Cossack

[Russian kazak and Ukrainian kozak, both from South Turkic qazaq, adventurer. See Kazakh.]

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Across the open, fertile plains of Ukraine six hundred years ago came the raiding Tatars, descendants of the Golden Horde of the Mongols. They were disrespectful in the extreme to the local populations. With Tatars constantly interfering, Ukrainians found it hard to get a life, let alone make a living. So they invented self-defense forces, the Cossacks, fierce enough to stop the Tatar hordes. They took their name from the South Turkic word qazaq meaning "adventurer" or "free person."

The Cossacks got their strength from local autonomy and leadership. They were not troops belonging to some distant government but members of democratic self-governing communities, each community electing its leader, known as an ataman, and the whole assembly of Cossacks electing a leader known as the hetman. Cossack communities welcomed diverse members, including Poles, Russians, and runaway serfs.

In later centuries, having defeated the Tatars, Cossacks fought the encroaching Polish and Russian governments. But by the end of the eighteenth century the Russians had overcome Cossack resistance and converted them into an elite military class within the Russian army. Cossack communities managed to survive Russian imperialism and communism, and Cossack forces have continued to be an elite within the Russian army.

Ukrainian, an Eastern Slavic and Indo-European language, is closely related to Russian. The two languages and their respective countries share much history and vocabulary. They are close enough that it is often difficult to tell whether an English word of Slavic origin comes from Russian, Ukrainian, or another related language. Cossack, for example, which has been in English since 1589, comes to us also from Polish and Russian, though the original Cossacks were in Ukraine. From Ukrainian we also have dumka (music that alternates between sad and happy, 1895) and gley (a kind of clay soil, 1927) as well as hetman (1710). In the independent republic of Ukraine, Ukrainian is spoken by more than forty million people.

Cossacks (Turkic: kozak, a daring or free person). Originally meaning a settler in a frontier area of the Russian empire or Ukraine who was exempt from serfdom, the Cossacks became an élite, predominantly light cavalry force within the imperial Russian army and, from being renowned for their independent lifestyle, became identified as an instrument of repression. In the Russian civil war many Cossacks supported the Whites but there were ‘Red’ or ‘crimson Cossacks’ (chervonnye kazaki) also. In WW II on the eastern front Cossacks fought on both sides. There were Cossack Nazi auxiliary units formed to fight against the Red Army, mostly alongside the Wehrmacht although some served in the Russian divisions of the Waffen SS. Since the break-up of the USSR, Cossack traditions have been re-emphasized, especially by those opposed to democratic and economic reform.

From the 14th to 17th centuries the Russian frontiers were settled by frontiersmen who were exempt from taxes and serfdom in exchange for military service against the Mongols and Turks. From the 15th century on the Dnepr, Don, Volga, Ural, and Terek rivers there were self-governing communities of so-called ‘free Cossacks’, mostly runaway serfs. Their military style followed that of the Mongols, and formations like the lava passed into the Russian army via the Cossacks. They played a major part in uprisings in Ukraine in the 16th and 17th centuries, producing a train of rebel leaders including Bogdan Khmelnitskiy and Stenka Razin, and finishing with Emelian Pugachev. Cossack leaders were called atamans. Originally they were elected but were later appointed by the tsarist government. Peter ‘the Great’ subordinated the Cossacks to his central authority and used them to guard his frontiers. The Cossacks became a privileged military caste, used as irregular troops. Each Cossack force had its own ataman and there was an ataman of all Cossack forces who, from 1827, was the heir to the imperial throne. The Zaporozhian Cossacks who had emerged in Ukraine in the early 16th century were abolished in 1775 after the Pugachev revolt, but new Cossack forces were founded. The Black Sea Cossacks, founded in 1787, were divided into Kuban and Tersk Cossack forces in 1860. By the beginning of the 20th century there were forces of Don, Kuban, Orenburg (founded 1855), Transbaikal (zabaikal) (1851), Tersk, Siberian (1808), Ural, Astrakhan (1817), Semirechensk (1867), Amur (1858), and Ussuri (1889) Cossacks. Cossack troops took part in all Russia's wars from the 18th to the 20th centuries. They were particularly adept in cavalry raids, such as that on Berlin in 1760, and in harrying the French in 1812. In the 1877-8 Russo-Turkish and the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese wars they developed this role. In 1904 the Independent Trans-Baikal Cossack Brigade commanded by Cossack Gen P. I. Mishchenko was designated the forward detachment (peredovoy otryad) of the Russian Manchurian Army. The 7, 500-strong detachment including Cossacks, mounted infantry, and horse artillery, conducted two penetrations into Korea and in January 1905 was sent to cut the Port Arthur-Harbin railway behind Japanese lines. An Irish journalist, Francis McCullagh, was allowed to join the raid. ‘I found that all the Cossack officers had changed, ’ he wrote. ‘They had all become very studious and were taking a particularly keen interest in nitroglycerine and the blowing up of railway trains and bridges.’

