Postwar Soviet Politics: The Fall of Zhdanov and the Defeat of Moderation, 1946-1953. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pinkus, Benjamin, and Frankel, Jonathan. (1984). The Soviet Government and the Jews, 1948- 1967: A Documented Study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Rubenstein, Joshua, and Naumov, V. P., eds. (2001). Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, tr. Laura E. Wolfson. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Vaksberg, Arkadii. (1994). Stalin Against the Jews. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
The word Cossack (Russian kazak) is probably Turkic in origin, and the term dates to medieval times, when it was used to denote wanderers or freebooters of varying Slavic and non-Slavic origins who lived off raids on the Eurasian steppe and jealously guarded their independence. By the fifteenth century, the term was increasingly applied to a mixture of freemen and fugitives who had fled the serfdom of Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy to live in the seams between encroaching Slavic settlement and receding remnants of the Golden Horde. From these beginnings two distinct traditions gradually emerged to figure in the evolution of the various Cossack groupings in later Russian and Ukrainian history. One tradition witnessed the transformation of these frontiersmen into military servitors, who, in exchange for compensation and various rights and privileges, agreed to discharge mounted military service, usually on the fringes of advancing Slavic colonization. These servitors came to be called “town Cossacks,” and their duties included mounted reconnaissance and defense against nomadic and Tatar incursion.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Cossacks of this type in what is now Ukraine appeared often in Polish military service. They also fought stubbornly to retain their autonomy and status as freemen, for which reason in 1654 they sought protection from the Muscovite tsar. However, their autonomous status and sometimes even their existence proved ephemeral, as Muscovite and Imperial Russian rulers gradually either absorbed, abolished, or transplanted various service-obligated Cossack groupings, including the Ukrainians.
A second and related tradition produced the more famous “free Cossack” communities. Like their service brethren, the roots of the free Cossacks lay largely with various wayward Russian and Ukrainian peasants (and town Cossacks) who combined with other migrants of mixed ethnic origins to settle in the open steppe beyond any recognizable state frontiers. They formed what the historian Robert H. McNeill has called “interstitial polities,” autonomous military societies that occupied the great river valleys of the Pontic steppe. Free Cossack communities began to appear in the fifteenth century, and by the mid-sixteenth century, they numbered six distinct groupings, including most prominently the Cossacks of the Don Host (voisko) and the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sich. Living by their wits and warrior skills off the land and its adjoining waters, these free Cossacks plundered traditional Islamic enemies and Orthodox allies alike. However, like their service-obligated brethren, the free Cossacks gradually came to serve as Muscovite allies, fielding light cavalry for tsarist campaigns, pressing Slavic colonization farther into the Pontic steppe, then into the Caucasus and Siberia. Although the free Cossacks formed bulCOSSACKS
Cossacks on the march, 1914. © HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS warks against invasion from the south and east, they were also sensitive to infringements of their rights and privileges as free men. From the time of Stepan Razin’s revolt in 1670-1671 until the rising of Yemelian Pugachev in 1772-1775, they periodically reacted explosively to encroachments against their status and freebooting lifestyle.
The service and free Cossack traditions gradually merged during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the former free Cossack groupings were either abolished (e.g., the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775) or brought under the complete control (e.g., the Don Host also in 1775) of imperial St. Petersburg. A series of imperial military administrators from Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin through Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev imposed measures that regularized Cossack military service, subordinated local governing institutions to imperial control and supervision, and integrated local elites into the ranks of the Russian nobility. Regardless of origin, by the time of the Crimean War in 1854-1856, all Cossacks had been transformed into a closed military estate (sosloviye) subject to mandatory mounted military service in exchange for collective title to their lands and superficial reaffirmation of traditional rights and privileges. During the Great Reform Era, War Minister Dmitry Alexeyevich Milyutin toyed briefly with the idea of abolishing the Cossacks, then imposed measures to further regularize their governance and military service. The blunt fact was that the Russian army needed cavalry, and the Cossack population base of 2.5 million enabled them to satisfy approximately 50 percent of the empire’s cavalry requirements. Consequently, the Cossacks became an anachronism in an age of smokeless powder weaponry and mass cadre and conscript armies.
Reforms notwithstanding, by the beginning of the twentieth century, many traditional Cossack groupings hovered on the verge of crisis, thanks to a heavy burden of military service, overcrowding in communal holdings, alienation of land by the Cossack nobility, and an influx of non-Cossack population. The revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War seriously divided the Cossacks,
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with a majority supporting the White movement, while a stubborn minority espoused revolutionary causes. Following Bolshevik victory, many Cossacks fled abroad, while those who stayed were persecuted, gradually disappearing during collectivization as an identifiable group. During World War II, the Red Army resurrected Cossack formations, while the Wehrmacht, operating under the fiction that Cossacks were non-Slavic peoples, recruited its own Cossack formations from prisoners of war and dissidents of various stripes. Neither variety had much in common with their earlier namesakes, save perhaps either remote parentage or territorial affinity. The same assertion held true for various Cossacklike groupings that sprang up in trouble spots around the periphery of the Russian Federation following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. See also: CAUCASUS; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST; UKRAINE AND UKRAINIANS
Barrett, Thomas M. (1999). At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700-1860. Boulder: Westview Press. Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2002). Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press. McNeal, Robert H. (1987). Tsar and Cossack, 1855-1914. London: The Macmillan Press. McNeill, William H. (1964). Europe’s Steppe Frontier 1500-1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Menning, Bruce W. (2003). “G. A. Potemkin and A. I. Chernyshev: Two Dimensions of Reform and Russia’s Military Frontier.” In Reforming the Tsar’s Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution, eds. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning. New York: Cambridge University Press. Subtelny, Orest. (2000). Ukraine: A History, 3rd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
BRUCE W. MENNING
The decision to establish the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, also known as COMECON and the CMEA, was announced in a joint communiqu? issued by Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Soviet Union in January 1949. Albania joined in February 1949; East Germany in 1950; Mongolia in 1962; Cuba in 1972, and Vietnam in 1978. Albania ceased participation in 1961.
COMECON members were united by their commitment to Marxism-Leninism, Soviet-style central planning, and economic development. COMECON served as an organizational counterweight first to the Marshall Plan and then to the European Iron and Steel Community and its successor, the European Economic Community.
COMECON was effectively directed by a group outside its formal organization, the Conference of First Secretaries of Communist and Workers’ Parties and of the Heads of Government of COMECON Member Countries. The Soviet Union dominated COMECON. From 1949 to 1953, Stalin used COMECON primarily to redirect member trade from outside COMECON to within COMECON and to promote substitution of domestic production for imports from outside COMECON. The COMECON economic integration function was stepped up in 1956, the year of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, with the establishment of eight standing commissions, each planning for a different economic sector across the member countries. Notable real achievements included partial unification of electric power grids across East European members, coordination of rail and river transport in Eastern Europe, and the construction of the Friendship pipeline to deliver Siberian oil to Eastern Europe. In 1971 COMECON initiated a compromise Comprehensive Program for Socialist Economic Integration as a counterweight to integration within the
