Pros and Cons of the National Paradigm

Today, the task of comparative research on the history of Cossackdom should be formulated as an appeal to cross the boundaries of national historiography and go beyond the parameters designated by the national paradigm.

At the same time, the national paradigm brought some major distor­tions into the field. In Russia, as mentioned previously, the Cossacks were marginalized as a subject of research, since it was believed that Russian nation building had originated and proceeded in the capitals and central regions of the country and not on its periphery, which was settled and guarded by the Cossacks. In Ukraine, on the contrary, too much attention was paid to the nation-building activities of Cossackdom (or activities susceptible to such interpretation) at the expense of research on their social and cultural history. This approach also tended to marginalize the history of the non-Cossack parts of Ukraine and exag­gerate the role of Cossackdom in the Ukrainian past. Furthermore, the lumping together of the Hetmanate, Cossack formations on the Right Bank of the Dnipro, and the Zaporozhian Host under the rubric of Ukrainian Cossackdom obscured differences between them, made it 'unpatriotic' to study tensions and conflicts between the Hetmanate and the Zaporozhians, and deflected attention from parallels between the development of the Zaporozhian Host and, for example, the Don Cos­sacks. Significantly narrowed under Soviet rule, the concept of Ukrai­nian Cossackdom usually excluded the Kuban Cossacks, as they ended up on the Russian side of the Soviet-era border. Conversely, the category of Russian Cossackdom left virtually no room for recognition of the national specificity of the Kuban Cossacks. Western scholars tended to question the Cossack character of the Hetmanate, while their Soviet col­leagues, studying Cossack participation in the so-called peasant wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, continued to claim that none of the Cossack-led revolts had achieved its goals, as the rebels were invariably defeated. Thus the study of Cossack statehood remained out­side the purview of specialists in the history of Russian Cossackdom.

Is there an effective way to utilize the potential of national historiog­raphies that distinguish for good reason between Russian and Ukrai­nian (Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian) Cossacks, while avoiding their pitfalls? It is one of the goals of this chapter to suggest that there is indeed such a way, and that it is directly related to comparative research in the field - an idea often suggested earlier but not carried out because of unfavourable circumstances: Soviet scholars had to work under political constraints, while Western researchers were denied access to East European archives and libraries.¹¹ The recent (post-1991) resurgence of Cossack studies in Ukraine,¹² Russia,¹³ and the West (where in the course of the last decade there has emerged a younger generation of scholars combining Western historical method­ologies with newly acquired access to archival sources)¹⁴ has put this task back on the scholarly agenda.