Putin's Wars
Page 23
Like the Tsars, today’s Russian leaders have turned to the Cossacks for internal and external security. Since 1990, Cossack vigilantes have patrolled the streets of many Russian cities, armed with clubs, sabres and nagaykas (traditional whips). The regional administration in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar went further, in 1992 hiring armed Cossack units to patrol the countryside on horseback and in armoured vehicles . . . . The section on law enforcement in the Law on Cossacks—drafted by the Interior Ministry—formalises this role, establishing the dubious precedent of giving full police powers of search and arrest to untrained, armed vigilantes responsible to their elders rather than the authorities.[9]
Yeltsin’s reforms led also to the creation of Cossack regiments, and some Cossack units were formed within the Border Troops.[10] Cossacks also got the right to set up security companies, and in 1997 several of these companies were working for the Moscow city government.[11] However, the rehabilitation of the Cossacks under Yeltsin still remained uncompleted, and their new status was only a pale reflection of their privileged position in the former tsarist Empire. Their real chance, therefore, came with the arrival of Vladimir Putin. The new president was highly appreciative of the Cossacks. He attached great importance to this group and wanted to restore the Cossacks to their traditional function of pillars of the regime. In 2003 he appointed Gennady Troshev, a Cossack general who had served as commander of the military operations in Chechnya, as special adviser for Cossack Affairs in his presidential administration. In 2005 Putin signed the bill “On the State Service of the Russian Cossacks,” which offered the Cossacks privileged entry to the state service.[12] Draft-age Cossacks would “gain the right to serve in traditional Cossack military units, as well as frontier and internal forces.”[13] Lev Ponomaryov, head of the NGO “For Human Rights” did not conceal his concern. “If they want to guard the borders,” he said, “let them do this . . . . [However], it is alarming that they may be given the right to maintain law and order within these borders. Experience shows that the Cossacks have their own interpretation of law and order.”[14] But the Cossacks were satisfied. They showed their gratitude by granting Putin the title of ataman—Cossack colonel—a title previously reserved for the Russian tsars. Putin himself became the highest Cossack leader. In 2005 a Cossack regiment was founded in the army together with Cossack military schools where pupils—ages seven to seventeen—attend classes in army fatigues. The curriculum includes military tactics, patriotism, and moral (i.e., Orthodox) education. In 2013 there existed thirty such Cossack schools in the Russian Federation.[15] The southern town of Krasnodar, the centre of the Don Cossacks host, became a testing ground for the new Cossack activities. In February 2012, during the presidential election campaign, Putin once more stressed the importance of the Cossacks in an article in Izvestia:
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
However, are the Cossacks really these so-called white knights as depicted by their admirers? It is, for instance, a well-known fact that in the latter half of the nineteenth century the tsarist government used Cossack troops not only to repress uprisings against the state, but also to perpetrate pogroms against the Jews. An Israeli paper expressed its concern. “Famed for leading anti-Jewish pogroms and close ties to the czar,” wrote the paper, “the group is making a comeback with Vladimir Putin’s support.”[25] In a 1998 Human Rights Watch report the Cossack ideology is described as “virulently anti-ethnic migrant which often degenerates into a general hatred of all minorities.”[26] After the fall of communism Cossacks became active as mercenaries in conflict zones. They fought in the Georgian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in Chechnya, in Transnistria (Moldova), and in the former Yugoslavia. During the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 Human Rights Watch reported that “officials in Java [South Ossetia] also said that Russian Cossacks were fighting alongside Ossetian militias.”[27] This was confirmed by other sources. The Nezavisimaya Gazeta wrote on August 6, 2008, that Cossack atamans (leaders) had announced “that in case of necessity the Cossacks could send 10,000 to 15,000 volunteers to the war, and this will be fighters with lengthy experience in active service.”[28] This announcement was immediately put in practice. “[I]rregular Cossack paramilitaries, said by some reports to have numbered in the thousands, fought on the Russian/separatist side in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.”[29] “Cossack volunteers . . . crossed the borders to engage Georgian forces. Cossacks in nearby North Ossetia apparently organized a relatively efficient and rapid system for clothing, equipping and transporting their paramilitaries into the breakaway province to feed them onto combat.”[30] “Cossack volunteers formed the second major paramilitary force in the war, the first being the South Ossetian militias. According to reports, the Cossack forces fought with dogged determination.”[31] Militias, active in South Ossetia in August 2008, have been accused of war crimes. Shortly after the war The Guardian’s Luke Harding wrote: “South Ossetian militias, facilitated by the Russian army, are carrying out the worst ethnic cleansing since the war in former Yugoslavia.”[32]
