Two hundred and twenty-three years — from the founding of the first stronghold on the island of Khortytsia in 1552 to the manifesto of Empress Catherine II on 3 August 1775 — at the Dnipro Rapids there existed perhaps the most extraordinary political community of early modern Europe: a Cossack republic with an elected kosh otaman, a Black Council, its own fleet of chaika boats and its own code of honour. The Zaporozhian Host fought at the same time against the Crimea, against the Ottomans, against Poland and against Moscow — and at the same time served every one of those neighbours as a hired army. From here came Bohdan Khmelnytsky, here Sahaidachny, Sirko, Mazepa and Kalnyshevsky were forged. Today the Sich is a cornerstone of Ukrainian national mythology: the image of a free man who sets liberty above life itself.
The Wild Field: where the Cossacks came from
Until the middle of the 15th century the steppes between the Dnipro and the Don remained the Wild Field — a no man\'s land between the settled principalities of Lithuania and Poland and the nomads of the Crimean Khanate, which had broken away from the Golden Horde around 1441. Every summer Tatar raiding parties rode out for yasyr — human plunder — into Ukraine and Poland; in the 16th century up to 20,000 Ukrainians a year were held in Crimean and Turkish slavery. Ottoman Caffa in the Crimea was the largest slave market in Europe.
In this strip of danger and freedom a special kind of man took shape — the Cossack (from a Turkic word meaning "a free man," "a brigand on a horse"). These were fugitives from Lithuanian and Polish estates, petty gentry, peasants who would not bow to the serf yoke, deserters, Christianised Tatars, adventurers of every stamp. By the mid-16th century they were gathering into spontaneous bands under elected otamans, roaming the steppe, fishing, hunting and falling on the Tatar encampments. Only one thing was lacking — a permanent fortified base.
Khortytsia 1552: Vyshnevetsky founds the first Sich
That base became Khortytsia — the largest island of the Dnipro, below the Dnipro Rapids. In 1552 Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky, nicknamed "Baida" — a descendant of the Gediminids, a rebellious Volhynian magnate who made the Cossack way of life into his political programme — gathered a garrison on Khortytsia and built the first wooden fort with ramparts and towers. This was the first Zaporozhian Sich: "beyond the rapids," that is south of the Dnipro cataracts, in a natural fortress among the river channels.
Vyshnevetsky thought on a grand scale: he wanted to turn the Zaporozhe into a bridgehead for a Christian coalition campaign against the Crimea and Istanbul. He sought an alliance with Lithuania, with Poland, even with Ivan the Terrible; between 1556 and 1561 he went four times with the Cossacks against Perekop, burning the Tatar forts. But neither Sigismund II Augustus nor the Muscovite tsar dared to unroll a great war on the Ottomans. The Khortytsia fort was destroyed by the Tatars in 1557, but the idea was already alive: over the next two centuries the Sich would change its location eight times — Tomakivka, Bazavluk, Mykytyn Rih, Chortomlyk, Oleshky, Kamianka, Pidpilnianska — but the form would remain one and the same.
Caffa 1556: naval raids and the «chaika» boats
Very quickly the Zaporozhians turned into a formidable sea power. Their warship — the chaika — was a dugout from a single oak trunk, planked over and bound with reeds for buoyancy; up to 18 metres long, with 50 to 70 oarsmen and a single light cannon. The chaika feared no storms, easily outran the Ottoman galleys and could in a few days slip from the Dnipro to the Bosphorus. In 1556 the Cossacks together with Vyshnevetsky burned Caffa for the first time — the chief slave port of the Crimea, a town of 80,000.
From then on it was like a dam giving way. Sinope, Trebizond, the suburbs of Istanbul, Varna, Izmail — over the next century the Cossack chaika fleet scorched the Turkish coast of the Black Sea year after year. In 1606 the Cossacks took Varna, in 1614 Sinope, in 1615 they stood beneath the walls of Istanbul itself and burned the sultan\'s palaces at Yeniköy and Stenia. The Ottomans built a special Bosphorus squadron against them; sultans wrote letters of complaint to Warsaw and to Moscow. One of the loudest names in 17th-century Europe is neither Tamerlane nor Cromwell but "Zaporoże", the Zaporozhian Cossacks.
The death of Baida 1563: the martyrology begins
The fate of Dmytro Vyshnevetsky himself was tragic. In 1563 he set out with a small band on a Moldavian adventure — to try to put his own candidate on the Moldavian throne. He was betrayed and handed over to the Turks; Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent ordered Baida to be taken to Istanbul. There, according to one tradition, he was thrown from the wall into the Istanbul pit, where for three days he hung on a hook by the rib above the sea and died cursing Mohammed. An Ottoman chronicler writes: "this giaour died long, and never once did he bow his head."
