Cossack migration (6.0)

The Cossack Migration is the journey undertaken by the Free Cossack Corps from 1945 to 1976 across the length of the Great Eurasian Steppe from Crimea to Manchuria via Iran, Central Asia and Mongolia. This migration would result in the formation of the Manchurian Cossack Horde. This migration would also result in the adaptation of Fascist ideas from Germany in the formation of the Steppe Fascist ideology which would eventually be adopted by the Manchurian state.

## Origin of the Cossacks

The Cossacks have their origin as a loosely-oeganized militarized people living in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe. While it has been hypothesized that the Cossacks have Tatar or even Khazar origins, by the 17th century the vast majority of them had Slavic names and spoke East Slavic languages. The Cossacks soon became allied with the expanding Russian Empire, guarding Russia's Southern Frontier against raids from Crimea, the Ottoman Empire, and Central Asia. While the original homeland of the Cossacks was along the lower Dniepr and Don rivers, the Cossacks were brought East as the Russian Empire expanded into Siberia. Cossack communities were established in Siberia and the Russian Far East, serving in the same paramilitary role they had served in for centuries.

With the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the rise of the Bolsheviks, many Cossacks would side with the Russian White Army in the ensuing Civil War. Anton Denikin's Armee Forces of Southern Russia contained many Cossacks among its ranks, and the self-governing Cossack Hosts of Southern Russia declared their independence from the Bolshevik government in Moscow. With the defeat of the White Army, the Soviet Union began a process of Decossackification, attempting to eradicate the fierce independence that Cossacks had always shown, and settling Russians in former Cossack lands.

## The SS Cossack Cavalry Corps

Thus, when Hitler's Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and came into occupation of the former Cossack lands, many Cossacks volunteered to serve alongside Germany against the Soviet Union. While the number of Cossacks serving on the Soviet side was far greater than those on the German side, those on the Soviet side were more likely to identify as Russian or Ukranian, while those on the German side were more likely to identify as a separate Cossack ethnicity. By the end of the war, those Cossacks fighting on the German side were concentrated into a single military unit: the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps, commanded by Helmuth von Pannwitz. As Germany exited the war, Pannwitz would surrender to British forces, but by an agreement between the Allies, the Cossack Cavalry Corps would be handed over to the Soviet Union as disloyal citizens rather than treated as German POWs.

## Escape from Crimea

With the global sea level already rising quickly, the Soviet Union was in need of manpower to deal with the ensuing crisis. In the summer of 1945, the Cossack Cavalry Corps, now stripped of their weapons and uniforms, were transported to the Isthmus of Perekop, to be put to work building dykes to preserve the land connection between Crimea and the rest of the Soviet Union. However, it would soon become clear that the waters were rising well beyond the dyke-building capabilities of even Soviet Engineers. In fall 1945, the decision was made to evacuate Crimea (which did not have enough above-water farmland to feed its population), although this decision came too late. Much of the Crimean population was left behind, including the Cossacks Cavalry Corps, still imprisoned in their camp.

The next spring, as the Red Army returned to Crimea in landing ships to attempt to re-establish order, they would discover that, against all expectations, the Cossacks had not only survived the winter, but had bent much of the remaining Crimean population to their will. Armed with pitchforks and old hunting rifles, the Cossack Cavalry Corps would ambush the Red Army soldiers, and take their weapons and landing ships. With their old homeland in the Pontic Steppe already underwater, the Cossacks would turn South and make for higher ground, fighting their way through the chaotic Caucasus.

## Cossacks in Iran

By the end of the 1946, the Cossack Cavalry Corps had made its way to Iran, then under the rule of Mohammed Reza Shah. The Shah's father had been the leader of the Persian Cossack Brigade before he had come to the throne, and Cossack traditions were well-respected by the young Shah. Moreover, the Iranian army had been gutted by the Anglo-Soviet intervention in Iran, and the Shah was in need of disciplined troops to defend his borders. The Iranian Plateau was quite untouched by the floods, and mobs of refugees from Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley were attempting to force their way to higher ground. The SS Cossack Cavalry Corps soon became the Royal Iranian Cossack Cavalry Corps, as this band of fighters found their home serving the Shah.

