Story I believe was told by Isaac Babel, a Jewish Bolshie who rode with red Cossacks, was one of the great short story writers of the 20s and 30s, was murdered in the purges. Anyway, as I recall, Babel reported that he heard a Red Cossack sneer at Lenin, "that Jew" hiding in the Kremlin, and compare him invidiously to a "real Russian" like Trotsky, who was fighting at the front.
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You know, I know a thing or two about Cossacks, that being my obscure area of specialization, but this anecdote does not ring true. From the point of view of a Civil War-era Cossack, while Russians were undoubtedly on a higher level than Jews, calling a Cossack a "Russian" was an insult to him or her. It was not a compliment. Cossacks considered Russians to be aliens and inferior to them. By the time they were reabsorbed by the Russian Empire, they had lived a separate existence for about 200 years. They were (and to some extent still are) a distinct group with distinct national traditions and in some cases a different religion. Cossacks don't even look Russian. I vacation in what some people used to call Cossackia every year, and I can attest that the people there, while almost universally as blond as Swedes, tend to swarthiness and dark eyes, given the histoty of intermarriage with the Chechens and Tatars, and the former Cossack tradition of taking abducted Turkish women home as brides after wars with the Ottoman Empire. My girlfriend, who is of mixed Cossack and Tatar blood, is a case in point.
This is actually a major theme in And Quiet Flows the Don, because the Cossacks viewed the Ukrainians, Russians and Jews on their territory as foreign immigrants/occupiers, and there was a Cossack nationalist movement in the Civil War to eject the "foreigners" and return to things as they were before the "enslavement of the Cossacks by the Russians." This is also a theme in Tolstoy's book "The Cossacks," in which the Cossacks look on Russians with contempt. If they hadn't, they wouldn't have been so willing to beat the crap out of them on orders of the Tsar. ;)
And Quiet Flows the Don (one of my favorite books ever) actually has one of the characters arguing that Lenin must not be a Russian, as alleged, but rather a Cossack by blood, because Lenin is fighting the Tsar on behalf of the poor, and all people who have done so in the past (Pugachev, Stepan Razin), have been Cossacks.
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