and freedom loving society of the Don Kozaks, Peter the Great officially annexed (declared sovereignty over) the Don to his Empire, and put an end to its existence as a free state. Later, during the very same years that the American colonists were revolting against their British rulers and establishing a new, free nation, the United States, the Russian Empress Catherine the Great took every vestige of freedom from the Kozaks of Ukraine, destroyed the Siech, the principal camp of the Zoporajni Kozaks and disbanded that Order of the Kozak Knights.

This condition continued down to our day: the central Russian government was bent on curbing the Kozak privileges and liberties, and adopted one after another measures forcing the Kozaks to the unenviable level of the Russian peasant (yet expecting at the same time the Kozaks to retain their unique military qualities!) ; while the Kozaks held to the shreds of their former independence and jealously guarded what was left of it.

The fast growing Russian state did not want the Kozaks as a separate people, nor as a series of independent clans. The Kozaks, with their war like characteristics, whose whole historical existence was a chain of wars and raids and penetrations into hostile areas, were needed as fighters only. Incorporated into the Russian army, the Don Kozaks were put on horses; and thus was created the best light cavalry in the world. These horsemen in many a battle bested the cream of the crop of the heavy cavalry of Frederick the Great; they outfought the famous troops of Marshal Murat and chased the remnants of Napoleon's Grand Army from Russia; they carried the battle flags of the Russian Army from the Seine to the Pacific, and from Finland to the gates of Constantinople.

From times of old the Kozaks were known for their loyalty and their military quality of obeying orders without questioning their merits. Taking advantage of these qualities, Russian rulers quite often employed the Don Kozaks for the suppression of revolutions and riots engineered by the liberal and revolutionary groups in Russia, and for crushing separatist movements in the recently annexed provinces.

The unenviable reputation of the Don Kozaks as brutal executioners in the Czar's service originated from this phase of their service in the Russian Army. Three Russian words — the pogrom, the knut (or nagaika) and the Kozak — entered hand in hand into the pages of Western dictionaries and school books. The inaccurate impression was created and universally accepted that the Kozaks conducted the pogroms and terrified the Jewish population of the western provinces of Russia.

Actually the pogroms were expressions of mob rule directed against the Polish Bourgeois Jews and carried out by the lowest, the most ignorant portion of the Russian peasantry and the scum of the big cities. They were usually engineered by the anti-semitic, ultra-conservative patriotic Russian societies, and encouraged, at least in some instances, by the government.

The pogroms often resulted in some loss of life and great destruction of property in the Polish Jewish sections of such big cities as Kishenev, Bielostok, and others. When the mob got out of hand and the instigators lost control over the rioters, the government officials would call the nearest army units to suppress the disorders and the pillage. Usually, the Kozaks would be the first to saddle, and gallop to the scene of the riot. In a short time, using their horse whips on the mob, they would disperse the drunken tramps and farm hands, and the pogrom would be over.

But the radicals and the revolutionary press in Russia and in the countries unfriendly to its government, constantly looking for something to undermine and damage the prestige and good name of the monarchy, would publish the next day a shocking account of the pogrom and the part the government had had in it. They would describe how the Kozaks were called on to protect the mob from the resisting Jews and how they horse-whipped every Jew who happened to be on the street.

The best proof of the actual role played by Kozaks in the pogroms is preserved to the present day in the archives of several Kozak regiments, in the form of beautifully inscribed and even more beautifully worded scrolls, presented to these regiments by organized Jewish communities, societies and synagogues, as tokens of their gratitude for the protection afforded by the Kozaks to the Jews in the suppression of pogroms.

A strange paradox should be noted in the make-up and employment of the Don Kozaks: on the one hand, they were constantly fighting for the retention of their liberties and privileges, while, on the other, they were blindly carrying out orders directed toward the suppression of the liberties of other peoples. Due to this situation, some Russian statesmen regarded the Don Kozaks as the most loyal subjects of the Czars (in fact, to the last days of the Monarchy, the personal bodyguard of the Russian Emperors were composed only of Kozaks), while others considered them the most unreliable, revolutionary element, dissatisfied with the loss of their absolute independence and forever ready to take up arms against the central authorities. For example, a single shot of a Don Kozak on the streets of St. Petersburg decided the outcome of the first phase of the 1917 revolution; it was made against the established authorities.