The Cossacks would fight in the name of the Shah for 15 years. During this time, many, including the aging von Pannwitz, would retire, and would be replaced by young Iranian men and migrants fleeing South from the flooding of the Western Steppes. While Cossack had once been an ethnicity, it soon became a lifestyle. Anyone could become a Cossack if they trained to fight on horseback and learned a bit of Russian. While the Cossack's time in Iran was pivotal, it would not last forever. In 1962, the Shah would soon be overthrown in a revolution, and the revolutionaries felt they had no need for an 'outdated' cavalry corps made up of 'foreigners'. While many Cossacks would simply return to civilian life, many would depart for the East, becoming the Free Cossack Cavalry Corps.

## Cossacks in Central Asia

Central Asia in the 1960s was a land in chaos. The collapse of Soviet authority had left a power vacuum in the region, which was now fought over by competing warlords. The Free Cossack Cavalry Corps fit right into this landscape, sometimes serving one warlord against another as mercenaries, and other times operating independently, taking control of a region and extracting its wealth before moving on. The Cossacks were led at this time by Nikolai Nazarenko, a Don Cossack who had led a small group of Cossacks in defecting from the USSR and Germany and then had risen through the ranks. Nazarenko had originally joined the fight against the USSR in an attempt to establish an independent Cossack state, and his position at the command of an army gave him the ability to do so. Nazarenko soon began formulating political ideas, mixing traditions of the Steppes of Central Asia with Cossack culture and Fascist ideology to which he had been exposed in the SS. The result was a new ideology which would later be dubbed 'Steppe Fascism'.

Nazarenko's poltiical ideas allowed the Cossacks to recruit disaffected young men looking for a greater cause than simply fighting for whichever warlord happened to be in power. The Free Cossack Cavalry Corps would grow, and would become even more multi-ethnic than they had been in Iran. Their tactics would change as motorcycles would now be used alongside horses. Sometimes even one of the great horse-shaped mech of Mongolia would make its way to Cossack hands. It was from Mongolia that the Cossacks would pick up neo-Tengrism and would incorporate it into their ideology.

## Arrival in Manchuria

While Nazarenko now had a following, he did not yet have a home. He was sentimentally attached to the Russian language, and refused to settle down in the Turkic or Mongolic speaking parts of the Steppe. As the lands of the lower Don had long since been flooded, and Western Siberia was now under the control of a resurgent governmen in Moscow, Nazarenko soon looked to the Soviet Far East. News reached him of the Manchurian War and of a Manchurian nationalism inspired by a Russian man by the name of Rodzaevsky. Rodzaevsky's Russian Fascist Party had been well known to the Cossacks who had fought under the SS, and many had even been members of the party. The city of Harbin, where Rodzaevsky had lived and died, had a sentimental appeal to Nazarenko, and soon the Cossacks were riding East again, accross Inner Mongolia towards Manchuria.

The Cossacks would find Manchuria already in chaos. The situation of Russian minority rule enforced by the Manchurian SSR had devolved in to open conflict between the Russian-dominated Red Army and the Manchurian People's Party that claimed to represent the Chinese-speaking majority. While the compromises brokered by President Afanasy Beloborodov had prevented the situation from deteriorating into outright civil war, these compromises had also led to both elements of the Red Army and various MPP militias refusing to submit to the authority of the central government.

Thus, when the Free Cossack Cavalry Corps entered Manchuria in 1976 and raided the city of Qiqihar, the military response dispatched from Harbin would be weak and demoralized. The Cossacks would ambush a number of supposedly state-of-the-art Red Army mechs, embarrassing Beloborodov to the point that he would resign the Presidency. With no clear successor to Beloborodov, Manchuria would splinter into many separate statelets, and the Cossacks would find themselves backing the Manchurian National Republic based in Harbin.

## Rise to Power

The Manchurian National Republic would, from the beginning, be little more than a failed state. While the MNR legislature claimed to represent all of Manchuria, most local governments refused to accept their authority, and elections could never successfully be held. The MNR had a vision of establishing a democratic constitutional to give them the authority to govern all of Manchuria, but they were unable to achieve the democratic mandate to draft such a constitution.

While the MNR refused to use their own militias against the rival Manchurian governments, they had no qualms about letting the Cossacks collect taxes (at gunpoint) on their behalf. With their warlordism being legitimized by their service to the MNR, the Cossacks were soon flooded with new recruits an defectors from the Red Army. The ideology of Steppe Fascism served to entice desperate people to join the Cossacks as a way of becoming part of something greater than themselves.

In 1985, with the MNR government already being little more than a excuse for Cossack warlordism, the Cossacks would stage a coup. The 'weak' democratic government of the MNR would be replaced by a military government dominated by Cossacks. The state now calling itself the United Horde of Manchuria, would now attempt to reunite Manchuria, not through constitutional negotiations but by force of arms.