Cossacks and Borders

Cossack mythology, which was based on accounts of the most glorious pages of Cossack history and the Cossack struggle against the Crimean Tatars and the Russian Empire, became an important part of the ideol­ogy of the Ukrainian national awakening in the nineteenth century.

In the Ukrainian grand narrative, the Cossack era covers the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In fact, the first accounts of Ukrainian Cossack activity come from the last decade of the fifteenth century, but only a century later did the Cossacks emerge as a signifi­cant military and, to some extent, political force. As a social group, the Cossacks came into existence following an eastward movement of the local Ukrainian population to colonize the steppe territories of southern Ukraine. Many of them were fugitive peasants looking for new lands to cultivate and trying to avoid the serfdom imposed on them by the Pol­ish and local Ukrainian nobility. Relatively soon the Cossacks became strong enough to oppose Commonwealth policies in the frontier region. A series of Cossack uprisings against Polish rule began in the late six­teenth century and culminated in 1648 with the Cossack revolt led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. He managed to create a separate Cos­sack polity - the Hetmanate. For a short period the Hetmanate enjoyed independent status, but in 1654, unable to resist a Polish offensive on his own, Khmelnytsky recognized the suzerainty of the Muscovite tsar.¹³ The Hetmanate became an autonomous part of the Muscovite state, and its eastern borders, based on those of the Kyiv and Chernihiv palatinates of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, became the basis of the first Russo-Ukrainian boundary.

Muscovy's drive to the west and its incorporation of the Ukrainian territories began after the conclusion of the Pereiaslav Agreement in 1654. The prolonged war that followed the treaty established a new international order in Eastern Europe. As a result of the Truce of Andrusovo (1667), Ukrainian territories were divided between Mus­covy and the Commonwealth. The Dnipro River was chosen as the major line of demarcation. Left-Bank Ukraine came under the tsar's rule, and the existence of an autonomous Cossack polity, the Het- manate, was allowed there. Right-Bank and western Ukraine remained under Polish control. In the Polish zone the autonomy of the Cossack formations was at first significantly restricted and then completely abolished. The same process was under way in Russian Ukraine. A Cossack uprising led by Hetman Ivan Mazepa in 1708 tried to reverse the decay of the Hetmanate with the help of Sweden. Mazepa and his ally, Charles XII of Sweden, were defeated by Tsar Peter I at the Battle of Poltava (1709), which resulted in the further limitation of the Het- manate's autonomy. The Russo-Polish border along the Dnipro contin­ued to exist for more than a century, and in some areas on the left bank of the river, such as the Chernihiv region, it laid the foundations for the present-day Ukrainian-Belarusian border.¹⁵

The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the further extension of Russian imperial territory to the west and south. The empire's victorious wars with Turkey resulted in the annexation of vast areas along the coast of the Azov and Black Seas and, finally, in the annexation of the Crimea in 1783.¹6 The subsequent partitions of Poland (1772-95) brought most of Ukrainian ethnic territory, including Right-Bank Ukraine, Volhynia, and Podilia, under the tsar's rule.¹⁷ The Ukrainian Cossacks played an important role in the acquisition of these new territories, especially the areas annexed as a result of the Russo- Turkish wars.

The Russo-Turkish wars of the second half of the eighteenth century resulted not only in the opening of new territories for Ukrainian colo­nization but also in the abolition of autonomous Cossack bodies in Ukraine. By the 1780s, both the Hetmanate and the Zaporozhian Sich - the Cossack Host of the lower Dnipro region - ceased to exist as a result of actions taken by Empress Catherine II. The Zaporozhian Cos­sacks were resettled (or migrated) partly on territories along the coast of the Azov and Black Seas that they had helped gain for the empire and partly in the Kuban (now in the Russian Federation) and the trans­Danube region (now part of Romania). The empire's new territorial acquisitions opened the way for Ukrainian peasants to emigrate from densely populated parts of Left- and Right-Bank Ukraine to southern and eastern Ukraine, as well as to the Voronezh, Don, Kuban, and Stavropol regions, which are now in Russia. This resettlement, which began in the seventeenth century, continued until the early twentieth and defined the boundaries of Ukrainian colonization in the east.¹⁹