In the 15th to 17th centuries, warrior communities known as the Cossacks formed along the rivers of the steppe border in what is now the territory of Russia and Ukraine. The seminar will focus on the emergence and development of Cossack communities. It will examine the ambivalent relationship between Russia and Poland-Lithuania and the Cossacks. They were valued as border guards, military forces and agents of Tsarist colonial rule in southern Russia and Siberia, but also feared as a source of unrest. As leaders of early modern popular uprisings in Eastern Europe, they spread fear and terror. It was only when the Russian Empire made the Cossacks a privileged military elite that their rebellious potential was brought under control. The Cossacks placed themselves in the service of the autocracy and were regarded by conservative circles as ‘loyal servants of the Tsar’ and by the liberal public as ‘willing henchmen of Tsarism’. In the 1920s, the Cossacks finally paid for their loyalty to the fallen empire with the destruction of their social, cultural and political foundations by the Bolsheviks. It was only in the late Soviet Union that the traditions of the Cossacks could be publicly revived. Finally, Ukraine, which had become independent in 1991, resorted to Cossack symbols and promoted the myth of the Cossacks as the founders of the Ukrainian nation and statehood.
The seminar will examine the reasons for the diametrically opposed evaluations of the Cossacks in Russian, Ukrainian and Polish historiography. It also presents interdisciplinary and transnational approaches, for which the Cossacks are an ideal object.
Literature: Kappeler, Andreas, Die Kosaken: Geschichte und Legenden, Munich 2013; O'Rourke, Shane, The Cossacks, Manchester 2007.
- Trainer/in: Julia Herzberg
- Trainer/in: Mailin Sonnenberg