Cossacks ride again for the protection of southern Russia

His eyes blazing, Oleg Tishenko runs a finger down the pitted blade of a 19th-century sabre.

'We are ready to fulfil our historic duty,' he says, making a slash through the air. 'We have never been afraid of anyone. It is genetically impossible for a Cossack to experience fear. We must protect the borders of the motherland.'

Here, on Russia's fringe in the Caucasus, a rebirth is taking place.

Under threat from Chechen terrorists, Russia has called on its 'untamed horsemen' - the Cossacks - to resurrect their historic role as defenders of its southern frontier.

Once the most feared fighting force in the world, the Cossacks' very survival was threatened after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. But now their traditions and status are being revived.

On December 7, the Russian Interior Ministry drafted more than 3,000 of them to maintain security during parliamentary elections in Stavropol, which borders Chechnya. It followed an attack two days before the poll by Chechen suicide bombers that killed 44 people on a train in the region. A second explosion in Moscow on December 9 left six people dead.

Riding in Lada cars with blacked-out windows rather than on white chargers, the armed Cossacks patrolled streets, polling stations and rail yards.

For many, their presence was a welcome addition to Russia's hapless police, the militsiya - although some ethnic minority groups were nervous about the roaming outfits.

There are more than 600,000 registered Cossacks in Russia, many of whom are descendants of the moustachioed warriors who lived for centuries in semi-autonomous clans between the Black and Caspian seas.

They have preserved a fierce pride in their fighting prowess and strong Orthodox faith. And now, worried by the rising number of terrorist strikes near Chechnya, President Vladimir Putin has indicated support for a new law that would formalise the Cossacks' security tasks.

About 20,000 serve in the armed forces, but thousands more are members of loosely defined defence units and volunteer patrols.

'What we need is official status,' said Mr Tishenko, 38, a sotnik (lieutenant) who lives at Novopavlovsk, a small town 1,440km south of Moscow, where the Cossack community has a self-funded unit that musters for emergencies such as floods and bombings. 'That would bring us funding, pensions, support for our families.'

Russian Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov announced last month that new legislation to strengthen the Cossacks' key security role would be pushed through the State Duma by next autumn. 'The potential of Cossacks who have always served Russia faithfully must be fully used by the state,' he said.

President Putin appears to support the draft law, and appointed a popular general as an adviser on Cossack affairs earlier this year.

Mr Tishenko's sabre, or shashka, is a museum piece, but the town's Cossack headquarters shows it is ready for active service. Rifles are stored and a back room is covered with posters demonstrating how to strip automatic weapons. The Cossack community - which makes up 2,000 of Novopavlovsk's 23,000 people - is setting up a security firm and patrols its agricultural land on horseback.

The town is situated where Russia's vast steppe begins to rupture and soar into the peaks of the Caucasus Mountains. Chechnya, from which militants launch terrorist attacks on the rest of Russia, is just a few kilometres away.

'The authorities need more vigilance to catch the Chechen infiltrators,' said Mr Tishenko, a burly man in a brown leather coat. 'We can provide that.'

Further north in Mineralniye Vodi, ataman (chieftain) Oleg Gubenko greets visitors at a desk surrounded by Orthodox icons and a portrait of the last tsar, Nicholas II.

Many Cossacks sided with the White Army after the Bolshevik revolution and were driven into exile. Suppressed in the Soviet era, they began a gradual revival in the early 1990s.

A descendant of the legendary Zaporozhian Cossacks who wrote a mocking letter to the Turkish sultan in the 17th century, calling him 'a swine's snout and a mare's ass', Mr Gubenko was one of a few elite troops drafted into a new Cossack battalion in the Russian Army in 1996. The battalion lasted only a few months after a fierce but controversial campaign in Chechnya.

'That was a high point for us,' said the 36-year-old - a tall, muscular man with cropped hair and a beard, wearing military fatigues. 'Now we hope for even better things. To serve Russia is in our blood and the new law will be extremely important.'

He dismissed suggestions that creating purely Cossack military units could inflame tensions with the patchwork of Russia's Caucasian nations, many of which are Muslim. 'Chechens, Dagestanis, Ingush, Cherkessians - we've lived with them all and absorbed their traditions,' he said. 'We respect the mountain peoples and they respect us.' Others remain sceptical that the Cossacks can suppress the fondness for pogroms and drunken rampages that led Napoleon to call them 'a disgrace to the human species'.

At the first international Cossack congress in Novocherkassk earlier this year, one angry ataman branded immigrants in southern Russia 'weeds and locusts', saying it was necessary 'to jump in and scare them a bit'.

But at the Cossack Cadet School in Stavropol, new recruits are taught to be patriotic, not racist.

Founded last year, the school has 600 pupils - almost 200 of them girls - from ages 11 to 17, training to join the armed forces.

Under glowering portraits of Russia's famous generals, the pupils, all Cossacks, learn the history of their ancestors, the wild horsemen of the steppe.

'We have a tradition of protecting the motherland,' said Aleksei Milaslavskiy, 16, who hopes to join the air force. 'Whatever the country asks of us, we must do it.'

Cadet Sveta Peizeva, also 16, said the greatest threat came from Chechnya. 'That is the epicentre and we are closest to it,' she said.