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.
Galeotti, “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.
