Military Traditions of the Don Cossacks in the Late Imperial Period

Given what was said above, the Maslakovets Commission's proposal to abolish centralized military education in the stanitsas, based on the state of affairs before the 1860s, appears to be quite understandable. As an alternative, members of the Commission suggested calling the Cossacks up for active service not in December but in February, as had been done before, so that draftees could undergo training in the regiments now. Out of the two dozen members of the Commission, only one -- member of the Provincial Zemstvo Committee A. S. Ezhov -- resolutely protested against the proposal arguing that this would result in “young Cossacks in the stanitsas no longer receiving training in horseback riding, the use of arms, and other military exercises”, which had “formed an indispensable part of life in the Don stanitsas from remote times”. That being said, he, too, acknowledged that “perhaps, the current system of preparatory education for the Cossacks is not meeting its purpose”. However, he regarded as absolutely unacceptable from a historical viewpoint the idea of “abolishing the military training of young Cossacks in the stanit- sas”. Essentially, statements like these only proved that A. S. Ezhov's opponents were right -- for it followed from his words that by the 1890s the system of military training for Cossacks in the stanitsas remained in place only through government initiative, and that abolishing the preparatory grade would put an end to military training altogether. Nonetheless, the issue of what to do with the training of Cossacks next produced a rift among the Russian army battle commanders as well. For instance, P. G. Dukmasov, who totally agreed with the conclusions of the Maslakovets Commission, not only argued, as was shown above, that the training of Cossacks in the stanitsas had long become useless and even harmful but noted that most of the young dragoons who joined the units totally unprepared in October turned into perfectly prepared cavaliers in the ranks in summer A. I. Domontovich, on the contrary, was wary that abolishing the preparation grade would “simply obliterate the smoldering embers of the Cossack spirit”, and, therefore, given that “a child develops a passion for what his father does”, it was not advisable to put off the start of the Cossacks' military training until they turned 21, when the father's influence on the child in that respect was no longer as powerful as before. Of interest is the view of Commander of the Moscow Military District Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, who suggested exercising care in implementing any major changes in the education of Cossacks, warning that “taking a wrong course in the matter could have highly undesirable consequences and considerably weaken the Cossacks' military morale”. That being said, he too regarded as imperative the need to enhance shooting skills and “exercise stricter control over the training of young Cossacks”. Yet these differences of opinion among the various battle commanders of the Russian army are not a major concern. The bottom line is that on the eve of the 20th century all of them recognized that the then-existing system of training for Don Cossacks in the stanitsas was totally ineffective and insisted that it be transformed.

Conclusion

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Don Cossacks' system of traditions related to military training was an artificial and relatively recent construct. The region's historically and naturally evolved martial games for young Cossacks began to die out no later than the early 19th century, with I. S. Ul'yanov and I. I. Krasnov, born at the beginning of the 19th century, appearing not to have witnessed them. This, however, does not signify that the region's military traditions had perished entirely in the stanitsas -- as far back as the 1860s did the Cossacks stage horseback riding and shooting contests during the week of Maslen- itsa. It is just that these “martial game” contests were hardly considered of much value. Nonetheless, the extant elements of traditional military education became the basis for the launch of a system of proper, official education for young Cossacks in the 1860s -- which would be regarded as quite effective by many, including D. A. Milyutin and the very same I. Krasnov. However, unfortunately it was impossible to stop the process of extinction of military traditions in the Cossack milieu in the period between the 1860s and 1870s. According to A. I. Domontovich, P. G. Dukmasova, and N. A. Maslakovets, the further, the stronger properly regulated education came into collision with the Cossacks' real needs and traditions. As a consequence, by the 1890s “natural” martial games no longer played a substantial role in preparing the Cossacks for service, whilst official training had become so ineffective that they had to retrain young Cossacks in the regiments. It came to the point that Don general P. G. Dukmasov and the members of the Maslakovets Commission who were from the Don stanitsas requested that the authorities provide joint training to the Cossacks and dragoons, i. e. to have draftees from the stanitsas undergo training in the regiments now, after being called up!

Accordingly, the image of the Cossack as a “dashing equestrian warrior”, so typical in pre-revolutionary official historiography, must be perceived with caution, if not with skepticism. An analysis of the War Ministry's internal documentation indicates that in the second half of the 1890s nearly half of the draftees from the Don region were prepared for service poorly or unsatisfactorily altogether. One could encounter scores of Cossacks who not just were poor horseback riders but seemed to have “never ridden a horse before”. Certain officers were unable to ride a horse simply due to their “phenomenal corpulence”. That being said, the issue of many of the Don Cossacks unpreparedness for service arose no later than the 1860s, when it drew the attention of Alexander II. Certain contemporary historians trace the crisis of the Cossacks' system of military traditions even further back -- to the 1820s.

