Cossacks are not police
"They join the Cossacks, but then they behave like nationalists," he said. "They have support from the region, from Moscow. They feel they can do anything they want, that tomorrow they will have protection."
Indeed, the Cossacks who set out to patrol Stavropol on a recent night felt that they were part of a rising tide. Andrei Kovtun, 29, recalled the ribbing he got from his former colleagues in law enforcement when he first patrolled with the Cossacks, who do not have the right to demand documents, carry weapons or detain people.
Still, on one of his early calls -- separating two groups of brawling men -- he understood that a Cossack's presence had a psychological effect. "Are you a cop?" someone asked him, and when he answered, the room went quiet. Mr. Kovtun understood why: Policemen are bound by the law.
Historians still argue about who the Cossacks were -- descendants of escaped serfs or Tatar warriors, an ethnic group in their own right or a caste of horsemen. They played a crucial role in colonizing the south for the Russian empire, and later turned on peasant and worker uprisings, defending the czar.
The Bolsheviks nearly obliterated them, deporting tens of thousands in a process they called "de-Cossackization," but the image of the Cossack, wild and free, was a permanent part of the Russian imagination.
When Tolstoy sat down to write his classic novel "The Cossacks," he set it near present-day Stavropol, where the Terek River divided the Muslim-populated mountains from the steppes, which were Cossack country. In a scene taught to generations of schoolchildren, a young Cossack spots a Chechen swimming across the Terek disguised as a log and shoots him.
The notion of an ethnic dividing line is widely accepted to this day, but it is running up against demography. Muslim ethnic groups in the Caucasus have a high birthrate, and Russians are abandoning the steppe. About 81 percent of Stavropol's population is ethnic Russian, but that share has been shrinking for decades, the International Crisis Group has reported.
This rapid change is unsettling to ethnic Russians in Stavropol, who sometimes refer to the newcomers as "shepherds." Gennady A. Ganopenko, 42, said he grew up in a city so homogeneous that "the sound of a non-Russian language was grounds for a brawl."
"Earlier, this was the gate to the Caucasus," he said. "We opened the gate, and then the gate came off the hinges."
The Cossack revival seeks to slow this trend. Last summer, Aleksandr N. Tkachev, the governor of the Krasnodar region, to the west, took aim at his neighbors in the Stavropol region, saying so many Muslims had resettled there that Russians no longer felt at home. The region, he said, no longer served its traditional function as an ethnic "filter."
To crack down on illegal migration, he announced the creation of a salaried force of 1,000 Cossack patrolmen, which -- he explained in a speech to law enforcement officers -- would not be restrained by the law as the police are. He put it this way: "What you cannot do, a Cossack can."