Territorial Integrity and Historical Claims

In the spring of 1990 in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Nikopol, in an area where most of the Zaporozhian strongholds (Sich) were established, the local branch of the Ukrainian Republican Party - one of the most anti-communist organizations of that day - endorsed the idea of a local student of Cossack history, Pavlo Bohush, to celebrate the five- hundredth anniversary of the Ukrainian Cossacks.

One of the ironies of history was that Galicians, who had no direct links to the Cossack past, were bringing the Cossack myth back to east­ern Ukraine, the homeland of the Ukrainian Cossacks. The communist functionaries in eastern Ukraine tried to fight back, challenging the Galicians' right to the Cossack heritage and exploiting the anti-Uniate motifs of nineteenth-century Cossack mythology. For example, in Dni­propetrovsk oblast they did not want to allow Greek Catholic (Uniate) priests to serve a liturgy on the grave of the Cossack otaman Ivan Sirko.³¹ But all these attempts to split the movement and isolate the Galician participants of the march from the local population had little if any effect. Government officials found themselves under pressure to join the Cossack celebrations; a year later, in 1991, seeking to take con­trol of the Cossackophile movement, they organized conferences and festivities of their own to mark the Cossack anniversary.

The rise of Ukrainian national aspirations in 1990-1 and the massive eastward offensive of national-democratic forces from Galicia provoked some Russian separatist initiatives on the part of the communist elite of the eastern and southern oblasts of Ukraine. These separatist moves were also based on historical arguments. They attempted to prove that the eastern and southern Ukrainian territories had never been part of Ukraine but were colonized and settled by Russians. Similar ideas were expressed around the same time by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who claimed in an article entitled 'How Shall We Reconstitute Russia,' which was widely distributed in the USSR, that New Russia, the Crimea, and the Donbas 'were never part of old Ukraine.'³³ The term 'New Russia,' first introduced in the second half of the eighteenth century, referred to the territory of the southern Ukrainian oblasts. Although that territory included the lands of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, which they had colo­nized long before the imperial authorities made their first appearance in the region, the idea of establishing New Russia as a Russian polity in southern Ukraine was put forward by some scholars and historians, including the Odesa professor A. Surilov. Around the same time, the idea of restoring the Donetsk-Kryvyi Rih and Crimean republics, pro­claimed by the Bolsheviks in 1918 to stop German seizures of territory after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, was advanced in some eastern and southern Ukrainian newspapers.³⁴ These initiatives were a direct chal­lenge to the historical arguments used by the national democrats to accelerate the Ukrainian national awakening in the region.

The adherents of Cossack mythology accepted the challenge and published a dozen articles in the national and local press in an effort to adjust Cossack mythology to the new political demands.

Ukrainian historians placed new emphasis on the role of Cossack detachments in the Russo-Turkish wars of the second half of the eigh­teenth century. Numerous publications issued in 1990-1 emphasized that it was not so much the imperial forces as the Ukrainian Cossacks who had conquered and colonized Ukrainian territories during the Russo-Turkish wars. This was true in part, especially in the case of col­onization, for otherwise Ukrainians would never have come to consti­tute a majority of the region's population, but as regards military history it was an exaggeration of the Cossack role in those actions and a diminution of the role played by the well-trained Russian imperial army. Ukrainian authors wrote about the participation of Cossack detachments in Russian attacks on the Turkish fortresses of Ochakiv, Izmail, and Akkerman and their capture of other forts, Berezan and Khadzhibei. On the site of the latter, Cossacks and their families were the first inhabitants of the newly founded city of Odesa.³⁵ Some articles even attempted to challenge the 'cornerstone' of Russian imperial ide­ology - the myth of Sevastopol. A historian of the Ukrainian navy, Volodymyr Kravtsevych, citing an eighteenth-century description of Sevastopol, claimed that the 'city of Russian glory' was built by Cos­sacks and local Ukrainian peasants and that in the first decades of its existence Sevastopol looked like a typical Ukrainian settlement.³⁶

Another modification of Cossack mythology was connected with the reexamination of the history of Cossack-Tatar relations. The Cossack was usually regarded by the creators of Ukrainian national mythology as a defender of his homeland, Ukraine, from Ottoman and Tatar attacks.