How to Become a Kozak To a certain extent Kozakdom was an ideal form of human relations, tested and tried in the course of many turbulent centuries, based on a truly democratic form of voluntary co-existence of different racial groups in one union. Often these groups were of different blood, language, religion and degree of civilization; yet they indestructibly bound themselves together by their way of living, their social structure, economic standards, deep love for their land and homes, and their established order and traditions.

To begin with, the Kozaks never claimed any exclusiveness; the best minds among them repeatedly proclaimed that there had never been any special Kozaks' God, and that our Lord God would not have entertained the idea of creating separately such an unruly tribe as the Kozak.s From the time of the establishment of small Kozak camps in the southeast of Europe to the period of the liquidation of the Kozaks under the Communist government of Soviet Russia, it was not difficult to become a Kozak. In the first period of their existence, prior to the formation of the large clans, the Kozak communities were of a strictly military character. The Kozaks, when not in an actual war, lived in their forts and camps in which women were not allowed. It was a warrior's world; the Kozak clans were similar to the various knightly orders of western Europe (such as Templars). Every Kozak, from the eager youngster to the graying veteran of many wars, was a fighter, first and last. Any other occupation was strictly forbidden to the Kozak, under severe penalty; and all trades, shops and stores in Kozak settlements were in the hands of non-Kozaks.

Going from one war to another as they did, there were very few "gray-haired veterans"; at times the Kozak kourens and regiments returned from the wars with just a few able-bodied men in the ranks; new blood would be needed. Newcomers were gladly accepted; all who wanted to join were welcomed. Formalities for admission were few: a candidate had to be a physically sound specimen and had "to believe in God"; he was called on to make the sign of the cross, and, if willing and able to do so, was pronounced a Kozak and was assigned to the kouren (regimental unit) of his own choice, or to that unit which had suffered the greatest losses in the last war or raid.

When the unsettled and dangerous conditions in the lands of the Kozaks gradually stabilized and the troublesome Tartars and Asiatics were pushed back, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries it became relatively safe for a man with a plow to make a hut and to start farming close to a Kozak fort. With these adventurous first settlers came their women. These new settlers gradually colonized and peopled the then "Border Land (Ukraine)"; in this way the present day Eastern Ukraine was formed and its population became known as the Ukrainian Kozaks. Such farmers were required to list themselves with the nearest kouren, and they were subject to being called to arms at a moment's notice.

The Kozaks themselves gradually began to know and to appreciate the comfort and benefits of a settled, civilized life. Their custom was to bring their captives, men, women and children, from their raids. The men would work for their captors for a while, and then would either be set free and able to join the Kozaks, or be returned, upon payment of ransom or in exchange for captured Kozaks, to their people. Children would be converted to Christianity and raised as Kozaks. Young women and girls would eventually become some Kozak's wife. Because of this manner of "adopting" former enemies, there are many foreign-sounding sur names among the Kozaks. It is not difficult to trace the origin of some old Kozak clans, like the Poliakovs, the Pospolitakis, the Kalmikovs and the Nogayetzs.

Married Kozaks acquired a taste for the comforts of a home between wars. Soon they learned other occupations; restrictions against farming were lifted. Thus was created a new Kozak, a farmer in peacetime, but every ready to mount his swift horse and go to war, leaving his wife to tend to the farm until his return, often after many, many years. Their women, living in the borderlands, quite frequently had to defend themselves from marauding Tartar bands, and there is many a story of Kozak women who successfully defended their towns against such raids.

With the passage of years there were many changes in the method of building up the Kozak ranks to the numbers needed for the protection of the less warlike population of the Russian Empire. Relations with formerly hostile neighbors became friendly; trophies of war had no girls among them any more. Although the birth rate was high, still the rate of death, from wounds and epidemics in remote localities, was higher. The government of Russia solved this problem radically and simply — an Imperial Ukaze would be issued, commanding several long existing and prosperous Kozak towns to assign a certain number of families for transfer to barren and dangerous parts of the borderland "to establish new Kozak towns." With much suffering and the tragic breaking up of family ties, often after an armed resistance, the designated families were moved to the new place. Whenever the number of such emigrants was not sufficient to populate the barren spot, the government would, by another Ukaze, settle in the same place soldiers from the regiments of the Regular Army who happened to be nearby at the time. In such a manner not only were new settlements built, not only were new clans (the Voiskos) created, but Kozaks themselves were made from men who prior to the Ukaze had no connection with the Kozaks. Such "making Kozaks" by decree was taking place as late as the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century. Some Kozaks were, therefore, quite new and young in this world. Yet, invariably, when a crisis came, like heavy losses in wars, or a revolution broke out, these new Kozaks proved to be just as brave, tenacious and just as strong in their conviction that they were a shade better than the next best man as their older Kozak brethren.

