Turtler says:

“The Soviets (and probably under the later Tzars, as well) made a point of appropriating the Cossack culture into Russia.”

Quite true indeed.

” They made great efforts to basically claim the Cossacks were always Russian, despite the actual history of the area. Any attempt at a Ukrainian identity has to overcome that.”

Largely true, though I think that’s one of the less complicated issues. The idea of a Pan-Russian identity applying to the areas of “The” Ukraine and most of the people there isn’t new. It isn’t even much of a product of Tsarist propaganda (though it certainly turned into that later). There is quite a lot of history binding what we now consider Russia (mostly the cities of the Center and North) with those in Ukraine and it’s probable the people down South were as “Russian” as those in the North during the era of the Kievan Rus. But that was also because the identity was a lot less centralized and was looser due to mixtures between the assorted different Norse, different Slavs, different Finnic and Urgic peoples, and so on held together under the rather loose overlordship of the various Kings of the Rus (and their fratricidal quarrels).

The issue, however, is that these were never particularly united peoples or polities to start with and the Mongols absolutely crushed what unity there was, razing a good half or so of the cities and polities and then pitting the rest against each other….. just as assorted powers from the West came in to compete with these.

Nikolai Gogol is best known for his dark, morbid, and surreal novels. He’s not as well known as an amateur ethnographer and historian, as well as mythologizer of the Russian Imperial Cause, but that’s what gave him his non-literary legacy, and he was deeply fascinated by the history of “Little Russia”/”Ukraine.”

He- through this admittedly dated introduction to a collection of his by John Cournos- touch a great deal about how things changed.

This is gonna be long but I couldn’t really find a good place to cut it off.

“More than that. The nomad and romantic in him, troubled and restless with Ukrainian myth, legend, and song, impressed upon Russian literature, faced with the realities of modern life, a spirit titanic and in clash with its material, and produced in the mastery of this every-day material, commonly called sordid, a phantasmagoria intense with beauty. A clue to all Russian realism may be found in a Russian critic’s observation about Gogol: “Seldom has nature created a man so romantic in bent, yet so masterly in portraying all that is unromantic in life.” But this statement does not cover the whole ground, for it is easy to see in almost all of Gogol’s work his “free Cossack soul” trying to break through the shell of sordid to-day like some ancient demon, essentially Dionysian. So that his works, true though they are to our life, are at once a reproach, a protest, and a challenge, ever calling for joy, ancient joy, that is no more with us. And they have all the joy and sadness of the Ukrainian songs he loved so much. Ukrainian was to Gogol “the language of the soul,” and it was in Ukrainian songs rather than in old chronicles, of which he was not a little contemptuous, that he read the history of his people. Time and again, in his essays and in his letters to friends, he expresses his boundless joy in these songs: “O songs, you are my joy and my life! How I love you. What are the bloodless chronicles I pore over beside those clear, live chronicles! I cannot live without songs; they… reveal everything more and more clearly, oh, how clearly, gone-by life and gone-by men…. The songs of Little Russia are her everything, her poetry, her history, and her ancestral grave. He who has not penetrated them deeply knows nothing of the past of this blooming region of Russia.”

Indeed, so great was his enthusiasm for his own land that after collecting material for many years, the year 1833 finds him at work on a history of “poor Ukraine,” a work planned to take up six volumes; and writing to a friend at this time he promises to say much in it that has not been said before him. Furthermore, he intended to follow this work with a universal history in eight volumes with a view to establishing, as far as may be gathered, Little Russia and the world in proper relation, connecting the two; a quixotic task, surely. A poet, passionate, religious, loving the heroic, we find him constantly impatient and fuming at the lifeless chronicles, which leave him cold as he seeks in vain for what he cannot find. “Nowhere,” he writes in 1834, “can I find anything of the time which ought to be richer than any other in events. Here was a people whose whole existence was passed in activity, and which, even if nature had made it inactive, was compelled to go forward to great affairs and deeds because of its neighbours, its geographic situation, the constant danger to its existence…. If the Crimeans and the Turks had had a literature I am convinced that no history of an independent nation in Europe would prove so interesting as that of the Cossacks.” Again he complains of the “withered chronicles”; it is only the wealth of his country’s song that encourages him to go on with its history.

