One of the favorite topics of historical and political speculations of Russophobic orientation is the history of the dissolution of the Zaporizhzhya Sich. Supporters of "political Ukrainianism" view this event unequivocally as another confirmation of the "anti-Ukrainian" policy of the Russian state throughout the history of the latter. August 14, 2015 marks 240 years since Catherine II signed the Manifesto "On the destruction of the Zaporizhzhya Sich and on its assignment to the Novorossiysk province." The Manifesto said: “We wanted through this to declare throughout Our Empire to the common knowledge of Our all subjects that Sich Zaporozhye had already been destroyed in the end, with the destruction for the future and the very name of the Zaporozhian Empire, we presented ourselves to the Kozakovs … Ours and before the very humanity in general to destroy Sѣchu Zaporozhye and the name Kozakov, from which it was borrowed. In the aftermath of the 4th June, Our General-Lieutenant Tekelliyem with the troops introduced to him from us occupied the Zaporizhzhya Sach in perfect order and complete silence, without any resistance from Kozakov … but now more similarly to the same political name of Zaporozhye … … Thus, the Empress's manifesto put an end to the centuries-old existence of the Zaporozhye Sich - a unique military-political formation that played a significant role in Russian history. Although contemporary Ukrainian (especially) authors view this event exclusively through the prism of the confrontation between "Muscovy" and "Free Ukraine", in reality it was caused by considerations of a rather geostrategic nature. The Russian Empire, expanding its territory to the south-west and reaching the borders of the Crimean Khanate, no longer needed a neighborhood with the uncontrolled Zaporizhzhya Sich, which repeatedly sided with Russia's fierce enemies - the Commonwealth, Sweden, the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire.
Zaporizhzhya Sich - a unique military republic
Initially, the Zaporizhzhya Sich played an important role in protecting the Slavic lands from the raids of the Crimean Tatar army. Zaporozhye Cossacks were considered excellent warriors and, I must say, repeatedly confirmed their glory - it was not for nothing that they were afraid of both in the Commonwealth and in the Crimean Khanate. At the same time, it would hardly be correct to define the Zaporozhye Sich as a “Ukrainian” political entity. To begin with, the ethnonym "Ukrainians" itself appeared only at the end of the 19th century and was introduced into the public consciousness thanks to the efforts of Austro-Hungarian propaganda. Until that time, the ancestors of a significant part of modern Ukrainians were called “Little Russians” in Russia, and they called themselves “Ruska” or “Rusyns”. As for the Zaporozhye Cossacks, they never identified themselves with the Little Russian population, moreover, they tried in every possible way to distance themselves from it. There is no doubt that a strong Little Russian component was present in the composition of the Zaporizhzhya Sich, especially at the later stages of its existence. However, among the Secheviks there were people of Turkic (Crimean Tatar, Nogai, Turkish), Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian (Belarusian), Greek, Armenian origin, and there were a lot of them - but no one calls the Zaporozhye Sich Polish, Tatar or Greek military political education. Meanwhile, the way of life of the Zaporozhye Cossacks was more similar to the way of life of the nomadic Turks than to the way of life of the Little Russian peasantry. Even in verbal communication, the Zaporozhye Cossacks used many Turkic words, starting with such fundamental concepts as actually “Cossack”, “Kosh”, “Ataman”, “Esaul”, etc. This is explained not only by the close proximity to the Crimean Khanate and the Nogais … The Zaporozhians were largely descendants of Christianized groups of the Turkic population who adopted the Russian language - the same rovers. In turn, these groups of the Turkic population were also formed not from scratch, but included and assimilated the pre-Turkic population of the Steppe - the same Iranian-speaking Alans. For a long time, the ethnic community of the Cossacks was called the Cherkasy. N. I. Karamzin writes: “Let us recall Kasogov, who lived, according to our chronicles, between the Caspian and Black seas; let us also recall the country of Kazakhia, believed by the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the same places; let us add that Ossetians still call the Circassians Kasakhs: so many circumstances together make one think that Torki and Berendeis, called Cherkases, were also called Kozaks”(Karamzin NI History of the Russian State). Thus, the Cossacks were formed practically independently of the Little Russian population, and it is a very controversial political maneuver to pass off the Zaporozhye Cossacks as the ancestors of modern Ukrainians.
