Although numerous linguistic and religious groups came together to form the Cossacks, most of them coalesced and became East Slavic —speaking Orthodox Christians. The rulers of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russian Empire endowed Cossacks with certain special privileges in return for the military duty to serve in the irregular troops: Zaporozhian Cossacks were mostly infantry soldiers, using war wagons, [ 4 ] while Don Cossacks were mostly cavalry soldiers.
The various Cossack groups were organized along military lines, with large autonomous groups called hosts. Each host had a territory consisting of affiliated villages called stanitsas. They inhabited sparsely populated areas in the Dnieper , Don , Terek , and Ural river basins, and played an important role in the historical and cultural development of both Ukraine and parts of Russia.
The Cossack way of life persisted via both direct descendants and acquired ideals in other nations into the twentieth century, though the sweeping societal changes of the Russian Revolution disrupted Cossack society as much as any other part of Russia; many Cossacks migrated to other parts of Europe following the establishment of the Soviet Union , while others remained and assimilated into the Communist state.
However, during the Perestroika era in the late s, descendants of Cossacks began to revive their national traditions. In , the Soviet Union enacted a law permitting the re-establishment of former Cossack hosts and the formation of new ones.
Throughout the s, numerous regional authorities consented to delegate certain local administrative and policing responsibilities to these reconstituted Cossack hosts. Between 3. Max Vasmer 's etymological dictionary traces the name to the Turkic word kazak , kozak , in which cosac meant 'free man' but also 'conqueror'.
