How I became a Cossack esaul

Enemies and foes, tremble: Sergei Rulev has become a Cossack esaul and, it seems, is preparing a liberation campaign against Kyiv. The hero of the story himself writes about this in his blog.

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...In Kyiv, where I was born and raised, the Cossacks were known mainly from the tours of the Kuban and Don Cossack choirs. These academic creative groups constantly toured both in Soviet Ukraine and in independent Ukraine, causing full houses in all cities and concert halls.

In Ukraine, almost all political forces considered themselves heirs of the Zaporozhye Cossacks and in their election programs they argued that they were the “Cossack family.”

With the coming to power of a protege of the State Department, the concentration of various kinds of “Ukrainian Cossacks” began to literally go off scale, and the larger the belly and ass of such a Cossack, the more he was considered a Cossack.

There were generally “Ivani Balabakhas” who got into the role so much that they forgot to leave it, and so they lived in it in the very center of the European state.

But this is a prelude.

From my parents I knew that my paternal grandfather, Vasily Petrovich Rulev, was from the Ural Cossacks. He was called up to the imperialist army sometime in 1914-15. After the German war, he fought with both the Whites and the Reds.

The fact that the end of the civilian life found my grandfather in the ranks of the Red Army saved his life, but he could not return to his homeland - the Cossacks of the Urals and Siberia supported Kolchak, and the return of another “unfinished” left no hope for survival.

Grandfather waited 10 years for the end of Soviet power, worked more for himself - he made shoes, because Cossacks from childhood were accustomed to any peasant and other work. On the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution (that’s what the great October Socialist Revolution was called until 1927), my grandfather got married, and at the age of forty he took as his wife an eighteen-year-old Ukrainian from near Vinnitsa.

A year later my father was born. My grandfather hid his social status in every possible way, and no one asked the shoemaker; he answered that he was from workers and peasants.

During the famine (that’s what the current Holodomor-genocide was called in the thirties of the 20th century in the USSR), he grabbed his small family and rushed to St. Petersburg-Leningrad. Why not to Moscow-Belokamennaya, where the majority of Ukrainian peasants were going (they were met by NKVD barriers at the Bryansk station), but to the northern capital? Apparently he had relatives there who also settled in foreign lands, fearing Bolshevik reprisals.

After 1933, my Cossack grandfather settled in Kyiv, where he lived until March 5, 1953, without a break. During the Nazi occupation, my grandfather did not flee anywhere - neither to the east in 1941, nor to the west in 1943 - shoemakers were needed under any government.

Here is a small epic prelude to my original attitude towards the Cossacks.

Finding myself on the Don in the spring of 2014 after the armed coup in Kyiv, for a long time I did not distinguish between the Don Cossacks belonging to one organization or another.

Having visited Sevastopol on May 9, 2014 at the first Victory Parade under the Russian tricolor and having met Kuban Cossacks in Krasnodar in the spring of 2014 and 2015, I began to understand why the Kuban Cossacks were given the honorable right to march in a parade box along Red Square during the military parade in honor of the 70th anniversary of the Great Victory in the Great Patriotic War. For courage and bravery during the Crimean spring of 2014.

I heard a lot and even saw the Don Cossacks of Ataman Nikolai Kozitsyn in the Lugansk region in the fall and winter of 2014-15.

Among the Don Cossacks of the Luhansk region, I had the opportunity to meet such legendary personalities as the commander of the Cossack regiment Pavel Dremov, the people's mayor of Pervomaisk Evgeniy Ishchenko. And the legendary commander of the Prizrak brigade, Alexey Mozgovoy, also claimed his Cossack origin.

And not only sixty-five-year-old Cossacks took up arms to stop the Nazi influx from Kyiv, but even children took up arms. Among the Kozitsyn Cossacks, at the end of 2014, in the village of Bile, I met a sixteen-year-old Cossack Vadim Shnip, who was not just the son of a regiment, but carried out military service along with the rest of the militia.

Unfortunately, the young Cossack was not allowed in by the Russian border guards when, by agreement with Nikolai Kozitsyn, his mother was taking Vadik to enter the cadet corps in Novocherkassk. The boy did not have a passport, and Russian border guards and customs officers advised the young militiaman to go to Kharkov and get a passport there. This happened on January 10.01.2015, XNUMX at the Novoshakhtinsk customs crossing.

It was after visiting Donetsk and Lugansk in 2014 and 2015 that I began to distinguish the Cossacks. Don Registered Cossacks with the capital on the street. Socialist, 112 in Rostov-on-Don I met mainly in the village of Starocherkasskaya at various folk festivals and concerts.

Kozitsyn Cossack women licked their wounds and served to guard the approaches to the state border near customs crossings, ensuring public order during the trials of the Ukrainian murderer of Russian journalists Nadka Savchenko.

And there was someone to protect public order - so many Russian liberals and Ukrainian media came to Donetsk RO!

And the longer the Ukrainian side continues to fail to comply with Minsk-2 in the Donbass, the more 200s and 300s appear in the Rostov region.

Most often, it turns out that the Russian Cossack who returned from the front to the LDPR is a member of the NGO “Union of Donbass Volunteers”.

I was unable to take up arms against the murderers of the civilian population of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in 2014-15, but I did not stand aside. My media support was highly appreciated by Russian volunteers. My patriotic amateur videos receive thousands of views, which arouse the fierce hatred of dill and Russian liberals.

I felt the need to unite with like-minded people.

After several meetings in the north of the Rostov region in Millerovo and Vyoshenskaya, the military Ataman of the MOO “VKR”, Cossack General Evgeny Sutormin, invited me to work as his media relations assistant and head of the press service.

I took this as the trust of those people who fought with weapons in the Donbass against the Ukrainian-Nazis.

Since I am an SA officer and have the military rank of retired major, I was awarded the Cossack rank of esaul. But I have always been and remain a public person, I consider my media work to be a party task of the Slavic Party of Ukraine, of which I am a member.

I wanted to take on certain obligations to those people who accept me into their society.

On September 9, I repeated my promises to fight for a just cause and for the Fatherland on the banks of the Russian Don River.

And I affirm that the Don, the Volga, and the Dnieper are primordially Russian rivers that have always been, are and will be together in my Fatherland.