Cossacks Patrolling the Streets
Cossacks were not only active in the “f
rozen conflicts” in the former Soviet space. According to Israpilov, Russia needed “more urgently a filter against threats coming from within the country, than from the external borders.”[33] In effect, inside Russia’s frontiers also the Cossacks proved to be useful to the authorities, taking on tasks that the authorities preferred to outsource. In the southern Krasnodar province, a Cossack region that includes Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, such practice was already long established. The regional government’s program “Cossack Participation in Protecting Public Order” allowed Cossacks “to be used as the main force for displacing the targeted ethnic minority of Meskhetian Turks. The Cossacks were not too picky about the means they used to do their job: ethnic Turks were subjected to mass beatings and ambushes, their gardens were destroyed, homes looted, and the goods and market stalls of Turkish traders were confiscated.”[34] The Cossacks’ efforts were successful, and the Turks left the Krasnodar region after the U.S. government granted them asylum. “The exercise in displacing the Turkish minority,” wrote Fatima Tlisova, “became an example of how effective Cossacks may be in dealing with the sensitive task of making people’s lives hell while maintaining the appearance of law and order and non-involvement on the part of the Russian government.”[35]
In the meantime Cossacks patrolling the streets have become a familiar sight in Krasnodar. Aleksandr Tkachev, the governor of the Krasnodar region, said the Cossacks were entrusted with “forcing out” from his region the unwelcome “intruders” (i.e., Muslim migrants) from adjacent Russian territories of the North Caucasus.[36] To clarify further, he went on to explain “that the Cossacks should act more freely than the police, whose operations are constrained by ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights.’”[37] “What they can’t do, he said, a Cossack can.”[38] After the mass demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg in December 2011 and the spring of 2012 it became clear that the Cossacks, with their sabres, high fur caps, epaulettes, and impressive, broad shouldered uniforms, could be useful also in the rest of the Federation. They displayed all the characteristics necessary for a pro-Kremlin militia with their militant tradition, their socially conservative attitude, their patriotism, their supposed strict observance of the Russian Orthodox faith, and their staunch support for Vladimir Putin. Moreover, they had still another additional advantage that the Kremlin could not neglect: they could more easily be controlled than Nashi hooligans, while in the population at large they enjoyed a rather positive image.
A New Praetorian Guard?
The potential of the new Cossack reservoir is impressive. About 7 million Russians consider themselves Cossacks, which is approximately 5 percent of the population.[39] This does not mean that the whole group will be engaged by the state. According to Alexander Beglov, the chairman of the President’s Council on Cossack Affairs, there are three ways to be a Cossack. The first is to be active as a member of a Cossack community in order to preserve its traditions; the second is more passive—to be “just a Cossack”; the third is to sign up on the state’s Cossacks register. Only by choosing this last option does a Cossack oblige himself to serve the state. In order to be accepted, a candidate must be a Russian citizen older than eighteen years, he must have no criminal record, drink no alcohol, “share the ideas of the Cossacks,” and be a Christian Orthodox believer, because “a Cossack cannot be an atheist.”[40] In 2012 the state register counted 426 organizations with a total of 937,000 active members.[41] At the end of 2012 the eleven existing Cossack armies were merged into a single All-Russian Cossack Army. The army leader (ataman) has his headquarters in Moscow and will directly report to the commander-in-chief, Vladimir Putin. In this way the Kremlin leader will have—like the tsars before him—his own army, loyal only to him. The Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church form the two pillars of this new praetorian guard, which functions as a “cordon sanitaire” around Putin. The haste with which Putin is building this personal army is a sign that, weakened after the mass protests of 2011–2012, he wants to strengthen his position in the “internal war” with the opposition. It is, furthermore, a sign that, due to growing dissensions amongst the political elite, he is placing less trust in the traditional vestiges of power: the military, the police, and even the secret service.
