I
will post information about Russia’s Cossack Revival from several news sources.
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A Cossack instructor gave orders to children
during their military practice at the cadet school in Stavropol, Russia.
Cossacks have steadily expanded their role in Russian public life since last
spring, when Vladimir V. Putin returned to the Russian presidency.
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INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/russian-cadet-school-photos-2014-4
Russia
Is Giving Military Training To 11-Year-Olds At This State-Run School [PHOTOS]
May 5 2014, 11:48 AM
There’s a state-run
school in southern Russia where students aged 11 to 17 undergo military
training in addition to traditional schooling.
Reuters
has published photos showing the weapons training at the General Yermolov
Cadet School in Stavropol. Only students with good grades get to go on the
trip.
Students stay in
military-style sleeping quarters during the training excursions.
Here they’re leaning
about the general the school was named after, Alexei Yermolov, who commanded
the Caucusus army in 1816 and is credited with reforming the structure of the
Cossacks.
The school allows
students to learn about the Cossacks, a Russian ethnic group that was nearly
wiped out after the Bolshevik revolution when tens of thousands of them were
deported. Russian president Vladimir Putin has given financial
support to Cossacks to rehabilitate their role in society, including
regional law enforcement.
Here, a child takes aim
with a pistol while instructors look on.
This student is holding
two rifles that are nearly as big as he is.
Fitness exercises and
other activities accompany the shooting practice.
Martial arts lessons are
included in the training.
Students sometimes train
in extreme cold.
Cooking meals in the
forest is also part of the program.
The school has operated
for more than a decade. It has open admittance for any child who wishes to attend.
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/world/europe/cossacks-are-back-in-russia-may-the-hills-tremble.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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A Cossack cadet at the training school in
Stavropol. Regional leaders are granting Cossacks an increasing role in law
enforcement, in some cases explicitly tasking them with stemming an influx of
ethnic minorities — Muslims from the Caucasus — into territory long dominated
by Orthodox Slavs.
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March
16, 2013
The
Cossacks Are Back. May the Hills Tremble.
By
ELLEN BARRY
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Cossack cadets wearing gas masks during
military practice. In his third term, Mr. Putin has offered one clear new
vector for the country — the propagation of a conservative, nationalist
ideology — and Cossacks have emerged as a kind of mascot, with growing
financial and political support.
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STAVROPOL,
Russia — Outside this city’s police headquarters on a recent night, a priest in
a purple velvet hat and gold stole moved from one man to the next, offering a
cross to be kissed and drenching their faces with holy water from a long brush.
And
so began another night of law enforcement as Cossacks, the fierce horsemen who
once secured the frontier for the Russian empire, marched out to join the
police patrolling the city.
In
his third term, President Vladimir V. Putin has
offered one clear new direction for the country: the development of a
conservative, nationalist ideology. Cossacks have emerged as a kind of mascot,
with growing financial and political support.
The
Kremlin is dipping into a deep pool of history: Cossacks are revered here for
their bravery and pre-modern code of honor, like cowboys in the United States
or samurai in Japan. But their legacy is bound up with battle and
vigilante-style violence, including campaigns against Turks, Jews and Muslim
highlanders.
These
days men in Cossack uniforms are making appearances all over Russia, carrying
out blustery raids of art exhibits, museums and theaters as standard-bearers
for a resurgent church. But here on Russia’s southern flank, the Cossack
revival is more than an idea. Regional leaders are granting them an increasing
role in law enforcement, in some cases explicitly asking them to stem an influx
of ethnic minorities, mainly Muslims from the Caucasus, into territory long
dominated by Orthodox Slavs.
“We’ve
lived cheek to cheek with them, and sometimes we fought with them, and we
probably understand them better than a Russian from Moscow,” said Staff Capt.
Vadim Stadnikov, head of security for the Terek Cossack Army, whose office
displays a portrait of Czar Nicholas II. “They respect strength here.”
“With
police it is a short conversation — you committed a crime, here’s the punishment,”
he said. With Cossacks involved, he added, “There is a prophylactic effect, a
kind of education. They come here. Take this group of young people. Explain to
them the traditions of the Orthodox, Slavic, Cossack people of the city of
Stavropol. What our rules are. How we live here.”
A
series of violent episodes have underlined the potential for trouble in this
incendiary and heavily armed part of Russia. This month, a Cossack chieftain
was fatally shot trying to arrest a drunken man who had taken hostages in the
neighboring region of Krasnodar. At the chieftain’s funeral, Cossacks in
crimson coats, carrying leather whips and sabers, streamed after a riderless
horse, a sight that could have dated from the 16th century.
Afterward,
a top official said the time had come for the state to allow Cossack patrolmen
to carry traumatic guns, nonlethal weapons that can inflict severe injuries at
close range — a proposal that has been endorsed by the governors of Krasnodar
and Stavropol.
“Some
human rights activists, some ill-wishers, talk a lot about whether it’s
necessary or not necessary,” Nikolai A. Doluda, chieftain of the Kuban Cossack
Army and a deputy to the governor, told Russian television. “This terrible,
frightening event underlines the fact that it is necessary.”
Historians
still argue about who the Cossacks were — descendants of escaped serfs or Tatar
warriors, an ethnic group in their own right or a caste of horsemen. They
played a crucial role in colonizing the south for the Russian empire, and later
turned on peasant and worker uprisings, defending the czar.
