Cossacks

• 1. Introduction

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  The Cossacks once razed the suburbs of Constantinople in 1615 and 1625, forcing an Ottoman Sultan to flee his own palace. These were not the armies of a great empire. They were semi-nomadic riders from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, a frontier people who answered to no single sovereign and whose way of life revolved entirely around the horse. Who were they? Where did they come from? And how did a collection of free horsemen from the borderlands between Ukraine and Russia become one of the most consequential military forces in early modern history? Those are the questions at the heart of this story. The name itself points toward the answer. Max Vasmer's etymological dictionary traces the word Cossack to the Tatar Turkic word kazak, meaning 'free man' but also 'conqueror'. That double meaning captures something essential. The Cossacks were free men who made conquest their trade, and the tension between those two identities would drive their history for centuries.

• 2. Origins on the Steppe

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  By the end of the 15th century, the word 'Cossack' was being applied to Slavic peasants who had fled to the devastated lower reaches of the Dnieper and Don Rivers, establishing self-governing, cavalry-based communities there. But the term itself predates them. Originally it described independent horse-riding tribes recognized by the Tatars as 'free men' who inhabited the Pontic-Caspian steppe north of the Black Sea near the Dnieper River.

  The origins of the Cossacks are genuinely disputed, and the debate is not merely academic. According to the historian Serhii Plokhy, the first Cossacks were of Turkic rather than Slavic stock. Christoph Baumer elaborates: from the thirteenth century onward, Cossack predecessors were mainly Turkic, but from the sixteenth century they were increasingly joined by Slavs from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and what is now Ukraine, becoming what Baumer calls a Slav-Tatar ethnic hybrid. The Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk, drafted in 1710, goes further, claiming Khazar origins for the Cossacks. Genetic studies of Zaporozhian, Don, and Kuban Cossacks, however, show their paternal gene pool is primarily East Slavic, with minimal Caucasian or Asian influence, though the Terek Cossacks are an exception, having historically aligned with North Circassian groups.

  The first international record of a Cossack act dates to 1492, when Crimean Khan Meñli I Giray complained to Grand Duke of Lithuania Alexander Jagiellon that Cossack subjects from Kiev and Cherkasy had pillaged a Crimean Tatar ship. The duke ordered his officials to investigate, execute the guilty, and return the stolen goods to the Khan. That combination of raiding, political complication, and disputed authority would define the Cossack position in Eastern European politics for the next two centuries. Early 'proto-Cossack' groups are generally placed in what is now Ukraine prior to the 13th century, though some historians push the origins back as far as the mid-8th century.

• 3. Freedom, Service, and the Sich

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  The first recorded structure to look like what we would later call a Cossack fortress was built in 1552 by Dmytro Vyshnevetsky, the starosta of Cherkasy and Kaniv, who constructed a fortification on the island of Little Khortytsia on the Lower Dnieper. That fortress became the prototype for the Zaporozhian Sich, the fortified capital from which the Zaporozhian Host took its name. 'Zaporozhian' derives from the Ukrainian phrase za porohamy, meaning 'below the rapids'.

  The Zaporozhian Host combined the ancient Cossack order with habits borrowed from the Knights Hospitaller. Their autonomy grew steadily through the 16th century. King Stephen Bathory granted them specific rights and freedoms in 1578, and they began conducting their own foreign policy, sometimes acting directly against the interests of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that nominally claimed them. They signed a treaty with Emperor Rudolf II in the 1590s. Registered Cossacks formed a component of the Commonwealth army until 1699.

  By 1615 and again in 1625, Cossack sea raiders had burned the suburbs of Constantinople itself. In 1637, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, joined by the Don Cossacks, captured the strategic Ottoman fortress of Azov, which guarded the mouth of the Don River. The hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny was particularly formidable in the first quarter of the 17th century, launching successful campaigns against both Tatars and Turks, and in September 1618, he laid siege to Moscow alongside the Commonwealth commander Chodkiewicz before peace was secured. The reach of these steppe horsemen stretched from the Black Sea to the walls of two imperial capitals.

• 4. The Khmelnytsky Uprising

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  On the 4th of July 1610, four thousand Ukrainian Cossacks fought in the Battle of Klushino, helping to defeat a combined Muscovite-Swedish army and facilitate the occupation of Moscow. Relations with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, however, were deteriorating steadily. The Commonwealth government had repeatedly refused to recognize Cossacks as equals of the szlachta nobility, and its suppression of Eastern Orthodoxy after the Union of Brest made the Cossacks fiercely anti-Catholic and, by extension, anti-Polish.

  The landowners of the Commonwealth developed an especially cynical practice: raising the Cossack registry during times of war to fill their ranks, then slashing it in peacetime and forcing Cossacks back into serfdom. This institutionalized humiliation produced a string of uprisings through the 1630s, led by figures including Taras Fedorovych in 1630, Ivan Sulyma in 1635, and Yakiv Ostrianyn and Karpo Skydan in 1638. All were suppressed.

  The largest of these explosions began in 1648, led by hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. The Khmelnytsky Uprising was one of the catastrophic events known collectively as The Deluge, which gravely weakened the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and set the stage for its eventual dissolution a century later. After years of warfare, the Treaty of Pereyaslav in 1654 brought most of the Cossack state under Russian rule, with the Tsar guaranteeing Cossack autonomy and recognizing their nobility. What that agreement actually meant, however, was immediately contested. For the Muscovite Tsar, it signified unconditional submission of new subjects. For the Ukrainian hetman, it was a conditional contract, revocable if the other party failed to uphold it.

