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A Great Northern War army can’t stay without Cossacks: there were the Russian ones, the Polish, the Swedish Allied Mazeppa’s and the Swedish Valacker which collectively are all Cossacks. My idea is to have a suitable numbers of them and then add a base with a Polish flag or a Swedish officier in blue to represent Polish Cossacks and Valacker respectively, whereas all the other not identified units would represent Russians.
Thus far I painted the 12 miniatures from the Orion box. The only fault of an otherwise very nice set are the horses: never Cossacks dreamed of such beautiful horse like those sculpted by Orion. Aside form this remark, the miniatures are well cast and detailed and it was a pleasure to paint them. Browsing Pinterest of other websites I found many images, painting and reenactor pictures to have a basic guidance to the dress of riders and horses.
With 12 figures I painted 6 bases which can represent when paired twice three V&B irregular Cavalry units, or one and half Maurice unit. The wild bunch:
A closer view of the bases:
On the more responsible side of the army, another Russian dragoons regiment, the Archangelgorodski in the yellow coat in use in 1705. The regiment was raised in 1703 in Jamburg from men of selected regiments as “Field Marshal Sheremetiev dragoon battalion”. In all the major campaign from 1704, at Poltava, then in Pomerania 1711 and in Poland 1716-17.
I finish with two command bases were I was able to use some weird figures from Strelets boxes. The first base represents a generic general in white coat: with him the giant kneeling figure from the Strelets Swedish artillery box.
The second base represents Prince Menshikov: with him one of the many Semeonovski grenadiers I was left with and the weird surrendering Streltsi from the “Streltsi Bonus collection” series.
