History of the Cossacks

William Cresson

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781537805788
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

THE level plains and steppes of South Russia were known to the ancients as the broad channel followed by the ebb and flow of every fresh wave of conquest or migration passing between Europe and Asia. The legions of Rome and Byzance found this territory as impossible to occupy by military force as the high seas...

BOGDAN HMELNICKY; A COSSACK NATIONAL HERO

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THE MAGIC CALL OF FREE land had slowly re- peopled the devastated steppes of the Ukraine following the withdrawal of the Tartar invasion. Little did the first hardy Cossack pioneers, who built their homesteads in this “smiling wilderness” know or care that by this act they subjected themselves to the feudal claims of former Polish and Lithuanian overlords. Too feeble to make good their pretensions against the Tartars, these nobles now sought to exercise their “rights” over the newcomers. But until the middle of the seventeenth century some acknowledged leader had been lacking among the Cossack chieftains. Until this time the very name of Cossack had indicated a “masterless” man, differentiating their race from the Russian peasant class who had long since bartered liberty in exchange for order. In Bogdan Hmelnicky the scattered settlements and clans of the steppes found a hero through whose genius their warlike race was to receive for a brief period the impulse of nationality.

The industry and courage of the Cossacks had brought prosperity if not peace to the deserted steppes. The Polish aristocrats of the border, panye and starostsi, were now for the first time safe behind the bulwark of their settlements, and already had begun to look with disfavour on their democratic protectors. Rightly enough, they considered that the “Free People” were dangerous neighbors for their own serfs, meek, priest-ridden folk exploited alike by Jew and Jesuit.

In our own day when the problems of a “Free Poland” unite the sympathies of the victorious democracies, it is difficult to realize the meaning that “Polish Freedom” must have conveyed to the peasant and Cossack population of the Ukraine two centuries ago. The persistent loyalty with which the Polish people have clung to their faith and their nationality has won the admiration of the whole civilized world. Yet the most superficial study of Polish national history reveals the reason for many of their past misfortunes.

The only recognized citizens of the old “republic” of Poland were the panye, or nobles, – a class so jealous of its arrogant equality that the negative vote of a single gentleman could set at naught the deliberations of the entire nobiliary body gathered in council. Their parliaments were usually held in the open fields near Cracow or Warsaw, often on horseback. These were attended by all of aristocratic lineage who chose to be present, either to vote or to impose their opinions by their shouts or the clash of their weapons. The great Polish nobles often attended these assemblies accompanied by private armies of horse, foot and artillery, recruited from among their serfs and retainers. Naturally, few of these armed assizes passed off without conflict and the spilling of much azure blood.

No Polish pan might engage in trade. To buy and sell was considered degrading and, therefore, forbidden their class. Yet these strange “republican” aristocrats might become the humble servants of a fellow pan without losing their rights in the national assembly. Only the nobles were permitted to own land, and too often the exploitation of their peasants was left in the hands of Jew or German “factors” or overseers. The only occupation of the masters of the soil lay in the more congenial employments of law-making – and law- breaking. In the tumultuous assemblies of the nobiliary Diet only one principle seems to have met with general agreement – the God-given right of the pan to exploit his serfs as natural “property.” Among the free peasants and Cossacks of the Ukraine it was commonly reported that the Polish priests taught their peasant parishioners to answer a question of the-catechism beginning “Why has God created you?” by the humble response: “To give our service to our noble lords.”

The civilization of Poland was Catholic and Roman: the civilization of the border provinces looked towards the East and remembered Byzance. These differences have persisted to the present time, but in the early seventeenth century, when Catholic Poland was a powerful state and Russia still in the making, religious oppression sowed the seed of differences which have not yet died away. The people of the Orthodox Ukraine – peasants and Cossacks alike – could only look to a distant Tsar for redress when the armed emissaries of the oppressing Polish Church rode among them demanding tithes and taxes. Or else – as the wise King Sigismond of Poland is reported to have himself advised them – they might “trust to their own Cossack swords.”

