Who is to say that such youth movements as Nashi (Ours), Mestnye (Locals), and the Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) will not go the same way as the nationalistic Rodina (Motherland) Party? After being likewise set up by the Kremlin, Rodina became a loose cannon because of the ambitions of its nationalistic leader, Dmitri Rogozin. The Kremlin had to remove the Motherland Party from the Moscow elections and expel some of its overambitious politicians. It might be more difficult to keep even the pro-Kremlin youth movements on a leash. The gangs of young Putin supporters created by the Kremlin in the wake of the Ukrainian Revolution started by harassing opposition politicians Garry Kasparov and Mikhail Kasianov and then went after foreign diplomats, attacking the British and Estonian ambassadors. The young are playing the game with evident enthusiasm, becoming more aggressive each time. They have already understood their strength and are eager to do “big projects.” The moment may come when the young wolves will feel they are manipulated and will want to become an independent force. And someone might emerge who will lead this destructive blind force that can be turned into a dangerous political weapon. The Russian authorities may never have read the story of Frankenstein and seem unaware of how experiments creating monsters may end.[58]
Unfortunately, sooner than expected, Shevtsova’s predictions seemed to come true. In an alarming article about the growth of racist neo-Nazi organizations in Russia, Newsweek wrote that “the growth of violent racism in Russia has been encouraged by the Kremlin’s dabbling with nationalist ideology and politicized youth groups…. The Kremlin’s ‘political technologists’ unwittingly trained a generation of cadres to be conversant in the dark art of rousing masses of young people, organizing demonstrations, manipulating the press, and cutting deals with the authorities.”[59] The magazine added that “[a] Newsweek investigation has revealed that many of the organizers of today’s extreme nationalist groups learned their tradecraft as ‘commissars’ of the Kremlin-sponsored youth groups Nashi, Walking Together, and the Young Guard.”[60] This might have raised some doubts in the Nashi leadership as concerns the desirability of the planned Nashi militias. In the spring of 2013 on the website of Rosmolodezh, the official youth agency, an article was published, announcing that at the end of 2013 the Nashi would be transformed into a new youth organization with a new name. The title commissar would disappear. The former commissars would get a new task: “they become managers, coordinating the movement’s projects.”[61] The objective of these projects would be “the social adaptation of youth.”[62] Aleksey Makarkin, a political scientist, commented that “after December 2011 it became clear that the Nashi were not effective in the struggle against the regime’s opponents. Therefore the emphasis is [now] on less ambitious local projects, that are, maybe, more effective projects.”[63] Does this mean the end of Putin’s druzhiny project? Not quite. Because in the meantime Putin had discovered another group of devoted supporters whom he considered more capable of this task: the Cossacks.
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
The Cossacks had to wait for Gorbachev’s perestroika and the fall of communism to make a glorious comeback. In 1992 Yeltsin issued Decree 632 on the rehabilitation of the Cossacks, followed, in July 1994, by Decree 1389, establishing a Council for Cossack Affairs. At the end of 1994 Yeltsin went still further, supporting a new law on Cossacks that granted them the status of an archipelago state within Russia, consisting of twelve Federal Cossack Regions, each of which corresponded with a Cossack host.[7] This Cossack archipelago state was headed by a Council of Atamans (Cossack leaders), which was responsible not to the government, but to the president—mirroring the historical special relationship with the tsar.[8] Already in the 1990s the Cossacks began to be used as vigilantes, though only locally. In 1995 Mark Galeotti wrote:
58
Lilia Shevtsova,
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.
1
Cf. Shane O’Rourke, “From Region to Nation: The Don Cossacks 1870–1920,” in
2
Vladimir Sineokov,
4
O’Rourke, “From Region to Nation,” 232. O’Rourke wrote: “This was not a clinical exercise in removing inveterate opponents of the Soviet regime, but the wholesale slaughter of a people” (233).
5
Lester W. Grau, “The Cossack Brotherhood Reborn: A Political/Military Force in a Realm of Chaos,”
7
Mark Galeotti, “The Cossacks: A Cross-Border Complication to Post-Soviet Eurasia,”