Prague, Russians and Cossacks

[Foreigner]

And what makes "drunken casual cruelty" worse than systematic cruelty and policy of extermination of indigenous people?

And "manifest destiny" doesn't count as an excuse.

On the question of loyalty and sovereign respect - there's the affair of 1776, when a certain number of colonies rebeled against their sovereign - over taxes (read money), no less. Then they allied itself with France - what does it think of the French now? On the other hand, it had two wars against the British, and two wars against them - I guess to even things out. The Americans who settled in Texas swore allegiance to Mexico - how long did that last? But I guess the US did offer to buy the land first, so the Mexicans have only themselves to blame for not taking the generous offer when they had the chance. Hawai was also an independent kingdom until the XIX century.

The area of the Black Hills in SD was granted by treaty to the Indians for eternity. Alas, eternity lasted only until gold deposits were found. Now you can see the faces of four presidents there - I guess as a reminder of how the US government keeps their word.

[ March 23, 2006, 08:24 AM: Message edited by: Foreigner ]

[JasonC]

Priceless. A consistent pacifist might denounce the Cossacks. A consistent relativist (not that there is such a thing in the corporeal world) might tolerate the US. But it takes years of therapy and indoctrination to arrive at the left's view, and defend only cultures committed to the right to murder others for sport.

Don't need an excuse, didn't happen, they are still here. There are more American Indians alive today than when they met Europeans, living vastly better lives in every respect. Oh and they were such plaster saints themselves they had been waging genocidal wars against each other for centuries, public torture was their leading sport, honor consisted of lots of human heads on your belt, etc. Which are the only things they have lost the ability to do, thankfully.

As for the predictable slavery yawner, a horrid institution that starts as soon as there are human records, who abolished it, when? Where is it still practiced? Who died by the hundreds of thousands to get rid of it? (Which parties, on which sides? - snicker).

As for your two wars and two wars, it doesn't even scan, you obviously missed some new pronoun reference somewhere.

We now return you to your regular scheduled Nazi fan club...

[Erik Springelkamp]

What I learned about the Cossacks from a biography of Peter the Great is that they were the people living in the border areas between the Golden Horde and the Slavic kingdoms.

As the Golden Horde didn't have a regular administration in these lands, they collected their tax in the form of yearly pillaging expeditions.

It takes a very mobile and military way of life to survive under those conditions.

A region cannot exist from robbery alone: there must be someone to rob from, and that could hardly have been the well-administrated parts of the Mongols or Russians/Ukrainians. So the Cossack community must have produced food for itself.

There was a constant influx from escaped serfs from the Slav kingdoms, as this was freebooter country.

Peter the Great started pacifying these regions by protecting them from raids from the Golden Horde.

In this light the blame on the rough lifestyle of the Cossacks cannot be put entirely on themselves. But maybe my picture is wrong?

[JasonC]

That is substantially correct as to the origin of the disorder in the region, which dates especially to Tamerlane and his systematic depredation of his own territories (as you say, the only form of "tax collecting" they knew), and the mimicry that system gave rise to in other steppe empires.

But it didn't stay that way. The Mongols lost power (largely because such methods depopulated their own base). The Turks who came after them had a much more settled civilization, after conquering Persia and waging long successful wars against Byzantium.

Meanwhile Russia and Poland-Lithuania (a great power extending far into the present Ukraine in those days) fought each other and the Ottomans. The people of the region between these powers were divided between relatively sedentary farming populations, and nomads of the steppe. The sedentary farmers went with the dominant power, the nomads didn't.

They had learned to live by raiding in the Mongol era and its aftermath. They preferred living that way. They raided the sedentary populations around them, exactly as Tamerlane had done.

They could dress that up as principled fighting for a cause from time to time, when e.g. the Turks were vulnerable and they were only raiding in that direction - then they can present themselves to Poles as a border cavalry that wouldn't bother them, only their mutual enemy.

But that kind of directionality did not last for very long. They helped destroy the Polish state. They then switch allegiance to Russia. But each of these major states wanted peace with its powerful neighbors often. And the Cossacks didn't, they couldn't survive with peace.

As a result, eventually you find freebooters being hunted by both Turks and Russians. They recruited from run away serfs, offered them a brigand life instead. They also slaved, at other times raided Turks to free Christian slaves, whichever was more profitable and (especially) easier to pull off militarily that year.