• 5. Rebellion and Imperial Absorption

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  Stenka Razin was born into an elite Cossack family and had made diplomatic visits to Moscow before he launched his rebellion in 1667. He began with a Persian campaign, leading his followers to plunder cities on the Caspian Sea, returning in 1669 with plundered wealth. When the revolt against the Tsarist system began in earnest, Razin's forces seized Tsaritsyn, Astrakhan, Saratov, and Samara, releasing peasants from slavery as they advanced. His vision was a united Cossack republic across the southern steppe, governed by democratic Cossack principles. In April 1671, the elder Cossacks chose compliance with Moscow over Razin's revolution. Ataman Yakovlev led elders to destroy the rebel camp and capture Razin, who was taken to Moscow and executed. In August 1671, Russian envoys administered an oath of allegiance and the Cossacks swore loyalty to the Tsar.

  A century later, Yemelyan Pugachev, a low-status Don Cossack, arrived among the Yaik Host in late 1772, claiming to be the assassinated Peter III. Many Yaik Cossacks believed him, and the first of three phases of his rebellion began in September 1773. After a five-month siege of Orenburg, Pugachev established his headquarters in a military college and issued manifestos calling for the restoration of Cossack freedoms. In September 1774, his own Cossack lieutenants turned him over to government troops.

  The aftermath was decisive. The Russian Empire dissolved the Lower Dnieper Zaporozhian Host in 1775, destroyed their Sich fortress on the Dnieper, renamed the Yaik River and Yaik Host to erase the memory of Pugachev, and formally transformed all remaining Cossack nations into a special military estate, a 'military class' bound to the Tsar. The last chief of the Lower Dnieper Host, Petro Kalnyshevsky, became a prisoner of the Solovetsky Islands.

• 6. Napoleon and the Cossack Myth

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  During Napoleon's invasion of Russia, Cossacks became the Russian soldiers most feared by the French army. Napoleon himself remarked: 'Cossacks are the best light troops among all that exist. If I had them in my army, I would go through all the world with them.' Several thousands of Cossacks were commended by Pyotr Bagration for their operations behind French lines near the Bug River. Their attacks on French supply lines and communications were among the earliest developments of what we now recognize as guerrilla warfare tactics.

  The service of the Cossacks in the Napoleonic wars transformed their public image. Throughout the 19th century, the Russian government promoted what one source describes as a 'powerful myth' portraying the Cossacks as having a special and unique bond to the Emperor. That image of ultra-patriotic defenders of the House of Romanov was embraced by many ordinary Cossacks, converting them into a force for conservatism.

  By the 1890s, the Cossack hosts had expanded significantly. In 1840 the list of Cossack voiskos already included the Don, Black Sea, Astrakhan, Little Russia, Azov, Danube, Ural, Stavropol, Mesherya, Orenburg, Siberian, Tobolsk, Tomsk, Yeniseisk, Irkutsk, Sabaikal, Yakutsk, and Tartar hosts. By 1879, the reach of the Cossack model had extended beyond Russia entirely. Nasir al-Din, the Shah of Iran, had been impressed with Cossack equestrian skills during a visit to Russia in 1878 and requested that Alexander II send instructors to Tehran. Nine Cossacks led by Kuban Cossack Colonel Aleksey Domantovich arrived in Tehran in 1879. What Domantovich and his men created became the only disciplined unit in the entire Persian Army, and thus a crucial instrument of the Shah's authority. At the beginning of the 20th century, Russian Cossacks numbered 4.5 million.

• 7. Revolution, Division, and Survival

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  At the outbreak of unrest on the 8th of March 1917 that led to the fall of the Tsarist regime, approximately 3,200 Cossacks from the Don, Kuban, and Terek Hosts were stationed in Petrograd. Although they were only a fraction of the 300,000 troops near the capital, their general defection on the 10th of March stunned the authorities and energized the crowds. During the Russian Civil War, Don and Kuban Cossacks were the first to declare open war on the Bolsheviks. In 1918, Russian Cossacks declared complete independence, establishing the Don Republic and the Kuban People's Republic. Cossack troops formed the core of the anti-Bolshevik White Army.

  With the Red Army's victory, the Cossack lands were subjected to decossackization and the Holodomor famine. The result, during the Second World War, was that Cossack loyalties were split: cohesive Cossack cavalry units fought on both the Soviet and the German sides. After World War II, the Soviet Union disbanded all Cossack units within the Soviet Army, and many Cossack traditions were suppressed under Joseph Stalin and his successors.

  The survival of Cossack identity through these catastrophes was neither inevitable nor complete. Many Cossacks migrated to other parts of Europe after the Soviet Union was established; others remained and assimilated into the Communist state. During the Perestroika era in the late 1980s, descendants of Cossacks began reviving their horse-centered way of life and historic traditions. In 1988, the Soviet Union enacted a law permitting the re-establishment of former Cossack hosts and the formation of new ones. Throughout the 1990s, regional authorities delegated local administrative and policing responsibilities to these reconstituted hosts. In the 2002 Russian Census, 140,028 people reported their ethnicity as Cossack. Between 3.5 and 5 million people around the world now associate themselves with Cossack cultural identity, though the majority have little direct connection to the original Cossack people, given how greatly the cultural legacy changed over time.