The complete reunion of Poland and Lithuania decreed at Lublin in 1569 had resulted in a promise to the Greek Orthodox population of the border lands that the freedom of their religion would be respected. But the militant Catholic order of the Society of Jesus was firmly entrenched at Warsaw. To the influence of these learned and courtly prelates the Polish aristocracy owed their astonishing progress in the arts of civilization and their, perhaps too faithful, conformity to the more superficial standards of western Europe. The not unnatural ambition of the Jesuits – and of the Polish nobles whose political policy as well as their conscience was dominated by these spiritual directors, – lay in bringing about the submission of the Orthodox provinces of the Polish frontier to the rule of the Catholic church. By one of those able compromises which formed the basis of Jesuit diplomacy, they conceived the idea of endowing these border races with a separate “Uniate” church. This allowed the Orthodox believers to retain some features of the old ritual, to which they clung so persistently, while yielding obedience to the Pope at Rome. But this first crafty step towards a more irrevocable union was viewed with not unnatural suspicion from the beginning. In 1595 all but thirty-seven of the bishops whose sees lay in the Orthodox provinces had succumbed to the powerful influence of the Jesuits. Not so, however, their parishioners, the sturdy Ukrainian peasantry and the Cossack polki. To these latter Orthodoxy meant personal liberty and the dignity of freemen, while Catholicism preached obedience and blind submission.

The lot of the Orthodox clergy and peasants of the Ukraine, separated by a gulf of fanaticism from their feudal Polish lords, was voiced in Morris Drecninski’s protest to the King in the Polish Diet:

“When your Majesty goes to war against the Turk who furnishes the greater part of your army? Russians practicing the Orthodox faith! How, then, can we be asked to sacrifice our lives abroad when at home there is no peace? Our miseries, the miseries of the Russian subjects of Poland, are patent to everyone. In the great cities seals close the doors of our churches and their holy treasuries are despoiled. In our monasteries the monks are driven forth and cattle stabled in their place. Our children are without baptism and their corpses are thrown out from the town like the bodies of dead animals. Men and women must live together without God’s benediction given by a priest. Death is without confession or sacrament. Is not this an offence against God and will not God avenge us?”

Another grievance, even more galling to the Orthodox frontiersmen, was found in the behaviour of the Jew and German “intendants” who usually acted as intermediaries between the Polish lords of the manor and the long-suffering population of their estates. These “unbelievers” were often given “control of the rights of hunting and fishing, the roads and wine shops” – even access to the Orthodox churches was to be obtained from them only by paying a fee.

The bitterest irony of the situation we have described lay in the fact that these burdens were laid by the aristocracy, not as in the rest of Europe, upon a grovelling population of serfs to whom their lords at least afforded protection, but upon a border nation of alien faith and blood who, following the policy of the Polish kings, possessed a system of martial preparedness and, indeed, were the principal protectors of the Polish frontiers.

The rampart against the Turks and Tartars, formed by the Cossack settlements, had by this time become fully organized. They formed no less than twenty regular Cossack polki or regiments, each under its own colonel, or polkovnik. The whole of this well disciplined army obeyed the commands of a single military chief called the “Hetman of the Ukraine,” who received his appointment from the King of Poland. In all his decisions this officer was guided by the advice of a starshina or council of the Cossack elders.

Besides the above troops, recruited from among the inhabitants of the Cossack settlements and the “slovods“ or armed villages nearer the Tartar frontier, the warlike brotherhood of the Zaporogian Cossacks had now grown into a powerful military organization. Their stronghold – the sitch – formed a permanent camp or rendezvous beyond the rapids of the Dnieper. These warriors – famous in all Europe – represented the perfection, or rather the extreme, of devotion to the principles of free Cossack life. Their celebrated infantry were the only troops capable of withstanding the shock of Polish cavalry, the heavily armed houzars or hussars of noble birth, and the less showy, but no less invincible dragoons.

In many places along the border the Cossacks had old-established settlements scattered among the serf-tilled lands belonging to the Polish and Lithuanian nobles. Often these homesteads, which the Cossacks had reclaimed from the steppes, were tenaciously claimed through some shadowy feudal right by absentee Polish landlords. By the latter, the Free Cossacks and their institutions were of course considered a dangerous example to the docile Polish peasantry.

