Cossacks

The Cossacks were self-governing, militarized frontier communities that developed on the Eastern European steppe from roughly the fifteenth century, most notably along the Don, Dnieper (Zaporizhzhia) and Kuban rivers, formed originally from a mix of escaped serfs, adventurers and local steppe populations who organized into semi-democratic host structures (voiskos) in exchange for military service and a substantial degree of self-rule granted by the Russian Tsardom and, earlier, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Cossack hosts supplied elite cavalry units to the Russian Imperial army and played a documented and often brutal role in imperial Russian frontier expansion and internal policing, including participation in pogroms against Jewish communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cossack cultural identity and host organizations experienced a significant, state-encouraged revival in post-Soviet Russia from the 1990s onward, a documented and ongoing feature of contemporary Russian regional and paramilitary culture.