There was another, much simpler, though not always easier, way of becoming a Kozak — any girl who chanced to marry a Kozak would automatically become herself a Kozak. Such a non-Kozak-born female, after the death of her husband, received all the benefits and rights of his widow in the same manner as if her ancestors had been Kozaks for generations.

Finally, in the latest pre-Revolutionary period, a person who desired to become a Kozak could do so, by first proving in some tangible way that they would be an asset to a Kozak community; secondly, by obtaining a consent resolution from the general assembly (the sobor) of that community; and, thirdly, by securing an approval from the Hetman or District Ataman. Then upon overcoming all these obstacles, the applicant's name was entered on the rolls, he became a full-fledged Kozak, and the whole stanitza would "go on a binge" for a couple of days to celebrate the new member of their community.

Military Duties of Kozaks As was indicated above, a Kozak originally was a warrior and nothing else — a professional fighter. He was "employed" only when he was in a war., declared or undeclared. Periods in between were few., and the "unemployed" Kozak spent his time in drinking, preparing equipment for future actions, electing and replacing his administration, in hunting and fishing, and in drinking and wasting the trophies and loot which he had brought home from the last war or said. Going to war, a Kozak had to bring with him all his arms, and a horse, if he was with a mounted outfit. A Kozak who, as a result of too much carousing and drinking, lost his weapons was unmercifully flogged by his friends and elders when he showed up in the ranks unarmed. This principle of the Kozak's bringing all the articles of his uniform and other necessities, as well as his own arms and horse, continued to be in force down to our day. This obligation distinguished a Kozak from the conscripts of the regular Army. Kozaks were proud of their arms, often passed from grandfather to father, and from father to son, and of their horses. On the other hand, quite often it was a hardship or even a calamity for a not too well-to-do Kozak family to equip three or four sons for the service in the regiment in a short space of time.

Originally there was no time limit on the Kozak's military service; he was always in the ranks. In time of war he was in saddle and in formation at the sound of the big drum or the church bell. No one knew when he would be back. Later, when Catherine the Great of Russia destroyed, in 1775, the last true order of knights in the world, the Siech of the Zoporajni Kozaks, the Kozaks who remained in Russian control (many emigrated into Turkey and became respected subjects of the Sultan, preserving their identity down to our day) were moved to new locations — eventually to the Kuban region in the northern Caucasus — again to guard the borders of the ever growing empire from its warlike neighbors to the south. They still had to go to war at a moment's notice, but their service in the regiment was not a life-long job any more. The term was reduced; at first to twenty-five years of active service (and to death in the reserve), and gradually to what it was in the years before the First World War — four years in a first line regiment, four years in a second line regiment, and four years in a unit of the third line, then in the armed reserve until the age of fifty-six. When listed in the second and third line outfits, the Kozaks lived at home, but were in constant readiness and subject to summer camps and periodical drills. Wars became few and, with the exception of the time served in a first line regiment, the Kozak stayed home in his stanitza (town) with his family, tilling the soil and free to engage in any other occupation.

Kozaks Before the Revolution of 1917 Forced to relinquish their sovereignty to the Czars of Russia, the Kozaks managed to retain semi-autonomy; within the borders of their eleven provinces they were independent. It is true that the Ataman, or chief of each clan (Voisko), was appointed by the Emperor; it is equally true that a recently established practice was to appoint only non-Kozaks to be Atamans; it is true that the tendency of the central government was to abridge the ancient rights and privileges of the Kozaks which had been recognized in a special Charter by every Emperor upon his accession to the throne. But in the main, the Kozaks were the masters of their own lives.

Proud as the Kozaks were of their military prowess and glory, they cherished much more their way of living. The main principles of Kozak-dom were full and complete equality in rights and duties — equality social, political and economic. Each Kozak Voiska was a patriarchal democracy, pure and simple.