In order to discourage the growth of a class of Cossack proprietors, even the tolerant Polish king, Stephen Bathory, had tried to establish a register of “Free Cossacks” whose numbers were not to exceed six thousand. The surplus of the Cossacks – those not needed for purposes of border defense – were often forced to labor on the land of some feudal lord. It was concerning the coveted right of inscription upon this list of free men and upon grounds of religious oppression that the principal difference now arose which was to separate the Cossack nation from their allegiance to the kings of Poland. Long patient under wrongs, they felt the power to redress: the Cossacks of the Ukraine only awaited a hero to lead them in a war of rightful assertion and protest.

Bogdan Hmelnicky had been chosen by the Swedish King of Poland, Vladislas (or Valdemar) Vasa, as Hetman of the Cossacks of the Ukraine, on account of his record as a soldier, and because judged by the standards of his time, he possessed “no small share of learning” – the ability both to read and write. Such talents were almost a mark of erudition among the Cossacks of the seventeenth century. In his youth a brilliant defense of the fortress of Zolkiev against the Crimean Tartars had made his reputation known even in Europe, where the gazettes were always much concerned with Polish affairs.

The incident which changed Bogdan from a conscientious official of the Polish crown and made him the implacable enemy of his former patrons is recorded in different ways by contemporary historians, – usually according to their race or prejudices. All are agreed that he was the victim of a cruel wrong, and even a Polish writer of his time finds his principal fault to have been that “he revenged himself upon the state for a private iniquity.”

Bogdan was a “free-holder” or non-noble proprietor of a small farm and flour mill at a place called Czehrin near the shores of the Dnieper. His little property lay in a country where for leagues around the land was owned, or rather claimed, by the great Polish family of Konietspolski. The intendant of these feudal lords casting a covetous eye on the Naboth’s vineyard belonging to the Cossack hetman, summoned him before a tribunal pre- sided over by their common ‘master, Alexander Konietspolski. Here, after due process of feudal law, Bogdan heard himself summarily dispossessed. To protest against such a sentence was unheard-of insolence. Yet the hetman (although he knew that Cossack “rights” stood little chance of prevailing against a Polish magnate who himself interpreted the laws) ventured to take this step – trusting in his record of past services to the “republic.” As an all-sufficient answer, the veteran soldier was sentenced to serve a term in the jail of the Konietspolski.

Fortunately for the Cossack nation, Bogdan was able to make his escape, and we soon find him an honoured guest in that citadel of personal liberty, the impenetrable sitch of the Zaporogians. Among the island fortresses defended by this famous brotherhood, even the armed retainers of Konietspolski dared not pursue him. Meanwhile, the intendant, Czaplinski, in order to revenge himself in true seignorial fashion, visited Bogdan’s homestead at the head of his retainers. The crime that ensued is recounted in many ways. The poetical necessities of the case may have caused the Cossack ballad- historians to rouse their countrymen by painting the intendant’s conduct in its blackest colours. Czaplinski, besides depriving the hetman of his property sought, in his absence, “to place upon the honour of his victim’s family an unspeakable outrage.”

The whole incident is but one in a long story of oppression, yet it was the spark necessary to fire the powder magazine of Cossack indignation and to rouse their fierce resistance to wrongs they had too long patiently endured. The war which now began between the nobles of the Polish “republic” on the one hand and the Free Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants on the other was to end only after the fairest provinces of the border land had again and again been devastated with “fire and sword.”

It was at the head of nearly 100,000 Cossack soldiers and a horde of Tartars whom the promised plunder of the Polish castles had enlisted on the side of their bitterest enemies, that the hetman returned to demand an accounting from the Konietpolski. As he advanced, new volunteers flocked to his standards: Cossacks, peasants, and gentlemen of the Ukraine, whom religious persecution had driven from their estates. In the space of a few weeks he found himself the leader of an army of irregular troops estimated at 300,000 men – a whole people in arms. From now on until his death Bogdan was an uncrowned king – the head of a Cossack nation for the first time united. As a symbol or scepter of authority he carried in his hand a reed from the shores of the River Dneiper.

