Word: cossacks
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...through the barricaded doors. By the time the final echoes of that historic assault had died, the last vestiges of Russia's old order had (in the Bolshevik phrase) been thrown on "the garbage heap of history." Russia of the Tsars, of Byzantine ritual, of mad monks and Cossack whips, Russia of fatalistic chaos and fatalistic inaction, was now to be kneaded with the butts of rifles into the Russia of the proletariat, of modern industry, of determined socialistic dictatorship. The time was November 1917, Year One of the Russian Revolution...
...know that among the defenders was an Austrian infantry officer, Hans Kohn, who three decades later would be teaching government at the Harvard University Summer School. Though the Russians were turned back, he and his company were captured and were sent as prisoners of war to a summer Cossack camp in Turkestan...
...Moscow's snow-clad streets celebrating infantrymen in fleece-lined leather coats and yellow fur hoods, provincial troops in worn quilted jackets and spiked woolen forage caps, Cossack officers in capes, spurred knee boots and high astrakhans would not reason with their joy. In the street, a grinning, drink-happy young man suddenly seized Tlinesman Sulzberger by the arm, exclaimed in joy and wonderment: "It is Moscow! Here we are in Moscow...
Bloodletting is nothing new to Odessa. During the Crimean War it was unsuccessfully attacked by the Franco-British Allies in 1854; later it was muffed by the Turks in the Russo-Turkish troubles of 1876-77. In an unforgettable silent film, Director Sergei Eisenstein recorded the Cossack slaughter and pogroms which followed the mutinied battleship's landing (1905) at Odessa's port. After the Bolshevik Revolution the city was in turn occupied by Austrian, German and French forces, and the monstrous General Simon Petlure (whose murderer a French jury in 1926 acquitted and fined one franc) also...
...story is told that a British colonel at Kazvin, whither the anti-Bolshevik forces had retreated, spotted among the Cossack Brigade's remaining officers a striking six-foot Persian with hard grey eyes. His name was Reza Khan. The colonel knew him for a brave man and, in a last desperate attempt to keep the brigade together, he put him in command. Had he not done so, the future King of Kings might have died an unknown old horse bully...