COLUMN ONE : Cossacks of Russia Ride Again : The farmer-warriors descended from fugitive serfs are a political movement on the rise. But their increasing militarism also represents a threat to the republic.

Braided whips and ceremonial sabers at their sides, mustachioed men in World War I vintage uniforms and knee-high boots crowded in rowdy fashion around the long table, looking like ancestral portraits that had stepped down from the wall.

Assembled in the Ataman Palace for a Saturday morning powwow on tactics, each of the men was himself an ataman, or Cossack chieftain. And they were arguing with the urgent energy of men who see power within their grasp.

Once merely a whimsical bit of historical color to brighten protest meetings, the modern Cossacks now are fighting by the thousands to defend their Russian brethren in Moldova. They are staging Robin Hood-style raids, swearing ominously to keep their beloved country whole and quietly moving to take over local governments in strongholds like this Don River city.

Sweeping from the deep Russian steppes to the remote Kuril Islands north of Japan, the Cossacks, once more than 4 million strong in their heyday before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, are rising again. They are taking on momentum as a movement with the power to attract tens of thousands of would-be swashbucklers nostalgic for the romance of Great Russia’s past.

“We have always been warriors,” said Gennady Chernakalov, a former livestock manager sporting homemade foil epaulets imprinted with a large “A” for ataman. “We were farmers, but we were soldiers to the depths of our blood. We defend the motherland.”

With their fiery patriotism and their striving to restore traditions, the Cossacks embody the widespread longing among Russians to return to their roots, now that the artificial construct of Soviet culture has collapsed.

But the Cossack revival goes further. Its dark side brings out strains of Russian chauvinism and anti-Semitism that recall the old image of Cossacks as brutal policemen, pogrom riders and unruly frontiersmen whose obedience to the crown extended only up to a point.

And the movement’s leaders make it no secret that, if they had the means, they would willingly appoint themselves the armed guardians of the 30 million Russians living in other parts of the former Soviet Union; they also would battle to win back all the traditionally Russian lands given to other former republics.

“Our ancestors expanded our boundaries,” said Victor Bezrukikh, deputy chief of the nationwide Cossack Union. “And we can’t stay calm when chunk after chunk is torn off and given to other republics. It wasn’t the current government that created Russia, you know.”

Cossacks, the caste of farmer-warriors who are descended from fugitive serfs, played a key role in making Russia a great empire. Their pioneering spirit helped conquer Siberia, and their military prowess and horsemanship long made them the stars of the czar’s army.

Now, Cossacks have declared that they will not tolerate it if Russia gives back four disputed islands in the southern Kurils to Japan, which has demanded that the territory be returned before it considers any large-scale aid to the former Soviet republics.

In Latvia, the Cossacks have joined to form armed battalions.

In the Dniester Republic, a breakaway splinter of mainly Russians and Ukrainians who want no part of ethnically Romanian Moldova, an estimated 3,000 Cossacks are fighting in sporadic clashes. Cossack spokesmen compare these fighters to American soldiers defending their compatriots in Grenada or to volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.

In Moldova, several Cossacks have been killed, prompting a Cossack newspaper to comment with sad pride, “The history of the Cossacks is an endless line of fatal marches. Cossacks never die in their beds.”

In the Don River region of southern Russia--a heavily Cossack area for more than 400 years--old-style Cossack assemblies, known as circles, are being formed in village after village. The circles, each headed by an elected ataman, serve as reserve military units, mutual-aid societies and cultural clubs all in one.

The Don Cossacks, led by Sergei Meshcheryakov, also launched a Cossack registration drive that they plan to use as a political mechanism to take power. They are asserting their self-appointed role as guardians of public order with growing fervor.

One local editor who wrote disparagingly about the Cossacks was dragged outside his house and flailed with a nagaika , or short braided whip, according to the national daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. In another notorious stunt, Rostov-on-the-Don Cossacks reportedly confiscated hundreds of pounds of mandarin oranges from a vendor they thought was charging outrageous prices; they delivered the fruit, instead, to a nearby orphanage.

“People reacted at first as if members of a circus had come out onto the street,” said Yuri Bespalov, Komsomolskaya Pravda’s correspondent in Rostov-on-the-Don. “But now they’re feeling more wary because the Cossacks are showing their teeth.”

Even Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government is approaching the Cossack phenomenon with great caution, keeping silent about the volunteers in the Dniester Republic and holding back support for Cossack demands that they be given their own units in the army.

“Yeltsin is afraid of the Cossacks,” said Igor Yerunov, an Academy of Sciences scholar the Russian government has asked to study the Cossacks with a view toward formulating future policy. “Among Russians, Cossacks are the most organized force.”