The Russians eventually incorporated them, and got a sort of marginal control over their endless lawless raiding by directing it either at the Turks, at the conquest of the eastern steppe and approaches to Siberia, or at internal undesirables or rebels. They effectively turned them loose on the recalcitrant or used them to exact taxes etc. When nobody else would serve, they had a pogrom and robbed Jews.

Some became effective and controlled soldiers in the Russian army. Others served as irregulars, and did the raid as punishment thing but for export (vs. Turks, or on the borders of the Balkans, in central Asia, during the Napoleonic wars in central Europe, etc).

[JasonC]

So it is clear, a sedentary Ukrainian peasant was not a Cossack. Cossack means "adventurer" and it referred exclusively to nomads who lived in the saddle. They herded but at a bare subsistence level, augmented by stolen livestock from raids. They found war far more profitable - it also continually reduced the population among which the proceeds were shared.

Normal societies can't live off of the proceeds of war because it is an occasional thing. They solved that by simply never having actual peace. One band might, if well off this year, but the hungrier types would just start their own private war for profit, in whichever direction it looked feasible.

[Guest Mike]

Interesting - Cossacks lived by raiding, and yet it seems they were famed as boatmen, and most of their armies were infantry formed from infantry settled in towns. Cossacks were well enough organised in the 1600's to have "registries" in which the name of every Cossack was recorded to ensure status under the law was properly applied within the Russian and Polish kingdoms of the time. Cossack hosts were recognised as independant nations by neighbouring countries by the same time.

Border raiding by Cossacks against Turks and Russians were no different from border raids by Scots and English against each other that happened for hundreds of years, raids by African pirates against the British Islas as late as the 17th century, and general acts of what we would call barbarism by peoples ever since history began to be recorded.

It was only in the 17th century that their military service begn to be limited to cavalry - but even in 1812 and 1853 there were still Cossack infantry and artillery units.

your analysis is rubbish Jason - you have taken broad historical generalities and tried to tie them to a specific culture to which they never applied in the first place, and your characterisation of opposing argumetns as "leftist" is boorish.

[LongLeftFlank]

So, my Lords, if I may summarize The Argument:

PROPOSITION: Nomadic/pastoral cultures (e.g. Cossacks) are morally (select one) BETTER/WORSE than settled/agrarian cultures (e.g. Amerika) because....

THESES/ANTITHESES:

a. Noble, freedom-loving Cossacks never built gas chambers, much less napalmed slaves at Wounded Knee, or (ultimate abomination) dreamed up IMF/WTO

b. Ignorant, stinky Cossacks wouldn't have faintest idea what gas was unless goats they stole passed it during intimate moment, much less invent railway timetables, napalm or sulfa drugs

Discuss.

Also, accusations of Nazi-fanboydom or good old fashioned Byronic romantic pastoralism seem a little half-cocked at this point. Nobody in this thread has either defended those fine humanitarians von Pannwitz, Kleist and Vlassov, eulogized the poor martyred souls of the First Division, or damned the perfidy of Gen. Alexander and the Argylls. Indeed, those subjects haven't even been brought up in this increasingly weird but strangely fascinating Plato's Cave of a forum.

So let's everyone take a deep breath and step back from our goats, stolen or not....

[Bigduke6]

Cossacks were not, as Jason argues, simply brigands living on the steppe and preying on whomeever they could, whenever they could. Certainly, some Cossacks were brigands sometimes.

Given the time and the location, that does not make their society a collection serial rapists, Ted Bundies, repeat offenders, and whatever else more settled societies chose to call them.

The origin of the term "Cossack" is really unknown, but most academics believe it came into Slavic languages via a Turkish word meaning "freebooter". Cossacks first appeared in written history, as far as I am aware, in the late 14th century in Kiev church manuscripts. (Verdansky) The term was used to describe raiders from the steppe attacking Christian settlements, primarily along the Dniepr valley.

At the time, the ruling power in the region was the post-Mongol Golden Horde. The church term for raiders from that organization was Tartars.

The term "Cossack" was used, primarily, to distinguish a horde depredation sponsored by the Khan, from a similar depredation sponsored by pick-up bands of bandits/land pirates in the steppe. At this point in time the Ukrainian steppe was not settled by agriculture-using civilizations, in significant part because when the Mongols came through a century earlier, they killed or enslaved pretty much every permanent settlement they could, so as to covert the steppe into pasture land, and also because they preferred slaves to taxes paid in agricultural produce.

Ok, now it's the 16th century, roughly. Tartar control of the Ukrainian steppe is receding, the Horde effectively controls greater Crimea and the north Black Sea shore, but the wide open space from the Slav-settled forest belt - roughly ending on the Dniepr at Kiev - and the sway of the Khan of Crimea is, well, wide open. What happens next?