Admission to the Zaporizhzhya Sich was carried out if the candidate met several basic requirements. First, the newcomer had to be "free" by origin, that is, a nobleman, a Cossack, a priest's son, a free peasant or even a "Basurman", but not a slave. Secondly, he had to know the "Cossack language", that is, the dialect of the Russian language spoken by the Cossacks. Thirdly, the candidate had to be Orthodox by faith, and if he professed a different religion, then be baptized into Orthodoxy. There were many baptized Catholics, Muslims and even Jews among the Cossacks. Arriving in the Zaporizhzhya Sich, the candidate for the Cossacks mastered the martial art and customs of the Zaporozhian people, and only seven years later he could become a full-fledged "comrade" of the Zaporizhzhya Sich. In addition, the Cossacks were forbidden to marry and maintain regular relations with women - this made them related to the European military-religious orders. Naturally, representatives of such a structure treated the peasant population of Little Russia with a certain contempt, which, however, was typical of any warriors and nomads who placed themselves disproportionately higher than peasants - farmers and urban artisans and merchants. Even with great rejection, the Zaporozhians treated Catholics - Poles and Uniates - residents of the Galician lands belonging to the Commonwealth - the very "Westerners" who today, for some reason, consider themselves the descendants of "Zaporozhye Cossacks" (although where is Lviv and where is the Zaporozhye Sich?). At the same time, among the Zaporozhians there were many Polish gentry who crossed themselves into Orthodoxy, who, for whatever reason, fled from the Commonwealth to the Zaporozhye Sich. Some of these gentry became conductors of anti-Russian sentiments and influenced some of the Cossacks, spreading among them rejection of "Muscovy" and sympathy for the Commonwealth. It is likely that it was they who introduced into the Cossack consciousness and ideology that the Cossacks did not belong to the Russian world. So, among the Cossack elite, the concept of the Khazar origin of the Cossacks spread - supposedly the Cossacks actually went back to the ancient Khazars, who adopted Orthodoxy before Russia - directly from Constantinople. By this, the anti-Russian part of the Cossack elite sought to undermine the religious ties between the Russian state and the Cossacks, cut off the Cossacks from the Russian world and give a historical justification for possible conflicts between the Cossacks and the Russian state.
In the perception of the Zaporizhzhya Sich, as the researcher of Ukrainian nationalism Nikolai Ulyanov rightly notes, two main contradictory tendencies have been established since ancient times. According to the first tendency, the Zaporozhye Cossacks were an expression of truly popular aspirations, an example of democracy and self-government. Any oppressed person, according to this theory, could flee to the Sich and join the Cossacks. The way of life of the Cossacks, based on everyday self-government, ran counter to the orders of most state formations of that time - both European and, even more so, Asian. The second tendency, on the contrary, asserts the aristocracy of the Zaporozhye Sich. Its adherents characterized the Zaporozhian people as nothing more than "knights", that is, "knights", aristocrats. It was this point of view that became firmly established among a part of the Polish gentry, which, back in the 16th century, began to romanticize the image of the Zaporozhye Cossack as an ideal warrior - an aristocrat who practically renounced the worldly vain life and devoted himself to the military cause. The Cossack as a free knight - this image appealed to many Polish gentry, who saw in him the embodiment of their own ideology. Let us recall that the concept of “Sarmatianism” later spread among the Polish gentry - supposedly the Polish gentry descended from the Sarmatians - legendary warriors of the Eurasian steppes. As you know, the gentry also gravitated towards self-government, but "internal democracy" was combined with the most severe oppression of the Little Russian and Belarusian peasants subject to the gentry. Democracy and self-government were for the elite, and the rest of the inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth "sirs" did not even consider people - so, "psya krev", that is, "dog's blood". However, another part of the Polish gentry treated the Zaporozhye Cossacks with poorly concealed or not at all concealed contempt, since they saw in them more robbers than "knights". Crown hetman Jan Zamoysky said that the Zaporozhye Cossacks go not for the sake of serving the fatherland, but for the sake of booty. The robber trade remained the main source of livelihood for the "core" of the Zaporozhye Sich - those very free Cossacks who never went to serve the king. Children of the Steppes, they could not and did not want to exchange their free spirit for the need for systematic military service, accompanied by a rejection of the previous way of life and submission to some kind of discipline. Nevertheless, the prospect of receiving a regular salary from the Polish crown inspired a significant number of Cossacks, who saw the service of the Rzecz Pospolita as a safer and more reliable source of livelihood than "free bread" with constant raids and subsequent punitive expeditions of Polish or Turkish troops to the Zaporozhye Sich …
