Oh, and did everyone know that Peter III's supposed abolition of slavery was a scam? He just renamed them "serfs," and he proceeded to expand it. Oh, excuse me, it was no longer legal for landowners to outright murder their serfs, so serfdom was really a warm and wholesome institution.
He was the scum that first started the military escalation against the Circassians. The Circassians were saying, "We don't like Islam, either, but we will take it over serfdom if we are being asked to choose, thank you." Murad was offering the Circassians what they really wanted, which was a semblance of independence.
To the people we call the Ukrainians, Peter III was really the Richard Cranium that turned around and, with a great big smile, attempted to stab Ivan Mazepa in the back after Ivan Mazepa's loyal service to his government. This was entirely because Ivan Mazepa's leadership was adequately competent that the Cossack Hetmantate had a non-zero chance of being able to stand on its own. That was the real reason why Ivan Mazepa threw his lot in with Charles XII of Sweden, but it made the bastards in Moscow so mad that were not allowed to complete their treachery against him that the Russian Orthodox Church still has not revoked their anathema against him, all the more reason to like Ivan Mazepa.
Of course, that was not enough for the Russians. Their foul treatment of the Cossacks only got worse under Sophie, excuse me, Catherine "the Great" II. What hum. In general, I prefer to give female rulers the benefit of the doubt, but it is very hard to have such forbearance from the standpoint of someone that lived in what is now Ukraine at the time. She destroyed the Hetmantate, and she attempted to enforce serfdom upon the Cossacks using that tried and true system of setting them at odds with their own upper-class: she was happy to dispense titles of nobility to a handful of serving officers as long as they agreed that their fellow Cossacks were no longer human beings but, instead, lowly serfs that deserved to be violently bludgeoned anytime they would not work like donkeys, regardless of whether or not they were starving. That is what the system of serfdom is really about, after all. It's not the product of their labors, but it is about setting people against each other so as to lead a nation of people to hate each other more than their true oppressor.
Of course, Sophie's, excuse me, Catherine "the Great" II's, successors continued their escalations against the Circassians, and I suppose that their entire idea of how this was going to work was going to be the Circassians saying, "Oh, thank you for bullying us, you lovely, lovely tyrants! Let us come and lick your boots, and we will be your good, little serfs from now on!" What actually happened was that the Circassians were defecting over to the Ottomans in droves. It never actually occurred to any of the Tsars that they could have kept the Circassians as their friends by the simple system of TREATING THEM LIKE HUMAN BEINGS.
By the way, a certain unprintably two-faced piece of scum, Paul I, got his just desserts from the self-same nobility that his regime had raised to power in order to subjugate and batter their people, and that only shows what folly it is to trust a hyena for any reason whatsoever.
However, the conflict witht he Circassians did not really have to turn into the genocide until after the 1810's. I will tell you what put the Tsars on course to become a genocidal monster doomed for a reckoning: it was a certain shifty Byzantine named Alexander I. He gets all kinds of credit for helping defeat Bonaparte, but nobody talks about how he did it (maybe because the Russians are ashamed of it?). No, I am not talking about how he razed Moscow, although, which shows exactly how much regard the Russians really have for architecture that does not belong to their nobility, although that was bad enough. Instead, I am talking about how he was really glad to call himself a Jacobin and work for Napoleon as long as it looked like Napoleon Bonaparte was certain to win. Alexander I was not really siding with Bonaparte out of principle, but he was betting on which side he expected to be the winner. He did not turn against Bonaparte until he recognized that Bonaparte's empire was built on a house-of-cards and lies upon lies. No, Alexander did not do the dirty work of exterminating the Circassians, but he made the course toward that genocide irreversible. And so he doomed his dynasty to extinction.
Anybody in the region with any real sense hated the Tsars, all of them, and when the Black Flag Army marched against them, the Cossacks did not really care very much at all about communism. They only wanted to make sure that not even one Romanov was left alive. Fuck the Romanovs, and I mean fuck all of the Romanovs.
However, the USSR was no more really "communist" than Peter was a "great emancipator" or that shifty Byzantine Alexander was a Jacobin. The system of serfdom did its work too well, and no matter what the government in Moscow calls itself for the sake of convenience, the vipers that control it are descended from unprincipled trash that were willing to help beat the spirit out of their own people for a plot of land and a title, and changing their pretensions will not change what they are. Fuck them, and may Moscow be razed to the ground and, this thime, buried. No good can come of that city. The only possible redemption for them is to acknowledge they were built upon treachery and lies and commit to change.
All that "Cossack" means is a person that wants to live free, and Frith knows nobody has labored more diligently against longer odds for the right to be free. Glory to Ukraine.
