Each Cossack host consisted of a certain territory with Cossack settlements that had to provide military regiments for service in the
Imperial Russian Army and for
border patrol operations. Usually the hosts were named after the regions of their location. The
stanitsa, or village, formed the primary unit of this organization. In the Russian Empire (1721-1917), the Cossacks constituted twelve separate hosts, settled along the frontiers: • the
Don Cossack Host • the
Bug Cossacks • the
Kuban Cossack Host • the
Terek Cossack Host • the
Astrakhan Cossack Host • the
Ural Cossack Host • the
Orenburg Cossack Host • the
Siberian Cossacks • the
Semiryechye Cossack Host • the
Transbaikal Cossack Host • the
Amur Cossack Host • the
Ussuri Cossack Host There was also a small number of the Cossacks in
Krasnoyarsk and
Irkutsk, who would form the
Yenisey Cossack Host and the
Irkutsk Cossack
Regiment of the
Ministry of the Interior in 1917. Cossack hosts on Russian soil were disbanded in 1920, in the course of the
Russian Civil War of 1917–1922 in a deliberate process of
De-Cossackization to remove their autonomy. ==List of hosts==