By the start of WW I Cossack forces comprised 54 mounted regiments, 6 dismounted Cossack battalions (plastun), 23 artillery batteries, 11 independent Cossack squadrons (sotnias), 4 independent horse and foot battalions (divizion), and the specially selected Imperial Guard: 68, 500 men in all. During the war their strength increased to 164 cavalry regiments, 54 batteries, 30 dismounted regiments, 179 independent sotnias, and other units totalling 200, 000 men. Being from distant parts of the empire and in a privileged position, they were perceived as the tsar's most loyal guards. However, in August 1917 the majority of the Cossack forces did not support Kornilov's attempted revolt against the Kerensky government, and in the November Russian Revolution many supported the Bolshevik uprising. By contrast, in 1918-19, during the period of foreign intervention, Soviet governments in the Don, Kuban, Ural, and Orenburg Cossack areas and in Siberia were overthrown and counter-revolutionary Cossack governments headed by atamans were set up. The prominence of Cossacks in the White, counter-revolutionary armies did not endear them to the new Soviet regime although Red Cossack units had also played an important part in the civil war. In 1936 limitations on Cossacks serving in the Red Army were abolished and several Cossack cavalry divisions were formed. In December 1941 a Cossack cavalry corps was formed. Among the commanders of Cossack formations was Gen Issa Pliev, who commanded the Soviet-Mongolian cavalry-mechanized group in the final campaign of WW II—the August 1945 Manchurian campaign— sweeping in across the Gobi desert to take the Japanese Kwantung army in the flank. Cossack cavalry remained effective into the nuclear age.

The passing of cavalry as a major military arm after 1945 ended the existence of separate Cossack cavalry formations. However, men from the Cossack areas including the Caucasus, Transcaucasia, and Siberia appear to have been attracted to—or sought out for spetsnaz— special forces units, whether of the Soviet and Russian armies or of the interior ministry. One such unit employed in Grozny in 1995 appears to have been recruited from Brnaul, beneath the Altai mountains in Siberia. These highly trained, élite special forces units would be just the place for modern Cossacks.

Bibliography

• McCullagh, Francis, With the Cossacks (London, 1906)

— Christopher Bellamy

The word Cossack (Russian kazak) is probably Turkic in origin, and the term dates to medieval times, when it was used to denote wanderers or freebooters of varying Slavic and non-Slavic origins who lived off raids on the Eurasian steppe and jealously guarded their independence. By the fifteenth century, the term was increasingly applied to a mixture of freemen and fugitives who had fled the serfdom of Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy to live in the seams between encroaching Slavic settlement and receding remnants of the Golden Horde. From these beginnings two distinct traditions gradually emerged to figure in the evolution of the various Cossack groupings in later Russian and Ukrainian history. One tradition witnessed the transformation of these frontiersmen into military servitors, who, in exchange for compensation and various rights and privileges, agreed to discharge mounted military service, usually on the fringes of advancing Slavic colonization. These servitors came to be called "town Cossacks," and their duties included mounted reconnaissance and defense against nomadic and Tatar incursion.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Cossacks of this type in what is now Ukraine appeared often in Polish military service. They also fought stubbornly to retain their autonomy and status as freemen, for which reason in 1654 they sought protection from the Muscovite tsar. However, their autonomous status and sometimes even their existence proved ephemeral, as Muscovite and Imperial Russian rulers gradually either absorbed, abolished, or transplanted various service-obligated Cossack groupings, including the Ukrainians.

A second and related tradition produced the more famous "free Cossack" communities. Like their service brethren, the roots of the free Cossacks lay largely with various wayward Russian and Ukrainian peasants (and town Cossacks) who combined with other migrants of mixed ethnic origins to settle in the open steppe beyond any recognizable state frontiers. They formed what the historian Robert H. McNeill has called "interstitial polities," autonomous military societies that occupied the great river valleys of the Pontic steppe. Free Cossack communities began to appear in the fifteenth century, and by the mid-sixteenth century, they numbered six distinct groupings, including most prominently the Cossacks of the Don Host (voisko) and the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Sich. Living by their wits and warrior skills off the land and its adjoining waters, these free Cossacks plundered traditional Islamic enemies and Orthodox allies alike. However, like their service-obligated brethren, the free Cossacks gradually came to serve as Muscovite allies, fielding light cavalry for tsarist campaigns, pressing Slavic colonization farther into the Pontic steppe, then into the Caucasus and Siberia. Although the free Cossacks formed bulwarks against invasion from the south and east, they were also sensitive to infringements of their rights and privileges as free men. From the time of Stepan Razin's revolt in 1670 - 1671 until the rising of Yemelian Pugachev in 1772 - 1775, they periodically reacted explosively to encroachments against their status and freebooting lifestyle.

