RUSSIA The unknown ‘Cosachia’

Some Cossack groups claim their own entity, independent from Moscow. The risk of disintegration is one of the effects of the Russian war in Ukraine. The first attempts to create a Cossack state after the Bolshevik revolution. It is difficult to establish how many people belong to the community.

Moscow () – Among the numerous separatist demands of the various republics and regions of the Russian Federation, the most surprising seems to come from an indefinite ethno-historical reality. It is a reality that has never had its own national identification, not even a regional one, but which is evoked by the current war in the Don area: the Cossack Union.

Speaking recently at a session of the FSB (the national intelligence service), Vladimir Putin pointed out the danger posed by those who wish to divide and weaken Russian society, using “separatism, nationalism and xenophobia as weapons”.

Indeed, in March 1993, some groups of Cossacks launched an attempt to create an independent republic in Rostov-on-Don. The so-called “Cossack” was to settle on the territory of southern Russia. It was not the first time: in 1920 there had been uprisings in the area, during the anti-revolutionary civil war that lasted for several years. Now there are those who return to claim an entity of the Cossacks, as revealed Novaja Gazeta Evropawhich published an investigation into the current reality of the Russian Cossacks, sometimes exalted as defenders of the homeland, and other times feared as they pose a threat to their integrity.

During the Forum of Free Peoples, held in Brussels on January 31, the participants came to propose the hypothesis of 27 independent States after the disintegration of the current Russian Federation. Among them would also be Cosachia, and at the headquarters of the European Parliament it was represented by a member of the Ezikovsky Ertaul movement. This is Aleksandr Zolotarev, who appealed to Europeans, reiterated in recent days in various media, to “recognize the Cossacks as an oppressed people.” The United States recognized it as such in 1959, within the framework of the law “On Enslaved Nations”, where the Cossacks are listed along with the Baltic countries, Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia and others.

The Cossack activist recalls that “almost all the peoples listed in that law have regained their independence, but Cossack has never resurfaced. Until now, the Russian Federation has not recognized the Cossacks as a separate people”, despite the fact that in the law Russian from 1991 “On the rehabilitation of repressed peopless” are also mentioned. The Cossacks are the “free men”, according to the original meaning of the Turkic term “kozak/kazak”, and they have always sought their own territory in the Russian empire, but have never been able to identify and obtain it.

Only after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, during the civil war, a section of the Cossacks tried to distinguish themselves from both the “reds” and the “whites”, proclaiming in the Rostov area and southern Ukraine – today the scene of the Russian invasion – the “Democratic Republic of the Cossacks”, led by General Petr Krasnov. This was suppressed by the Bolsheviks in 1920.

In 1942, a group of Cossacks who had fled from Stalinist terror tried to revive the republic, taking advantage of the uncertainty of the war after the attack by German troops, making themselves available to the Nazis. It ended badly: more than 250,000 people – including wives and children – were forced to retreat with the occupying army, while Soviet troops massacred those left behind. Some were deported and dispersed across Siberian territory together with the Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Kalmyks and other “traitorous peoples”.

At the end of the 19th century, there were more than 3 million Cossacks on the territory of Russia, with 11 warrior battalions spread over 15 republics – 2.3% of the total population. The most recent census (2021) shows that 50,450 Russian citizens called themselves Cossacks. However, in 2010, the then Chairman of the Federal Council for National Affairs, Aleksandr Beglov, believed that some 7 million people of Cossack descent lived in the country.

In reality, the Cossacks have never defined their own nature, either by considering themselves an independent ethnic group or a part of the Russian people due to other social, military or geographical characteristics. Putin’s war seems to awaken the consciousness of peoples old and new, even those who never really existed.