ABSTRACT
The Cossacks were originally runaway serfs and outlaws who lived on the outskirts of the Russian Empire, starting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They formed democratically run, military nomadic male communities in which unusually close attachments arose among the men, who were dependent upon each other for survival. Before the end of the seventeenth century, few Cossacks married; later, around the same time that the Cossacks shifted to a sedentary way of life, they began to live with women captured from the groups they fought and pillaged, and afterward they took Russian wives.3 In the eighteenth century they became subject to Russian rule, and composed a legal estate under the imperial government. They were offered certain freedoms and rights in exchange for their military service to the Tsar. After the 1917 revolution the structures underpinning the Cossacks’ existence as a corporate entity collapsed, leaving them without a defined identity. Due to demands of the new regime and the international community, Cossacks began to propagate a definition of themselves as ‘a people with a shared history and culture’ that included democratic representation; they wanted to be defined as ‘a people bordering on a distinct nationality.’4