All their administration was elective. All communal matters were discussed and decided by the general assembly (the sbor), composed of all male Kozaks of each stanitza; all local officers, beginning with the stanitza's ataman, were elected, mostly for a term of three years, at these sbors. Every officer could be impeached for inefficiency or malfeasance. The duties of all elected officers were strictly defined, as well as their rights and powers. In general, their rights were broad, but always short of infringement on the personal freedom and dignity of their constituents. The Kozaks were a proud people. Thev had no classes, social or economic, and the few attempts on the part of the central government to create a class of nobles, from among the distinguished Kozak officers and generals, always met with determined opposition from the rank and file, as well as from the intended beneficiaries of the scheme.

Kozakdom is the long established combination of complete individual freedom with the iron discipline of organized society; it is an absolute equality in rights and privileges, and just as absolute an equality in carrying common burdens and duties; it is a sensible and practical unity of individual initiative and private ownership of things personal with communal ownership of the gifts of nature and the means of production.

The last half century, immediately preceding the beginning of the First World War, 1864 to 1914, was a period of economic and cultural achievement in Kozak history. It was a comparatively quiet period in the history of the Russian nation, when the Kozaks had an opportunity of staying home and attending to their peaceful pursuits. It was a period when the Kozaks proved that their way of living, their system of democratic institutions with no dictation from above, paid large dividends.

By this tim tehe two original Kozak clans, the Don and the Zaporojie, branched out and formed eleven Kozak states, extending along the borders of the Empire from the lack Sea to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. The names of these eleven states, starting from the west and going eastward were: Don, Kuban, Terek, Astrakhan, Ural, Orenburg, Semirechjie, Sibir, Zabaikal, Amur, and Ussury. The first six states were in European Russian control and the last five in Asia. Some states were large,with populations in the millions (two millions of Don Kozaks), while others were small (just a few thousand in the Ussury Voisko). These Kozaks were different in their appearance, facial characteristics, and even in the uniforms they wore; but in the main they were the same; they cherished their free and easy way of life; they knew that they were born for war; they were proud to be Kozaks. Their institutions were also alike, as well as their military service. Each Kozak went to his own regiment, where his father and forefathers had served; each served along side his schoolmates and next door neighbors; their officers were boys from the same stanitzas, often close relatives, who chose to go to military school when others preferred to stay at home to help their fathers in farming. Their military uniforms were practically the same as their every-day dress, mostly adopted from or influenced by the neighboring mountaineers or nomads. The total population of all the Kozak states amounted to slightly over five million. It should be noted, in passing, that while originally every Kozak state was on the fringe of the Russian state, beginning with the rapid expansion of Russia toward its present southeastern borders, some of these Kozak states found themselves well within these new borders. At the brink of the First World War seven Kozak states, among them the largest and the oldest, like the Don and Ural, were far inside the new borders of the emipre. This situation was fraught with danger for the very existence of these states — they ceased to be buffer states, intended to absorb the first shock of the advancing enemy or to repel the marauding bands of Bakh-tiari or the Afghans, and when they lost this quality, what was the justification for treating the Kozaks different from the rest of the Russian population?

Another potential danger to the existence of the Kozak states lurked in the minorities" problem; the bountiful and free life in the Kozak lands continued to attract adventurers and the dissatisfied long after the Kozaks had lost interest in filling their ranks with newcomers from every side. These new émigrés settled in Kozak towns, mostly as traders and mechanics of all sorts; gradually they acquired land and plots in towns. Their number was always increasing, to the point that in 1914-1917 in some of the richest Kozak states, the non-Kozak population exceeded the Kozaks. The builders of the Empire in St. Petersburg were pondering on this situation and were coming to the conclusion that, for the benefit of the whole nation, the anomaly of having a separate people, with separate customs, laws and privileges should be removed forever.

The kozaks in peacetime Living for centuries at the crossroads of Eastern Europe, in close contact with various nations and peoples, the energetic and curious Kozaks easily observed the ways of living of these peoples and willingly adopted from them all that looked worth while copying. Ever ready in war to discard some attractive trophy for something more glittering and valuable, the Kozak retained the same trait in peaceful pursuits; and, as a result, before the Revolution of 1917, the Kozaks had the largest agricultural machines and theory — the best for their situation of working and dairy cattle, and they had several famous breeds of saddle horses. The Kozaks undoubtedly were the best farmers in the Russian empire; the wheat and corn from the Kuban and Don were the chief items of export through the ports of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov; in Kozak pastures roamed swift horses, future mounts for the regular cavalry regiments of the Russian Army; the best table wines in Russia were produced from the grapes grown on the Don and the Terek; the best tobacco was cultivated on the Kuban foothills of the Caucasian ridge; the Ural Kozaks were famous as fishermen, and who does not know of Russian caviar and sturgeon steaks. Orenburg woolen shawls were always the most cherished possession of the Moscow belles, while the word "Astrakhan" rings familiarly to all of us. The Kozaks of Siberia and Amur and Ussury were intrepid trappers and hunters, going alone after the ferocious Siberian tigers.