In 1572, part of the Cossacks entered the service of the Polish king, after which they received the name of "registered" Cossacks and actually turned into a kind of professional army, in contrast to the Zaporozhye Sichs, who preserved the traditions of the Cossack freemen. The Zaporizhzhya Sich was not recognized by the Commonwealth, which used the registered Cossacks in the fight against it. The latter played an important role in carrying out punitive operations against the Zaporizhzhya Sich. In turn, the Secheviks were very indignant that the registered Cossacks call themselves Zaporozhye Cossacks - after all, having passed to the service of the king, and then to the Russian tsar, the registered Cossacks ceased to be free and renounced the traditions of the Sich, turned into ordinary border guards performing police functions … Registered Cossacks since 1572 were officially called "The Army of His Royal Grace Zaporozhye" and performed tasks of border guard and police service on the southern borders of the Polish-Lithuanian state, participated in military campaigns against the Crimean Khanate. At the same time, the registered Cossacks also met with opposition from the Polish gentry - even though there were many noblemen in the ranks of the Zaporozhye army who, for whatever reason, joined the Cossacks. The Polish gentry did not want to share privileges with "some Cossacks" and this also became one of the reasons for the Cossacks' dissatisfaction with the Commonwealth and its policy in Little Russia. Ultimately, in 1648, a grandiose uprising broke out against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in which the Little Russian peasantry played the leading role, and the Cossacks led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky played the leading role. As a matter of fact, the transition of the Cossacks to the jurisdiction of the Russian Empire was a direct result of the uprising of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. At the same time, Khmelnytsky himself can hardly be described as a pro-Russian politician - his transition to the side of Russia was rather a forced step, caused by the desire to put pressure on the Rzeczpospolita, to demonstrate to it the "independence" of the Zaporozhye Cossacks.
Cossacks and Russia: victories, betrayal, punishment and forgiveness
In 1654, the Army of His Royal Grace Zaporozhye passed into the service of the Russian Tsar and was renamed into the Army of His Royal Majesty Zaporozhye. Thus, the registered Zaporozhye Cossacks voluntarily chose to serve the Russian state. The Zaporozhian Nizovoe Troops, that is, the Secheviks, which remained an autonomous military force and were involved in military campaigns against the Crimean Tatars, also passed into citizenship to the Russian state. However, the uncontrolled Zaporizhzhya Sich caused a lot of trouble for the Russian state. Firstly, the secheviks did not disdain predatory attacks on the territory of both the Commonwealth and the Crimean Khanate, which led to problems in relations between the Russian state and the Polish king and the Turkish sultan. Secondly, the hetmans, who felt the growing limitations of their power on the part of the Russian tsars, felt discontent and periodically switched over to the Polish side. The most famous example of the transition of the Cossacks to the side of the opponents of Russia is the betrayal of Hetman Mazepa. Like his ideological heirs three hundred years later, Mazepa used the methods of manipulating the consciousness of ordinary Zaporozhians and Little Russians. In particular, he announced that Peter I wanted to drive all the inhabitants of Little Russia "beyond the Volga" and accused the Russian authorities of ruining Little Russian lands worse than the Swedes and Poles. On March 28, 1709, the koshevoy ataman Gordienko and hetman Mazepa signed an allied treaty with Sweden, after which Mazepa took an oath of allegiance to King Charles XII of Sweden. The Cossack mass supported Mazepa, as they were dissatisfied with the policy of Peter I, since he introduced fines to cover the damage inflicted on the Russian treasury by the constant attacks of the Cossacks on Turkish caravans.
The Cossack foreman was offended by the imposition of a fine for the "basurman" and chose to support Mazepa, who went into the service of the Swedes. As a result, the aggravation of relations between the Zaporizhzhya Sich and Russia turned into a phase of an armed conflict. Although what kind of conflict could there be between a large state with a strong regular army and a military-political organization, which was, in fact, a relic of the Middle Ages. Three regiments of Russian regular troops under the command of Colonel Yakovlev laid siege to the fortifications of the Sich. However, the Cossacks defended themselves quite skillfully and were even able to capture a number of prisoners, who were later brutally killed. However, the Cossack Colonel Ignat Galagan, who was familiar with the Sich defense system, helped the Russian troops to take the fortress by storm. She was burned, 156 Cossacks were executed.
