Cossacks
카자크
The armed, Eastern Orthodox, mainly East Slavic communities that grew up on the steppe north of the Black Sea and the Caspian, and their members. They governed themselves in "hosts" such as the Don, Kuban, Terek, Ural and Orenburg, made up of stanitsas, and in the Russian Empire formed an estate that enjoyed privileges in return for military service. In the Russian Civil War the Cossack lands became bases of the White movement, though many Cossacks, the Red Cossacks among them, fought for the Red Army.
In depth
The word "Cossack" comes from a Turkic term for "free men", and by the end of the 15th century it was applied to Slavic peasants who had fled to the wastelands of the lower Dnieper and Don and formed cavalry communities. They first appear in an international record in a complaint by the Crimean Khan in 1492. Poland-Lithuania and the Russian Empire gave them self-government and privileges in return for guarding the southern frontier and irregular cavalry service, and the late tsarist state also used them as police against revolutionary movements, as in 1905–1907. In 1917 the Cossack hosts set up their own governments around their krugs (assemblies) and atamans, and after the October Revolution most atamans, Kaledin of the Don among them, refused to recognise Soviet power. On 22 December 1917 the Council of People's Commissars ended the Cossacks' military obligations and privileges, abolishing the estate itself.
Poorer Cossacks and soldiers back from the front were drawn by Bolshevik promises to spare the land of "toiling Cossacks", and by late spring 1918 the Red Army held most Cossack lands. Grain requisitioning, however, provoked revolt, and Cossack communities founded the Don Republic and the Kuban People's Republic and joined forces with the Volunteer Army. Mass desertion and defection among Don, Ural and Orenburg Cossacks fighting for the Whites in late 1918 and early 1919 opened chances for the Red Army, but the de-Cossackization of 1919 provoked fresh revolt. When the Whites were defeated in 1920, 80,000 to 100,000 Cossacks went into exile, while many other Cossack soldiers went over to the Red Army and fought in the Polish war.