So in Cossack culture there was born the image of the hero-martyr — the man who gives his life for the faith and for Cossack freedom. In folk dumas Baida would be the first in a long row: after him would come Kosynsky, Nalyvaiko, Sulyma, Khmelnytsky, Sirko, Mazepa, Kalnyshevsky. "Hey, in Tsargorod at the little market" — the song about Baida — was taken down from kobzars in the 17th century and is still sung in Ukraine today. This is the moment when the Cossack estate ceased being merely military and turned into a cultural idea.
How the Cossack republic worked
The Sich was not merely a fortress but a whole state in miniature. At its head stood the elected kosh otaman — chosen every year, most often re-elected, the loudest could sit three or four terms (Sirko — eight). Beside him were a judge, a scribe, an esaul. All important decisions (war, peace, embassies, executions) were taken at a general Black Council, in which every Cossack had one vote. The man who shouted loudest carried the day; sometimes councils turned into brawls and even killings.
The Host was divided into 38 kurins — something between a barracks and a company; a kurin was commanded by a kurin otaman. The lands outside the Sich proper were divided into palankas — administrative-territorial districts, each with its own colonel. Within the Sich a strict code of honour was in force: unconditional priority to a comrade, no harm to the unarmed, the right of duel. The famous peculiarity was the ban on women entering the territory of the Sich. Breach of this rule (as of theft from a comrade) was punished by death — the offender was buried up to the neck beside his murdered comrade, or tied to the muzzle of a cannon. This was not monasticism: married Cossacks lived with their families in winter farmsteads on the palankas, and came to the Sich itself only for the time of war.
The Kosynsky uprising 1591—1593: the first great rising
The first great clashes between the Zaporozhe and Poland began in the 1590s. Polish magnates — the Ostrozhskys, the Zaslavskys, the Żółkiewskis — were seizing lands along the Dnipro and laying obligations on Cossacks and peasants alike. In 1591 the registered Cossack hetman Kryshtof Kosynsky, a nobleman from Podlasia who had gone over to the Zaporozhians, rose up against the Ostrozhsky princes — formally over the seizure of lands granted to him, in reality over the long-gathered mass discontent with Polish pressure.
The rising swept through Kyiv region, Volhynia and Podilia. Peasants joined the Cossack army en masse; it looked as though the war would become all-Ukrainian. In May 1593 Kosynsky was crushed by Ostrozhsky at the battle of Piatky, and a few days later perished in an ambush near Cherkasy — by one account he was killed by servants of the starost of Cherkasy, Olexander Vyshnevetsky. Kosynsky did not win, but for the first time he showed: the Cossacks were not merely a frontier guard but a political force with which the magnates would have to reckon. Before the end of the century there would be seven such uprisings.
Nalyvaiko 1594—1596: execution in Warsaw
The next wave rose two years later. Severyn Nalyvaiko — son of a craftsman from Husiatyn, a former captain in the household troops of Prince Ostrozhsky — in 1594 led an insurgent force from the Zaporozhe against the Tatars, then routed the Hungarian garrisons in Moldavia, was returning with booty and on the way began to sack the estates of the Polish nobility in Podilia and Volhynia. Nalyvaiko\'s uprising became the largest before the Khmelnytchyna: thousands of peasants, registered Cossacks and Zaporozhians united under his banner.
The Polish crown hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski in May 1596 surrounded Nalyvaiko at Solonytsia in the Poltava region. After two weeks of siege the Cossack camp split — the registered Cossacks handed Nalyvaiko over to the Poles in exchange for their lives. Together with ten of his comrades he was brought to Warsaw, where in April 1597 he was publicly executed: legend has him placed in a red-hot copper bull and burned alive; more probably he was quartered. The Poles thought they had cowed the Cossacks for good. It turned out that the memory of Nalyvaiko became one more fire that would burn in the Cossack heart for fifty years — right up to Khmelnytsky.
Sahaidachny: the hetman who made the Zaporozhe a European power
At the beginning of the 17th century at the head of the Zaporozhian Host stood perhaps its greatest leader before Khmelnytsky — Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny (c. 1570—1622). A petty nobleman from the Sambir region, a graduate of the Ostroh Academy, he was elected hetman several times and rebuilt the Host from the ground up: he introduced regular-army discipline, reorganised the fleet, set up supply, formed regiments of European pattern out of Cossacks. It was he who turned the Zaporozhe from a band of free spirits into a proper army with which monarchs reckoned.
