Who were the Cossacks?
The name “Cossack" originated from the Turkish word qazaq, which means “freebooting warrior" or “ranger." The original Cossacks were runaway serfs who made their living in the underpopulated steppes on the southern frontier of Rus, where the nomadic Muslim Tatars roamed freely in search of captives to be sold into slavery.
In this no man's land, the Cossacks survived by hunting, fishing, and beekeeping—and also by attacking and looting the Tatars. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Lithuanian governors of the frontier lands (the former Rus principalities) employed the Cossacks to defend the southern frontier. The authorities also created a register of Cossacks, granting those included on it the right to own land, a tax exemption, and a degree of self-government.By the late 1500s, the international political and economic configuration in the region had changed, creating the conditions in which the Cossacks would rise to prominence. The expanding Ottoman Empire in the south threatened Eastern and Central Europe. The Crimean Tatars, who were the vassals of the sultan, regularly raided the former Rus lands. In 1569 the dynastically linked kingdoms of Poland and Lithuania forged a closer constitutional union as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The former Rus lands west of the Dnipro fell under Polish rule. The local Orthodox Slavic nobles initially welcomed this change because in Poland the nobility enjoyed far-reaching privileges, but soon the Orthodox Church came under pressure from the Catholic Polish elites and was even banned for periods of time. In 1596 the Polish state supported the creation of the Uniate Church (known later as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic and today simply as the Ukrainian Catholic Church), which combined observance of the Eastern rite with subordination to the pope.
At the same time, the expanding Polish state developed into a major exporter of grain to Western Europe, including England.
This led to the increased demand for arable land, especially in what is now Ukraine, and the establishment of a manorial landholding system. In order to secure labor for the noble estates, beginning in the 1570s, Polish kings decreed the enserfment of the peasantry. Within a generation or two an explosive social situation developed: discontented East Slavic Orthodox peasants were forced to toil on land belonging to their Polish Catholic noble owners (often recent converts from Orthodox Christianity). To make matters worse, absentee landlords often engaged in tax farming by leasing their manors, breweries, and the right to collect duties to live-in managers, usually Jews. The social tensions thus ran along both economic and religious lines. What allowed the whole system to work was the protection from Tatar raids afforded by the Cossacks; at the same time, the most popular peasant resistance strategy was running away to join the Cossacks.By the early 1600s, the Cossacks had grown into a formidable force, with the register reaching 20,000 in 1620. The “register” Cossacks were led by an elected general called “hetman" (a term borrowed in this meaning from Polish but originally related to the German Hauptmann, or captain). Hetmans from that period, such as Petro Sahaidachny, also saw themselves as protectors of the Orthodox faith and their people. In 1620 he enrolled his entire army in Kyiv's Orthodox fraternity, thus forcing the Polish government's hand in recognizing the previously banned Orthodox Church. In addition to the registered Cossacks, a significant number of unregistered ones had amassed in the Cossack stronghold on the lower Dnipro, the so-called Zaporozhian Sich (“Fortress beyond the Rapids"). The size of the register became a contentious issue between the Polish authorities and the Cossacks, who increasingly developed a distinct group identity as defenders of the Orthodox people.
Following a series of unsuccessful Cossack uprisings, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky's rebellion of 1648 developed into a peasant war and national revolution, resulting in the creation of an autonomous Cossack polity.
This precedent of statehood served as an inspiration for future generations of Ukrainian patriots, even though the revolt ultimately resulted in an alliance with Russia and the eventual absorption of Cossack lands by the Russian state. The Cossack social estate, signifying a distinct class of crown peasants, survived in central Ukraine until the Bolshevik Revolution, but they did not play any significant historical role.The Cossacks encountered in books and films set in the late tsarist empire—the ones seen cracking down on protest rallies and brutalizing civilians—have different historical origins. Just as the Polish governors of the 1500s began using the Cossacks to guard the steppe frontier, so did the Russian tsars in their borderlands, both in the south and during the conquest of Siberia. The main groups of Russian Cossacks were the Don Cossacks in the south and the Ural Cossacks in the east, as well as the Kuban Cossacks on the eastern shores of the Black Sea (the latter were originally Ukrainians who resettled there in the late 1700s). Late Imperial Russia provided Russian Cossacks with land and made them into an irregular police force, similar to a national guard. During the Revolution the conservative Don Cossacks in particular would prove to be the Bolsheviks' most powerful opponents.