Well, as far as Cossacks are concerned, what happens is that slowly a trickle of mostly-Slavic settlements moves south along the Dniepr River valley. At the southern boundary of the organized princpalities, those of Kiev and Chernihiv/Chernigov for instance, the communities

are called "Cossack communities". This is a village living primarily on agriculture, but instead of paying tax to the prince, the men have the right to bear arms and the obligation to help the prince fight off raiders from the south. (Who, to confuse things, sometimes were called "wild Cossacks".)

Then there are the "wild Cossacks" that get organized enough, so that it becomes somewhat difficult to just label them bandits, because they already have foreign policy, a standing military, an organized society, rah rah rah. The classic example is the Zaporizhia Cossacks, which was an (apparently) all-male society controlling portages around rapids in the lower Dniepr near the present-day city Zaporizhia, naturally charging a percentage for any one moving goods through there, and attacking any one who didn't pay the toll. In this aspect they weren't so different from the bazillion German princes that set up along the Rhine, did the same thing, and eventually got "von" in front of their name.

The Zaporizhian Cossacks by the late 16th century were a political player in their own right, making treaties and conducting foreign policy and sending ambassadors and so on. This was in part because they had latched onto a very lucrative racket (they stood on the main highway between the then-flowering Ottoman culture and all of eastern Slavdom, and also, most histories say, because the Zaporzhia Cossacks had a roughly democratic process for selecting leaders, and so were guaranteed at least mediocre bosses, and frequently they managed to pick smart ones. What's more, for about a century they were able to maintain a fairly disciplined soldier culture, which, without Romanticizing, made them fairly effective at keeping Tartars and Turks from moving northward to sack the Ukrainian/Polish prinicpalities.

Now it's the 17th century. What's up with the Cossacks?

Well, it all depends on which ones you are talking about. The Zaporizhians are waning because, basically, they have been in the business so long their society separated into rich and poor, the rich made their rule of the society hereditary, dumped democracy, and settled down; while the poor, being poor, revolted against the rich and/or left in increasing numbers to become bandits or members of other Cossack communities in other places.

The Tartars are now pretty much walled up in the Crimea. (Leaving aside the Genoa-sponsored settlements on the coast) However, the Ottomans via the Balkans are now in the mix, trying to push their influence into the region, and naturally making deals.

The Polish/Lithuanian empire meanwhile is flowering, and Warsaw sees the region as its natural area of expansion, and also one of Christendom's main bulwarks agaisnt the Turks.

And then there are the new players on the block, the Moscow princes, who see the wealthy Ukrainian principalities as their proper rout of expansion.

As to the Cossacks, the Cossack outpost settlements south of Kiev/Zhitomir line are pretty much civilized now as the "wild steppe" border has pushed south. Sometimes these Cossack settlements lose their rights and just get forced into peasantry, but sometime they retain their rights to bear arms as organized "Cossack regiments", becoming effectively semi-regular cavalry under the employ of the dominant prince in the region. The better-organized the prince, the more likely the Cossacks would be set up in a regular-style regiment with standard rolls and equipment, but this is not to say that even that same Prince might not, in an emergency, call up Cossacks from another village, remind them of their old obligations, and describe the mounted freemen so brought into his as "Cossacks."

Since Slavic settlement is moving south, so is the border, and now the belt of border settlements is roughly Cherkassy/Poltava/Kharkov. Fore these Cossack settlements it's the same deal as before: you swear fealty to a prince, he doesn't tax you, but you have to be ready to fight for him if he calls you up.

Also there are "Cossack princes" arising at this time, if I remember right in Chernihiv particularly, where Cossack settlements, instead of getting incorporated into an existing principality, become their own principality with their very own ruling line, and indeed, sometimes, peasants.

And of course, there are bands of bandits large but mostly small in the steppe itself, of an absolute ethnic mix, no particular religion, and living by preying on weaker groups. All of whom, in civilized histories of the region, are also called "Cossacks".

By the 18th century the handwriting is on the wall for the independent Cossacks, and also the bandit (the historical term was "wild") Cossacks however. This is primarily due to the appearance of a single great power capable of moving men and resources into the region in volumes no one could match: Moscow.

The Russians bit by bit incorporate the Ukrainian principalities, in general making the residents peasants, but on the border with the "wild steppe", leaving Cossack communities with their old rights as before, or turning the Cossack communities into bases for standing cavalry units. A lot of the Imperial Russian army's oldest hussar and dragoon regiments, pedigrees 200 years and more, date back to this.

