2019
Berlin/Zaporozhia

Zaporozhian Cossack Mythology As Political Agenda

Since the early formation of the Ukrainian nation and up until today, the representation of the Zaporozhian Cossacks has been reconstructed and redesigned, each time by a different group, to serve different political and personal agendas. At a time when the largest Lenin statue in Ukraine has been removed from its pedestal and replaced by a poster of a Cossack, it is becoming more and more difficult to see through the many layers of the Cossack’s remade image into what this phenomenon actually was.

This essay makes an argument about who the Zaporozhian Cossacks were and what their political and social impact was on the various stages of Ukrainian history, in order to understand how they are used in today’s politics. This essay attempts to separate the Cossacks’ mythology from their history by explaining what the Zaporozhian Cossacks were not, notwithstanding today’s new national identity that makes claims to the contrary. The Zaporozhian Cossacks were not representatives of the Ukrainian community and not Orthodox Crusaders. They did not fight for the Ukrainian people and were not at any point Ukrainian nationalists. Even though the Zaporozhian brotherhood was at times self-consciously Ukrainian, their members came from many different ethnic, religious and linguistic groups. This study challenges some of the traditional interpretations of the Zaporozhian Cossacks’ role in Ukrainian history as well as in the development of modern Ukrainian nationalism.

UKRAINE THE EARLY HISTORY

The territory that is considered today to be modern Ukraine has been populated since 32,000 BC. During the Middle Ages the area was a fundamental center of East Slavic culture, with the powerful state of Kievan Rus establishing the basis of Ukrainian identity.

The area described as Ukraine was mostly a plain on the direct route from the Southern Asian lowlands to the heart of Europa, meaning that it was also a buffer between Occidental and Oriental civilizations. From its early days Ukraine was a corridor for many migrations, such as Huns, Bulgars, Scandinavians, Mongols, Jews, Tatars, Turks, Poles, Russians, French, and Germans. Among these were also several distinct sub-ethnic groups, especially in western Ukraine.⁰¹ The most commonly known are the Hutsuls, Volhynians, Books, and Lemkos. On a large part of the Eurasian plain, nomadic tribes remained dominant well into the modern era.

Ukrainian nationality developed later than most European groups. Furthermore, the very existence of this nationality was constantly debated and at times even denied by the Russians and the Poles. The history of the Ukrainian national movement is, for the most part, the history of this struggle. The Ukrainian self-concept was created in resistance, each time to a different ruler: including the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom, Austria-Hungary, Muscovite Russia and the Crimean Tatar. The word—Ukrainian, in the sixteenth century, remained only a geographical and not an ethnic term. The oldest mention of the word Ukraina appears in the Hypatian Code⁰² that dates back to the year 1187. It was first used to define the territory of Kievan Rus.⁰³ At that time, Ukraine contained people of different nationalities and groups—all of whom might be called Ukrainian.

01. Linda Gordon, Cossack Rebellions-Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1983.

02. The second oldest surviving manuscript of the Primary Chronicle (1425), after the Laurentian Codex. It incorporates precious information from the 12th-century Kievan and 13th-century Galician chronicles.

03. Also known as the “land of the Rus” (Ро́усьская земля). It was a loose federation of East Slavic and Finnic peoples in Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century. The modern nations of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine all claim Kievan Rus as their cultural ancestors.

ZAPOROZHIAN COSSACKS—
HISTORICAL PHENOMENA

There are many blank spots in the Ukrainian history, from the Christianisation of Kievan Rus in 988, through to the Red Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks, Stalin and the man-made famine in 1933, and finally the Chernobyl explosion in 1986. Among all of these, the Zaporozhian Cossacks occupy a unique position.

It is not clear when exactly the first Cossack communities on the Lower Dnieper appeared. There are stories about similar people living in the steppes as early as the 12th century BC. The steppes north of the Black Sea were inhabited by nomadic tribes such as the Cumans, Pechenegs, and Khazars. There were also groups of people who escaped into those wild steppes from Kievan Rus in order to avoid oppression or criminal pursuit.⁰⁴

The name Cossack itself most likely came from the Turkish word Kasak, meaning a free man or a free warrior. Additionally, Cossack has the same Turkic root as Kazakh—the descendants of the Turkic and ancient Mongol tribes.⁰⁵ The first people to be systematically called Cossacks were the Tatars, renegades from the Khan’s armies.⁰⁶ However, around the fourteenth century, the Crimean Khan used the term to apply to Ruthenians who attacked a Turkish fortress. In any case, the fact that the Turkish term finally dominated suggests the strong influence that the Turkish had on the Cossacks’ image.

