Cossacks

The Cossacks descended from runaway peasants and free men who from the 15th–16th centuries settled on the steppe frontier, along the Dnieper, the Don and the Yaik. In the Russian Empire they formed a separate estate divided into Cossack hosts, from the Don, Kuban and Terek to the Amur and Ussuri. They received land in return for compulsory service: every Cossack reported with his own horse, uniform and sword, while the state supplied the rifle. In 1914 they fielded several hundred cavalry sotnias, and by 1916 about 160 regiments.

At the front Cossacks scouted, covered the flanks and pursued the enemy, and in Persia and the Caucasus they were the main strength of the Russian cavalry; the Shah's Persian Cossack Brigade was a separate formation. They were also used against unrest, but in February 1917 the Cossacks in Petrograd stopped defending tsardom. After the Bolshevik coup the atamans of the Don Cossacks, Alexei Kaledin and then Pyotr Krasnov, led the resistance, and in 1918 Cossack states arose on the Don and the Kuban. Soviet power abolished the Cossack estate and in 1919 began the repression known as de-Cossackisation.