As regards the Cossacks' spontaneous martial games, these could be divided into two major groups, with the reservation that there are not so many credible descriptions out there of what these games were like during the period under examination. Only two authors, I. I. Krasnov and S. F. Nomikosov, describe large-scale group games that were most beneficial to military training, which involved forming two separate detachments (e. g., the “Cossacks” and “Turks”) and staging a mock battle. However, as was shown above, S. F. Nomikosov's account has yet to be confirmed by other authors and appears somewhat embellished, while I. I. Krasnov describes an uncertain past altogether. Consequently, it may be stated with confidence that this kind of large-scale games were no longer organized in the first half of the 19th century, while in the century's second half, even if they had been revived, they were staged quite rarely. At the same time, what seems quite plausible is that to older-generation Cossacks, like the above-mentioned I. I. Krasnov and I. S. Ul'yanov, it is these two-way battles that were real traditional Don Cossack martial games, whilst less significant contests, which technically dealt with the honing of military skills too, were regarded by them as ordinary, everyday games. This is the only way to explain their view of martial games in the Don region as having died out, whilst martial games in the second group were in use in the stanitsas at least up until the 1860s.

The second group is made up of martial games in which the Cossacks competed with each other individually in skills that are crucial for military service. This incorporates festive horseracing and fist fighting contests, mentioned by M. N. Kharuzin, and shooting and equestrian contests staged during the week of Maslenitsa, mentioned by N. I. Krasnov. However, with all the outward effectiveness of these games, their real benefit for military service was equivocal. For instance, horse races were usually won by stanitsa residents who could afford to buy a charger in advance, while fist fighting was not a distinct discipline with the Cossacks. Nonetheless, by the end of the 19th century unfortunately only these games, not related in any way to the provision of proper training to the Cossacks by stanitsa instructors, remained in place. The Cossacks, generally, advocated keeping these games in place and developing them, acknowledging that while they could no longer produce a full-fledged warrior, they could still help obtain “pristine material” to be trained when in the combatant forces -- draftees who did not know the fundamentals of combat horseback riding but at least were “firm in the saddle”.

Lastly, it is also possible to single out a third group, which includes games that may once have had a military subtext to them but lost it with the passage of time. Among those mentioned above, the most glaring example of this type of activity is “walking with the flag”, which, according to M. N. Kharuzin, eventually had turned into ordinary visits to houses in the area for the mere purpose of partying. The existence of games like this is eloquent testimony to the decline of the Cossacks' system of military traditions in the second half of the 19th century.

When talking about the Cossacks' military traditions, it is customary to draw upon testimonies from various decades and even centuries. A good example is the writings of A. V. Iarovoi. In other cases, historians appeal exclusively to formal texts that idealize the Cossacks, as is the case with N. V. Ryzhkova. This way of doing it, however, distorts the reality and substitutes myths about the Cossacks' military traditions for the real history of them. Only serious work with the sources and an understanding of the fact that, in essence, much of the system of military traditions of late Don Cossackdom was an artificial construct of the second half of the 19th century, intended to restore or to replace the half-forgotten military traditions of the 18th century, can help us to obtain an answer to the question of what Don Cossackdom was like in actual fact.

References

1. Iarovoi A. V. Traditional war games of the Don Cossacks in the context of preserving historical memory. Voina i voinskie traditsii v kul'turakh narodov Iuga Rossii. VII Tokarevskie chteniia. Rostov-on-Don, Altair Publ., 2018, pp. 14-22. (In Russian)

2. Kashkarov A. P. Cossacks: traditions, customs, culture (a brief guide to the true Cossack). Rostov-on-Don, Phoenix Publ., 2015, 125 p. (In Russian)

3. Matveev O. V. From the historical and military-cultural heritage of the Cossacks of Kuban. Krasnodar, Ecoinvest Publ., 2011, 252 p. (In Russian)

4. Mininkov N. A., Mininkova L. V. The Cossack Region of Russia in the Characteristics of Russian Travelers of the Modern Era. Bylye Gody, 2019, vol. 54, iss. 4, pp. 1761-1771. (In Russian)

5. Peretyatko A. Y. “Look, the British and the French”: a Little about the Don Literary Propaganda during the Crimean War. Propaganda in the World and Local Conflicts, 2018, no. 5 (2), pp. 39-48.

6. Peretyatko A. Y. At the Origins of Don Military Propaganda: the Creative Activity of I. S. Ul'yanov at the Time of the Crimean War. Propaganda in the World and Local Conflicts, 2019, 6 (1), pp. 8-18.

7. Ryzhkova N. V. Don Cossacks in the wars of the early 20th century. Moscow, Veche Publ., 2008, 448 p. (In Russian)

8. Volvenko A. A. D. A. Milyutin and Cossacks. Bylye Gody, 2016, vol. 40, iss. 2, pp. 398-411. (In Russian)

9. Volvenko A. A. Ivan Krasnov about “the Cossack nationality” and “the Don patriotism” (Based on Periodicals of the 1860s). Russkaia Starina, 2016, vol. 17, iss. 1, pp. 33-40. (In Russian)

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