A crushing blow was dealt to the Sich, but a significant part of the Sichs remained in arms and after the defeat of the Swedish troops near Poltava moved to the Kherson region, where a new Sich was founded in the area of the confluence of the Kamenka River with the Dnieper. However, soon the new Sich was destroyed by military units under the command of the Russian-controlled Hetman Skoropadsky and General Buturlin. The remnants of the Cossacks retreated to the territory controlled by Ottoman Turkey, and tried to establish a new Sich there, but immediately faced opposition from the local Turkic population. As a result, the foreman filed a request to Peter I to allow the Cossacks to return to the Russian Empire. As it turned out, the Cossacks could not exist without Russia. However, Peter, as a tough man, refused to the Cossacks, and only during the reign of Empress Anna Ioannovna, the Cossacks managed to regain their Russian citizenship. But, despite the return to Russian citizenship, it was obvious that historically the Zaporizhzhya Sich had outlived its usefulness. An absolutist monarchy was established in Russia, within which there was no place for an autonomous quasi-state entity, which was the Zaporozhye hetmanate. The dissatisfaction of the central government with the behavior of the Cossacks intensified during the reign of Catherine II. First of all, in 1764, Catherine issued a decree abolishing the hetmanate in Little Russia and appointed Count P. A. Rumyantsev - Zadunaisky. It is noteworthy that the Little Russian population perceived the ongoing changes in the political and administrative structure of the region rather positively, as they were tired of oppression and extortions from the hetman and the foreman.
The Cossacks remained a potentially dangerous part of the population of the Russian Empire for the social order, since the traditions of the freemen created the basis for the spread of anti-government sentiments in the event of the slightest attack on the rights of the “free Cossacks”. When the uprising of Yemelyan Pugachev broke out, the tsarist government doubted the loyalty of the Zaporozhye Cossacks. Although the Cossacks did not support Pugachev and for the most part did not take his side, Catherine II believed that in the event of a repetition of such uprisings, an armed and explosive mass of Cossacks could oppose the central government. Moreover, ordinary Cossacks were dissatisfied with the policy of strengthening the central government in Little Russia, and some of them, despite the refusal of the majority of the Cossacks to support Pugachev, nevertheless took part in the uprising. For the empress, who feared a repetition of the Cossack uprising, only in Little Russia, this was enough. She was suspicious of all the Cossack troops, but the Zaporozhye Sich caused the greatest concern in the queen. In addition, the Zaporizhzhya Sich at the time under review practically lost its "applied" military-political significance. The borders of the Russian Empire shifted to the south and southwest, the need for Cossacks on the territory of Little Russia disappeared. In the absence of a permanent military service, the Cossacks became a harmful and dangerous class, since they did not expend their "passionary" potential. Meanwhile, the need for combat-ready contingents carrying border service appeared on the new borders of the Russian Empire, including the Caucasus, and the forces of the Don Cossacks were clearly not enough to protect the Caucasian borders of the Russian Empire. Another factor that contributed to the decision to dissolve the Zaporizhzhya Sich was associated with its reactionary role for the socio-economic development of Little Russia and Novorossia. The essentially medieval military-political formation of the Zaporozhye Cossacks created obstacles to economic growth, since the Cossacks terrorized the colonists - Serbs, Bulgarians, Vlachs, Greeks, with whom the empress sought to populate the sparsely populated lands of Novorossia. With great difficulty, the Russian authorities managed to attract colonists from among the representatives of the Eastern European Orthodox peoples, since not everyone was ready to go to the "Wild Field", the bad fame of which remained in Europe since the Middle Ages. And the actions of the Cossacks, who robbed the colonists and set fire to their estates, trying to survive from the "primordial Cossack land", directly interfered with the tsarist policy of settling the Novorossiysk lands.