In 1616 Sahaidachny carried out his most resounding feat — the capture of Caffa. With 150 chaika boats and 4,000 Cossacks he broke into the Black Sea, landed beside Caffa, stormed the city, burned the Ottoman galleys in the harbour and freed about 14,000 Christian slaves. Europe began to speak of him as a "new Tamerlane." No less important: Sahaidachny was the first to put seriously the question of defending Orthodoxy within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He enrolled the whole Host in the Kyiv Brotherhood, restored the Orthodox hierarchy in 1620 (Iov Boretsky as Metropolitan of Kyiv), and so in effect made the Zaporozhe the religious and cultural support of Ukrainian Orthodoxy. This was to be the ideology of the next century.
The Khotyn war 1621: the Cossacks save Poland
In 1621 the young and ambitious Sultan Osman II sent against Poland an army of 150,000 — formally in revenge for the Cossack sea raids, in reality to bring Poland into the orbit of the Ottoman Empire. Poland could put against him no more than 35,000 troops. King Sigismund III Vasa knew that without the Cossacks it was the end. He sent envoys to Sahaidachny; in reply the hetman brought 40,000 Zaporozhians to the Dnister, to the fortress of Khotyn.
The battle lasted from the end of August to the beginning of October 1621. The Turks threw five assaults at the Polish-Cossack camp — and all five were beaten off. The Cossack regiments bore the main blow; Sahaidachny himself was hit in the arm by a poisoned arrow during the fighting, and a year later died of it. The Ottomans lost about 80,000 killed and wounded; Sultan Osman II retreated to Istanbul and as early as May 1622 was strangled by the Janissaries for the failure of the campaign. Poland was saved. But Sahaidachny died in Kyiv in April 1622; at the funeral pupils of the Kyiv Brotherhood read over him an "Epitaph" in verse. Instead of promised privileges to the registered Cossacks the Sejm two years later cut the register from 20,000 down to 6,000. Poland forgot too quickly to whom she owed her existence.
Triasylo 1630, Sulyma 1635: the uprisings go on
After Sahaidachny\'s death the waves of uprisings did not subside. In 1625 the Zhmailo uprising broke out, in 1630 — Taras Triasylo (Taras Fedorovych). This kosh otaman with a 30,000-strong army crushed the Polish banners near Pereyaslav in the famous "Taras\'s Night," in which a large part of the Polish force perished. The Pereyaslav agreement of the same year raised the register to 8,000 — but again Poland deceived, the promises were not kept.
In 1635 the Polish Sejm took a decision to build on the right bank of the Dnipro, opposite the first cataract, the fortress of Kodak — to control movement to the Sich and to block peasant flight to the Cossacks. Kosh otaman Ivan Sulyma, returning from a successful sea raid and bypassing this fortress, learned of it and in August 1635 attacked at night. Kodak was taken, the garrison cut down, the fortress burned. But the registered Cossacks, in exchange for a promise of pardon, handed Sulyma over to the Poles; he with four comrades was brought to Warsaw, where in November 1635 he was quartered in the square of the Old Town. Poland did not forgive this: rebuilding Kodak, she began to press still harder.
Kodak: the fortress they fought against for half a century
Kodak was not an ordinary fortress. The French engineer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, specially invited by the Polish hetman Koniecpolski, built it according to the latest word of European fortification: four bastions, ditches up to 6 metres deep, ramparts 10 metres high, a permanent garrison of 200 troops and 24 cannon. Geography itself was on the Poles\' side: Kodak stood on a high crag directly over the first cataract and controlled all navigation on the Dnipro.
For the Zaporozhians Kodak was the symbol of everything they hated: a Polish garrison in the heart of the Wild Field, right on the umbilical cord that joined the Sich to the outer world. Sulyma in 1635 took Kodak — the garrison then sat carelessly and was not expecting a blow. The Poles rebuilt the fortress still stronger. In the following years Kodak withstood several more sieges; only Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648, at the very start of the Great War, succeeded in taking it for good. This symbolic blow was no accident: in breaking Kodak the Cossacks were breaking the very idea of "Polish order" in the Ukrainian steppe. In 1709 the Russian troops of Menshikov would raze the fortress for the last time — so that no one would ever again have a defensive base against Moscow. In the steppe only a hill and a memory remained.
