Governments and Cossacks
One of the themes discussed on the basis of extensive archival research by Christoph Witzenrath16 is the relationship between the state authorities and the Cossacks in the early stages of their development as a social body.
For scholars familiar with the early history of the Dnipro Cossacks, the picture drawn by Witzenrath presents many parallels with the early history of Ukrainian Cossackdom and suggests a number of research topics that could contribute to a better understanding of Cossack history on both sides of the Russo-Ukrainian historiographic divide. These topics include the social origins of the Cossacks, the organization of early Cossack bands, the functioning of institutions of military democracy in militarized border societies, the role of leaders (otamans/atamans) in Cossack communities, and the level of contacts between the Cossack settlements and the metropole. No less important is the comparative study of relations between the Cossacks and the state authorities - a topic for the study of which (especially in the earlier periods) we have many more sources than for research on the social history of Cossackdom. Relations between Muscovite voevodas (military governors) and Cossack bands in Siberia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be compared with those between the border starostas of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Dnipro Cossacks in the early and mid-sixteenth century. Imposing taxes on products of Cossack trade (furs in Siberia and fish, honey, etc. in Ukraine) was one way in which both states exploited Cossack economic activity for their benefit. Equally important in government-Cossack relations were the attempts of border administrators based in fortified settlements (zamky in Ukraine and ostrogi in Siberia) to control the Cossacks' military activities. These and other parallels, which would become more obvious in the course of further research, can establish similarities in early Cossack social organization and economic and military activity throughout the Eurasian borderland, while revealing similar methods applied by governments (Lithuanian, Polish, and Russian) to control Cossack activities.A comparison of government-Cossack relations in Siberia and the Dnipro region reveals not only parallels but also major differences in the status of the Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks and the policies of their home states. Like the above-mentioned parallels, these differences suggest questions of great importance for the better understanding of Cossackdom. I shall mention only three of them here - in my opinion, the most obvious ones. The first major difference concerns the government stipend or wages paid to the Cossacks and the extent of control exercised by government officials over their actions. It appears from the Russian sources (and is confirmed in all three papers discussed here) that the Russian Cossacks were much more heavily dependent on the tsar's stipend and supplies from the state than were the Ukrainian Cossacks under Lithuanian, Polish, or Russian rule. True, the Ukrainian Cossacks occasionally received a stipend and supplies from the tsar before 1648, but those payments were infrequent and directly related to specific military expeditions. They were also much less dependent on payments from the Lithuanian and Polish treasuries. First, it was only the registered Cossacks who received wages; second, wages were tied to participation in government-sponsored military campaigns and were often delayed or not paid at all. The conditions put forward by the Cossacks at the start of the Khmelnytsky Uprising show that by the midseventeenth century the salary demands of the registered Cossacks had receded into the background and lost most, if not all, of the importance ascribed to them in the late sixteenth century. It is worth examining to what degree, as Cossackdom matured and the Cossacks turned from steppe trade and warfare to a more settled way of life and membership in a distinct social order, the role of government payments diminished in Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy.
Another important difference in state-Cossack relations on both sides of the Russo-Ukrainian divide is related to the goals of government policy with regard to the Cossacks.
In Muscovy, the stipend was paid almost exclusively for services rendered by the Cossacks in their places of settlement and encouraged them to fight the enemies of the state and protect its borders. The history of the first Cossack register (and, consequently, the first Cossack wages) in Ukraine is profoundly different. There, during the 1570s, the Cossacks were organized and paid their wages by the Polish kings Zygmunt August and Stefan Batory not in order to fight the Crimean Tatars and Turks but to remove the aggressive Cossack element from the steppe borderland and deploy it far from home, on the battlefields of the Livonian War with Russia. The actual initiative to do so came from the Ottoman sultan, and up to the midseventeenth century the Polish-Lithuanian authorities spent more time preventing the Cossacks from attacking the Ottomans and their vassals (the Crimea and Moldavia) than organizing them for battle against those southern adversaries. Muscovy, on the other hand, was much less intrusive when it came to actions of the Don Cossacks against the Ottomans and the Crimea. In the late 1630s and early 1640s Muscovy refused to accept the 'gift' of the captured Ottoman fortress of Azov from Cossack hands, and in its relations with Istanbul until the 1670s it denied any responsibility for the actions of the Cossacks. Once Muscovy admitted responsibility, it attempted to make use of the Cossacks in its military confrontation with the Ottomans in the North Azov region. Only much later were the Don Cossacks employed by the government to fight its enemies beyond the Don.One more important difference in relations between the Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks and their respective governments is that Muscovy and Lithuania, and later Poland-Lithuania, were represented in their dealings with the Cossacks by very different types of servitors. In the case of Muscovy they were voevodas (military governors), often rotated by the central government and entirely dependent on the will and whim of the tsar and his courtiers.
In Poland-Lithuania, the border administrators were often scions of Rus' princely families - rich, semi- autonomous of the central government, and often intent on their own military, economic, and even political agendas. Although certain parallels can be drawn between the private Cossack armies of Prince Kostiantyn Ostrozky in Ukraine and the Stroganov family in Siberia, the crucial difference between them was that Ostrozky, as palatine of Kyiv and administrator of a number of starosta districts in Ukraine, was part of the state apparatus and represented not only his own economic power but also the power of the state. This was not the case with the Stroganovs, who cooperated closely with the state but did not replace it in Siberia. The weakness of the central authorities and the variety of political actors with their own agendas in the borderlands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth undoubtedly contributed to the development of Ukrainian Cossackdom as a much more powerful and independent force than Russian Cossackdom. Both states regarded the Cossacks as a cheap substitute for standing armies and expensive fortifications in the borderlands, but there was a great difference in the degree of autonomy that the Polish and Russian governments were prepared (or forced) to grant the Cossack hosts under their control.