In the 1960s, representatives of the Ukrainian democratic movement introduced a new approach to the Tatar problem. The role of General Petro Hryhorenko in defence of the rights of the Crimean Tatars is well known in the West, but he was not alone in his attempts to 'rehabilitate' the Tatars. In 1968 the well-known Ukrainian writer Roman Ivanychuk published a novel, Mal 'vy (Mallows), in which he attempted to reexam­ine the history of empires and the role of janissaries, who were regarded as traitors to the nation. He also took a new approach to the dramatic history of Ukrainian-Tatar relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The novel was severely criticized, banned, and confiscated from bookstores and libraries.³⁸

With the beginning of glasnost, Ukrainian historians renewed their attempts to reexamine the history of Cossack-Tatar relations. This ini­tiative was launched by publications of scholars from Dnipropetrovsk University, the only centre of Cossack studies that survived the perse­cution of Ukrainian historiography in the 1970s and 1980s. In his arti­cles on the history of the Cossack army, the Dnipropetrovsk historian Ivan Storozhenko pictured the Tatar troops of Tughay Bey, the ally of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, in predominantly positive terms.

These and other attempts to reexamine the history of Cossack-Tatar relations represented something of an effort to modify Cossack mythology so as to meet new demands for the creation of a Ukrainian- Tatar political union to oppose Russian claims to the peninsula. For this reason, those promoting the Cossack myth have been giving up some features of ethnic exclusivity in order to help build a multina­tional civil society and preserve Ukraine's territorial integrity. In Ukraine, the Cossack legacy was also regarded as an important means of legitimizing Ukrainian claims to the USSR Black Sea Fleet. Propo­nents of Ukrainian national ideology began the history of the Ukrai­nian Navy with the period of the Kyivan princes Askold, Dir, Oleh, and Ihor, who attacked Constantinople by sea on a number of occa­sions in the ninth and tenth centuries, but most attention was devoted to the history of Cossack activity in the Black Sea region. After inde­pendence, organizations of Ukrainian Cossacks established close rela­tions with the newborn Ukrainian Navy and its commander, Admiral Borys Kozhyn. He then promised that the first anniversary of the Ukrainian Black Sea Fleet would be celebrated on the island of Khor­tytsia on the Dnipro River - the legendary homeland of the Zapor- ozhian Cossacks.⁴²

Ironically, Cossack mythology has found it much less difficult to claim some Ukrainian territories beyond the country's borders than to secure the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian state.

47.1 per cent of the region's inhabitants considered themselves Ukrai­nian and 41 per cent Russian. Ukrainian schools, newspapers, and even a Ukrainian department of the local university existed for a brief period, but a policy of Russification of the Ukrainian population was launched by the communist authorities in the 1930s, and, with the introduction of a passport system, all residents of the Kuban were declared to be Russian.⁴³

Kuban Cossack organizations like those of the Don and Stavropol regions were reestablished in 1990, with some support from local authorities who wanted to use Cossacks to counter the growing politi­cal activity of non-Slavic peoples in the North Caucasus and to fight crime. With the proclamation of Ukrainian independence, pro-Ukrainian sentiment emerged among some leaders of the Cossack movement in the Kuban region - a development that was not welcomed by the local authorities. Unlike their Don colleagues, the Kuban Cossacks devel­oped close ties with Cossack organizations in Ukraine. It is quite symp­tomatic that in March 1993, when a leader of the Kuban Cossacks, Yevhen Nahai, was arrested by local authorities in the Kuban on charges of plotting a Cossack coup, another high-ranking officer of the Kuban Cossacks, the kish otaman Pylypenko, stated that in the event of further violations of his colleague's civil rights the Cossacks would call for support from their historical homeland, Ukraine, and the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States and Canada, and would even use arms to defend themselves. A special Committee for the Return of the Kuban to Ukraine, led by General Siverov, was established in the Kuban region in 1993.⁴⁴

From the outset, Ukrainian Cossack organizations declared the Kuban a sphere of special interest. There in 1992 they employed tactics similar to those used by Galician Ukrainian organizations in eastern and southern Ukraine in 1990: a Cossack march to the region was orga­nized to mark the bicentennial of Cossack resettlement to the Kuban. The idea was supported by the hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, General Volodymyr Muliava, who also headed the socio-psychological directorate of the Ukrainian Army and served as its chief ideologist. In August 1992, forty-four men, representing not western but eastern and southern Ukrainian oblasts, including the Donbas and Zaporizhia regions, took part in a cavalry march to the Kuban. The march was reportedly met with enthusiasm on the part of the local population.⁴⁵

