Russian Cossacks were a military caste whose primary responsibility was military service. During the war, many of them received military awards. Until 1917, the main award for the lower ranks, to which the absolute majority of the Cossacks belonged, was the St. George Cross. Mikhail Sholokhov masterfully depicted Cossacks' attitude towards their hard-won decorations prohibited by the Soviet regime. The group of words and expressions in the writer's vocabulary pertaining to decorations needs to be supplemented and clarified.
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