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THE COSSACKS THEm HISTORY AND COUNTRY
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COSSACKS
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W. P. CRESSON
LATE CAPTAIN A. E. P., FOBMERLY SECRETARY OP THE AMERICAN EMBASSY AT PETROGBaD
AUTHOR OP "Persia"
NEW YORK
BRENTANO'S
COPYRIGHTED, IQIQ, BY BRENTANO'S
All rights reserved
TBB-FI.I UPTON -FKESS NORWOOD -MASS -U-S -A
TO irr BROTHER
EMLEN VAUX CRESSON
A. BEMINDEB OF OXTR JOUBNEY ALONG THX TEHERAN-BAGDAD CARAVAN TBAUi, 1900.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Origin of the "Free People" 1
II. The Zaporogian Cossacks 21
III. Yermak and the Cossack Conquest of
Siberia 44
IV« BoGDAN Hmelnicky: a Cossack National
Hero 65
V. The Struggle for the Ukraine 93
"VI. Mazeppa 104
VII. The End of the Free Ukraine: Little
Russia 129
X. The Cossacks of To-day: Organization
XI. The Cossacks of To-day: The Don 209
XII. The Frontiers of Europe 222
ILLUSTRATIONS
Zaporogian Cossacks Frontispiece
The old defenders of the Polish and Russian frontiers against the Tartars writing a letter of deftance to the Sultan.
FACING PAGB
Yermak's March in Siberia 44
[fragment illegible in the scan of the first edition]
And "Cossacks" of the "Wild Division-"
FOREWORD
TO weave a connected narrative from the known episodes of Cossack history would be a difficult and, in many ways, an impossible task. Such a work would, moreover, involve years of patient^^ preparation and research — for authentic records It concerning the subject are only to be found scat- V tered as isolated chapters or paragraphs among the I pages of Russian, Polish and Turkish historj'. y^
Poets and native bards were, generally speaking, the chief historians of the Cossacks or "Free People." The guiding traditions of their race, like those of all pastoral peoples, are to be found in songs, ballads and f olkstories, rather than in written records. Yet the national ideals thus orally maintained have lost nothing thereby in strength or influence. The Cossack ballads and hhorovod of the present day, like those of earlier times, teach love of freedom, loyalty to comrades and hetman, and a sturdy devotion to the privileges which the courage of their forefathers obtained for them in the past. Cossack folktales differ in many respects from the heroic legends and peasant by-lines of the North. They possess, moreover, a characteristic vi FOREWORD
strain — praise of joyous adventure and "glad living" — all their own. Filled with the spirit of the "Free Steppes,'* they tell of hard knocks given and taken for the sheer love of fight; of struggles desperate and bloody, followed by Gargantuan feasting and debauch. Doughty feats with the wine-cup are honoured almost equally with deeds of war. In all these romances the dominant note is the praise of personal liberty and of a freedom often degenerating into license.
While the Cossack did, or ballad-mongers, frankly celebrate the deeds of their heroes in a measure of exaggeration permitted by patriotism and poetic license, the more ambitious and labored ''historical" works of certain Pohsh and Russian writers only furnish an account so manifestly partial and prejudiced that they have little more scholarly authority than the Cossack folklore tales. A great historical romance has added to this confusion. All that is generally known abroad concerning the most glorious epoch of Cossack history is contained in the heroic pages of the late Henryk Sienkiewicz. In these masterpieces of fiction the part played by the tyrannical oppressors of the Cossack patriot Bogdan is lauded to the skies, and every act of his "base-bom" followers too often treated with a fine if unconvincingly nobiliary contempt.
To French historical authorities, Salvandy, Rambaud and notably Lesur (to whose Histoire des
FOREWORD vii