Untitled - OUDL Home

the attitude of the Cossack right wing: " We don't needa constitution. We don't want a republic. We won'tbetray Russia. We will defend the Tsar's throne."And so they did. But many of the poorer Cossacksand the non-Cossack people on the Don swung to theleft. Divisions were deep, and in 1918 when it cameto civil war the Don did not prove a reliable bastion forthe White armies. 1 Death, emigration, and deportationthinned the Cossack ranks; the victory of the Bolsheviks,and later collectivization, spelt disaster for many of them.Then in 1936 the Kremlin altered course, formed specialCossack contingents in the Red Army, and harnessedthe old fighting traditions of the Cossacks to the newSoviet patriotism, with results that the German armyhas only too bloody reason to know.There remains to consider one last sample of colonizationand of the interplay of the compulsory and thevoluntary, of the state and the individual or independentgroup, as seen in the modern development of Siberia.It has already been emphasized that Russian Siberiauntil the eighteenth century was almost entirely a furcolony of the great conifer forest zone. Thereafter itchanged character as mining, agriculture, and lumberingdeveloped and as the Russians settled the black-earthwooded steppe strip and expanded into Siberia of thesteppes merging into the dry grasslands of Kazakhstan,up to the last generation the immemorial preserve of thenomad pastoralist (see map 2). The rate of development,however, was much slower than in the steppelands of Russia until the great colonizing wave that beganin the eighteen-eighties.Peter the Great, in search of minerals and traderoutesto Central Asia, had pushed out the frontier andpestablished new chains of Cossack posts to check nomadillaging. His successors continued his work, particuarlyin the extreme west of Siberia, well-watered andwith good black-earth soils, but settlement was for longslow and sparse, a mixture of serfs ascribed to mines,1Sholokhov in his well-known novel Quiet Flows the Don (1929)has painted on an immense canvas the Don during the 1914 War andthe first years of the Revolution.53