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Cf. Darrell P. Hammer, “Law Enforcement, Social Control and the Withering of the State: Recent Soviet Experience,” Soviet Studies 14, no. 4 (April 1963), 379.

54.

Boris Yakemenko, “Vernyy Put” (February 21, 2008). http://boris-yakemenko.livejournal.com/2011/02/21/.

55.

“Sledstvie podtverdilo, chto glava Rosmolodozh osnoval firmu dlya banditov iz ’29-go kompleksa,’” Newsru.com (March 23, 2011).

56.

The official name of the Soviet youth organization Komsomol was VLKSM = Vsesoyuznyy Leninskiy Kommunisticheskiy Soyuz Molodezhi (All-Union Leninist Communist Union of Youth).

57.

Cathy Young, “Putin’s Young ‘Brownshirts,’” The Boston Globe (August 10, 2007).

58.

Lilia Shevtsova, Russia: Lost in Transition, The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2007), 282.

59.

Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova, “Fascist Russia?” Newsweek (August 15, 2011).

60.

Matthews and Nemtsova, “Fascist Russia?”

61.

“Bolshe ne ‘Nashi,’” (no date), website of Rosmolodezh, http://www.rosmolodezh.ru/novoteka-rosmolodezh/1-novosti-rosmolodezh/1365-boshe-ne-nashi.html. Accessed May 27, 2013.

62.

“Bolshe ne ‘Nashi.’”

63.

“Bolshe ne ‘Nashi.’”

Chapter 9

Send in the Cossacks

In 2012 the Kremlin took steps to diversify its druzhina policy. After doubts emerged over the effectiveness of the Nashi groups, the Kremlin polit-technologists identified a new reservoir of public peacekeepers. They found this reservoir in a traditional group: the Cossacks. The Cossacks have a reputation for being independently minded, whip-wielding horseback warriors. Originally, they were runaway serfs, nomads, and adventurers who colonized the southern steppes near the river Don where they were not likely to be caught. The oldest historical records concerning their existence date from 1549, when Crimean Tatars complained to Ivan the Terrible that Cossacks living on the Don were raiding their territory.^[1] Later the Cossacks acknowledged the sovereignty of the tsar. In exchange they got land and the status of a special military community with its own rights and freedoms. The different Cossack hosts (communities) served as buffers on the borders. They enjoyed great autonomy, had a local democracy with a general assembly (Krug) that elected a leader (ataman), and were recognized as a special estate (soslovie) between the serfs and the nobility. During more than two centuries they were engaged in the tsars’ armies, and their cavalry played an important role in the expansion of the Russian Empire into Siberia and the Caucasus. They brought their own horses and weapons. Service of the state was a lifelong affair. In the period 1835–1863, for instance, individual Cossacks served the state for thirty years, of which five years in active service and twenty-five years as reservists.^[2] Their relative importance becomes clear if one considers the fact that during the war in Turkestan (1877–1878), the Cossacks provided 125,000 soldiers, which was 7.4 percent of the army, while they made up only 2.2 percent of the total population.^[3] The Cossacks’ fortunes, however, were reversed during the Civil War (1917–1923), which followed the October Revolution. Though they fought on both sides, the majority resisted Bolshevik rule. This led to severe repression under communism. In 1919 the Soviet authorities even ordered the genocide of the Don Cossacks.^[4] Thousands of Cossacks fled abroad and went into exile. The fate of those who remained was dramatic. “Their property and livestock were confiscated, over two million Cossacks were repressed, more than 1.5 million were killed . . . . Cossack institutions, laws, self-government and customs were abolished.”^[5] However, before the Second World War Stalin made some conciliatory gestures toward the Cossacks. He even established a Cossack cavalry division in the Red Army, though a Cossack ancestry did not seem to be required to serve in this division. During the war the Germans also raised some Cossack units from among their prisoners of war and war deserters,^[6] which only reinforced Stalin’s suspicions about this group.

The Rehabilitation of the Cossacks