The name—Cossack appears both among Ukrainian and Russian people. However, it refers to two completely different groups. Furthermore, in Ukraine itself, there are a few different Cossack groups that are usually divided by region, but have developed different kinds of self-governing-military communities. Among many examples, there are Kuban Cossacks, Don Cossacks, Ural Cossacks and Crimean Tatars. This essay refers only to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who had the most substantial impact on the Ukrainian society and simultaneously took the Cossacks’ values regarding isolation and freedom to the most extreme level among all of the Cossack groups.

The name “Zaporizhia” refers to the location of the Cossacks’ autonomous territory. Zaporizhia is derived from the Ukrainian words za porohamy, meaning “beyond the rapids” (of the Dnieper river).⁰⁷ The Zaporozhian Cossacks lived on the Khortytsia island, by the lower Dnieper. This location allowed them to completely isolate themselves from the normative society, religion and government. The Zaporozhian Cossacks named their settlement Zaporozhian Sich. The term Sich relates to the Eastern Slavic verb Sech (сѣчь) meaning “to cut”: a reference to the palisade surrounding the settlement, which had carved sharp edges.

In claiming the right of self-government, the Zaporozhian Cossacks did not call themselves a nation but rather a brotherhood. They acknowledged the king of Poland as their sovereign but maintained the right to choose their employers and to define their membership. Beyond that, the Zaporozhian Cossacks presented themselves as strong brothers-in-arms. They created their own set of rules and style of governing. Among these rules were the exclusion of women and children, neither of which were allowed to set foot in the Zaporozhian Sich. Respect between Cossacks themselves had an extremely high value. For instance, when one Cossack is caught stealing from another in Nikolai Gogol’s historical novella Taras Bulba,⁰⁸ he is punished by being buried alive by all the members of the Zaporozhian brotherhood.

The Zaporozhian Cossacks were first evident to observers as bandits and frontier fighters. Later, by around 1480, they became internationally famous as mercenaries of various rulers, guards of governmental property and bodyguards for messengers and merchants venturing into the steppe. Over time the Zaporozhian Cossacks developed a role as retainers of the ruling class, and not as representatives of the oppressed. They remained so until their dissolution by the Russian Empress—Catherine the second⁰⁹ in 1775.
The Zaporozhian Cossacks’ military style was very similar to that of the Tatars. For instance, both were renowned for their ability to mobilize forces from among men in scattered villages. Furthermore, both the Tatars and the Zaporozhian Cossacks emerged as the servitors of powerful rulers. In their relation to authority, however, there was a fundamental difference between Cossacks and Tatars. The relative weakness of Polish-Lithuanian government¹⁰ in Ukraine meant that the Cossacks were able to parlay their positions as retainers into positions of autonomy from which they could become mercenaries, and could operate as a free and independent warrior brotherhood. The Tatars, however, remained always loyal soldiers to authority.¹¹ One of the best evidence of the Cossacks’ anti-authoritarian behavior can be found in the correspondence between them and Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed IV, that appears in the painting Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire by the Russian painter Ilya Repin, 1880-1891.
Although the veracity of this correspondence is not certain, the fact that this story exists suggests the nature of the Cossacks’ self-serving and aggressive behavior towards authority. According to the story, the Zaporozhian Cossacks had defeated the Ottoman Empire’s forces in battle. However, Mehmed IV demanded that the Cossacks submit to Turkish rule. He wrote to the Zaporozhian Cossack:
“As the Sultan; son of Muhammad; brother of the sun and moon; grandson and viceroy of God; ruler of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Babylon, Jerusalem, Upper and Lower Egypt; emperor of emperors; sovereign of sovereigns; extraordinary knight, never defeated; steadfast guardian of the tomb of Jesus Christ; trustee chosen by God Himself; the hope and comfort of Muslims; confounder and great defender of Christians—I command you, the Zaporogian Cossacks, to submit to me voluntarily and without any resistance, to desist from troubling me with your attacks.”¹²