The Cossacks, so far, have pressured Yeltsin’s government mainly via telegrams with demands and small protests. But their increasing military weight presents a mounting threat.

Although the Cossacks blame Bolshevik propaganda for fostering their reputation for brutality against demonstrators, Jews and others, tints of Cossack anti-Semitism, anti-communism and xenophobia still show through.

Ivan Kolotkin, a massively built teacher with a biblical beard who attended the Saturday meeting of atamans in Novocherkassk, declared, “Nothing will kill the Russian soul--even if the Jews kill all our culture.”

And Chernakalov asserted that the Cossacks’ bad name stemmed from “Zionist propaganda” and insisted that Soviet founder V. I. Lenin was of Jewish descent and should be considered a Jew. “It was Blank who brought Russia to its knees,” he said, using Lenin’s mother’s maiden name.

For many Russians, however, the Cossacks retain a glamorous appeal that, Yerunov allowed, could be compared to that of the American cowboy. “The Cossacks became the symbol of Russian freedom,” he said, using a Russian word, volya , that has no exact English equivalent and carries a sense of unbounded space and uncontrollable willfulness.

The name Cossack stems from the Turkish word for free men--the term used for the fugitive serfs who, beginning in the 15th Century, fled czarist repression to settle on the remote outskirts of the Russian Empire, particularly along the Don and Dnieper rivers.

For centuries, the Cossacks served as impassable border guards and crack cavalry, with each Cossack bringing his own horse and uniform to his service of the czar in exchange for land and tax privileges.

Always unruly, Cossacks led almost all of the great Russian peasant rebellions. They sided largely with the anti-Communist Whites during the civil war that followed the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In retaliation, the Communist regime repressed the Cossacks with special vigor, killing and deporting them until the 12 voiska , or hordes, across Russia were effectively liquidated.

The Cossack Union could give no figures on how many Russians are currently of Cossack descent. It refused to divulge the numbers of its own local paramilitary units, but it said that hereditary Cossacks live across the entire former Soviet Union and that all 12 hordes have been re-established.

Like the cowboys, Cossacks originated as a social class, rather than as an ethnic group. Almost any Russian-Orthodox Slav could join their ranks; there once was even an Italian Cossack leader. Now, however, many Cossack activists insist that the Cossacks are a people, a bona fide ethnic group that deserves self-rule in its own region.

The Cossack circles remain largely open, though, with leaders saying they are willing to accept anyone who considers himself a Cossack. Despite the Communist reprisals against Cossacks, their descendants are still believed to number in the millions.

For Yevgeny Tkachev, editor of the local newspaper and now ataman, as well, in the Don River village of Vesyoly, the attention given to Cossack soldiering misses the point of the revival: the return to farming the Cossack way, on Cossack land.

“If you offer a Cossack land or weapons, he’ll take land,” Tkachev said. And if, as the state sells off its collective farms, Cossacks in the overpopulated Don region are not given most of the plots, “They’ll yell, ‘This is my land, this was the land of my ancestors!’ And then the saber-wavers will fill their ranks.”

Along with returning to farming, the Cossack circles are fostering the revival of the rich Cossack culture of horsemanship, song and high-kicking dance.

Pyotr Boldyrev, a tractor driver who is now ataman in the small village of Sredny Manich, said his circle of 120 men has founded a singing group, launched the construction of a sports stadium and helped a Cossack whose wife died organize the funeral. It also posts Cossacks to guard areas of his collective farm during holidays and organizes Cossack celebrations replete with troikas--traditional carriages drawn by three horses. The circle has also gotten permission to farm a large chunk of land together.

“The more solidarity we have, the better for each person,” Boldyrev said.

Tkachev, his neighbor, is a rich repository of Cossack lore, full of tidbits gleaned from books and elderly Cossacks who still remember the old ways.

Did you know, he asked, that Cossacks are supposed to wear an earring in their right ear, if they are their mother’s only remaining son, so that a commander will be reminded to spare them from dangerous missions? That the nagaika was meant for breaking wolves’ backs from the saddle? That the Cossacks, by always electing their ataman from within the circle, were the forerunners of Russian democracy?

For Tkachev, the Cossack circle is mainly a means of pressuring local authorities into doing what they want--from granting land mainly to Cossacks to running the harvest right.

“I say to my Cossacks, ‘You’re the master. You’re the salt of the earth,’ ” Tkachev said. “And now the bosses have their tails between their legs. To a simple tractor driver who is a Cossack leader, they speak with respect now.”

But for many Cossacks, including Boldyrev’s wife, Lyubov, Cossack power is even more: It is a new creed. “We’re used to believing in something,” she said, “and we’d like to believe in this.”