The Cossack a True Son of Mars.
Apprenticed to Mars at birth, as were the Spartans before them, the Cossacks, survivals from a young, non-industrial world, are the most picturesque fighters on Europe’s battlefields. A frontier’s folk like the people of our early West, a mixture of many adventurous elements, and constituting within their own country a class more distinctive than that of the American cowboy, they have finally been subdued to the needs of the great imperial government of Petrograd, taken over just as they were into its machinery, and preserved as a soldier caste. A wild, conquering, freebooting folk, the Cossacks have been brought within the fold of Russian civilization as soldiers, descendants of warriors and progenitors of generations of soldiers to meet the future needs of the Slav empire.
These Cossacks, in the leisure of national peace, conquered the vast empire of Siberia for Russia, and in each Russian war for the last hundred years have formed the czar’s irresistible first-line strength.
The Cossacks are a people of the limitless steppes, a[Pg 61] people of close corporation, situated in Russia as a race apart, a soldier caste, their state a military organization, their connection with the great empire maintained through the imperial war department, the administration of their internal affairs practically in their own hands, and their privileges as a caste almost as pronounced as were those of the Spartan soldier-citizen, or more comparable to the solider caste of the older Indian organization. The Cossacks came of the original Slav stock, but they were those Slavs who never bowed their heads beneath a yoke, foreign or domestic; who lived a free life on the borders of their race’s civilization, wandering, fighting, buccaneer Slav tribes, who penetrated deeply into Tartar and Georgian lands, who lived by the hunt and by plunder, and who maintained themselves on the borders of Asia and Europe free of all serfdom.
These sturdy Russian wanderers assimilated many adventurous elements, took up among them many Tartars and Slavs, and so to-day the Cossack type is a more or less distinct one. The total Cossack population of Russia is more than 3,000,000. Some years ago they owned nearly 146,500,000 acres of land, of which 105,000,000 acres was arable and 9,400,000 forest land. This land is held by the Cossacks in community partition as a state reward for their military service. It will be seen that the Cossack holdings amount to about fifty acres for each man, woman, and child of the people. There is an admiring, half-envious Russian catchword about being as “free and as rich as a Cossack.”
The Cossacks are the roughriders of Europe. As the cowboys of the American plains and gauchos of the pampas, the Cossacks are as intensely interesting, wild, free, plain folk who live in the saddle in the open places, and whose rough democracy is the expression of the same naïve, rudimentary culture as that of their new-world brothers in spirit. None of their members are allowed to starve, and none of them has succeeded in winning overmastering position through the laying up of great wealth.
The Cossack is favored by the state, and is a main prop of the state’s authority. To be born a Cossack is to be born a soldier. Every Cossack bears the obligation of twenty years’ military service. He enters into this service at the age of eighteen, spends three years in a preliminary Cossack division, next passes twelve years in active service, and spends his last five military years in the Cossack reserve. It is the picked men from his ranks who constitute the imperial guard, a body of the finest type of fighters, whom the czar can trust when he can trust no one else around him. These Cossack soldiers have been the greatest terror with which Russia has been able to threaten Europe. They have been the empire’s most efficient internal police, and they have marched eastward to the Pacific and southward to the zones of British influence, conquering for the czar a vast domain.