In response, the Cossacks wrote a letter to the Sultan, replete with insults and profanities. The original letter, if it ever existed, has not survived. However, in 1870 an amateur ethnographer found a copy made in the 18th century:

“O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil’s kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are thou (modern English—you), that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck thy mother.
Thou Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright (mechanic), brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia, Podolian¹³ thief, catamite¹⁴ of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets¹⁵, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig’s snout, mare’s arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow, screw thine own mother!
So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won’t even be herding pigs for the Christians. Now we’ll conclude, for we don’t know the date and don’t own a calendar; the moon’s in the sky, the year with the Lord, the day’s the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!”¹⁶

The ethnographer gave this letter to the historian Dmytro Yavornytsky, who by chance read it to his guests, among whom was the painter Ilya Repin. Repin became curious about the story and in 1880 started to work on a painting that exhibits the Zaporozhian Cossacks’ pleasure at striving to come up with ever more base vulgarities.

04. Linda Gordon, Cossack Rebellions-Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1983.
05. Philip Longworth, The Cossacks, Constable, 1969. 06. Genghis Khan; first Great Khan of the Mongol Empire who emerged the mongol homeland from several nomadic tribes.07. Borys Krupnytsky and Arkadii Zhukovsky, The Zaporizhia, Encyclopedia of Ukraine, 1993. 08. Nikolai Gogol, Taras Bulba, 1835. A romanticized historical novella that describes the life of an old Zaporozhian Cossack, Taras Bulba, and his two sons, Andriy and Ostap. 09. The decision to liquidate the Sich, the main Zaporozhian fortress, was adopted at by the court council of Catherine the Great on May 7, 1775. After the Cossack troops came back from the Russo-Turkish War, on May 15, they were ambushed by the Russians. 10. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (also the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), was a dual state of Poland and Lithuania ruled by a common monarch, who was both King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.The Zaporozhian Cossacks remained under the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1654, when they signed a military and political alliance with Russia that acknowledged loyalty to the Russian Tsar. 11. Linda Gordon, Cossack Rebellions-Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1983. 12. Victor A. Friedman, The Zaporozhian Letter to the Turkish Sultan: Historical Commentary and Linguistic Analysis, Slavica Hierosolymitana, Vol.2, Jerusalem: Magnes, 1978. 25-138. 13. A historical region in Eastern Europe (Поді́лля), located in the west-central and south-western parts of Ukraine. 14. In ancient Greece and Rome, a catamite was a boy or youth kept for homosexual practices. 15. A city on the Smotrych River in western Ukraine, to the north-east of Chernivtsi (Ка́м'яне́ць-Поді́льський). 16. Victor A. Friedman, The Zaporozhian Letter to the Turkish Sultan: Historical Commentary and Linguistic Analysis, Slavica Hierosolymitana, Vol.2, Jerusalem: Magnes, 1978. 25-138.

FROM CRIMINALS TO HEROES

In today’s Ukraine, the Zaporozhian Cossacks are represented as the Robin Hoods of their times—seekers for justice against the rule of the unjust, robbing the rich and giving to the poor. This is however, not by any means an accurate portrayal of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. The social element of their banditry was mostly coincidental and exclusively oppositional.

In 1969, Eric Hobsbawm first published his book Bandits.¹⁷ The book focuses on social bandits, who are not regarded by public opinion as simple criminals but rather as champions of social justice. In his book, Hobsbawm explores and analyses the history of banditry and organized crime and its relationship to class structures of agrarian societies. Hobsbawm wrote that bandits: “are not so much political or social rebels… as who refuse to submit, and in doing so stand out from their fellows, or even more simply men who find themselves excluded from the usual career of their kind.

Their criminality then becomes a model of self-help for escaping caste and status restrictions. A critical part of the Zaporozhian Cossacks’ appeal was their success in causing loss and distress to hated authority figures while at the same time remaining free. As Hobsbawm wrote: “banditry is freedom, but in peasant society, few can be free.”

By the end of the 16th century the appeal of the Cossacks had become at once narrowed and strengthened by class and ethnic considerations, turning them into the heroes of the largest social group in Ukraine. In their roles as resistance fighters, the Zaporozhian Cossacks were able to separate themselves from their aristocratic employers. This separation is the main reason why the Zaporozhian Cossacks have been labeled as Robin Hoods by historians over the years.

