The Formation of the Cossack Myth

Despite the initial spread of Cossack formations over the vast territories of Left- and Right-Bank Ukraine, Volhynia, and Podilia, the origins of Cossack mythology are associated with the relatively small part of Left­Bank Ukraine once controlled by the Cossacks - the Hetmanate.

There is enough evidence to assert that the creation of certain elements of Cossack mythology began as early as the first decades of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, until the turn of the eighteenth century there was a lack of 'bearers of high culture' closely associated with the Cossacks to create any semblance of elaborated mythology. The process began on a large scale only in the first decades of the eighteenth century. This period saw the emergence in the Hetmanate of a new social stratum comprised of a mixture of Cossack officers and the older nobility, defined by Zenon Kohut as the Ukrainian gentry.²⁰ The gentry strived to maintain the autonomy of the Hetmanate and to legitimize it on the basis of past Cossack treaties with the tsars, thereby laying a foundation for the development of Cossack mythology. In fact, the myth was shaped in such a way as to support the power of the emerging gentry, which needed the Cossack past to secure not only the political rights of the Hetmanate but also its own economic rights, based on the Cossack-Muscovite treaties of the second half of the sev­enteenth century.²¹

The defeat of Hetman Ivan Mazepa at the Battle of Poltava in 1709 was in many ways a turning point in the development of Cossack mythology. Threatened by Peter I, the gentry mobilized in defence of the rights of Cossack officers first obtained from the tsar by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

It was the gentry of the Hetmanate - the ruling elite of a compara­tively small part of what is now Ukrainian territory - that created the Cossack myth as a reflection of its own political needs and historical beliefs. A new generation of Ukrainian patriots would have to enter the political arena to turn that myth from a local cult into a national ideology extending to the remotest parts of Ukrainian ethnic territory. That task was accomplished by the nation builders of the nineteenth century.

The most prominent role in the development and popularization of Cossack mythology belongs to the apostle of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian national revival - the poet and artist Taras Shevchenko (1814-61).²⁴ His views on the Cossack past were based on two main sources - popular memory and the Cossack mythology elaborated by the Hetmanate elite and popularized by the 'History of the Rus'.' The outstanding event in Cossack history remembered by the simple peas­ants of Right-Bank Ukraine (Shevchenko's homeland) was the Koli- ivshchyna of 1768-9, a popular uprising against Polish rule led by the Cossack officers Ivan Gonta and Maksym Zalizniak.

Without a doubt, the new type of Cossack mythology created and pop­ularized by Shevchenko's poetry won the hearts of readers in eastern and central Ukraine, where the Cossack past still lived in popular mem­ory, much more easily than in western Ukraine, where the Cossack expe­rience was but a short-lived phenomenon of the seventeenth century. Shevchenko's poetry was also a much better vehicle for propagating the new Cossack mythology than the writings of the Hetmanate elite. Unlike the 'History of the Rus',' which was written in the highly Russified, bookish language of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, read and understood only in Russian Ukraine, Shevchenko's poems were written in the Ukrainian vernacular. This opened the way for the dissemination of his writings and the Cossack mythology that they pro­moted in Ukrainian ethnic territories under Austro-Hungarian rule.

Especially important for the fate of the Ukrainian national move­ment was the case of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.²⁵ For a host of political, confessional, and historical reasons, it was difficult for Cossack mythology to make its way into Galicia, where there had never been any Cossack organization, even though many of its natives, such as the seventeenth-century Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, had taken part in the Cossack movement in Dnipro Ukraine.

This situation was complicated not only by the fact that the Cossack system had never existed in Galicia but also by the pro-Orthodox and very often anti-Uniate character of Cossack mythology. Accepting that mythology full-blown, with all its anti-Uniate trappings, was no easy task for the Ukrainian movement in Uniate Galicia. The myth was accordingly modified and reshaped for adaptation to local circum­stances. In a very short time, owing to the spread of the Shevchenko cult and the activity of the narodovtsi (populists), Galician Ukrainians became even more zealous adherents of the Cossack mythology than their eastern Ukrainian counterparts.

The triumph of Cossack mythology as the unifying factor of the Ukrainian national revival came with the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-20. Detachments of Sich Riflemen, named after the traditional headquarters (Sich) of the Zaporozhian Cossack Host on the lower Dni- pro, were formed in Galicia during the First World War and later played an important role in the struggle for independence in both western and eastern Ukraine. In 1918 eastern Ukraine, occupied by German forces after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, witnessed the rule of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky, who sought to restore Hetmanate traditions. The armed forces of the Directory, the Ukrainian government that took over from Skoropadsky after the withdrawal of German troops, were also dedi­cated to the preservation of Cossack tradition. Even the Bolshevik army that fought Ukrainian forces for control of Ukrainian territory claimed to be an heir to the Cossack tradition: special units of 'Red Cossacks' were formed as an integral part of the Red Army.²⁶

When the Bolsheviks took over eastern and central Ukraine, they ini­tially tolerated and then attempted to take over the Ukrainian national and cultural revival, but finally crushed it in the early 1930s.

Cossack mythology, revived in Ukraine after Stalin's death, became quite popular in the 1960s but was banned again in 1972. At that time, Petro Shelest, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, was accused of 'idealization of the past' and replaced by his rival Vol­odymyr Shcherbytsky. A purge of 'Cossackophiles' began in the insti­tutes of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and in the universities, and many of the academics who specialized in Ukrainian history and the literature of the Cossack era were removed from their positions or forced to shift to the study of other topics unconnected with the offi­cially condemned Cossack past.²⁹ Despite the persecution of Cossack studies, Cossack mythology appeared to be deeply rooted in the histor­ical consciousness of Ukraine and reemerged with the beginning of perestroika and glasnost.