These principal occupations, like farming, cattle, sheep and horse breeding, fishing and hunting, made the Kozaks rich. Their wealth created an envy in the masses of the Russian peasantry, land hungry and often destitute. Goaded by the Bolsheviks, they later so willingly responded to the cry, "On to the Don, on to the Kuban!" sounded by Lenin and Trotzky.

But in addition to the rich black earth, so good for farming and ranching, the land of the Kozaks contained tremendous riches below the ground. Within the territories occupied by the Don, Kuban and Terek Kozaks are the renowned anthracite mines of the Donetz region, the oil fields of Grozny and Maikop, the salt of Ural and the as yet uncounted wealth of minerals, including gold, silver, nickel and marble in the mountain ridges of the Caucasus, Ural, Altai and Trans-Baikal. The best fisheries in Russia were found in the deltas of the Volga, Kuban, Ural, Irtish and Amur; some of the best game preserves were also in the Kozak lands.

However, this bounty of Mother Nature cannot by itself explain how in many ways Kozaks were among the most advanced peoples of the Russian Empire. They were in the front ranks in the fields of education and culture because they practiced the old proverb, "Education is light and ignorance is darkness." The Kozak lands were blessed with hundreds of schools and institutions of learning. In the absence of any compulsory law, in the years preceding the Revolution of 1917, every Kozak boy and girl received an elementary school education; a great many of them went to the high schools or attended the special trade or vocational schools which were established in every good-sized Kozak town; and even from the smallest and most remote towns there were, as a rule, several young men and girls attending colleges and taking special courses in the great universities in central Russia. The most fortunate ones attended the higher learning centers in Kiev and Lviv. It should be noted here that this urge of the Kozaks to give to their youth a broad general education was frowned upon by the Czar's government; the Kozaks were repeatedly told that the only education they needed was special military training; that ambitious young men ought to be sent to the military schools and colleges, to become trained officers for the Kozak regiments; as to the girls — why, they ought to stay home, "particularly because higher education invariably carries within itself the seeds of discontent and revolutionary ideas."

This paternal advice and admonition had its results, and the supreme ambition of a Kozak of the ranks was to see his son with silver epaulettes on his broad shoulders. But more and more Kozaks were sending their boys and girls to the civil seats of learning; they resented the implication that they were a military cast only; they were conscious of their separate ethnic identity, and they wanted to have their own sons and daughters as the teachers, judges, bankers, traders, mechanics and priests in their schools, courts, offices, factories, shops and in their churches.

How well the Kozaks succeeded in their drive to conquer the fields of the arts and sciences, other than the military trade, shows in the fact that in the last two centuries one could hardly find in Russia cultural, accomplishment, or an advance in science, or a new movement in the arts, where the Kozaks hadn't their men and women in the front ranks. They had their scientists and explorers, educators and writers, artists and composers, executives and industrialists; but whether one of them was a senator, or a world known agriculturist, or a bishop of great fame, he was still a Kozak, first and last. The cold war scientific and technical advances created by Ukrainian Kozaks was far out of proportion to their numbers.

Land Ownership "In payment for faithful military service, which had been full of hardships," each Kozak clan (Voisko), by special imperial grant, received acknowledgment of full ownership over the lands originally conquered and settled by the Kozaks. Each clan was the owner of its land, not the individual members of it. Each clan divided its land into three parts. One part, including forests, rivers, mines and part of the arable land, remained in the clan as a whole; the other two parts the clan subdivided among the stanitzas (the towns); each stanitza, in turn, kept part as township property, for communal use, and the other part was distributed among! the individual families, according to the number of male Kozaks who had reached the age of seventeen. As a rule, families were large and the sons remained in the family until long after the end of their active military service; from the stanitza's communal land each young man, upon reaching the age of seventeen, received his parcel of land; and the larger the family, the richer it was in the land it used and in the number of working hands.

