PhD Project
Project of the DFG Research Unit “Military Cultures of Violence-Illegitimate Military Violence from the Early Modern Period to the Second World War” (University Potsdam)

The project is dedicated to the study of illegitimate military violence by Cossack units in the period between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the end of the Second World War. The collapse of the Tsarist order caused a deep rupture within their societies. United in service to the fatherland during the First World War, the Cossacks fought in the subsequent civil war both on the side of the white troops and the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army as well as, for a time, even in the ranks the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. This circumstance makes it possible, on the one hand, to examine the Cossacks as perpetrators of violence within the regular Russian, Soviet and German armies and, on the other hand, to explore how the experiences of violence within the period under consideration had affected them.
Apart from the conventional military historical investigations, this project aims to bring the Cossacks as perpetrators of violence within various military units to the forefront.