In contrast to agrarian tribute paid by many settlers in the Russian border areas which the Cossacks were protecting (and in some instances repressing) and the fur pelt tribute paid by the small people of the North, the Cossacks fulfilled their commitments to the Tsar by supplying men for military service. This allowed the Cossacks to pursue their unique mix of soldiering and agriculture, an often precarious balance (Barrett, 2). This resettlement was generally achieved by giving the Cossacks preferable land grants as incentive to move into these areas and establish military colonies.
#WHAT IS COSSACKS FREE#
While the original Cossack settlements, free of state interference, did spring up in Ukraine (leading them to claim the Cossacks as their own in a related process of ‘invented tradition’), the bulk of Cossack settlements were actually commissioned by the Russian autocracy in order to control their new acquisitions which stretched across the Steppe and South into the Caucasus. The Russian state has generally viewed the Cossacks as being one and the same with ethnic Russians, and the Soviet state went so far as to deny them any separate cultural heritage, partly as punishment for their siding with the Whites in the Russian revolution (O’Rourke, 4). Despite this conflation with a central Asian province, the origin of the Cossacks is far more European. It is really a Westernized version of the word Kazakh, which is a Russified version of the Turkic Qazaq. The very term Cossack is deceptive in its meaning.
The various Cossack uprisings, most importantly the Pugachev rebellion, also occupy a central mythicized aspect of their history. Nonetheless, the Cossack’s history is not one of unwavering support for the state. Indeed, the Cossacks were central in maintaining the hegemony of the Russian Empire in its outlying frontier territories. While it is difficult to define the many roles which the Cossacks fulfilled within the Russian Empire, their importance is undeniable. After realizing the potential value of the Cossacks, the Russian state began in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to establish additional Cossack outposts in newly acquired territories. These communities, which eventually came to be referred to as Cossack “hosts”, were subsequently put to work maintaining order on the fringes of the expanding Russian Empire and used as a source of skilled warriors for fighting the tsar’s battles in far away lands. The Cossacks were semi-autonomous and militaristic communities that first appeared along the Dnieper and Don rivers in the area of modern-day Ukraine.