David Smith, age 16, of Jackson, Miss., for his question:
WHO ARE THE COSSACKS?
Cossacks are members of a group of people who live in the Soviet Union, primarily on the Steppes that stretch north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains and extend eastward to the Altai Mountains in Siberia. The Cossacks are mostly of Russian and Ukranian stock.
Historians have traced the origin of the Cossacks to serfs who fled from the principality of Moscow in the 14th and 15th centuries and established wheat growing and stock raising communities in the valleys of the Dnepr, Don and Ural rivers in Siberia.
The Cossack communities were governed by village elders called atamans or hetmans. The chief ataman or hetman of the region enjoyed great prestige and exercised the authority of a military chieftain in war and of a civil administrator in peacetime.
From the 16th Century, as the czars extended their realm, the Cossacks were subjected to the authority of the Russian government, which tried to incorporate them into the state on the same basis as the other inhabitants of the country. Therefore, as subjects of the czar, all Cossack males 18 to 50 years of age became liable to military service. They were used most often as cavalrymen and became famous in the wars of the czars against the Tartars in the Crimea and the Caucasus.
The Cossacks cherished their traditions of freedom, however, and conflicts with the czars followed. In the 17th and 18th centuries the Cossacks, supported by peasants, engaged in two widespread revolts in the lower Volga Valley. The revolts occurred in 1670 71 and 1773 74.
Later the czars used the Cossacks as border troops and as a special military and police force for the suppression of internal rest.
Cossack troops were used in the suppression of the Russian Revolution of 1905 although they refused to be used for the same purpose in the Revolution of 1917.
During the civil war in Russia, following the Revolution of 1917, the majority of the Cossacks fought against the Red armies.
The establishment of the Soviet regime made a great number of changes in Cossack life. The richer Cossacks lost their wealth and social distinctions based on wealth were abolished. The new government also abolished the traditional forms of local administration and Cossack soldiers lost their special military and police duties.
Despite resistance, in the early 1930s the Cossacks were assigned to collective farming. Cossack cavalry units were forbidden and many Cossacks were resettled in Kazakhstan Oblast and in a number of areas in Siberia.
In 1936 the Soviet government re established a number of Cossack cavalry divisions that later fought against the Germans in World War II.
Today Cossack customs and traditions still survive and even thrive, especially in the areas of the Don and Kuban rivers.