The service and free Cossack traditions gradually merged during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the former free Cossack groupings were either abolished (e.g., the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775) or brought under the complete control (e.g., the Don Host also in 1775) of imperial St. Petersburg. A series of imperial military administrators from Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin through Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev imposed measures that regularized Cossack military service, subordinated local governing institutions to imperial control and supervision, and integrated local elites into the ranks of the Russian nobility. Regardless of origin, by the time of the Crimean War in 1854 - 1856, all Cossacks had been transformed into a closed military estate (sosloviye) subject to mandatory mounted military service in exchange for collective title to their lands and superficial reaffirmation of traditional rights and privileges. During the Great Reform Era, War Minister Dmitry Alexeyevich Milyutin toyed briefly with the idea of abolishing the Cossacks, then imposed measures to further regularize their governance and military service. The blunt fact was that the Russian army needed cavalry, and the Cossack population base of 2.5 million enabled them to satisfy approximately 50 percent of the empire's cavalry requirements. Consequently, the Cossacks became an anachronism in an age of smokeless powder weaponry and mass cadre and conscript armies.

Reforms notwithstanding, by the beginning of the twentieth century, many traditional Cossack groupings hovered on the verge of crisis, thanks to a heavy burden of military service, overcrowding in communal holdings, alienation of land by the Cossack nobility, and an influx of non-Cossack population. The revolutions of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War seriously divided the Cossacks, with a majority supporting the White movement, while a stubborn minority espoused revolutionary causes. Following Bolshevik victory, many Cossacks fled abroad, while those who stayed were persecuted, gradually disappearing during collectivization as an identifiable group. During World War II, the Red Army resurrected Cossack formations, while the Wehrmacht, operating under the fiction that Cossacks were non-Slavic peoples, recruited its own Cossack formations from prisoners of war and dissidents of various stripes. Neither variety had much in common with their earlier namesakes, save perhaps either remote parentage or territorial affinity. The same assertion held true for various Cossack-like groupings that sprang up in trouble spots around the periphery of the Russian Federation following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Bibliography

Barrett, Thomas M. (1999). At the Edge of Empire: The Terek Cossacks and the North Caucasus Frontier, 1700 - 1860. Boulder: Westview Press.

Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2002). Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500 - 1800. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

McNeal, Robert H. (1987). Tsar and Cossack, 1855 - 1914. London: The Macmillan Press.

McNeill, William H. (1964). Europe's Steppe Frontier 1500 - 1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Menning, Bruce W. (2003). "G. A. Potemkin and A. I. Chernyshev: Two Dimensions of Reform and Russia's Military Frontier." In Reforming the Tsar's Army: Military Innovation in Imperial Russia from Peter the Great to the Revolution, eds. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye and Bruce W. Menning. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Subtelny, Orest. (2000). Ukraine: A History, 3rd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

—BRUCE W. MENNING

Frontierspeople between the Slavic and Turkic worlds, the Cossacks (name derived from the Turkic kazak, 'free person') emerged by the fifteenth century as military servitors. In the sixteenth century, a wider strata of the Slavic-borderland foragers and fishers took on the name Cossacks. They were especially numerous in the Ukrainian territories along the Dnieper River of the Polish-Lithuanian state and somewhat later along the Don River on the periphery of the Muscovite state, where they developed skill in building small boats and navigating the Black Sea. The Lithuanian state (after 1569 the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) enlisted the Cossacks in defending its long steppe frontier with the Crimean Khanate. Border officials often served as leaders of the Cossacks who defended grand ducal (later royal) castles. By the second half of the century, Cossacks established strongholds or siches beneath rapids in the lower Dnieper beyond the reach of the authorities (hence the name Zaporozhian, from the Ukrainian za porohy, 'beyond the rapids'). Increasingly the Zaporozhians became an autonomous force, often conducting raids on the Black Sea against the Ottomans. The commonwealth enlisted some Cossacks in its service (the registered Cossacks), but the register never encompassed more than a small part of the Ukrainian Cossacks.

