Word: cossack
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...Army-officer family, the Shah was born in 1876 in the Firuzkuh district east of Teheran. Iran was Persia then; and in the '80s Russia, which had steadily picked off Persia's northern provinces, conspicuously strengthened her position at Teheran by organizing under Tsarist officers the Persian Cossack Brigade, most effective military force in the country. This rough & tough outfit Reza, a youngster of 24, joined as a trooper...
...however, Lord Curzon's lovely dream was rudely shattered. The Bolsheviks overran large chunks of northern Persia. Along the shores of the Caspian the British, assisted by the Persian Cossack Brigade, vainly tried to stop them. Those of the old Tsarist officers who were not killed, fled; the brigade started to fall apart...
Mikhail Sholokhov is a Russian Communist* who is also a Don Cossack-one of the proud, half-savage people who, neither Red nor White, fiercely and hopelessly resisted the Bolsheviks during 1917-21. In And Quiet Flows the Don (TIME, July 2, 1934) Sholokhov marshaled a big cast of Cossacks through the vicissitudes of war and revolution, left them at the brink of civil war. In this, its 777-page sequel, he carries them through that war to its last exhausted gasp in the Bolshevik triumph...
Sholokhov invests his Cossacks with much of that tragic glamor U.S. Northerners feel in the "lost cause" of the Confederacy. This winner's ease of sympathy has a double-edged pathos now that the Muscovite winners stand to lose so much. As a political novel, The Don Flows Home to the Sea has almost ceased to have meaning. Though they are scarcely 20 years gone, its violent events, against the vast implacabilities which devour that same earth now, have the minute, archaic beauty of actions seen through a reversed telescope: Cossack fighting was an affair of horses, hard riding...
Gregor is a full-length portrait of an average man in war. He is ably supported by hundreds of sharp details of war, family living, nature, and what female readers like to designate as typically "Russian" scenes: a madly loyal Cossack hanging on to a disabled cannon "like a dangerous pig tied to a log"; Red troops who, with a blaring phonograph on a sledge, gallop round & round the streets of a village; some gruesome close-ups (on both sides) of rape, looting, calm and frantic murder; a soldier trying on some fancy drawers he stole for his wife, catching...