Читать книгу The Red Reign. The True Story of an Adventurous Year in Russia онлайн

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I found the Cossacks of the Caucasus splendid raw material for the development of good citizens. They are physically strong and good. They have dash and daring. Their home life is clean. They have a superstitious

Orenburg Cossacks—a family group

(Not posed for the author)

loyalty to God and to the Czar—so long as the government continues to give them their land free, and attempts to exact no other tax from them than their military service, which they now render because it is a tradition among them.

The Cossacks are to-day as much of an unconquered people as the tribes of the Caucasus—or of Central Africa. But they are not of the same aggressive character as the other Caucasus people. They must be conquered by diplomacy. The Cossacks will not submit easily to a yoke, and not at all to a yoke which gives them no interest or occupation in life. To-day Cossack towns have neither mills nor factories. They are purely rural communities. They cannot subsist on this alone, and the young Cossacks who are ready for military service will not readily change their outlook and take up the peaceful pursuits of the farm. The wandering spirit is in his blood as much as in the blood of the gipsies. Yet he is so purely a survival of the past, maintained until the present time by so absolutely an unnatural system and combination of circumstances, that the continuance of his existence is unthinkable.