The Ordinance of 1638: a ten-year "golden peace"
The series of uprisings of 1635—1638 (Sulyma, Pavliuk, Ostrianyn, Hunia) had exhausted both sides. In 1638 the Sejm of the Commonwealth passed the "Ordinance of the Registered Zaporozhian Host that is in the service of the Commonwealth." Its terms were draconian: the register was cut from 8,000 down to 6,000; the kosh otaman and all colonels were to be appointed by the Polish king (not elected); the Cossacks lost the right of self-government; non-registered Cossacks were turned back into peasants; a permanent "commission" of Polish officers was sent to the Sich.
The Poles themselves called it the "golden peace" (złota wolność) — ten years, from 1638 to 1648, in which peace seemed to reign in the Ukrainian lands. But it was the peace of a graveyard: the pressure of magnates was rising, serfdom was spreading into new regions, non-registered Cossacks were fleeing to the Sich by the thousand, the Union of 1596 was squeezing out the Orthodox. This "peaceful" decade turned out to be the last quiet before the storm. As Hrushevsky wrote, "the Cossacks furled their banners, but wrapped themselves in them, as in robes, awaiting their hour." The hour came in January 1648 at Khortytsia.
January 1648: at the Sich Khmelnytsky is elected
The Chyhyryn captain of the registered army Bohdan Khmelnytsky had his own scores to settle with the Polish authorities: the sub-starosta Czapliński had raided his farmstead, killed his small son and carried off his second wife Motrona. Petitions through every instance, up to King Władysław IV himself, brought nothing. In December 1647 Khmelnytsky with a handful of comrades fled to the Zaporozhian Sich — at that time it stood on the island of Mykytyn Rih.
In January 1648 the Black Council at the Sich elected Khmelnytsky hetman. He concluded with the Crimean khan İslâm III Giray an alliance which was gold to him: Tatar cavalry covered the Cossack infantry, Cossack artillery broke through any Polish banner. In May 1648 at Yellow Waters and Korsun two Polish armies, one after the other, ceased to exist. The hetmans Potocki and Kalinowski found themselves in Tatar captivity. By summer all Ukraine — from Lviv to Poltava — was in revolt. The great war that began at the Sich transformed the Zaporozhe from an estate-republic into the core of a new state — the Hetmanate, which would last 134 years. From this moment on the Sich was no longer simply a fortress but the symbolic heart of Cossack Ukraine.
The Ruin: when one state turns into three hetmans
Khmelnytsky died in August 1657 without having had time to fix his work politically. Over the next 30 years the Ukrainian Hetmanate was torn into three, then four pieces. Ukrainian historiography has rightly called this epoch "the Ruin" — after the title of a famous poem by Kulish. While the Khmelnytchyna lasted, the Zaporozhian Sich had its word in every political combination: under Khmelnytsky it was the word of an ally, under his successors the word of opposition.
Ivan Vyhovsky in 1658 concluded with Poland the Treaty of Hadiach (a Grand Duchy of Rus as a third component of the Commonwealth); Moscow attacked, and at the battle of Konotop in 1659 the Cossacks and Tatars destroyed the 30,000-strong army of Prince Trubetskoy. Yurii Khmelnytsky, the son of Bohdan, went from Polish service into Muscovite and back; the right-bank hetmans Teteria, Doroshenko, the left-bank Briukhovetsky, Mnohohrishny, Samoilovych — each had his own piece of Ukraine, his own embassy in Istanbul, his own in Moscow, his own in Warsaw. Turks, Tatars, Poles, Muscovites, Swedes — all walked through the Ukrainian steppe. The Zaporozhe, with the Andriivsky Kosh at Chortomlyk, in this chaos became the last bastion of Cossack freedom: there fled those who recognised neither Moscow, nor Poland, nor Istanbul.
The Black Council at Nizhyn 1663: chaos in a mirror
The most famous event of the Ruin was the Black Council at Nizhyn in June 1663. On a field outside the town three pretenders to the hetman\'s mace gathered: Ivan Briukhovetsky (the Zaporozhian candidate, supported by the Muscovite voivodes), Yakym Somko (the acting hetman and uncle of Yurii Khmelnytsky), and Vasyl Zolotarenko (colonel of Nizhyn). Each had his own party; each was ready to settle the matter with fists and sabres.
And settle it they did. The Zaporozhians, peasants and lesser Cossacks, falling upon the Muscovite banners, shouted: "Somko and Zolotarenko on the stake!" — and in the press of bodies trampled and crushed several dozen noblemen. Briukhovetsky was proclaimed hetman. A few days later Somko and Zolotarenko were executed at Borzna; they became two more passion-bearers of this endless ruin. Panteleimon Kulish in 1857 would write a historical novel about it, "The Black Council" — the first modern Ukrainian historical novel. In it the Black Council appears not merely as an episode but as a metaphor for all the Ukraine of the Ruin: when a people that has the right to a vote can agree on nothing except whom to hang.