Periodically, each stanitza redistributed its land among the growing families, and each time the parcel given to an individual was smaller; when there was no more communal land in a stanitza to distribute among it’s families, then the clan would give for the stanitza an additional piece of land from the clan's part. So, there were instances when a stanitza, originally established on the banks of the Kuban, would have a parcel or two of land situated on the Pshish river, quite a distance from the original place. Individual lots became so small that toward the end of the first decade of our century the wealth of families had diminished to such an extent that equipping two or three youngsters for service in a first line regiment, with horses, weapons, uniforms, saddle, etc., was breaking the back of many Kozak fathers. In such cases the whole township came to the aid of the family, and the young man appeared in the ranks just as well equipped as any other.

Rich was the soil in the Kozak lands; highly important and cherished were the grants and privileges enjoyed by the Kozaks. They were excused from payment of many taxes; to a great extent they were their own masters. But it was not "for free"; the Kozaks paid with full value for these rights and privileges. Every Kozak, man and woman, lived under the constant risk of being called for active service. In peace time the object was either to increase the strength of border garrisons on an uneasy stretch of the border; or maybe to augment the police forces in times of unrest in the interior. In time of war, the Kozaks immediately trebled their regiments, and often fielded additional units, many of them composed of men in their forties and fifties. In a prolonged conflict like the First World War, practically the entire able-bodied population of the Kozaks came to arms. Toward the end of that war, fully ten percent of the whole Kozak population was at the front, and it was a real treat to see a male Kozak on a stanitza street; unusually it was a convalescent warrior, on a short leave before returning to his regiment. All the work which had been done by the stronger, such as working in the fields, making new roads and erecting: new community buildings was done by Kozak women and children. The losses on the battlefield were great, and rare was the home that had its men and boys all alive and untouched. The Kozaks paid dearly for their privileges.

The Revolution of 1917 Many a crime and a cruel injustice were inflicted by the Czar's government in its dealings with the Kozaks. Some would argue that, on-the-whole, the cardinal policies of that government, as well as its methods, in making the newly conquered tribes and recently annexed peoples subject to dictates from the center were wise, humane and far-sighted. Documented reports of revolts and uprisings on the part of the tribes, which lived in far away fringe provinces were extremely rare. All annexed lands at first lived under a generous degree of autonomy. They retained their courts and administrative institutions. They continued to be governed by their boyers and princes, according to their tribal common law and customs; they were permitted to use their native language in dealing with the officials of the Crown. Officially, there was an absolute religious tolerance, and an absolute equality with the conquerors as to the education of their sons and daughters in government schools. Like no other great empire, there was in the Russia of that period a great ratio of non-natives occupying the most important positions and offices in the military and civil life. The hand of the Czar was heavy, but it was set gently and the great pressure was applied gradually.

Another picture was created when the government was taken over first by the "professional revolutionists" and later by the Bolsheviks. Communism and Kozakdom do not mix, and from the first days of the triumph of the party of Lenin and Stalin, these two social ideals clashed and entered into mortal combat.

As was indicated above, the Kozaks accepted the Russian Revolution of 1917 as something in which they had very little interest, aside from re-establishing their cherished and centuries-old institutions which had been curbed in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries by the Czar's government. They declared their neutrality in the internal affairs of the Russian people and asked its new rulers to leave them alone. Following a stirring public declaration to that effect, made by the Ataman of the Don Kozaks, General Kaledin, on the Moscow Conference in the summer of 1917, the Provisional Government of Kerensky declared the Kozaks to be traitors and dissidents and made an ineffective attempt to crush their "rebellion" by sending an armed force to the borders of the land of the Don Kozaks, but on the whole the Kozaks were permitted to re-establish their autonomous tribal structure.

Civil War — 1917-1920 This atmosphere of cool tolerance and non-interference continued until the overthrow of the Kerensky government by the Bolsheviks of Lenin and Trotsky. The Kozaks were immediately placed high on the list of enemies of the proletariat, and fighting broke out along the borders of each of the eleven Kozak territories. The Kozaks, with their ancient cry "All for one, and one for all" rose to the defense of their land, institutions and their freedom.

The massacre of Kozaks and Russian Army officers by Red Army "shooting team". Painter Shmarin

The Civil War in Russia was joined. There were many others besides the Kozaks who did not accept Communism. As distinguished from the "red" radicals, they all were loosely called the "White Russians." A great number of the active opponents of the Bolsheviks fled to the Kozaks and fought against the Reds, using Kozak territories as their base, and the Kozaks as their allies. In addition to filling the ranks of the fighting units of the armies of Admiral Kolchak, Generals Ivanov, Udenich, Denikin, Wrangel and others, the Kozaks put into the field their own armies, commanded by their Hetman and Atamans.

