"This book is concerned with the development, formation, and history of the late-war cavalry formations of the Waffen-SS, excluding the 8th SS Cavalry Division 'Florian Geyer, ' which was formed and activated earlier in World War II. Most of the material is derived from articles that appeared in now out-of-print issues of Siegrunen magazine"--Foreword

The downfall of tsarism in 1917 left the peoples of Russia facing an uncertain future. Nowhere were those anxieties felt more than among the Cossacks. The steppe horsemen had famously guarded the empire's frontiers, stampeded demonstrators in its cities, suppressed peasant revolts in the countryside and served as bodyguards to its rulers. Their way of life, intricately bound to the old order, seemed imperiled by the revolution and especially by the Bolshevik seizure of power. Many Cossacks took up arms against the Soviet regime, providing the anticommunist cause with some of its best warriors--as well as its most notorious bandits. This book chronicles their decades-long campaign against the Bolsheviks, from the tumultuous days of the Russian Civil War through the doldrums of foreign exile and finally to their fateful collaboration with the Third Reich.

"Cossak Tales" by the Ukraine-born writer Nicolai Gogol is a collection of folklore and legends about the lives and deeds of cossacks, the Ukrainian rebel formation that existed between the 14th and 18th centuries. The book was written less than a century after the Russian Empress Catherine the Great destroyed the last cossack formation. In those times, the people's memory kept the stories about bigger-than-life and mystical adventures of the folk heroes, which laid the basis for Gogol's book.