Sirko: eight times kosh otaman, sixty-five victorious campaigns
Out of the chaos of the Ruin shone the most brilliant military figure in Zaporozhian history — Ivan Dmytrovych Sirko (c. 1610—1680). He was born in the village of Merefa in the Sloboda region, went young to the Sich, fought for Khmelnytsky at Yellow Waters and Korsun, served in the French army at the battle of Dunkirk in 1645. After the Khmelnytchyna he settled in the Zaporozhe and over the next twenty years was eight times elected kosh otaman — a record never matched by anyone else.
In his whole life Sirko led, by various reckonings, about 65 campaigns — and lost not one. His tactics were brilliantly simple: swift raids by small detachments of 1,000—3,000 Cossacks, a strike at the very heart of the enemy, retreat before he could concentrate. In 1675 at Sivash he freed from the Tatars 13,000 Christian slaves; the Crimeans nicknamed him "Urus-shaitan". Sirko manoeuvred between Moscow, Poland, the Crimea and Istanbul, was four times exiled to Siberia (Tobolsk), and four times returned — for without him the Sich could not do. He died at Hrushivka in August 1680; legend has it that the Cossacks heaped so much earth on his grave that a kurhan rose. They say that for long afterwards a handful was taken from the kurhan into battle — as an amulet of victory.
The letter to the Sultan: a legend that became a painting
About 1676, when the Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV, intoxicated by his victories in Europe, sent the Zaporozhians a letter demanding their submission to his power, at the Sich — under kosh otaman Sirko — they are said to have composed their famous reply. The letter began with the words: "Thou, Sultan, devil of the Turks, damned devil\'s brother and comrade, secretary to Lucifer himself" — and went on for several paragraphs more of refined abuse, the turns of which the Cossacks had so carefully honed over two centuries of war with the Crimea and Istanbul.
Whether this letter ever really existed historians dispute to this day; it is probably folklore that took shape later, or perhaps a real joke which memory has magnified. But the image proved stronger than factual accuracy. In 1880—1891 the Russian painter Ilya Repin (born at Chuhuiv in the Sloboda region, of Cossack stock) painted his enormous canvas "Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Sultan of Turkey." On the canvas are Sirko, the scribe, a cluster of Cossack faces, each with its own expression of laughter; Tsar Alexander III bought the picture for 35,000 roubles. Today it hangs in the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. The image of the Zaporozhian laughing in the face of the Sultan of the world has entered the very DNA of Ukrainian national consciousness.
The Eternal Peace 1686: when Ukraine is divided without her
While the Zaporozhians warred with the Crimeans, the European capitals were redistributing Ukraine on paper. In 1654 Khmelnytsky concluded with Moscow the Pereyaslav Agreement — entering under the protection of the tsar on terms of autonomy. Moscow from the start understood the agreement otherwise — as subjecthood. The Treaty of Andrusovo of 1667 already officially divided Ukraine: the Left Bank and Kyiv — to Moscow, the Right Bank — to Poland, the Zaporozhe — joint possession (the so-called condominium). This was the catastrophe of the Ruin.
And on 6 May 1686 in Moscow the "Eternal Peace" between Poland and Moscow was signed. This was the final partition: Left-Bank Ukraine, Kyiv with its environs and the Zaporozhe passed under the rule of the Muscovite tsar. For renouncing Kyiv Poland received 146,000 gold roubles; Ukraine was not asked at all. Neither Polish nor Muscovite rulers considered Ukrainian statehood a subject of international law; it existed exactly as long as it could defend itself by arms. This lesson of 1686 (and a similar one in 1772, with the partition of Poland) would run as a thread through Ukrainian history: when you are being divided — you keep silent, or you are silenced forever. The Zaporozhe would win for itself a shadow of autonomy for forty more years — but from 1686 it lay formally within the borders of the Russian state.
The Mazepa era 1687—1709: the Hetmanate at its height
In 1687 to the hetman\'s mace was elected Ivan Mazepa (1639—1709) — a man of unique learning for those times (the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, the University of Krakow, the University of Padua, service with the Polish king John Casimir). He became one of the richest landowners in Europe, with 100,000 peasants in his hereditary holdings. Tsar Peter I trusted him unconditionally and rewarded him with the title of "Prince of the Holy Roman Empire."