Since Ukraine was gathered into the Lithuanian Grand Duchy,¹⁸ the Ukrainian peasants faced a class struggle which continues to this day. Cossack participation in this struggle was mainly coincidental—they were loyal exclusively to their own brotherhood and had only opportunistic relations to all other social groups. Yet both authorities and peasants used Cossacks as a kind of security force. Although Zaporozhian Cossacks did not have any desire to protect either the authorities or the peasants, they “accidentally” did so. This situation created a one-sided relationship of solidarity between the Zaporozhian Cossacks and the other ethnic groups around the steppe.

Another turn of events that had a significant influence over the Cossack image as a social bandit group was the “escape wave” into the steppe. The relative emptiness of Ukraine suggested a possible escape from different exploitations by the landowning class. This situation allowed individual rebels to free themselves from their Polish aristocratic rulers without struggling against them. The Zaporozhian Cossacks assimilated into the escape wave, and the boundary between Cossacks and non-Cossacks became quite blurred.¹⁹ The more that rebels joined the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the more the authorities saw the Cossacks as a threat. At the same time, the more that rebels became prevalent among the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the more determined they were to protect their ability to offer asylum from the Polish law.²⁰

All of these circumstances forced the Cossacks to become involved in the growing Ukrainian class struggle, of the peasants against the rulers, from the middle of the sixteenth century. Although this was not at any point the Cossacks’ free choice, this turn of events led them to become the Robin Hoods of the Ukrainian peasants.

It is essential to note that the newcomers of the “escape wave” had no Cossack traditions and no interest in adopting them. As a result, the Cossacks had extended their movement but simultaneously lost control over their troops. In a sense, from this point on the Cossack brotherhood as it had been, with its particular values and beliefs, came to an end.

17. Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits, Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd, United Kingdom, 1969. 18. European state that was founded by the Lithuaniansa polytheistic Baltic tribe from Aukštaitija. It endured from the 13th century to 1795, and included vast portions of the former Kievan Rus and what is today Belarus, parts of Ukraine, Poland, and Russia. At the hight of its power—the 15th century—it was the largest state in Europe. 19. Dmytro Yavornytsky, The History of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Russia, 1892-1897. 20. Linda Gordon, Cossack Rebellions - Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1983.

ZAPOROZHIAN COSSACK MYTHOLOGY
AS POLITICAL AGENDA

For Ukraine, all aspects of investigating its own history have usually been in the service of establishing its right for national independence. This begins with the fundamental question of who the Ukrainians ethnically are. When examining the Zaporozhian Cossacks, the discussion is equally fundamental. It begins with the question—are the Zaporozhian Cossacks Ukrainians? Nowadays, raising a question about whether the Zaporozhian Cossacks were Ukrainians aloud in a public space in Ukraine can cause someone trouble. By saying that, one refers to his or her pro-Russian political and social views on the current Russian-Ukrainian war.²¹ In recent years, the Zaporozhian Cossacks have become a very sharp image of Ukraine and the right of Ukrainians to independence. There is no more option, in the minds of the Ukrainian people, to make the separation between the two groups.

At the end of the 18th century, when the Zaporozhian Sich was entirely liquidated along with the Cossack movement and the Russian Empire had successfully crossed the Dnieper and extended towards Central Europe, the first wave of the Ukrainian national revival took place. Since then and up until today, the Zaporozhian Cossacks have served as a focus for national self-identification.

At the end of the 18th century the leaders of the Ukrainian national revival faced the difficulty of inspiring national consciousness in a stateless people that did not even live in a single administrative unit called Ukraine. For them, the Cossack brotherhood provided a political, social and cultural model. The Ukrainian political leaders found great comfort in the Cossack’s image, as did artists. Romantic Ukrainian poetry was considered revived in 1798 by Ivan Kotlyarevsky’s mock-heroic poem Eneyida, a parody of Virgil’s Aeneid in which Kotlyarevsky transformed the Trojan heroes into Zaporozhian Cossacks. This poem is considered to be the first work published in the modern Ukrainian language. Although Ukrainian was an everyday language to millions of people in Ukraine, it was officially discouraged from literary use in the area controlled by Imperial Russia. Critics believe that the poem was written in the light of the destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich by order of Catherine the Second in 1775.