And then Peter the Great comes along, defeating (eventually) the Turks, the Swedes, the Zaporizhian Cossacks, and so on, and for practical purposes placing all of modern day Ukraine under serfdom.

Except of course in the East, where now, the main Cossack communities are in the Don River valley. And once the Russians established full control there, the Cossack communities moved to the Caucauses and indeed Central Asia. Plus of course the other Cossack communities that get converted into cavalry regiment feeders; Peter was first and foremost an army-builder. He would have loved playing Civilization, I bet.

The history of the Cossacks, by and large, has reached the west via Russian and Soviet historians very much interested in depicting the expansion of Russian culture a naturally wonderful thing, and thus everything that stood in the way, very much including independent Cossacks, as bad. Add into that the Cossacks' performance against Napoleon in the early 19th century, and then against the Jews in the latter 19th and early 20th century, and it is very easy for a modern reader to tar Cossacks with a big nasty brush. If you don't look very closely into what Cossacks were and were not, for the centuries they existed, it's a breeze to assert they all were bad, humanity was better for their destruction, and it should have come earlier.

In reality, that view of Cossacks is simplistic.

[John Kettler]

John_d,

Here's the link to a Vlasov documentary I never knew existed.

http://ihffilm.com/aavlasgenfor.html

Regards,

John Kettler

[JasonC]

BigDuke6 - Fine, I agree I am talking about the "wild" cossacks as opposed to all the other adjectival versions. I leave it to you to puzzle out how all male cossack groups lived off knitting, point out that cossack is not synonymous with Ukrainian (and indeed, those still considering themselves by that name at the time of the war were in the north Caucasus mostly, or farther east). I hardly think I am alone in the usage - Lermontov, Gogol, and Sholokov weren't discussing boy scouts either. As for my simplicity in preferring civilization to barbarism, we need more rather than less of it.

As for my my boorishness, one and only one person I discussed it with dragged the US into it with the curious idea that cossack crimes - which he did not deny - were fine excusable, but US ones weren't, and that is indoctrinated ideological crap any way it is sliced. As for fans, the thread starter shows a curious interest but had the sense to at least call the subjects in question infamous. But that was rapidly followed by portrayal as innocent victims if not heros, which I consider morally insupportable. All the later discussion was of much earlier history, however.

[Zalgiris 1410]

Just to paint a picture, AIUI most normal peasants in the region were smerfy serfs, while, let me say in non-Wild Cossack agriculture based communities the Cossack peasants were free members of them. During their lifetime the peasant Cossack would be given his share of land to farm, as much as he could farm during earlier to middle working life, and he would operate less as he got older. Although it was probably not all cut and dry and also I think things were done according to household, not on an absolute individual basis. The economic model was similar to other village based societies and completely baffles micro-economists to be sure! The obligation of military service was based upon their being an able bodied male either avaliable or even always on service or somethink. Anyway that's my very generalized understanding so far.

O'h this is a stretch but on the subject of a society based solely upon robbery I've got a good timely enough (in the Commonwealth) example. I was catching a passing glimps of some long distance running in the bloody Commo Games last night on TV in the staff room, and of course the Kenyans were winning. No surprises there! There was some discussion about how those highland/mountaineer Kenyans are made for winning long distance running while we (the bloody Anglo-celtics) are good at swimming etc, yadda yadda.

Then I rememberred a documentory that I saw a long time ago with some Anthropologist investigating the where, why and how abouts of these very Kenyan Marathon Goldmedel winning runners or at least their recent enough team members. Anyway it was very interesting cos it turns out that they all only come from one this tribe in one area of Kenya. Now sure that's not all that controversial a thing. Completely understandable, but it's got to do with the reason this is so about them imparticular that means this is so. I can't remember the name of this tribe but for generations upon generations they have been pedestrian cattle rustlers!

Apparently in a region where most of the other tribes breed and raises cattle our Goldmedelist Kenyans' ancestors would run around the mountain sides pilfering the cattle from their neighbouring tribes doing all the herding. It is also an area where horses can't live so they litteraly had to run off with the other guys cows during the night until they got them home. Intregingly they didn't breed them themselves and therefore they were entirely devoted the robbery of cattle because cattle was the most valued thing as in ancient times. IIRC the men or probably rather the older boys of this tribe had to take a cow or possibly more in order to be able to marry their first wife or more!

