Christians and Muslims

The conventional treatment of the role played by the Cossack hosts in international relations also seems to be dogged by misconceptions. In today's historical imagination, both the Russian and the Ukrainian Cossacks appear as fighters against the Tatars and the Ottomans.

It is quite true that both groups were involved in that military, political, and civilizational conflict on the borders of the Christian and Muslim worlds, and both Catholic Poland-Lithuania and Orthodox Russia enlisted the Cossacks in their conflicts with Istanbul and Bakhchesarai. But were the Cossacks mere pawns in a game played by the great powers of the region? The history of both Ukrainian and Russian Cossack- dom shows otherwise, even though both entities were able to extract numerous privileges from their Christian sovereigns and protectors for their defence of what was considered to be the Christian cause. What is often overlooked in that regard is that the Cossacks adopted many elements of the culture and traditions of their non-Christian adversaries and spent more time living in peace with them than in conflict. Indeed, they sometimes preferred to ally themselves with the 'infidels' rather than with Christian monarchs. These elements in the history of Cossackdom are easy to pass over, given the prevailing historiographic tradition that portrays the Cossacks as warriors for the faith. This is particularly easy to do in today's Russia, where the modern national myth tends to exclude the infidel Tatars from the Russian historical narrative, but somewhat more difficult in Ukraine, where the newly constructed national mythology stresses the tradition of cooperation between Cossacks and Crimean Tatars against Polish oppression.

That tradition includes a number of episodes in seventeenth-century Ukrainian history. As early as the 1620s, the Ukrainian Cossacks became involved in Crimean affairs on the side of one of the pretenders to the Crimean throne.

Khmelnytsky's spectacular victories over Polish forces in 1648-9 would have been all but impossible without the help of the Tatar cavalry. After Ivan Mazepa's defeat at Poltava, the hetman in exile, Pylyp Orlyk, linked his plans for a return to power to joint military action with the Crimean Khanate, and, as noted above, the Zaporozhians moved their Sich to Tatar territory at the time. Moreover, there were several Cossack hetmans (besides Khmelnytsky and Doroshenko) who favoured the Ottoman orientation at one time or another or accepted the protectorate of the sultans or khans. In a comparative context, these and other examples of cooperation between Ukrainian Cossackdom and the southern Muslim powers pose the question of why, despite the fact that a number of Russian Cossack leaders contemplated alliances with the Muslims or intended to seek their protection, those plans succeeded only in the case of the Nekraso- vites. Clearly, a discussion of the issue should take account of numerous factors - political, economic, social, international, and geographic. Ethnocultural and religious factors, which played an important role in the history of Cossackdom, should also be considered. Both Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks had a cultural boundary with their Muslim neighbours but differed considerably when it came to boundaries with the governments of their home states. In Russia there was no such boundary, but in Ukraine it was all-important, as it divided the Orthodox Ruthenian Cossacks from the Polish Catholic authorities. Under these circumstances, an alliance of Ukrainian Cossacks with ethnically distinct Muslims against ethnically distinct Catholics was apparently far less problematic than an alliance of Russian Cossacks with Muslim Tatars against the Orthodox Russian state. To be sure, this is a hypothesis that should be tested by further research. It brings us, however, to the highly contested question of Cossack national and religious identity - a problem that cannot be adequately addressed without employing the comparative method.

The question of Cossack identity in general and distinctions between the ethnic consciousness of Ukrainian and Russian Cossacks, while extremely important for the national historiographies of Russia, Ukraine, and Poland, remains much less studied than other aspects of Cossack history. Far more has been written about Cossack involvement in religious life, especially the major religious conflicts of the epoch - the struggle for and against the church union in Ukraine and Belarus and the Old Believers in Russia. Here, as in other areas of Cossack history, the comparative approach helps formulate a number of new questions and opens fresh perspectives on the history of the Cossacks themselves and the religious and cultural history of the region. Certain parallels can be drawn between the support offered by the Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks to the persecuted churches in their home states: Orthodoxy in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Old Belief in Muscovy. In both cases, the Cossacks and the persecuted churches found themselves in similar circumstances, living side by side in remote areas of the country. Under pressure from the authorities, to whom they were opposed, they needed each other's support: the Cossacks, especially when involved in acute conflicts with the government, needed religious legitimation of their actions, while the church required the military and economic muscle of the Cossacks to oppose officialdom and survive. In Ukraine and Russia alike, close relations were established between the Cossacks and the persecuted churches, but the intensity of that cooperation and its outcome were quite different. In Ukraine, Cossacks helped save the persecuted church from destruction by the state, and under the banner of Orthodoxy they later created a monoconfessional state. In Russia, after a brief flirtation with the Old Belief and acute internal conflict, discussed by Mininkov and touched upon by Boeck, the Cossack elites preferred to remain under the jurisdiction of the state church, never fully raising the banner of the 'old faith' in their struggle with the authorities.

Why did the Russian Cossacks behave differently from the Ukrainian Cossacks and not give their full support to the dissident priests and monks against their reform-minded hierarchs, who were backed by the power of the state? Why did they not fully utilize the potential of such cooperation and declare 'holy war' on the state? Again, there is no clear and simple answer to this question, but there are several possible explanations, one of which I shall discuss. It might be argued that the major difference between the Russian and Ukrainian cases was the attitude of the Cossack officer stratum towards the persecuted religion. The Zaporozhians sided with the oppressed church, while the Don Cossacks, as shown once again in the papers by Mininkov and Boeck, aligned themselves with the government. The Zaporozhian and Don Cossack officers were clearly focused on different tasks and subordinated the religious issue to the achievement of those tasks. The Ukrainian Cossack officers, as exemplified by Konashevych-Sahaidachny, who ensured the restoration of the Orthodox hierarchy in 1620, were struggling for the recognition of particular rights within the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth. To obtain those rights they needed powerful allies, whom they could find among the Orthodox nobility of the Commonwealth. Their ethnic origin also inclined them to side with other members of the Orthodox coalition, the Ruthenian princes, nobles, and burghers, in the ethnocultural and religious conflict. All these factors were absent in the case of the Don Cossacks. The alliance of their officers with the persecuted church could not possibly help them acquire important allies and improve their standing vis-a-vis the state. Positioned on the Orthodox-Muslim border, they chose loyalty to the powerful Orthodox state and its church over allegiance to the spiritually strong but resource-poor Old Believer movement.

While the attitude of the Cossack officer stratum was an important factor in determining the strategies adopted by the Ukrainian and Russian Cossacks in religious conflicts with the state, it does not explain all the differences between them in that regard.

Rather, this brief examination of the positions taken by the Ukrainian and Russian Cossack elites demonstrates the potential of the comparative approach to the study of Cossackdom. This is equally true of the other problems in the history of Cossackdom discussed in this chapter, which generally offers more questions than answers - not inappropriate at this stage in the study of such a multifaceted phenomenon as Cossackdom. Making a case for the comparative study of anything, including Cossackdom, may be seen today as old-fashioned, attesting among other things to the methodological backwardness of anyone advocating such an 'innovation' in an era of advancing postmodern scholarship. Yet there is no way to recognize the uniqueness of the voices of the past without comparing them one to another. Nor can we skip the comparative stage in the historiography of Cossackdom and pretend that the goals set by historians before Stalin's suppression of historical scholarship in the 1930s have already been achieved or are irrelevant to today's scholarly agenda. In order to move forward, present-day historiography must go back and pick up the thread of research where our predecessors were obliged to abandon it for reasons beyond their control.

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Source: Plokhy S.. Ukraine and Russia: Representations of the Past. University of Toronto Press,2008. — 412 р.. 2008

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