Thinking to crush without difficulty this motley gathering (for in spite of the stiffening battalions of Zaporogian frontiersmen the Cossack polki were scarcely a match for the regular troops maintained by the Polish republic) a brilliant company of nobles set forth from Warsaw “as to the chase.” Their leader was a brave young general – Stephen Pototski. At Zoltivody – the Yellow Waters – this army of Polish nobles thought to ride roughshod over the peasant bands, but their own defeat was complete and crushing.

Vladislas, the King of Poland – the wise ruler of a distracted nobility – received on his deathbed a message from Bogdan. Although the Cossack- chieftain was now victorious, his letter was a submissive proposal (dated June 2, 1648) suggesting, not dictating, the terms of an honourable peace. The principal privilege asked for was an assurance that the “ancient rights” of the Cossacks, notably the famous “Register of Freemen,” should be restored, and that the right of free worship be allowed to those of the Greek-Orthodox faith. Perhaps the very mildness of the tone of Bogdan’s communication deceived Prince Jeremy Visnowiecki, the new chief of the Polish armies. Prince Jeremy was the embodiment of Jesuitical intolerance and well-born arrogance, but to these defects he joined one doubtful virtue – stupid and uncalculating courage. Strengthened by a few minor successes among his own revolted villages, he now thought only of punishing the offenders. “Strike so that they may feel!!” he had ordered his judges and executioners. The story of his “frightfulness” brought to the Cossack camp new and more desperate levies of volunteers.

No reply had even been vouchsafed by the proud nobility to Bogdan’s proposal of peace. Indeed none was awaited: on foreign agent and Jesuit priest – the twin scourges of the long-suffering Orthodox peasants of the Ukraine – fell the weight of Cossack vengeance. The stories of the wrongs of these “martyrs” have generally survived the grievances they provoked. It is but fair, however, to search for some underlying motive of justice behind the Cossack brutalities which have been so eloquently exploited. In spite of the naturally prejudiced accounts of Polish historians, the student of the present day will find something besides blind ferocity in the acts of this “coalition of Mussulmen, Socinians and Greeks,” who in their furious crusade overthrew churches, burned monasteries, “granting their lives to monks and nuns only to enjoy the spectacle of their forced nuptials, celebrated in the shadow of the sword.”

Fleeing before the advancing Cossack army, a horde of fugitives: old men, women and children, the inhabitants of the border villages, brought to the castles and cities of Poland the first news of these unexpected, unbelievable disasters to her armies. Thus at a time when Western Europe was celebrating the end of thirty years of continual bloodshed by signing the treaty of Westphalia, the border world of the Slav nation took up the burden of war.

After the death of the wise Vladislas, a great Plenary Diet of the nobles of Poland was held on the field of Volna. While the excitable Panye screamed recriminations at each other’s heads – trying in disorderly conclave to elect a new king for their distracted nation – Jeremy Visnowiecki with an army of 140,000 men, nobles of Poland with their serfs and mercenaries, tried to stem the tide of invasion at Plavace. But at the approach of the Cossacks and their allies this forlorn hope, gathered from all her wide lands to meet Poland’s extremity, melted away in most ungentlemanly panic before the waving of Bogdan’s reed – the peasant standard.

Bogdan’s wise policy now spared the farmsteads and the Roman Catholic churches dear to the Polish peasants. But upon the castles of the nobility, stored with treasures of art which excited the admiration of every European traveller who had visited these distant lands, the advancing host wreaked its anger. Bogdan no longer...

Table of contents

• THE ORIGIN OF THE “FREE PEOPLE”
• THE ZAPOROGIAN COSSACKS
• YERMAK AND THE COSSACK CONQUEST OF SIBERIA
• BOGDAN HMELNICKY; A COSSACK NATIONAL HERO
• THE STRUGGLE FOR THE UKRAINE
• MAZEPPA
• THE END OF THE FREE UKRAINE: LITTLE RUSSIA
• POUGATCHEV
• THE HETMAN PLATOV
• THE COSSACKS OF TO-DAY: ORGANIZATION AND GOVERNMENT
• THE COSSACKS OF TO-DAY: THE DON
• THE FRONTIERS OF EUROPE