James Bond, in his Pierce Brosnan phase, was a refugee supporter. At least, that is what we are led to believe from the character’s statements and actions in the 1995 movie GoldenEye.

Bond expresses the opinion that the forcible repatriation of Cossacks by the British government in 1945 from Allied-occupied Austria to the Soviet Union was a source of shame. The main villain of the film, played by Sean Bean, is the son of one of the repatriated Cossacks, who exacts revenge on the government that supposedly ‘betrayed’ his father, sending him to certain death in the USSR.

That makes for a fantastic movie scenario, full of action, crime and death-defying stunts.

The return of the Cossacks by the British government at the time has turned into a minor albeit important cause célèbre in Tory and conservative circles. Authors such as Nikolai Tolstoy, ultrarightist enthusiast, whose anti-Sovietism is something of an obsessive crusade, wrote books about the ‘betrayal’ of the Cossack soldiers. Remaking himself as a ‘revisionist historian’, his exercises in revisionism somehow always correspond to an ultranationalist reinterpretation of the events and outcomes of World War 2.

Ever willing to provide more grist to the mill of Britain’s paranoid Russophobia (complemented by Sovietphobia), Britain’s conservatives have turned the fate of the Lienz Cossacks into a historical epic, shrouded in a hypocritical ‘self-criticism’. Naughty us, we should not have done that.

There is just one problem with this narrative; the Cossacks who were forcibly repatriated by the British, under the terms of the Yalta agreement, were Nazi collaborators, ultranationalist extremists and war criminals. Formed as auxiliary units of the Wehrmacht and SS, the Cossacks were deployed by the Nazi authorities to combat the Yugoslav partisans, anti-guerrilla operations, and suppress the famed Warsaw Uprising.

Fighting for the Nazis, and maintaining ultranationalist views, is perfectly okay for the imperialist states, if you are an immigrant foot soldier for regime change.

The Cossacks are an East Slavic subset of the Russian-Ukrainian polity. Their history is complex, but they derive from the feudal-era conflicts and principalities in Eastern Europe and Ukraine. A semi-nomadic people, their name derives from the Turkic qazaq, meaning ‘adventurer’, though that is disputed by some historians.

Occupying the vast grassland steppe regions of the Don, Terek and Kuban regions of Russia and Ukraine, they are known for their distinctive fur hats, squat dance, and horseback skills. While they led numerous armed rebellions against the Tsar, the Cossacks became a feared paramilitary force, enforcing the laws of Holy Mother Russia with the whip and cudgel.

Employed as strike-breakers, the Cossack formations in the Tsarist Russian army were fiercely patriotic, espousing a virulent antisemitic Greater Russian nationalism, coupled with ferocious loyalty to the Orthodox Church. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Cossacks fought both for and against the Communist regime.

Numerous anticommunist Cossacks, maintaining their ultranationalist Russian nationalism, escaped to the West. The enforced collectivisation of Cossack lands in the 1930s, and the official de-Cossackisation policy, brought its own problems. Nevertheless, Cossacks joined the Soviet army and fought for the Bolsheviks in World War 2. Cossack units still march in the annual Victory Day parade in Moscow.

The monumental Soviet novel And Quiet Flows the Don, published in the 1930s, is an epic novelisation of the Don Cossacks and the impact of collectivisation. Its author, Mikhail Sholokov, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1965.

Cossack identity re-emerged in the wake of Gorbachev’s perestroika, and by the early 2000s, Russian President Vladimir Putin accepted the Cossacks as a necessary prop for the Russian state. The ultranationalist outlook of the Cossacks found a corresponding home in the perspective of the Kremlin.

The rightwing Cossacks, having sought regime change during the years of Communist rule, have made their peace with the Putin administration. It is important to note that point, because there was a rather interesting article in Inside Story, denouncing the Cossack and Russian community in Australia for being a pro-Putin fifth column.

Denouncing the socially regressive and ultrarightist perspective of the Australian Cossacks and their Russian supporters, the author paints a dark picture of dastardly and nefarious forces at work, manipulated by the Kremlin. It appears that paranoid anticommunist fantasies of ‘reds under the bed’ controlled by Moscow have been updated and metamorphosed into new illusions of the Kremlin’s international influence.

Indeed, if there is a foreign power exerting a malign influence in Australia, look no further than Washington.

If the Cossacks in Australia are a repository of ultranationalist and militarist values, and upholding the social conservatism of the Russian Orthodox Church, then that should be no surprise. The imperialist states have nurtured, and provided sanctuary to, precisely the militarist and ultrarightist Cossacks for decades.

In fact, similarly to Nikolai Tolstoy and James Bond, you expressed remorse for having failed to provide sanctuary for Nazi-collaborating Cossacks, because they were appropriate cannon fodder for your regime changes fantasies. Imperialist states use extremist fighters, rebranding them refugees. Once their utility has expired, their extremism is used against them.

Indeed, the objection to the ultranationalist extremism of the Cossacks sounds hollow, because Washington and London (with Canberra in tow), willingly use and heroise ultranationalist Russians who work in line with regime change objectives.

In March of this year, Russian fighters, attached to and trained by the Ukrainian military, made a stunning public relations incursion into Belgorod, southern Russia. The anti-Putin soldiers, named the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK) and the Freedom of Russia legion, espouse white nationalist and racist perspectives, seeking to establish an imperial Russian society. In fact, these Russian groups are directly modelled on, and trace their ideological pedigree to, the Russian Liberation Army of General Andrei Vlasov, a Nazi collaborationist outfit which fought for the German army.

I have no interest in Cossack nationalism, or prioritising Russians over Ukrainians, or one nation over another. I am not interested in cultivating nationalist resentments. I am interested in exposing the monumental hypocrisies of the Anglo-Atlantic alliance, which perpetuates hatred in the service of war.