The Invented Cossack — Kazachii Vestnik & the Factory Masquerade

In November 2015, I picked up a four-ruble newspaper from a kiosk in the Russia-occupied town of Stakhanov. It was called Kazachii Vestnik — “The Cossack Herald.” Edition 5,500 copies, weekly, published since November 2014. Its masthead described it as the “Official printed source of the First regiment named after Platov of Kozak National Guard.”

The Masthead Read Carefully

Platov was a 19th-century Don Cossack ataman, a hero of the 1812 campaign against Napoleon. He was picked out, deliberately, from the deep well of Russian folk memory, and hung above the masthead of a small-town occupation newspaper 200 years later.

Stakhanov is named after Alexei Stakhanov, the Soviet coal-miner turned into a Stalin-era labour hero in 1935 for mining fourteen times his quota in a single shift. The town was built on factories — coach-building, mines, steel. The men who lived there were, for three Soviet generations, industrial proletarians. Not Cossacks. There were no Cossack stanitsas in Stakhanov. There was no Platov lineage. There was a coach-building plant.

The Archetype in Action

The Invented Cossack is one of the most documented archetypes in the Luhansk Well — 444 items. And one of the most brazen.

Russia’s occupation did not just seize the territory. It rebranded the inhabitants. The welder became a Cossack. The pensioner became a stanitsa elder. The miner’s son became a kazak, a warrior of a warrior caste that had never existed in that place. And the newspaper handed him his new identity in four-ruble weekly instalments.

Hobsbawm’s Invented Tradition, Weaponised

This is the classical move that historians of nationalism call the Invented Tradition — Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase. You take an older costume, historically glamorous, and you dress the present in it. Scottish kilts as we know them are Victorian. The German folk songbook was assembled by Herder and the Grimms. The Welsh Eisteddfod was largely 18th-century theatre.

What is distinctive about the Russian case is the speed and cynicism with which the costume was imposed: an occupation administration, funded by Moscow, printing a Cossack newspaper in a mining town within eighteen months of occupying it.

Why Cossack?

Because the Cossack is a deep archetypal character in Russian folk memory. He is the frontier warrior, the border-guardian, the man of the Don and the Dnieper. He is, in Russian iconography, the one who stands between the motherland and the Outer Realm.

To dress the men of Stakhanov as Cossacks is to cast them, without their consent, in a role. It primes them for the role’s next scene: to defend. To fight. To be sent across a river with a rifle.

And in 2022 they were.

The Counter

Name the factory. When a man in uniform claims his grandfather was a Cossack, ask him what his grandfather actually did for a living. Ask him what the name of the town means. Ask him where the coach-building plant went.

The Invented Cossack dissolves when the actual grandfather is summoned back into the room.

Primary source: Kazachii Vestnik No. 46 (52), 18 November 2015, Stakhanov edition, 5,500 copies, 4 rubles.

See also: The Legitimacy Inversion · Sootechestvenniki · ← Back to Archetypes