They were the closest European counterparts to the heroes and villains of the American
Wild West.
Rugged, even cowboy-like individuals, fighting again and again for their freedom.
You may picture them with boots and saddles, and huge mustaches and hats, armed with sabres
and rifles and sweeping across the steppe.
I’m talking, of course, of the Cossacks.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about the Cossacks.
We’ve talked a lot about Tsar Nicholas, the last ruler of the Romanov Dynasty, and
now I’m going to talk about the first.
Michael Romanov.
He had support from the Cossacks that, after years of chaos, put him on the throne at Moscow.
Later, he sent a representative south to Cossack lands to demand submission, and that representative
was put into a sack and thrown in the River Don.
And that was that.
Back then, no matter how much Moscow tried to turn them from allies into subjects, the
Cossacks refused, which caused a fair amount of trouble, but Moscow allowed them to keep
any territory they conquered, like Siberia, as long as it was officially part of Russia.
But who were these people?
And where did they come from?
Until the 1500s, there wasn’t really any such thing as a Cossack.
For a few hundred years, the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors had ruled
the enormous open plains that stretched all the way from Hungary to China.
But the Mongol expansion eventually stopped and the empire of the Khan was divided up.
The part that is now southern Russia was under control of a people called the Tatars.
They were very warlike and they lived by plunder, often raiding to the north as far as Moscow.
They were pretty nasty, even for the times, carrying off thousands of people to sell at
the Ottoman slave markets.
The Russians saw them as a true terror and their lands as simply barbaric domains.
But by the 1500s, the Tsars were gaining in power, and while doing so were reducing the
peasant population to the level of serfs, which is pretty close to being slavery.
You can imagine that the peasants weren’t so happy about this development, but what
could they do?
Well, they could submit, they could die, or they could run.
And the only place to run was to the Tatar lands to the south, so again- as you can imagine-
the only ones that made it there were bravest, strongest, or most self-reliant of the Russian
peasants.
Now beyond Moscow’s reach, they assimilated with the Tatars, and eventually dominated
them in ways, so you had something totally new- a huge community of Orthodox Christian
warrior horsemen, of both Slavic and East Asian descent.
These were the Cossacks, and they truly lived by the sword and were ruled by no man.
(World Undone) “They were unlike any other people in Europe- not exactly Russian but
not an entirely distinct tribe, certainly not a military caste like the Junkers of Germany.
For centuries their homelands were a kind of melting pot open to anyone brave or desperate
enough to enter.
There is no better analogy than the gun-toting freebooters of the American West.”
The name, well, as far as I’m aware nobody knows exactly where the name Cossacks came
from, but they were a remarkable people.
Unlike pretty much anyone else in the area, they were totally democratic.
Everyone had a vote, including the women, and they elected an Ataman who served as leader
for one year, so that no one person could ever get too powerful.
And anyone in the world who wanted to be a Cossack could be a Cossack.
You just had to at least say that you accepted the Orthodox Church..
Whatever race or ethnic group you were didn’t matter; there was no hereditary elite, and
all property was communal.
And Moscow certainly enjoyed having them as a buffer between enemies further south or
east, and they certainly helped out Michael Romanov.
But times change and Russia did want them as subjects.
The 17th and 18th centuries saw Russian wars against the Cossacks and Cossack rebellions
against the Russians.
These ended in Cossack defeat and they became part of the Russian Empire, and many of their
traditions were diluted.
The Ataman was now appointed by the Tsar; that was a big one.
Some large and strong Cossack families took huge estates and began to live as traditional
Russian aristocracy, and serfdom was introduced to Cossack lands.
But some traditions won’t die, and for the Cossacks it was the warrior tradition.
But keeping that came at a price.
Cossacks owed the Tsar first 20 and then 30 years of military service, and they had to
provide their own equipment and horses, which is a lot to ask from an ordinary family.
And a big downside for pretty much everyone- the Cossack’s traditional contempt for outsiders
eventually made them into the tsar’s instruments of repression and genocide.
In 1648 and 1649, they massacred 300,000 Jews (A world undone).
For doing all of this, for their years of service, they got grants of land.
I guess I just made them sound like murder robots, and that wasn’t really the case,
especially a couple hundred years down the line.
In the abortive 1905 Russian revolution, their service to the Tsar nearly broke down when
there were Cossack mutinies against being used to crush the peasant and workers rebellion.
The disloyal units were disbanded and a crisis was averted.
But when this war came, they were ready for service, all of them boys, middle-aged men,
you name it.
They made up more than half of the Russian cavalry and had a fearsome reputation, though
since the Russian High Command sent them and their horses against German and Austrian machine
guns, the war was worse for them than most Russians.
They died in droves, (World Undone) and “By 1917, when they were called upon once again
to put down popular uprisings, many of them had had enough.
They stood aside and allowed the revolution to proceed.
Of all the signs that Nicholas II and his whole system were finished, this was the clearest.”
Though no one had been surprised that when Petrograd turned to chaos and the revolution
began, it was Cossack horsemen who were called in to stop it and restore order.
Russians had learned to expect to see Cossacks wherever there was trouble.
In fact, often it was the Cossacks who were the trouble.
They put the first Romanov on the throne, overran Siberia, and broke the back of Napoleon’s
forces.
They were often the Tsar’s enforcers, eventually becoming very much the scourge of the peasants
and the Jews.
They broke what the Romanov’s needed breaking, and yet the great Tolstoy, who had lived among
the Cossacks when he was young, said that what actually made a Cossack a Cossack was
their love of freedom.
And yet ironically, they were the real symbol of
the Tsar’s oppression.
The Cossacks.