Brazenman
Posts: 1001
Joined: 1/23/2015 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Karaganov Soviet Cossacks-scouts (plastuns) A little about Plastun The term was revived in the Soviet Army during the Great Patriotic War and used in the names of several Cossack battalions and regiments. The only plastun Cossack division of that time was the 9th Krasnodar Plastun Division, which fought in Northern Caucasus, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and was one of the elite Soviet military units. Germans called them "Stalin's cutthroats". A Plastun or plastoon (Ukrainian, Russian: пластун) was a Kuban Cossack foot scouting and sentry military unit. The name derives from the word plast, "sheet" via an expression "to lay like a sheet", i.e., flat and low. The tradition of foot scouts, vanguard troops and ambushes, together with the term "plastuny", belong to the early Cossack history of the Zaporizhian Sich and mentioned, e.g., by Vladimir Dahl in his "Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian language". Plastun foot units were introduced during the Russian-Circassian War to guard and scout beyond the "Kuban Line", a frontier in the Kuban plains, against sudden Circassian raids.
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