[ March 24, 2006, 09:43 PM: Message edited by: Zalgiris 1410 ]

[Bigduke6]

Jason,

Ileave it to you to puzzle out how all male cossack groups lived off knitting,

No need, that the all-male Cossacks societies lived by preying on their neighbors is pretty much a generally-accepted historical fact. I would be a bit remiss if I didn't add that, if you look at Cossacks throughout their half-millenium of existence, most of the time the people the Cossacks were raping and pillaging were Islamic, and usually steppe nomads to boot. Not that that makes Cossacks morally better in my eyes, but in the eyes of the time Cossacks were very much considered a bulwark of Christendom, and by the European standards of the time that allowed you to practice non-European war against Christiandom's enemies. By that same token I think it is fair to say Cossacks raped and pillaged Christians a whole lot less than non-Christians. So not purely barbaric in that way, a true barbarian is equal opportunity when deciding whom to rape and pillage.

Now it is quite possible to get into a discussion as to, in the 16th and 17th centuries, whether it was Eastern Slav Christian society or Ottoman Turk/Crimean Tartar was the more civilized; as you are no doubt well aware this was the heyday of the Ottoman Empire, and the Renaissance definately did not penetrate to the Cossack lands.

My point is, a blanket characterization of all Cossacks as barbarians is not accurate.

point out that cossack is not synonymous with Ukrainian

I'm not asserting that they are, at least in terms of the strict definition. The ethnicity of Cossacks changed over the centuries, and as far as that goes the Ukrainian ethnicity really didn't exist until Russia took over the region. If we're talking 15th - 17th century, the Slavic principalities were where people gave their fealty, not to an ethnic nation.

The Prince of Kiev, Chernihiv, Lviv etc. had subjects, most of them spoke a language clearly directly linked to modern Ukrainian, but it was far from just Ukrainian-speaker that made up the Cossacks. Pretty much every brand of eastern Slav ethnicity made it into the Cossack ranks, Ukrainians in the first place but also including healthy helpings of Russians, Poles, White Russians; and also representatives from the dozens of Latin and/or Islamic ethnicities in the region. Part of the deal about most Cossack settlements, especially the all-male ones, was that a man could become a member without regard to his ethnicity; all he had to do was obey the rules.

Once Russia took over Ukraine (roughly, by the mid 18th century) the frontier moved to the Don River basin, and once that got incorporated in the Russian empire with nobles and serfs and so-on, the frontier moved to the Caucauses, and thus so did the frontier Cossack settlements.

You're quite right the term "Cossack" has seen plenty of use, and definately that use has gone far longer than when Ukraine was a wild frontier region.

I would argue, however, that once the Russian Empire incorporated Ukraine, Cossacks became very much a part of the Tsarist imperial system, and so the "free" aspects of Cossackdom (all-male communities, independent principalities, land bandits racing around raping an pillaging any one they could lay their hands on) became history. So I would say that, regardless of their limited or unbounded barbarism prior to the 19th century, by the 1800s Cossacks could in no way be considered barbaric; they had a defined role in the Tsarist system, which much counts as civilization.

The period when there were "barbaric" Cossacks, for practical purposes began after the Mongol Horde lost control of the Ukrainian steppe, (say, 1300) and the time the Russian empire re-imposed control (say, 1700-1750). And during that period, the Cossacks in all their permutations pretty much were doing their thing in what is now modern Ukraine.

As far as modern Cossacks, peculiarly enough I actually have had the, uh, pleasure of meeting more than a few over the years. They generally impressed me as mostly under-educated men with a bent towards nationalism and dressing up in uniforms. Not very different from Civil War recreationists in a lot of ways. If you scratch the surface more than a few modern Cossacks that I have talked to seemed to be pretty durn anti-Semetic. Very, very few could ride horses. The Cossack "regiments" these days seem to push a form of martial arts on their younger members, it is sort of a primitive Slavic karate, if you can imagine sort a thing. I would assume that some of the Cossack leaders in the depths of their dark hearts have hopes of leading their bully boys in street battles, but frankly like most recreationist organizations modern Cossacks turn out to be pretty limited financially, and, uh, disorganized.

And another thing, for some reason just about every one of the higher-ranking modern Cossacks I've chatted with had atrotious breath, with all the attendant implications towards civilization, or lack thereof.

I agree civilization is preferable to barbarism, but I would say that sometimes civilizations slap the term "barbarian" on competing civilizations, and that the dividing line between civilized and barbarian cultures is not always cut and dried.

[ March 25, 2006, 12:23 AM: Message edited by: Bigduke6 ]