Stanitsa

Originally stanitsa meant a unit of mounted scouts on the steppe frontiers of Muskovia. The term appears in the historical chronicles of the XVI century, as a name for Cossack units watching the Tartar’s steppe on the outskirts of the Great Duchy of Moscow. Membership in the stanitsa was assigned on the basis of blood kinship or at least relationship by marriage, although there is no reason to rule out the possibility that other Cossacks without those special relationships joined the stanitsa as well. In any case, some of the stanitsa kept their kin names until our days, particularly on Don (Arzhanovskaya, Kachalinskaya, Kargal’skaya, Grigor’evskaya, Melihovskaya etc.).

Stanitsas would come into the Steppe beginning April 1. Different stanitsas would rotate during the summer and fall until the steppes were covered with the deep snow and the danger of sudden attack from the enemy disappeared. If a stanitsa discovered approaching Tartars, it had to alert neighbor guard units and its rallying point – the town. After that, members of the stanitsa (stanichniks) would withdraw from the enemy’s path, while staying on the flanks and trying to determine the number of hostile troops.

By the XVII century the Russian frontier advanced further south, and the Don was inhabited by Cossacks friendly to Moscow. There was no need to defend previous borders and as a result Town Cossacks (Cossacks stationed in the towns) and their stanitsas were not needed for defense. A significant part of them resettled to free lands along the Don, Terek and Yaik rivers, and there the word stanitsa received new meaning. The settlements that before were considered towns began being called stanitsas. In those cases when a new stanitsa had a strong kin basis, it kept the old kin name; if a stanitsa was comprised of many kins, Cossacks would come up with a new name for it.

Stanitsa could also mean an administrative-territorial unit of the Cossack army, consisting of a few Cossack settlements.

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