Fear stalks the steppe as Cossacks lose patience

WHEN YOU actually see a knout, you recognise it. This one was dangling from the fist of a Don Cossack, one of a group haranguing us in a street in Rostov-on-Don.

The knout was something between a short whip and a big rope's end, and the Cossack was slapping it idly against the big red stripe down his uniform trousers. He wore a red and white military cap, pushed to the back of his head to display his sweaty blond curls. His face, like those of his mates, was brick- red from sun and steppe wind. The Association of Don Cossacks have seized a house in the middle of the city of Rostov, and are demanding their rights.

Cossack agitation, frightening though most Russians find it, has been growing for more than a year now. Their full dress of high boots, bandolier, towering fur hat and whiskers was already common on the Moscow streets by the time of last year's putsch; more recently, Cossack volunteers have been leaving Rostov to fight for the Russian ethnic minority in Moldova. The Cossacks want their land back, all the land taken for industry or collective farms during the 70 years since the Bolshevik Revolution. President Boris Yeltsin has promised them 'restitution'. But they do not know what that means, and are running out of patience.

Many centuries ago, escaped serfs from Russia mixed with Tartar nomads and settled in the southern plains as fiercely independent cavalry warriors. The Cossacks served the tsars as cavalry in war and as a weapon of terror in peace, especially in pogroms against the Jews. The Revolution split them into Red and White Cossacks, but the Cossack ethic has remained - to put it politely - atavistic.

The oldest Cossack in the group, a St Andrew's Cross clanking on his military tunic, shouted at me: 'We are not bandits, like they say in the West. No, we are the party of ecology. All we ask is for the factories to be torn down and the steppe to be given back to us. We will restore this land to nature, and bring all the poor little town children to come and breathe our fresh air]'

He paused for breath, and handed me a questionnaire inviting me to support a demand for a halt to the settlement of 'non-Slavs' in the Don region. This meant 'non-Christians', he explained. So Georgians and Armenians could live in Rostov? Well . . . but anyway, not Muslims from the Caucasus, and not . . . you know. OK then, Jews. He must have noticed something gloomy in my expression, for he added: 'It is the Bolsheviks in this city who are plotting to make a pogrom against the Cossacks]'

Most of this is noisome rubbish. Land could well be returned to the Cossack villages, but the idea of de-industrialising southern Russia is about as plausible as turning Greater Sheffield into a bird sanctuary. Equally crazy but twice as evil is the notion of 'ethnic cleansing' in one of the most multi-ethnic regions of the old Soviet Union. Anyway, who is a true Cossack? The purists, if that is the right word, insist that both parents must be Cossacks, which dangerously narrows the constituency. The fact is that the Cossack movement is in total chaos. The traditional warlord, the chief 'Ataman', is a discredited Communist Party appointee unable to prevent local hotheads from plunging into action.

This is what created the farce at 20 Suvorov Street, Rostov. The building the Cossacks have illegally seized - one of those gorgeous old Russian merchant palaces apparently made out of marzipan and crystallised fruit - used to belong to one of the two grand capitalists of pre-Revolution Rostov, Mr Paramonov. He, a Cossack, owned grain elevators and coal mines and river barges; his rival Mr Panchenko had paper mills. They solved their differences by marrying a Paramonov daughter to a Panchenko son.

For over 70 years, they have been described as bloodsucking capitalist leeches. But it turns out that, in spite of nearly three generations of propaganda, they are still revered in Rostov as fathers of the city who built schools, embankments, parks and churches. The Cossacks, thrilled to discover that the granddaughter of Paramonov and Panchenko was living in Paris, hit on the wild scheme of seizing and occupying his old house, now a municipal office. They would hand it over only to his granddaughter, Cossack and rightful owner, as a symbol of the right of all Cossacks to their 'stolen' lands.

They had reckoned without a very shrewd woman. There are no flies on Madame Fedorovsky, born in exile in Belgium but a perfect Russian-speaker. She sees all the ironies: the macho Cossacks making a cult of a woman, the pre-capitalist horsemen making a shrine out of the town house of an industrialist. Madame Fedorovsky, invited to revisit Russia by the Rostov Museum, walks through the streets with a small, fluttering retinue like a queen. But she is not going to let herself be manipulated.

Over lunch, of champagne and sturgeon soup laid on by the museum director, she told me: 'Of course, I went to see them in Suvorov Street. I said I sympathised, but I warned them above all to avoid violence. Their leader made a great welcome speech about 'we the Cossack people'. I interrupted him to say: 'There is no such thing. I am proud to be a Cossack, but I am a Russian - and so are you.' I turned to the others and dared them to say that they were not Russians. And, you know, they looked so hangdog and they all mumbled to me: 'Yes, we are Russians]' '

All this, it seems to me, is a lesson about nationalism. Ethnic and linguistic graves are opening all over this part of Russia as 'nationalities' resurrect their identity. At the Black Sea resort of Anapa, for example, I found the local Greeks producing their own newspaper and demanding 'cultural autonomy'. But the Don Cossacks are essentially Russians who speak Russian. Their problem is that their sense of identity was to do with feeling superior - and now they no longer can. The Cossacks understood themselves as an outpost of Russian 'civilisation' against the barbarians. There is the same sort of mind-set among the Serbs of Krajina - or the Loyalists of Northern Ireland. But the Revolution took that superiority from them, and only now are they free to lament and rage about it.

I went to Novocherkassk, the Cossack 'capital' on the Don. The old party building flies a Cossack banner instead of a red flag. There is a triumphal arch commemorating the Cossacks' part in the war against Napoleon, a statue of their medieval leader, Yermak, a golden sword from Tsar Alexander I. Medals have rained down. But Russian or Soviet honours were intended only to distract the Don Cossacks from the reality of their own powerlessness and poverty.

It worked. For a hundred years, the Don Cossacks lived in a dream: the dream of a horseman cantering across a world of grass with fear running ahead of him like the wind. But now the dream machine has been switched off. The Cossacks have woken into a world where force, race and male pride are no longer honoured. Only the extremists of Russian nationalism might, if they smelt success, call on the Cossacks to rise and support them. That would restore the Cossack dream - and, after so short a democratic interval, restore the Russian nightmare.