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Now, a few words about the Cossacks, a large group counting millions of Russians. Historically, Cossacks served the Russian state by defending its borders and taking part in military campaigns of the Russian Army. Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Cossack community was subjected to brutal repression, which was actually genocide. But the Cossacks survived and retained their culture and traditions. The mission of the state now is to help the Cossacks, draw them into military service and educational activities for youths, involving a patriotic upbringing and initial military training.^[16]

Touting “Cossack Values”

The comeback of the Cossacks into Russian public life after an absence of ninety years was accompanied by much publicity, culminating in a Cossack media frenzy in which their martial traditions and supposed virtues, such as courage, loyalty, patriotism, and observance of “traditional values” were touted. “Cossacks protected the Russian Orthodox Church and the Motherland during difficult times,” wrote Olivia Kroth in the pro-Kremlin paper Pravda.^[17] “Today Cossacks continue doing so, educating children and young people according to their high ethical standards.”^[18] Another author, Sergey Israpilov, saw in the Cossacks a bulwark against the decay of modern Russian society, characterized by individualism that “arrived in Russia from the West” and by a low birth rate. According to him, Russia needed to build “enclaves of traditionalists, who defend or create anew traditional society with its strong family and great fecundity.”^[19] Improving the birth rate and “bearing children for Russia” is also one of the objectives of Putin, who, in his address to the Federal Assembly, in December 2012, said people should “believe that families with three children should become the standard in Russia.”^[20] A BBC correspondent, who visited some Cossack villages in southern Russia, saw families there with seven children. He was told “that Cossack families should be as large as possible.”^[21] He wrote that “Cossack family values are simple, rigid, and to a Western eye, seem to come from another era. The men build the home and provide an income; the women cook, clean and give birth to children. Traditional Russian values, culture, and Orthodoxy form the bedrock of their beliefs.”^[22] Russian authors and intellectuals, touting the purported traditional values of the Cossacks, resemble the nineteenth-century narodniki, urbanites who idealized the supposedly high ethical standards and deep spiritual life of the simple Russian peasant. In 2009, in a speech before the Presidential Council for Cossack Affairs, Patriarch Kirill also contributed to this moral glorification of the Cossack. “Without faith, without spiritual eagerness, without true reliance upon spiritual and moral values,” declared the Patriarch, “it is not only impossible to revive the Cossacks, but the Cossack culture itself cannot exist.”^[23] This culture, he added, is “a lifestyle, formed under the spiritual influence of the Orthodox faith.”^[24]

The Role of the Cossacks in Post-Soviet Local Wars