Over twenty-two years of his hetmanship Mazepa built what is rightly called the "golden age" of the Hetmanate. He founded and restored 26 churches in a baroque style now called "Ukrainian" or "Mazepan": the Cathedral of St. Sophia, the Golden-Domed St. Michael\'s, the Brotherhood Monastery, churches at Chernihiv and Pereyaslav. He financed the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (where Prokopovych and Skovoroda studied). The Hetmanate had a developed system of justice, schools (in the 1670s — about 40,000 pupils in schools at the Orthodox brotherhoods), its own currency, its own ambassadors in Warsaw, Istanbul and Stockholm. It was a real European state within the Russian empire — and the more terrible was the wager that Mazepa would make on it in 1708.
Hordiienko and the Swedish bet 1708
By 1708 Mazepa had reached a hard conclusion: Tsar Peter I would do away with Ukrainian autonomy in the shortest possible time. Russian orders to the Hetmanate for the compulsory participation of Cossacks in distant construction works (the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Ladoga Canal) were a means of methodical exhaustion of the Host. At the beginning of the Northern War, 30,000 Muscovite troops were already on Ukrainian territory. Mazepa played one of the riskiest games of his epoch: on 26 October 1708 with his staff and a 4,000-strong guard he secretly went over to the side of King Charles XII of Sweden.
Not everyone answered his call. Most of the left-bank colonels remained on the tsar\'s side — they feared the Swedes would not hold out in Ukraine. But kosh otaman Kost Hordiienko led the entire Zaporozhe with him: in March 1709 about 8,000 Zaporozhians left the Sich and joined Charles XII. Tsar Peter reacted at once: under threat of capital punishment to anyone harbouring "Mazepists," he turned them into "traitors." On 8 November 1708 the capital of the Hetmanate, Baturyn, was destroyed — Menshikov\'s Russian troops passed through the town with the sword, slaughtering every living thing (by various estimates 6,000—15,000 people), and burned the town itself. The reckoning for Mazepa\'s choice began before he had even concluded the alliance with the Swedes.
Poltava 1709: catastrophe
On 27 June (8 July New Style) 1709 at Poltava two armies met: the 42,000-strong Russian one under the command of Tsar Peter I and about 25,000 Swedes and Cossacks under Charles XII and Mazepa. The battle lasted a few hours. The Swedish infantry, exhausted by a six-week siege of Poltava, fell under the fire of the Russian artillery; the Swedish cavalry was broken; Charles XII himself, wounded in the leg, barely managed to escape southward. Russian losses — about 1,300 killed; Swedish — about 7,000 killed and another 17,000 captured, including nearly the whole Swedish army. Charles XII with Mazepa and a few hundred horsemen broke through to the Turkish dominions at Bender in Moldavia.
Poltava changed the geopolitical map of Europe for good: Sweden as a great power ceased to exist, the Russian Empire was born. For Ukraine the catastrophe was deeper still. On 22 September 1709 at Bender died Ivan Mazepa — by tradition not of his wounds but of a heart attack and exhaustion; he was 70 years old. With him died the hope of restoring the European orientation of the Hetmanate. His successor Pylyp Orlyk in April 1710 drew up with the Cossacks a Constitution — one of the world\'s first documents of constitutionalism, providing for separation of powers, parliamentarism and the rights of the hetman\'s council; but the document was nowhere applied and remained an act of emigration.
Chortomlyk May 1709: Menshikov destroys the Sich
The punishment of the Zaporozhe for its support of Mazepa Peter I entrusted to Alexander Menshikov. In May 1709, even before the Battle of Poltava, Russian troops under the command of Colonel Pyotr Yakovlev approached the Chortomlyk Sich (at that time the main one, the seventh by count, founded in 1652). The Zaporozhians under kosh otaman Yakym Bohush at first beat off the first assault; but after the regiments of the Zaporozhian deserter Hnat Halahan, who knew all the approaches and the weak spots of the fortress, joined the Russians, the Sich fell.
The Russian troops plundered Chortomlyk to the last grain, burned everything, and put the kosh otaman and several hundred Cossacks to the sword on the spot. The rest fled into the steppe. Tsar Peter issued an edict forbidding peasants to harbour Zaporozhians and promising death to anyone who did. The Chortomlyk Sich ceased to exist — and for the first time in 157 years there was no free Cossack state at the Dnipro Rapids. The remaining Zaporozhians went under the rule of the Crimean khan. This was the end of the first epoch of the Sich — the epoch that had begun with Khortytsia in 1552.