General Tekeli's operation
After the Kuchuk-Kainardzhiyskiy peace treaty was concluded in 1774, and Russia gained access to the Black Sea, the military-political need for the existence of the Zaporozhye Sich finally lost its meaning. Naturally, the empress and her entourage thought about the need to dissolve the Zaporizhzhya Sich - not because of the mythical desire to "destroy the foundations of Ukrainian self-government", as Ukrainian historians are trying to present the events of 240 years ago, but due to the lack of military-political expediency of further existence an armed autonomous entity on the territory of the Russian Empire. On the other hand, the Zaporizhzhya Sich, in the context of the general European tendency to strengthen the institution of the state, could not exist as an independent or autonomous entity. The Russian Empire would not have subdued the Zaporozhye Sich - the Cossacks and their lands would have been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. And the economic development of the Little Russian lands was not facilitated by the preservation of an archaic structure, whose representatives did not disdain even plundering actions in relation to trade caravans.
Preparations for the dissolution of the Zaporizhzhya Sich began even before the publication of the manifesto "On the destruction of the Zaporizhzhya Sich and on its assignment to the Novorossiysk province." On June 5, 1775, Lieutenant-General Pyotr Tekeli received an order, together with the formations of Major General Fyodor Chobra, to advance to Zaporozhye. In total, 50 cavalry regiments of hussars, Vlachs, Hungarians and Don Cossacks, as well as 10 thousand infantrymen, were concentrated under the command of Tekeli. Since the Zaporozhye Cossacks celebrated the green Christmastide, Tekeli's troops managed to occupy the fortifications of the Zaporozhians without a single shot. Lieutenant-General Tekeli gave the Koshevo Ataman Pyotr Kalnyshevsky two hours to make a decision, after which the latter gathered the foreman of the Cossacks. At the meeting, it was decided to surrender the Zaporozhye Sich, since resistance against 50 regiments of the regular army was practically pointless. However, Kalnyshevsky had to persuade ordinary Cossacks for a long time not to clash with the Russian army. Ultimately, the Cossacks left the Sich, after which the Tekeli corps artillery destroyed the empty Cossack fortress. So the existence of the Zaporizhzhya Sich ended. Lieutenant-General Tekeli was awarded a high state award for conducting the victorious operation - the Order of St. Alexander Nevsky. Most of the Cossacks after the dissolution of the Sich remained on the territory of Little Russia. Pyotr Kalnyshevsky, Pavel Golovaty and Ivan Globa were arrested and exiled to various monasteries for treason to the tsarist government. At the same time, Kalnyshevsky, who found himself on the Solovki, lived there until he was 112 years old. Some of the categorical opponents of Russian citizenship moved to the territory controlled by the Ottoman Empire, where they settled in the delta of the river. Danube and received permission from the Turkish sultan to create the Transdanubian Sich. In response to the Ports' favor, the Cossacks pledged to provide a five-thousand-strong army to carry out the orders of the Sultan, after which they participated in punitive operations against the periodically rebellious Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs. Thus, the "freedom-loving" and striving in every possible way to emphasize their Orthodox faith, the secheviki turned into the Sultan's punishers and suppressed their own co-religionists - the Balkan Christians. It is noteworthy that a century after the dissolution of the Sich, a regiment of Trans-Danube Cossacks, totaling 1,400 officers and Cossacks, took part in the Crimean War, although it did not enter into direct clashes with Russian troops.
Resettlement to the Kuban and Russian service
At the same time, there was no talk about the destruction of the Zaporozhye Cossacks and even about their "dispersal" across the vast lands of the Russian Empire. After the dissolution of the Sich, a part of the Zaporozhye Cossacks, loyal to the Russian Empire, with a total number of 12 thousand people, received the opportunity to enter the Russian military service - in the dragoon and hussar regiments of the Russian army. At the same time, the foreman was given the nobility - that is, there was no question of any real discrimination of the Cossacks in the Russian Empire. Of course, in the units of the regular army, the Cossacks who got used to the freemen had a hard time, so they left the service. In 1787, the foremen of the Cossacks submitted a petition to Empress Catherine, in which they expressed a desire to continue serving and defend the southern borders of the Russian Empire from threats from Ottoman Turkey. On the instructions of the empress, the famous commander Alexander Suvorov began to create a new army, who on February 27, 1788 took the oath of the "Troops of the Loyal Cossacks". The chiefs of the army were presented with banners and flags confiscated during the dissolution of the Sich. In 1790, two years after its creation, the Army of the Loyal Cossacks was renamed the Black Sea Cossack Army. After the end of the next Russian-Turkish war of 1787-1792, the Black Sea Cossack army, as a token of gratitude for the valor shown in the battles against the Turks, was allocated to the left bank of the Kuban. In the same 1792, the settlement of the Kuban lands by former Zaporozhye Cossacks began. In total, more than 26 thousand people moved to the Kuban. 40 kuren villages were founded, 38 of which received the old, Zaporozhye names. In fact, the Zaporozhye Sich, only already controlled by the Russian power, was reproduced on the Kuban land - under the name of the Black Sea and Azov, and then - the Kuban Cossack troops.
