DON COSSACKS
Protecting Russia against raids from the Crimean Tatars and to a lesser extent the Kalmyks in the seventeenth century were the Cossacks of the Don. They were cited in the lower Don already in the late fifteenth century; by the seventeenth century they were a populous and powerful band, much more politically cohesive than the Iaik Cossacks. Inhabiting space between the Russian and Ottoman empires, they established fortresses to protect themselves from Nogai, Crimean Tatar, or Kalmyk raids and themselves lived the typical raiding life. But they were also drawn into trading information with Muscovite authorities in return for guns and supplies, fulfilling a valuable surveillance function as Russia moved south. By mid-sixteenth century Don Cossacks had forged a reciprocal relationship with the Russian empire, receiving generous annual grain payments and the privilege of trade in Russian towns in return for serving in campaigns (such as 1552 and 1556 Kazan and Astrakhan) and spying.
The Don Cossack territory was a self-governing enclave in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, divided into Cossack stanitsy ruled by Cossack officers and Cossack law. Their leaders skillfully negotiated their deals with Muscovy: Don Cossacks paid no direct tax to Russia, their regimental and governing institutions were not infringed upon, they did not permit serfdom, and by treaty they enjoyed personal liberties including the right to distinctive colorful dress patterned on Turkish garb. Russian speakers, they were known in the seventeenth century for mixing pagan practice with nominal Orthodoxy—the first Orthodox church in the Don Cossack capital of Cherkassk came under Peter I—and many became adherents of the Old Belief.
When in the seventeenth century local social tensions rose, Don Cossack elites found common ground with Russia. Floods of in-migrating Russian peasants had been winning status as Cossacks but found themselves unable to acquire land; they complained of poverty and inequitable treatment by their richer Cossack brethren. Overturning a time-honored Cossack tradition of integrating newcomers, the Don Cossack elite sided with Russia, rejecting the migrants' claims to Cossack status and joining with Russian search parties to deport runaways to Russia. When Russia concluded peace agreements with the Ottoman empire in 1681 (Bakhchisarai), Don Cossacks deferred to Muscovy, agreeing to curtail raiding into Ottoman territories and even respecting borders drawn by the treaty. Brian Boeck and Peter Perdue both remark that this was long before European states fixed such firm territorial borders in Europe. When poor Don Cossacks rose in rebellion under Stepan Razin in 1670-1 (and later under Kondratii Bulavin in 1706-9), the leadership assisted tsarist troops in bloody repression, capturing Stepan Razin and turning him over to Moscow. When Razin was executed in Moscow in 1671, he was paraded through the streets, but only after he had been made to change from his colorful Cossack clothing to sackcloth. Such loyalty on the part of the Don Cossack elites gave them leverage to renegotiate with Moscow to maintain their most important autonomies.
MODERN-DAY UKRAINIAN AND BELARUS' AN LANDS
Muscovy encountered another potent group of Cossacks—those on the Dnieper— in the second half of the seventeenth century, but to understand the importance that these Cossacks played in the Russian empire, a look back at the cultural and political history of these lands is required. As we have noted, in the vacuum of power accompanying the weakening of the Horde in the second half of the fourteenth century, the Grand Dukes of Lithuania claimed Belarus'an- and Ukrainian-speaking lands of the Kyiv Rus' state. Settled by East Slavic Orthodox Christians, since the eleventh century these lands had been dividing into small principalities ruled by branches of the Kyiv dynasty. Upon conquest those princes were integrated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, maintaining local power and serving as governors and administrators. In 1387 the Grand Dukes entered into a dynastic alliance with the kingdom of Poland, which relationship deepened until in 1569 the two states united in a "Commonwealth," according to which the southernmost lands, called at the time the "Rus'" palatinates, were transferred into the kingdom of Poland, while the Grand Duchy retained control of the areas that became modern Belarus'. The Commonwealth had a single ruler (as had been the case since 1387, occasionally honored in the breach), a single noble-dominated parliamentary system, and a single foreign policy. At the same time, significant differences were accommodated: parallel laws and legal systems, two armies, two state budgets.
Across the centuries from 1387, even though elites in these Orthodox, East Slavic-speaking areas retained their status, lands, and religion, they also experienced political and cultural Polonization. At politically sensitive moments in the fifteenth century they demanded and won the extensive rights, privileges, and institutions of the Polish nobility, including a parliamentary political system with representative institutions at county and national levels, an elected king, virtually exclusive access to landholding and serfs, preferential position in the economy including the right to produce alcoholic beverages, freedom from taxation, legal right to resist the king, and legal guarantees of these rights by charter. Orthodox princes and nobles flourished with the rest of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the Commonwealth became a major exporter of grain, cattle, and other goods to the growing cities of western Europe. The nobility pushed laws through Parliament to enserf peasant labor and to undercut townsmen in the marketplace, although on the Baltic shore German-language towns from Gdansk to Riga and Reval flourished. As Natalia Iakovenko has shown in her studies of the mentality of the Orthodox princely elite, they shared in common the warrior ethos and culture of the Commonwealth's nobility, even while maintaining a firm sense of their Ruthenian identity.
Polish-Lithuanian lands experienced all the waves of cultural change of the Catholic medieval and early modern times; high Gothic adorned fifteenth-century cathedrals, followed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Renaissance neoclassical architecture and a classical curriculum developed from close ties to Italian universities. Printing spread quickly from central Europe to Poland to Ruthenian lands in the sixteenth century, as well as the use of Polish, Old Ukrainian, and Old Belarus'an vernacular in public documentation (replacing Latin). Literacy became standard for noblemen and wealthy burghers. Towns received self-governing rights according to Magdeburg and other urban lawcodes. Jews were also a significant population group, self-governing in communities protected by monarchical privileges that also ensured religious freedom. Jews in the Commonwealth lived primarily in towns, but in the seventeenth century many moved with Polish gentry to Ukrainian lands to work as agents on noble estates.
The sixteenth century in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania witnessed confessional struggles on par with western Europe. Lutheranism swept across the lands of the Teutonic and Livonian Knights on the Baltic littoral already in the 1520s, winning over the majority of the population (gentry, townsmen, and peasants). Across the sixteenth century in the kingdom of Poland and in areas of the Grand Duchy, Arianism (Anti-Trinitarianism) found ardent adherents among the peasantry, while Calvinism made dramatic inroads among the Polish, Lithuanian, and even Ruthenian Orthodox nobility (in 1572 Calvinists were in the majority in the Parliament's lower house, and of the lay senators, 70 were Catholic, 60 Protestant, and 3 Orthodox). At this time there were 21 Catholic printing presses in the Commonwealth and 24 Protestant ones; about two-thirds ofprovincial governors in 1564 were Protestant.