Kozaks vs. Bolchevicks This war lasted for more than three years, from 1917 to 1920, and it was conducted with great ruthlessness on both sides. The Kozaks fought with desperate courage against an enemy twenty-two times superior in number. The position of the Kozaks was made all the more difficult because they possessed practically no war industry and no arsenals. Particularly in the first phase of this war, the Kozaks knew of only one method of arming themselves — it was to capture arms from the enemy. Literally the entire population of the Kozak states, including the women, took part in defending their land and freedom from the Bolsheviks with ancient weapons and farm tools. The Kozaks suffered tremendous losses in that war; every Kozak home had its share of dead and maimed. As a rule the Reds burned every Kozak farm and house that offered resistance. After three years of a desperate and hopeless struggle, the Kozaks and their allies, the "White," their resources exhausted, were defeated. Their land was occupied by their mortal enemies, the Communists.

Kozaks in Exile Nearly all of the fifty thousand don Kozaks who were fortunate enough to escape with their lives into the Balkans, Turkey, Persia, Poland and China, left their homeland as organized army units. Together with them went their atamans, parliaments and a few private persons and families. The Kozaks carried with them their State regalia, battle flags and archives. By far the greatest part of this group eventually settled in the Balkan countries and there, by hard work and perseverance, prospered and became substantial citizens again. Another part went farther, to Czechoslovakia and France; of this group many young men acquired a higher education and became professional men, also achieving considerable prosperity and renown. They retained their "Governments in Exile.," supported their sick and aged, published periodicals and books relating to the Kozak glories of the past, and encouraged their sons to wait for the coming hour of liberation of their country. They even held elections, sending delegates to such great centers of Kozak concentration as Paris or Belgrade, to elect the Atamans. Unfortunately, some of the elected atamans decided to follow the footsteps of Hitler, Mussolini and other dictators, and refused to step down at the termination of their terms of office. Even now one of the Kozak clans, the Kuban, has for its ataman a person who was elected to that four year term of office thirty-one years ago. However, with the passage of the years and through changed circumstances, the power and authority of the atamans became negligible and the directing hand belongs now to elected and recognized councils and committees.

This peaceful life in their second homelands continued until the start of the Second World War, when these Kozaks found themselves between the anvil and the hammer. All their sympathy was with their former allies of the First World War, with the forces of Democracy, but, in their determination to ally themselves with anyone who was starting a war against their oppressors, the Communists, they found themselves fighting, some against the Red Army and others against the partisans of Tito, side by side with the totalitarian legions. When Hitler's forces were beaten, these Kozaks, for the second time in the course of a man's life, had to drop everything, lose all they had created in the over twenty years of exile, and flee again before the advancing Reds. That flight was costly to their enemy; all who could carry a gun joined the retreating armed formations, and fought day and night as the rear guard of the fleeing Germans. They literally "fought unto death"; the Reds took no prisoners from among these units. The main direction of this retreat was from Yugoslavia to Austria, then to Northern Italy, and finally to Germany.

Under the Sickle and Hammer Those Kozaks who had remained in Russia after their defeat in 1920, the families, the kin of those few who had managed to escape, and all those who had been in the ranks and whose regiments were cut off from the ports of embarkation, had to live under the stiff yoke of their conquerors. Their leaders and the heads of families were the first to be liquidated in the dreaded chambers of the Gheka and the OGPU; their families were split and dispersed; newcomers, faithful followers of Lenin and veterans of the Red Guard, were settled in stolen Kozak homes. All who were allowed to stay in their stanitzas were forced to become virtual slaves in the collective farms and factories; they were forbidden to wear their traditional dress; their regiments were disbanded and their young men drafted to serve in Red Army units. The pressure on them was terrific, but even then the Kozaks refused to give in and continued their usually passive, but at time violently active resistance to the masters of the Russian empire. They became experts in sabotage and hiding their identities. From time to time such passive resistance would erupt into a violent revolt, with public executions of the most hated members of the secret police and the special punitive units. As a result of repeated uprisings from 1922 to 1937, the Kozaks were officially decreed by the Kremlin to be enemies of the Soviet State, and as such, subject to an absolute and complete liquidation. Every means were used by the Bolsheviks to exterminate the Kozaks, including a forced famine, artificially created by trusted lieutenants of Stalin in 1922 and again in the 1930’s. In consequence, up to ten million Ukrainians and millions from other ethnic groups perished or disappeared in the years between 1920 and 1940, from famine and privation, in resisting forced collectivization, in rebellions and riots, and in the slave labor camps of Siberia and the Far East.

