March 1, 1920.---The first All-Russian Conference of Cossacks is in session at the Labor Temple. Some interesting faces and picturesque uniforms are there, Caucasian dress is much in evidence; camel-hair capes reaching to the ground, cartridges across the chest, heavy sheepskin caps, red-topped. Several women are among the delegates. A mixture of uncertain origin, half wild and warlike, these Cossacks of the Don, Ural, and Kuban were used by the Czars as a military police force, and were kept loyal by special privileges. More Asiatic than Russian, almost untouched by civilization, they had nothing in common with the people and their interests. Stanch supporters of the autocracy, they were the scourge of labor strikes and revolutionary demonstrations, with fiendish brutality suppressing every popular uprising. Unspeakably cruel they were in the days of the Revolution of 1905. Now these traditional enemies of the workers and peasants side with the Bolsheviki.
Chapter 3. Denikin’s Offensives and Final Defeat “The Statists,” as Archinov says with good reason, “fear the free people. They maintain that without authority the latter would lose the anchor of sociability, that they would disperse and return to the savage state. These are certainly absurd ideas, held by idlers, lovers of authority and the labor of others, or by the blind thinkers of bourgeois society.” Already, the mortal enemy of the world of labor and its freedom — authority — was pressing closely on the region [of the Ukraine]. It threatened from two sides at once. From the southeast the army of General Denikin was coming up. From the north the army of the Communist state was descending. Denikin arrived first From the first days after the fall of the Hetman Skoropadsky, several counter-revolutionary detachments commanded by General Chkouro, operating as patrols, had infiltrated into the Ukraine along the D...