In the early 1990s, Ukrainian Cossack mythology began to spread to former Cossack territories outside Ukraine. The Cossack past of those regions, which include parts of the Voronezh oblast in Russia and Transdnistria in Moldova, was regarded by proponents of Ukrainian nationalism as an important means of rekindling Ukrainian national identity among the Ukrainian diaspora of more than six million in the former Soviet Union. On a number of occasions Ukrainian officials have rejected claims by proponents of Ukrainian nationalism to territo­ries outside Ukraine, but the development of Cossack movements in the Russian regions of the Don and the North Caucasus presented a challenge to the leaders of the Russian Federation. Although the Rus­sian Cossacks are generally considered partisans of the restoration of the Russian Empire, in the 1990s their demands for self-government of the Cossack regions, including the Don area, promoted tendencies towards the decentralization and, potentially, the disintegration of the Russian Federation.

One can hardly exaggerate the significance of national territory for the belief system of modern nations. Of no less importance to that system is the complex of historical myths that provides a nation with its own view of its past and tries to explain and justify its territorial possessions or claims against its neighbours. With the collapse and disintegration of world empires, the problem of the division of territories between 'old' imperial and 'young' stateless nations has arisen. Historical arguments and myths are of special importance in justifying the conflicting territo­rial claims of different nations.

Russian politicians have often challenged the demarcation of Ukrai­nian borders on grounds of historical legitimacy. Most of these chal­lenges are rooted in the highly developed Russian historical mythology. In the case of Ukraine, as in other cases of territorial claims against former Soviet republics, Russian politicians of the 1990s proceeded from the borders of the Russian Empire of the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, when the empire had attained its greatest territorial extent, and ignored periods that did not fit their agenda. A student of foreign policy, N. Narochnitskaia, indignantly posed the rhetorical question: 'Why in the case of the Crimea do we follow the borders of 1954, in the case of the Baltic region those of 1939, and in the case of the Kurile Islands those of 1855?'⁴⁶ There is nothing new in this approach. For instance, Romanian nationalists usually claim the territory once united under the leadership of Michael the Brave at the beginning of the seventeenth century, while Poles used to claim the territory that belonged to their state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁴⁷

From the Ukrainian perspective, Cossack mythology was used to protect the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The myth emerged locally in Dnipro Ukraine in the early eighteenth century and was then dissemi­nated all over Ukrainian ethnic territory by nineteenth-century nation builders, including the celebrated poet Taras Shevchenko. It was pre­served best of all in a historically non-Cossack territory, Galicia, and with the beginning of glasnost it made a successful return to the histori­cal Cossack lands - the eastern territories of Ukraine along its current border with Russia. Cossack colonization of most of these territories in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped Ukrainian historians make the case that they belonged to Ukraine. Another argu­ment was Cossack participation in the Russian military campaigns that helped annex the vast territories of southern Ukraine to the empire in the second half of the eighteenth century and open them to Ukrainian colonization. In view of the eruption of the Russo-Ukrainian dispute over the Crimea in the early 1990s, the traditionally anti-Tatar character of Cossack mythology has changed dramatically. In order to foster coop­eration between the Ukrainian and Tatar national movements, episodes of such cooperation in the past have been recalled, bringing traditional Cossack mythology into conflict with its newest variant.

Not unlike other border disputes, Russo-Ukrainian territorial dis­putes of the 1990s were based on conflicting historical arguments and mythologies. The periods of greatest territorial expansion of the Rus­sian Empire and the autonomous Cossack polities have been taken as points of departure in making territorial claims. Russo-Ukrainian con­flict over the future of the Crimea, Sevastopol, and the Black Sea Fleet developed in an atmosphere of economic decline and the deterioration of the standard of living in Russia and Ukraine, as well as the activiza- tion of nationalist and pro-communist forces. Both these potentially dangerous processes were under way in the early 1990s and threatened to bring territorial disputes between Russia and Ukraine to the brink of military conflict. Conflicting territorial claims based on Russian impe­rial mythology and the Ukrainian national myth could have dangerous consequences if one side were to try to assert its 'historic right' by force. Fortunately, this has not happened, although political debates over the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet on Ukrainian territory are still going on.

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