In the new place of residence, the Cossacks could continue their usual service as guards of the Russian border, only the Nogais and Caucasian highlanders became the main opponents here. Thus, we see that for their service to the sovereign, most of the former Cossacks were awarded the Kuban land, much more fertile than the lands of Little Russia. In addition, the Cossacks were able to continue to exist as an autonomous Black Sea Cossack army, preserving their customs and way of life. Where is the "genocide" and "discrimination" about which modern Ukrainian authors of a nationalist persuasion write? Moreover, that part of the "defectors" - the Trans-Danube Cossacks, who in 1828, fed up with life under the rule of the Turkish sultans, asked to be returned to Russian citizenship, were not subjected to repressions either. Emperor Nicholas I answered in the affirmative to the petition filed by the koshevoy ataman Josip Gladky, and allowed the Trans-Danube Cossacks to return to Russian citizenship, after which the Azov Cossack army was formed from them, which existed until 1860 and played an important role in the coastal protection of the Caucasus. After 1860, the Azov army was nevertheless disbanded, and its Cossacks were resettled to the Kuban and included in the Kuban Cossack army, formed on the basis of the Black Sea Cossack army, the Kuban and Khopersky regiments of the Caucasian line army. The further history of the Kuban Cossacks is the history of the heroic service of Russia. The Kuban Cossacks participated in most of the wars and conflicts of the Russian Empire, and then the Soviet Union. Heroes - Kuban people took part in the Victory Parade on Red Square in 1945. You can endlessly talk about the exploits of the Kuban Cossacks in the Russian-Turkish wars, the First World War, the Great Patriotic War, about the heroic path of our contemporaries who passed through Afghanistan and Chechnya, other "hot spots" in the near and far abroad. Despite the fact that Little Russian traditions and even language are still preserved in the Kuban, centrifugal and Russophobic tendencies have not spread among the descendants of the Zaporozhye Cossacks. During the Great Patriotic War, traitors from among the Cossack elite, who emigrated to Europe after the defeat of the Whites in the Civil War, tried in vain to raise the Cossacks against the Soviet regime. Indeed, the Cossacks suffered a lot during the Civil War and later - in the 1920s - 1930s, when the Soviet leadership pursued a policy of decossackization. However, even the horrors of decossackization did not force most of the Cossacks to betray Russia - if two corps manned by Cossacks fought on the side of the Wehrmacht, 17 Cossack corps fought in the ranks of the Soviet Army, and this is not counting the Cossacks who served in all branches of the army and in the navy. Attempts by Ukrainian nationalists to spread their propaganda to the territory of the Kuban, where in the villages they still speak practically the Little Russian dialect, were not crowned with success either during the Civil War, or during the Nazi occupation, or in the post-Soviet period of national history. But in Ukraine itself, a lot of Cossack organizations appeared, it is not clear where they came from "hetmans" and "atamans", tracing their genealogies to the Zaporozhye seches and reflecting on the cardinal differences between the Zaporozhian people and the Russians, about the unique tradition of self-government and the "imperial genocide" of Russia, which allegedly destroyed the democratic and freedom-loving community of the Cossacks.
Zaporizhzhya Sich and Ukrainian nationalism
The myth of the Zaporizhzhya Sich became the fundamental construct of the concept of Ukrainian nationalism. The fact is that, if you do not refer to the ancient Russian principalities, the Zaporizhzhya Sich was the only independent Slavic political formation on the territory of modern Ukraine that existed in the Late Middle Ages and Modern Times. Simply, Ukrainian nationalists simply have nowhere to take examples of sovereign Ukrainian statehood, so there is no other way out but to parasitize on the history of the Zaporizhzhya Sich.