Too much a visionary and a poet to be an impartial historian, it is hardly astonishing to note the judgment he passes on his own work, during that same year, 1834: “My history of Little Russia’s past is an extraordinarily made thing, and it could not be otherwise.” The deeper he goes into Little Russia’s past the more fanatically he dreams of Little Russia’s future. St. Petersburg wearies him, Moscow awakens no emotion in him, he yearns for Kieff, the mother of Russian cities, which in his vision he sees becoming “the Russian Athens.” Russian history gives him no pleasure, and he separates it definitely from Ukrainian history. He is “ready to cast everything aside rather than read Russian history,” he writes to Pushkin. During his seven-year stay in St. Petersburg (1829-36) Gogol zealously gathered historical material and, in the words of Professor Kotlyarevsky, “lived in the dream of becoming the Thucydides of Little Russia.” How completely he disassociated Ukrainia from Northern Russia may be judged by the conspectus of his lectures written in 1832. He says in it, speaking of the conquest of Southern Russia in the fourteenth century by Prince Guedimin at the head of his Lithuanian host, still dressed in the skins of wild beasts, still worshipping the ancient fire and practising pagan rites: “Then Southern Russia, under the mighty protection of Lithuanian princes, completely separated itself from the North. Every bond between them was broken; two kingdoms were established under a single name—Russia—one under the Tatar yoke, the other under the same rule with Lithuanians. But actually they had no relation with one another; different laws, different customs, different aims, different bonds, and different activities gave them wholly different characters.””

Now, a quick note:

Gogol was an absolute monarchist and Greater Russian Nationalist. He wrote Taras Bulba as part of tying the struggles of the Cossacks and the assorted revolts against the Poles into the great Russian Imperial Myth (and indeed this becomes REALLY evident if you study the end of the book and Taras Bulba’s dying speech). It NEVER would have occurred to him that Ukraine and its various peoples WERE NOT part of Russia and SHOULDN’T have been united under the scepter of a Tsar in the Kremlin of Moscow.

But he was QUITE blunt talking about the vast differences between “North Russia” and “Little Russia” that sprang up after the Mongol Invasion and the lengthy Polish-Lithuanian occupation following it. And he also clearly had a more romantic affinity for the culture and history of “South Russia” than the North around Moscow and Novgorod.

So while the people in Moscow and places like the various Sichs viewed themselves as kindred in religion (which was probably the most important), ethnicity, history, and language, they had begun diverging pretty fervently by this point, and by the time “Russia” united under Moscow and came South in the 1500s things had already changed drastically.

And this is before we get into how confusing the society down South was or what Cossacks were. But to make a formidably long story short, Cossack originally wasn’t an ethnic or national identity but something of a social class, “Kozak” (tied into Kazakh), which means something close to “The Free”, basically mostly unbound Free people of the Wild Fields. Which is important because A: The vast majority of the people that lived under the authority of the assorted Cossack Hetmanates – even those that were loyal to them – would never have considered themselves “Cossacks” since they were more settled farmers or townsfolk, and B: As late as the 20th century it was used as a sort of profession description even by Cossacks. Hence things like “White Republican” General Lavr Kornilov describing himself as “The son of a Cossack and a Peasant” (Ie one of his parents was a Cossack and the Other was a Peasant, as if they were mutually exclusive).

So by the time of the 1500s, Cossacks (or at least “Registered Cossacks”) were a kind of social status that held a role something like a mixture between Knights in Feudal Western Europe and Roman Auxiliaries, tasked with guarding the frontiers of the Great Steppe. The issue is that this meant they clashed a great deal with the actual nobility in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (and later the Russian Empire but we’ll get there later), especially since people fleeing serfdom on the great noble estates were one of their main recruiting fields.

So you saw a lot of bitter fighting and ultimate rebellions by Cossacks who had gotten wronged in the assorted feuds. Eventually one of them – Bohdan Khmelnitsky, who had ironically tried hard to appeal his case to the Polish Monarch before being told “You have your sword” – had particular success in defeating the Commonwealth Armies and creating a government, but started to run into problems. So he started to look towards the Muscovites for help in the 1650s.

He was to be bitterly disappointed and shocked at how high-handed the Muscovite emissaries (used to living in a quasi-totalitarian, absolute monarchy far beyond anything Khmelnitsky had experience with) were towards him, as well as the extremely invasive and far reaching nature of their demands for his vassalage in exchange for help against the Commonwealth. Khmelnitsky had a great deal of misgivings, but ultimately decided he had no choice but to swear allegiance to the Tsar in order to win the war.

Which is a cornerstone of Russian nationalist historiography.

(The fact that Khmelnitsky later regretted it and in his dying days spent time in communication with the Swedes for help, and that his son would go on to try and come to an agreement with the Poles is largely glossed over).

Khmelnitsky was afraid the Muscovites would break their word. And while it took decades to play out he was ultimately correct.

“And, as other conquering nations have done throughout history, they moved actual ethnic Russians into the area (aside from the ebb and flow of peoples that had already occurred) to basically remove any independence the region might otherwise have.”

Agreed, and well said.

“Some excellent comments, Turtler.”

Thanks, and you too.