The
Bolsheviks nearly obliterated them, deporting tens of thousands in a process
they called “de-Cossackization,” but the image of the Cossack, wild and free,
was a permanent part of the Russian imagination.
When
Tolstoy sat down to write his classic novel “The Cossacks,” he set it near present-day Stavropol,
where the Terek River divided the Muslim-populated mountains from the steppes,
which were Cossack country. In a scene taught to generations of schoolchildren,
a young Cossack spots a Chechen swimming across the Terek disguised as a log
and shoots him.
The
notion of an ethnic dividing line is widely accepted to this day, but it is
running up against demography. Muslim ethnic groups in the Caucasus have a high
birthrate, and Russians are abandoning the steppe. About 81 percent of
Stavropol’s population is ethnic Russian, but that share has been shrinking for
decades, the International Crisis Group has reported.
This
rapid change is unsettling to ethnic Russians in Stavropol, who sometimes refer
to the newcomers as “shepherds.” Gennady A. Ganopenko, 42, said he grew up in a
city so homogeneous that “the sound of a non-Russian language was grounds for a
brawl.”
“Earlier,
this was the gate to the Caucasus,” he said. “We opened the gate, and then the
gate came off the hinges.”
The
Cossack revival seeks to slow this trend. Last summer, Aleksandr N. Tkachev, the governor of the Krasnodar
region, to the west, took aim at his neighbors in the Stavropol region, saying
so many Muslims had resettled there that Russians no longer felt at home. The
region, he said, no longer served its traditional function as an ethnic
“filter.”
To
crack down on illegal migration, he announced the creation of a salaried force
of 1,000 Cossack patrolmen, which — he explained in a speech to law enforcement
officers — would not be restrained by the law as the police are. He put it this
way: “What you cannot do, a Cossack can.”
Stavropol’s
leaders bridled at the speech, but it struck a chord with nationalists. Among
them was Boris V. Pronin, chieftain of the Romanov-Cossacks, one of the many
Cossack associations in Stavropol not officially registered with the
government. Like many people in the region, he said youths from the Caucasus
had begun to behave too freely in Stavropol.
“It’s
as if I came to your house, slapped you in the face and said, ‘Tonight, I’m
going to sleep with your wife,’ ” he said in an interview.
Mr.
Pronin has bright blue eyes and the battered nose of a boxer, and he wears a
handsome, traditional Cossack uniform. After an ethnic Russian man was stabbed
in a brawl with Muslim youths from the Caucasus this winter, he lashed out at
regional law enforcement for acting too slowly to detain his assailants. He
advocates the creation of a Cossack guard unit with powers equivalent to those
of the police, warning that immediate action is needed.
“If
a person has a cancer and metastasis has begun, if a professional doctor
doesn’t take care of this metastasis, he will die,” he said. “It is the same
with society. If there is already metastatic cancer on the territory of
Stavropol region, one has to take appropriate preventive measures.”
The
rise in official support for Cossacks is troubling to some Muslims, though
their official representatives are careful about saying so. An exception was
Zainudin Azizov, who, on a recent morning, barreled past herds of sheep and
over acres of gray-brown steppe in a Mercedes S.U.V. while music wailed from
its dashboard.
“One
class is turning out to be somehow privileged,” he said of the Cossacks. “Why
don’t they support the whole Russian people? Why are they supporting only this
small class?”
Mr.
Azizov represents Dagestani families who now dominate in villages at the
far-eastern edge of the Stavropol region, and he is particularly irritated by a
plan to grant free land in areas like his own to Cossack families being
resettled, creating a kind of buffer zone of ethnic Russians. Nor does he like
the idea of Cossack patrolmen receiving salaries from the state. While some of
the local Cossacks are old friends, he said, others are “skinheads.”
“They
join the Cossacks, but then they behave like nationalists,” he said. “They have
support from the region, from Moscow. They feel they can do anything they want,
that tomorrow they will have protection.”
Indeed,
the Cossacks who set out to patrol Stavropol on a recent night felt that they
were part of a rising tide. Andrei Kovtun, 29, recalled the ribbing he got from
his former colleagues in law enforcement when he first patrolled with the
Cossacks, who do not have the right to demand documents, carry weapons or
detain people.
Still,
on one of his early calls — separating two groups of brawling men — he
understood that a Cossack’s presence had a psychological effect. “Are you a
cop?” someone asked him, and when he answered, the room went quiet. Mr. Kovtun
understood why: Policemen are bound by the law.
“A
complaint cannot be made against a Cossack, and a Cossack cannot be fired,” he
said. “They know Cossacks are free, and will not think too much about how to
take a violator to a police station, but will simply give him a whipping. This
is what people are afraid of — that a Cossack will punish the culprit in the
old, traditional but fair fashion.”
“However,”
he added hastily, “first we should always stop it by force of persuasion.”
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Cossack cadets practiced using whips in
Stavropol, Russia.
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INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000002114638/russias-cossack-revival.html
Russia's
Cossack Revival - 2013
Published on Mar 18, 2013
As
the Russian government aims to promote a more conservative tone, Cossacks are
playing a growing role, but threatening a gentle ethnic balance.
Related article: http://nyti.ms/ZNzUwP
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