- Maidan in Kiev. These are modern "Zaporozhye Cossacks"
Conflicts between Russia and individual hetmans of the Zaporizhzhya Sich were presented by tendentious Ukrainian researchers as examples of "Russian-Ukrainian wars" in which the "Asian Muscovy" was opposed by the self-governing, democratic Sich. In fact, the sovereignty of the Sich was very conditional - the Zaporozhye Cossacks rushed between the Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Sweden, again between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, looking for more profitable patrons. Yes, the military qualities and valor were not to be occupied by the Cossacks, but on the other hand, is this enough to build a truly sovereign and prosperous state? As practice has shown, no. The Zaporozhye Sich remained an archaic military democracy, incapable of organizing a full-fledged economy and conserving backwardness on the Little Russian lands. Moreover, the Zaporozhye Cossacks with their predatory campaigns themselves impeded the economic development of the region and, like any similar community, were doomed. The Russian Empire acted with them as humanely as possible, because if history had turned differently, and the lands of the Cossacks would have been part of the same Ottoman Turkey or even Sweden, it is likely that only memories of the Zaporozhye Cossacks would remain. The sultan or the king could simply physically destroy the freedom-loving Cossacks, and they would find who to populate the fertile lands of Little Russia with. The sane part of the Zaporozhye Cossacks understood this perfectly and saw their future exclusively together with Russia. The commonality of the language and the Orthodox faith contributed to the awareness of unity with the Russian world, albeit despite the obvious differences in the way of life, everyday life and culture of the Great Russians and Zaporozhians.
However, already in the twentieth century, Ukrainian nationalism, cultivated by the Austro-Hungarian and German political circles, and then by Great Britain and the United States, adopted the myth of the Zaporozhye Cossacks. On the other hand, the national policy of the Soviet state contributed to the cultivation of this myth. In fact, it was in the USSR that the final boundaries of the demarcation of the Great Russians and the Little Russians were created - through the pursued policy of "Ukrainization", which consisted not only in the creation of Ukraine as a political entity, including land that had never belonged to the Little Russian, but also in the approval of all possible myths that distorted the true history of the Little Russian lands and their population.
As N. Ulyanov noted in his time, “it was once taken for granted that the national essence of the people is best expressed by the party that is at the head of the nationalist movement. Nowadays, Ukrainian autonomy provides an example of the greatest hatred for all the most revered and most ancient traditions and cultural values of the Little Russian people: it persecuted the Church Slavonic language, which was established in Russia since the adoption of Christianity, and an even more severe persecution was erected on the all-Russian literary language, which lay for a thousand years at the heart of the writing of all parts of the Kiev State, during and after its existence. The self-styledists are changing the cultural and historical terminology, changing the traditional assessments of the heroes of the events of the past. All this means not understanding and not affirmation, but the eradication of the national soul”(N. Ulyanov The origin of Ukrainian nationalism. Madrid, 1966). These words are quite applicable to political speculations around the history of the Zaporizhzhya Sich. Ukrainian nationalists tried to forget everything that connected the Zaporozhye Cossacks with Russia. The very path of the Zaporozhye Cossacks in Ukrainian nationalist literature comes to an amazing end after Catherine's Manifesto on the dissolution of the Zaporozhye Sich. Two and a half centuries of the subsequent existence of the direct descendants of the Zaporozhye Cossacks - their blood relatives, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as part of the Russian state, is completely ignored.
- Heroes of the Kuban are real Cossacks, Defenders of the Motherland
Meanwhile, the Kuban Cossacks performed much more feats in the service of Russia than their ancestors - the Cossacks. One cannot look without trepidation at the slender ranks of the Kuban Cossacks in Circassians - the very soldiers who conquered the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus for Russia, maintained order on the southern borders of the Russian Empire, fought heroically in all the wars that the country waged in the 19th - 20th centuries. The Kuban Cossacks played an important role in ensuring public order during the reunification of the Crimea with Russia in 2014. The Kubans did not remain aloof from the events in Novorossiya. The confrontation between the Russian world and its worst enemies, which unfolded on the lands of Novorossiya, finally confirmed the loyalty of the true Cossacks of the Don and Kuban to Russia.