The Oleshky Sich 1711—1734: under a Crimean roof
About 7,000 Zaporozhians under kosh otaman Kost Hordiienko, after Poltava and the destruction of Chortomlyk, went under the rule of the Crimean khan Devlet II Giray. He received them in 1711 at Oleshky on the left bank of the Dnipro, in the lower reaches, not far from the Kinburn Spit. So arose the Oleshky Sich — formally under the protectorate of the Crimean Khanate and correspondingly of the Ottoman Empire.
For twenty-three years the Zaporozhians lived in a foreign land. Khan Devlet used them as a heavy cavalry force in his campaigns; he demanded a tribute (one thousand gold pieces yearly) and participation in the wars against Moscow. Though the Cossacks preserved their organisation — kosh otaman, esauls, Black Council — the position was humiliating: in fact they had become mercenaries of the khanate. In 1728 the Cossacks petitioned Empress Anna Ioannovna for permission to return under Muscovite rule — and received a refusal. Only after Empress Anna Ioannovna in 1733 began another Russo-Turkish war and was in need of Zaporozhian cavalry, in January 1734 she issued the "Lubny Letter" permitting the Zaporozhians to return. Some 7,000 Cossacks under kosh otaman Ivan Biletsky set out from Oleshky homeward.
The New Sich 1734: return to the Pidpilna
For the new Sich they chose the right bank of the river Pidpilna (a tributary of the Dnipro), 5 kilometres from the former Chortomlyk Sich. In March 1734 the Cossacks under kosh otaman Biletsky raised here ramparts, redoubts and the Church of the Protection — everything as tradition required. So began the life of the New (Pidpilnianska) Sich, which would last exactly forty-one years.
The terms of the return were heavy. The Sich passed under the direct subordination of the Russian command; the kosh otaman was now confirmed by the Senate; all important decisions went through the Kyiv provincial chancery. The Zaporozhians became Russian "irregular troops" — something like the Cossack regiments of the Don and the Ural. But internal self-government was preserved: the Black Council, elections, palankas, kurins. Economically the Sich flourished: winter farmsteads, cattle, fishing, trade with the Crimea, Poland and Turkey were all developed. In the 1750s and 1770s, on the territory of the Lower Zaporozhian Host lived, by various estimates, between 50,000 and 100,000 souls; the Sich itself numbered up to 13,000 Cossacks. Paradoxically, the New Sich was the wealthiest period in the history of the Zaporozhe — and, as we shall see, that was one of the reasons for its end.
Kalnyshevsky 1762—1775: the last kosh otaman
It was destined to Petro Kalnyshevsky (1690—1803) to be the last kosh otaman of the Zaporozhian Sich — a man who would live 113 years and spend twenty-five of them in solitary confinement. Born into a Cossack family in the Poltava region, Kalnyshevsky climbed every rung at the Sich: kurin officer, esaul, military judge, and finally ten times elected kosh otaman in 1762—1775, with short interruptions.
Kalnyshevsky was a fine manager. During his kosh-otamanship the Zaporozhians established more than 4,000 winter farmsteads, schools (more than 30), built new churches, organised the export of salt and fish. The kosh otaman himself built at Lokhvytsia at his own expense the Pokrov Church, at Mezhyhirya another monastery cathedral, and financed the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Kalnyshevsky was the type of a new man: a reformer who was trying to transform the Sich into a normal province of the Russian Empire while preserving its autonomy. This was strategically impossible: for the empire an autonomous Zaporozhe was an anachronism, and the wealth of its economy a temptation. Kalnyshevsky was unwittingly preparing his state for the same end for which the enemy too was preparing it.
The Russo-Turkish war 1768—1774: the Zaporozhians fight for the last time
In 1768 the Russian Empire began another war with the Ottoman Empire — one of the most successful in its whole history. The war lasted six years. The Zaporozhian cavalry under the command of Kalnyshevsky played a key role in it: the Zaporozhians took part in the assaults on Turkish fortresses on the Danube and in the Crimea (Kinburn, Perekop, Ochakov), in naval raids on the Black Sea, in the battle of Kagul. Their chaika boats once again sailed into the Black Sea — for the last time.
The war ended with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 21 July 1774. It was a colossal victory: the Crimean Khanate was recognised as independent from the Ottoman Empire (in fact under Russian control), Russia obtained access to the Black Sea, the coast from the Dnipro to the Buh. Ukraine no longer faced any threat from the Crimea. But at exactly this moment the Zaporozhe became superfluous. Two hundred years of the Sich\'s existence had military sense for exactly as long as the Tatars rode out for yasyr. Now the Crimea ceased to be a threat — and the Zaporozhe was transformed from an outpost into an anachronism. Four months after Küçük Kaynarca, Catherine II decided: the Sich was no longer needed.