A Cossack Political Party
To test the ground in 2011 Cossack squads had already become active in the southwest district of Moscow. On September 12, 2012, a new step was taken when they made their first appearance in the center of the Russian capital. About six hundred Cossacks were assigned to Moscow, which is fifty per district.[42] The Cossacks took their new role of moral police seriously, barring visitors from entering a Moscow art exhibition in which the female punk group Pussy Riot’s woollen balaclavas were put over Orthodox Christian icons.[43] Cossack activists also led a campaign to cancel a staging of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita in St. Petersburg, accusing the organizers of “propaganda for paedophilia.” Their action was successful: the play was canceled. This new moral police could also play a prominent role in the homophobic campaign initiated by the “gay propaganda bill,” introducing heavy fines for providing information about homosexuality to minors, which was signed by Putin on June 30, 2013. Alexander Mikhailov, a regional deputy from the Zabaikalsky region, said Cossacks should be allowed to punish gay people physically by flogging them in public with a leather whip.[44] How privileged the Cossacks’ position has become in Putin’s Russia became clear when on November 24, 2012, the Cossacks founded their own political party. According to the official website the program of the party is “based on the traditional values of the Cossacks. This is patriotism, the defense of the interests of the government, and the moral principles of society.”[45] The party’s chairman, Sergey Bondarev, is a former member of the pro-Kremlin party United Russia and deputy governor of the Rostov region.[46] The abbreviation of this new Cossack Party of the Russian Federation is CaPRF, which resembles the abbreviation of the Communist Party: CPRF (in Russian, respectively, KaПРФ and KПРФ). It has led to protests from the Communists against this “spoiler project.” Vadim Solovyev, secretary of the central committee of the Communist Party, accused the Kremlin of wanting to siphon off voters: “They seek to water down the electorate.”[47] According to the Russian analyst Alexander Golts, “All the talk that Cossacks represent generations of pedigreed fighters imbued with a burning desire to defend the motherlands is nonsense.”[48] “The Kremlin,” he said, “wants to incorporate an invented ‘elite’ group of Russians into the siloviki.”[49] Golts saw the Cossack patrols as the first step in the creation of a new mafia: the “first step toward their control over such profitable sectors as collection of parking fees in the city center.”[50] While these profitable practices might motivate individual Cossacks to enter Putin’s Cossack squads, their importance for the Kremlin lies elsewhere: to build a reliable force that is able to prevent and repress mass protest movements.
Notes
1. Cf. Shane O’Rourke, “From Region to Nation: The Don Cossacks 1870–1920,” in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, eds. Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen, and Anatoliy Remnev (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 221.
2. Vladimir Sineokov, Kazachestvo i ego gosudarstvennoe znachenie (Paris: Prince Gortchakoff, 1928), 44.
3. Sineokov, Kazachestvo i ego gosudarstvennoe znachenie, 28.
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,” Low Intensity Conflict & Law Enforcement 2, no. 3 (Winter 1993). http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/cossack/cossack.htm.
6. Grau, “The Cossack Brotherhood Reborn.”
7. Mark Galeotti, “The Cossacks: A Cross-Border Complication to Post-Soviet Eurasia,” IBRU Boundary and Security Bulletin (Summer 1995), 56.
8. Ga
leotti, “The Cossacks: A Cross-Border Complication to Post-Soviet Eurasia.”
9. Galeotti, “The Cossacks: A Cross-Border Complication to Post-Soviet Eurasia.”
10. Galeotti, Mark. “The Cossacks Are Coming (Maybe),” Moscow News (February 22, 2012).
11. Galeotti, “The Cossacks Are Coming (Maybe).”
12. Olga Dorokhina, “Kratkiy kurs istorii kazachestva,” Kommersant Vlast (November 19, 2012).
13. “Cossacks Return to State Service,” RIA Novosti (June 30, 2005).
14. “Cossacks Return to State Service.”
15. Marie Jégo, “Le renouveau cosaque,” Le Monde (February 3–4, 2013).
16. Vladimir Putin, “Being Strong: National Security Guarantees for Russia,” RT (February 20, 2012).
17. Olivia Kroth, “Moscow Police Shall Revive the Great Cossack Tradition,” Pravda (November 20, 2012).