Following Ivan Kotlyarevsky, many different writers set themselves the goal of reviving the Ukrainian language. The most outstanding among them was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, as well as folklorist and ethnographer—Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko. In 1847 Shevchenko was politically convicted for writing in the Ukrainian language, promoting the independence of Ukraine and ridiculing the members of the Russian Imperial House. This occurrence made him one of the most celebrated Ukrainian heroes of modern times.

During the Soviet period, academic researchers and archaeological excavations regarding the Cossacks were strictly forbidden due to the anti-national campaigns of the Soviet authorities. Although more than 42 million people in the USSR called themselves Ukrainians, they did not form a cohesive national community. Many generations in Eastern Ukrainian cities had been raised and schooled in Russian, and some did not even speak Ukrainian. Collective loyalty to the Soviet Union pushed aside the Ukrainian identity, which suffered from a lack of linguistic, cultural and historical content.²²

After the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine was adopted in 1990, Ukrainian law was prioritized over Soviet law. Moreover, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cossack legacy stood at the core of the Ukrainian national awakening.

Since the beginning of the war in Donbass and Luhansk,²³ the Ukranian government has been striving to gather her people under one strong nation and has been looking, as many other governments have before, for a symbol. A hero, an image, and eventually a purpose. This magical something that consistently makes people believe that they are connected one another. This magical something that makes people willingly give their lives in its name. The Zaporozhian Cossacks have been chosen to fulfill this mission again—to represent the romantic image of the Ukranian nation seeking freedom and independence.

Going around the streets of Zaporizhia today, it is impossible not to notice the images of the Cossacks: on milk cartons in the supermarket, on chocolate and yogurt packages, on the walls in public places, on the covers of textbooks and even tattooed on the bodies of many Ukrainians. The city, as well as the whole county, proudly uses those images of the strong men with a long mustache and partly shaved head in every possible instance. It is interesting to try to imagine what the Cossacks would have had to say about that, how they would address this interpretation of them as the leaders of a whole Ukrainian county and representing values of equality, Christianity and nationalism.

21. Frank Sysyn, The Reemergence of the Ukrainian Nation and Cossack Mythology, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 22. Frank Sysyn, The Reemergence of the Ukrainian Nation and Cossack Mythology, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 23.From early March 2014, protests by pro-Russian groups took place in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, as a result of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and the Euromaidan movement.These protests, which followed the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, escalated into an armed conflict that continues until today.

EPILOGUE

Nowdays, western historians argue that nationality is imagined. Like most other communities, nationalities exist primarily in the minds of the people; a large group of people who believe that they are ancestrally related, belonging to a particular nation. History has crucial importance to the existing of a nationality. No nationality can exist without coherent and firmly held beliefs about national identity—those are historical myths. Whether those myths are true or false does not play a significant role in the creation of a nationality. Subversion of those constitutive myths can stop and even reverse the process of nationality building.²⁴

This argument is exceptionally accurate when examining the Zaporozhian Cossack’s implementation on the young country of Ukraine. The Ukrainian people, as has been shown in this essay, came from a large variety of ethnic backgrounds and did not have anything in common besides their geographical location. Since they were attacked by the populations around them, they had to form a collective story and to gather all of those different people, with different languages and cultures, into one strong nation.

The annexation of the Zaporozhian Cossacks phenomenon by the Ukrainian leaders might look entirely natural as Ukraine has for a long time been fighting for a freedom that has been continuously debated and denied, while the Zaporozhian Cossacks were probably the best representations of freedom in the eastern European region.

Although the political, cultural, and social environments have changed over the years, the association of Ukrainian identity with the Cossacks has remained. From the first wave of the Ukrainian national revival to modern times, the image of the Zaporozhian Cossacks has been remade and redesigned by numerous politicians and leaders in order to fit their personal agenda. Due to this fact, one can not understand the Zaporozhian Cossacks legacy by looking at today’s Ukraine. One can, however, satisfy certain assumptions about today’s politics and national interpretations of the Ukrainian people by examining the way that the Zaporozhian Cossacks are represented by the country.

24. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, 1983.

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© 2020 Anisia Affek, all rights reserved