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However, are the Cossacks really these so-called white knights as depicted by their admirers? It is, for instance, a well-known fact that in the latter half of the nineteenth century the tsarist government used Cossack troops not only to repress uprisings against the state, but also to perpetrate pogroms against the Jews. An Israeli paper expressed its concern. “Famed for leading anti-Jewish pogroms and close ties to the czar,” wrote the paper, “the group is making a comeback with Vladimir Putin’s support.”^[25] In a 1998 Human Rights Watch report the Cossack ideology is described as “virulently anti-ethnic migrant which often degenerates into a general hatred of all minorities.”^[26] After the fall of communism Cossacks became active as mercenaries in conflict zones. They fought in the Georgian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in Chechnya, in Transnistria (Moldova), and in the former Yugoslavia. During the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 Human Rights Watch reported that “officials in Java [South Ossetia] also said that Russian Cossacks were fighting alongside Ossetian militias.”^[27] This was confirmed by other sources. The Nezavisimaya Gazeta wrote on August 6, 2008, that Cossack atamans (leaders) had announced “that in case of necessity the Cossacks could send 10,000 to 15,000 volunteers to the war, and this will be fighters with lengthy experience in active service.”^[28] This announcement was immediately put in practice. “[I]rregular Cossack paramilitaries, said by some reports to have numbered in the thousands, fought on the Russian/separatist side in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War.”^[29] “Cossack volunteers . . . crossed the borders to engage Georgian forces. Cossacks in nearby North Ossetia apparently organized a relatively efficient and rapid system for clothing, equipping and transporting their paramilitaries into the breakaway province to feed them onto combat.”^[30] “Cossack volunteers formed the second major paramilitary force in the war, the first being the South Ossetian militias. According to reports, the Cossack forces fought with dogged determination.”^[31] Militias, active in South Ossetia in August 2008, have been accused of war crimes. Shortly after the war The Guardian’s Luke Harding wrote: “South Ossetian militias, facilitated by the Russian army, are carrying out the worst ethnic cleansing since the war in former Yugoslavia.”^[32]

Cossacks Patrolling the Streets

Cossacks were not only active in the “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet space. According to Israpilov, Russia needed “more urgently a filter against threats coming from within the country, than from the external borders.”^[33] In effect, inside Russia’s frontiers also the Cossacks proved to be useful to the authorities, taking on tasks that the authorities preferred to outsource. In the southern Krasnodar province, a Cossack region that includes Sochi, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, such practice was already long established. The regional government’s program “Cossack Participation in Protecting Public Order” allowed Cossacks “to be used as the main force for displacing the targeted ethnic minority of Meskhetian Turks. The Cossacks were not too picky about the means they used to do their job: ethnic Turks were subjected to mass beatings and ambushes, their gardens were destroyed, homes looted, and the goods and market stalls of Turkish traders were confiscated.”^[34] The Cossacks’ efforts were successful, and the Turks left the Krasnodar region after the U.S. government granted them asylum. “The exercise in displacing the Turkish minority,” wrote Fatima Tlisova, “became an example of how effective Cossacks may be in dealing with the sensitive task of making people’s lives hell while maintaining the appearance of law and order and non-involvement on the part of the Russian government.”^[35]