The spread of the manorial serf economy into central Ukraine in the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century increasingly threatened the Cossack way of life and status as free people. Starting in the 1590s, Cossacks led revolts in Ukraine, with the authorities suppressing them in time of peace and seeking their support in time of war. Thus the magnates and court enlisted them in invading Muscovy in the early seventeenth century and in fighting the Turks in 1619–1621. Yet when Warsaw wanted peace with the Ottomans, it found the Cossack naval raids troublesome. After the Union of Brest (1596) established Orthodox union with Rome, the Cossacks resisted the religious change, and by the 1620s they played a major role in Ukrainian religious and cultural life. Cossack revolts in the 1620s and 1630s were put down by the Polish authorities, but the entire political and social order of Ukraine was overthrown by the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648), in which the Zaporozhian Host was transformed into the civil administration, much of the Ukrainian population "Cossackicized," and Cossacks became the major social Estate. In 1654 the Ukrainian hetman took an oath to the Russian tsar, and while the Cossacks changed their sovereigns frequently in the wars of the century, they ultimately came under Russian rule.

Out of the revolt two Cossack polities emerged, the Zaporozhian Host and the Hetmanate. The Zaporozhian Host, centered on the old sich, long retained the character of old Cossackdom in the unsettled steppe and remained autonomous of neighboring rulers. In the eighteenth century it came under Russian control and was destroyed by the Russian imperial forces in 1775. Its Cossacks were dispersed to other Black Sea areas (eventually the Kuban). The Hetmanate, known as Little Russia in the eighteenth century, developed into a complex society with a Ukrainian Cossack culture and identity controlled by the Cossack officers, who evolved into a nobiliary elite. The office of hetman was abolished in 1764, and the autonomy of the region was abolished in 1781. Cossack social strata were absorbed into the Russian imperial social structure. An outcropping of Ukrainian Cossack formations was established in parts of Muscovy by Cossack emigrants in the mid-seventeenth century and became known as Sloboda Ukraine.

In the Muscovite and Russian state the Cossacks remained a borderland phenomenon. They intervened in Russian affairs in times of weakness, such as the Time of Troubles of the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. Major revolts, such those of Stepan Razin (died 1671) in 1670–1671, Kondratii Bulavin (c. 1660–1708) in 1707–1709, and Emilian Pugachev (1726–1775) in 1773–1775, were launched by Don, Iaik, and other Cossacks. The Don Cossacks, who like the Zaporozhians conducted sea raids in the early seventeenth century, came under more direct rule of Moscow in the eighteenth century and lost their autonomy in 1775. They were integrated into Russian military structures, as was the Kuban Host that formed near them in 1792. The Cossacks Hosts of the Terek and Iaik played a major role in the conquest of the Caucasus and Siberia and then were integrated into Russian imperial military structures.

Bibliography

Gordon, Linda. Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine. Albany, N.Y., 1983.

Hrushevsky, Mykhailo. History of Ukraine-Rus'. Vol. 7. Translated by Bohdan Strumiński. Vol. 8. Translated by Marta D. Olynyk. Edmonton and Toronto, 1999–2002.

Longworth, Philip. The Cossacks. London, 1969.

Plokhy, Serhii. The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine. Oxford and New York, 2001.

—FRANK E. SYSYN

A people in southern Russia who became aggressive warriors during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In place of taxes, they supplied the Russian Empire with scouts and mounted soldiers. The Cossacks are also famed for their dances, which feature fast-paced music and seemingly impossible leaps.

Dansk (Danish)
n. - kosak, kosaksoldat
adj. - kosakisk

Nederlands (Dutch)
kozak

Français (French)
n. - Cosaque
adj. - cosaque

Deutsch (German)
n. - Kosak
adj. - Kosaken-

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - κοζάκος
adj. - κοζάκικος, κοζάκος

Italiano (Italian)
cosacco

Português (Portuguese)
n., -
adj. - cossaco (m)

Русский (Russian)
казак, казацкий

Español (Spanish)
n. - cosaco
adj. - cosaco

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - kosack
adj. - kosack-

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
哥萨克人, 骑马巡警, 哥萨克骑兵, 哥萨克人的

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 哥薩克人, 騎馬巡警, 哥薩克騎兵
adj. - 哥薩克人的

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 코삭 사람, 기마순경
adj. - 카자흐인의

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - コサック, ズボン
adj. - コサックの

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) ما يتعلق بالقفقاز, فارس, من جنوب روسيا (صفه) قفقازي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮תושב אזור-ספר של רוסיה, ידוע בכושר-הלחימה, קוזק‬
adj. - ‮נוגע לקוזק או מאפיין אותו‬

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