And yet their spirit could not be crushed, and those Kozaks who managed to survive the terror and escape the clutches of the Soviet secret police, held high the torch of their determination to win back their freedom and their independent way of life. They believed that their hour had come when Hitler's armies in 1940 advanced toward the lands of the Kozaks as liberators of Russia from the tyranny of Communism. Town after town and village after village greeted the Germans with flowers and the traditional Russian "bread and salt." The Red Army soldiers surrendered by whole divisions, without offering any resistance to the advancing German patrols. By the thousands the younger Kozaks joined the ranks of Hitler's auxiliaries "to get even with the Communists." Alas, very soon they saw the true face of Hitler's "supermen/ but it was already too late for them to turn back. When the Germans began their frozen exodus from the Kozak steppes, the whole Kozak population left their homes and., with women and children, on foot and in horse carts, went into exile. Nearly 150,000 Kozaks retreated with the Germans from Russia. The price they paid for the paradox of having their sympathy with the Western Allies and actually fighting alongside Hitler's regiments was truly appalling; thousands upon thousands of these unfortunates fell into the hands of the rapidly advancing units of the Red Army; their fate invariably was either execution, exile to the concentration camps in the Far North, and systematic, or planned extermination by cold and starvation. Others died from huger and from the bullets of red partisans in the forests of White Russia and Poland. The survivors, who fled to sections of Austria and Germany, which fell to the advancing allied divisions, finally found themselves interned in the former camps for Hitler's forced labor. There a great many of these Germans found their fathers and older friends who had escaped from the Reds twenty-two years before, at the end of the civil war against the Bolsheviks.

The Effect of Yalta

For many of these Kozaks the joy of reunion with their kin and the happiness of finding security and refuge was short lived; in accordance with an agreement signed in Tehran and Yalta by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, they were forcibly surrendered by the Allies to the Reds and "repatriated" to the Soviet Union.

The most tragic event of this kind occurred near the city of Lienz, in Austria. Toward the end of the war General Krasnoff and some other Kozak leaders persuaded Hitler and his authorities to allow all civilians and non-fighting Kozaks to settle on a permanent basis in the sparsely settled foothills of the Italian Alps. The Kozaks moved there in numbers and established a refugee settlement, with several stanitzas and posts, with their administration, churches, schools and defense units. When the victorious Allies moved from central Italy into the Italian Alps, the German command ordered the Kozaks to leave their new homes and to retreat northward, into Austria. There, on the banks of the river Drave, near Lienz, the British army units caught up with the Kozaks and interned them in a hastily arranged camp. For a few days the British fed these refugees and created the impression that they understood the unique problem of this group, and could see the reason for their fear and uneasiness. The advance units of the Red Army were only a few miles to the east, rapidly surging to establish contact with the Allies. And then, suddenly, just when the Kozaks decided that under the protection of the British flag they had nothing to worry about, the sons of "perfidious Albion" turned over the free men of Kozakdom to their Communist enemies. On May 28, 1945, twenty-one hundred and forty-six Kozak officers and generals, including the world famous cavalry leaders, Generals Krasnoff, Shkuro and Kiletch-Girey (all NOT SOVIET CITIZENS), were, through a ruse, disarmed and carried in British cars and trucks to a neighboring town held by the Reds. There they were surrendered to the Red Army general, who immediately ordered them to stand trial for treason. Many of these Kozak leaders had never been Soviet citizens or subjects of the Soviet Union, being the men who had left Russia in 1920, at the end of the civil war, and therefore could not be guilty of any treason. Some of these men were executed on the spot; the higher officers were subjected to mock trials at Moscow and were also executed. For example, General Krasnoff was hanged by a hook through the lower jaw, on a public square; this in the Twentieth Century in the capitol of the "most advanced nation of the world!" The bulk of this group was sent to slave labor camps in the Far North and Siberia, to suffer a slow and painful death in the hands of their tormentors.