3 August 1775: Catherine\'s manifesto, the end of the Sich
On 4—5 June 1775 about 30,000 Russian troops under the command of Lieutenant-General Pyotr Tekeli, returning from the Turkish war, surrounded the New Sich. The Zaporozhians, not expecting an attack, had not had time to organise a defence. Kosh otaman Kalnyshevsky at the Black Council persuaded the Cossacks to surrender without a fight — the old wise politician understood that battle would lead to nothing but bloodshed. The Sich was disbanded without a single shot.
And on 3 August 1775 at St. Petersburg, Empress Catherine II signed the Manifesto on the Destruction of the Zaporozhian Sich. It stated, among other things: "These Zaporozhian Cossacks, their home-grown, base manner of life and uncultured behaviour, are incapable of bringing any benefit to the state and serve as no firm pillar of the empire, but on the contrary — by seizing into their wilfulness of lands, they seek to build a self-willed, brigand and turbulent habit." The Lower Zaporozhian Host ceased to exist after 223 years. The lands of the Sich were divided between the state, Prince Potemkin and his favourites; some Cossacks registered as peasants, others as new Russian regiments, a part (5,000) fled across the Danube and founded the Trans-Danubian Sich under the rule of the Sultan. The wheel of history had come full circle.
Solovetsky exile: 25 years in a solitary cell
The old kosh otaman Kalnyshevsky — at that time 85 years old — was arrested in June 1775 together with the military judge Holovaty and the scribe Hloba. The investigation lasted a year; the formal charge was "treason, brigandage, preparation of a rebellion." The empress graciously commuted the death sentence to lifelong exile. In 1776 Kalnyshevsky was sent to the north of the White Sea, to the Solovetsky Monastery, and walled up in a solitary cell measuring 1.5 by 2 metres.
There he sat for 25 years. By 1801, when Alexander I already reigned in Russia, the new emperor on the advice of his counsellors issued a decree of pardon for the "Solovetsky prisoners." The warden opened the cell — and saw an old man of 111 with a grey beard down to the waist. Kalnyshevsky refused to return to Ukraine: he had grown into the monastery itself. He lived at Solovki another two years and died in 1803 at the age of 113. On his grave by the Cathedral of the Transfiguration there still stands a plain stone with the inscription: "Kosh of the Zaporozhe, Petro Kalnyshevsky." In 2008 the Ukrainian Orthodox Church canonised him as a saint. Today Ukrainian pilgrims come to the Solovetsky cell where he sat for a quarter of a century.
Legacy: why the Sich still lives
The Sich has been gone for two and a half centuries — yet it still works as one of the strongest pillars of Ukrainian national consciousness. Where did the Kosh go after 1775? A part of the Cossacks twenty years later was transferred to the Kuban and founded there the Black Sea Cossack Host; their descendants — the Kuban Cossacks — still preserve the Ukrainian language in some villages. Another part, that which went beyond the Danube into Turkey, in 1828 went over to the Russian side during another war and was resettled on the shore of the Sea of Azov. The Zaporozhian cavalry was dissolved into other Cossack hosts of the empire; on its former lands were built Katerynoslav (today\'s Dnipro) and Kherson.
But the real legacy of the Sich is not in regiments. It is in Ukrainian culture. The kobzars of the 19th century — Ostap Veresai, Ivan Kravchenko-Kriukovsky — carried the Cossack dumas across the centuries. Taras Shevchenko made Cossack Ukraine the centre of his "Kobzar" (1840) and "Haidamaky"; his image of the Zaporozhian fighting for freedom became the foundation of the national canon. Nikolai Gogol in "Taras Bulba" (1835/1842) immortalised Zaporozhian life — even if with an admixture of Russian imperial sentiment. The modern symbols of the Ukrainian state — the blue-and-yellow flag, the trident (though Kyivan, yet popularised through the Cossack banners), the very idea of "a free people that chooses its own government" — all of this comes directly from the Zaporozhe. In 2022, when Ukrainian soldiers went into battle against the Russian invasion, on their berets and shoulder patches there still stood "Slava Ukraini!" — a slogan first uttered in the 1840s at a gathering of Cossack descendants. The Sich was destroyed — but the idea it nourished proved stronger than all the empires that suffocated it. Perhaps that is the chief lesson of the history of the Zaporozhe: the state is mortal, the spirit is not.