Battlefield Ukraine: 1420-1709

The meaning of empire in the Eurasian steppe. The military motivation of serfdom. The northern wars. Cossacks, Poles and Swedes. Land versus sea empires

Nowadays, everyone’s favorite military-historical analogy is always world war two. Churchill this, appeasement that, Hitler this, Nazi that and so on and on. And given how many of the towns and cities being fought over in Ukraine today also had such storied histories in the 1940s, it’s hard to blame them. And when units named ‘Nachtigall’ are entering the Kursk region in a desperate counter-offensive…

But that wasn’t the only time the rivers of left-bank Ukraine found themselves playing the role of a geographic barrier dividing two armies. There was another period of wars in the history of the territory now known as Ukraine, one which lasted far longer than the blitzkriegs and operation Bagrations of 1941-1945.

Ukraine was a battlefield for around two centuries - from the Cossack uprisings of the early 1600s until Peter the Great’s victory at Poltava in 1709. After which it would see two centuries of unprecedented peace. And for centuries before, the territory of modern-day Ukraine - particularly that east of the river Dnepr - was the ‘wild field’, a space of anarchy, whose settled and nomadic inhabitants were under constant threat of pillaging and enslavement by Tartar, and before them Mongol raids.

And if the second world war was ultimately a showdown between Germany and the Soviet Union, what is sometimes called ‘the northern wars’ was a far more complex theatre, involving a multiplicity of subjects and political projects.

To illustrate, here is a brief list of the various wars that can be grouped within this historical sequence, or which have contextual relevance:

1420: The Mongol Golden Horde falls apart into competing nomadic Hosts. The Grand Duchy of Muscovy is one of many competing city-states in the region. At this point, modern-day Ukraine is thinly populated due to constant nomadic raids from the south and east.

1462-1563: Moscow conquers and otherwise absorbs a range of competing nearby city-states, such as Pskov and Novgorod. Fearing a competitor, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania tries to ally with Pskov and other enemies of Moscow, including the Crimean Khanate. Lithuania and Moscow spend much of the century at war. At times, Moscow would ally with the Crimeans against the Lithuanians.

1521, 1571: Both years marked particularly successful raids by the Crimean Tartars on Moscow. In the final case, the entire city - all but the Kremlin - was burnt to ash, and the estimates of the number of those killed and enslaved runs from the tens to hundreds of thousands.

An illustration of the 1571 raid by contemporaries

1601-1613: Russia suffers its greatest famine in history, partly caused by the strain of endless war, partly by the eruption of Peru’s Huaynaputina volcano, leading to a small ice age and crop failures across Eurasia. Muscovy is riven by the time of troubles. the Poles occupy Moscow in 1610-11 and try to install their own, Catholic leader. Cossacks from the territory of modern-day Ukraine entered Moscow several times, supporting various foreign armies and pretenders to the throne and playing a major role as discontented and armed popular forces,. The Cossacks employed by the Poles devastated Muscovy and other regions of modern-day Russia, often described as being even worse than the Tartars. Other southern Cossacks would join forces with patriotic Muscovites to expel the foreign invaders.

1591-1593, 1594-1596, 1630, 1637, 1638, 1648-1657: Cossacks, theoretically employed by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, raise bloody peasant wars against their Catholic employers. They would often appeal to their supposed Orthodox brothers in Moscow for aid, to no avail. Memories of their recent rampages during the time of troubles were too strong, and Muscovy itself too weak.

1654-1667: the Thirteen Years’ War between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Muscovy over Ukraine, spurred by the largest Cossack uprising, that of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1648-1657).

1656-61: After destroying the territory of Poland (‘the Deluge’ of 1655-1660), Sweden locks in battle with Muscovy over control of the Baltic region and the fate of the PLC.

1687, 1689: Two campaigns against the Crimean Khan fail.

1700-1721: The great northern war between Peter the Great of Russia and Charles XII. The last battle in Ukraine until WW1 would be that of Poltava in 1709, but not before the seemingly loyal leader of Russia’s allied Ukrainian Cossacks, Mazepa, turned sides over to the Swedes.

I didn’t go into the outcome of these battles because the territorial results were fluid, constantly changing hands. Of course, these centuries saw Muscovy’s - then Russia’s - most rapid expansion. But what I want to focus on here are the deeper processes beneath these wars.

Imperial logic on the open steppe

What is an empire? The twentieth century, with its twin ideologies of Leninism and liberal Wilsonianism (which seamlessly transformed into Reaganism neo-conservativism), was one where most political vectors agreed that ‘national self-determination’ was a positive end in itself, and ‘imperialism’ was associated with reaction, greed, and decay.

Nowadays, there is no shortage of voices struggling to prove that Russia’s territorial expansion has always been determined by ‘imperial interests’ rather than security interests.

This article isn’t about Russia’s failed imperial larp in China, or anything past the 18th century at all. I have another question - to what extent is it really possible to counterpose ‘imperial interests’ in this part of the world as something separate from security concerns?

The whole problem of the steppe is that there are no real geographic features to stop enemy incursions. Hence the lands of ancient Rus lay in depopulated ruin and Mongol domination from the 13th to 15th centuries. And for centuries after, the remnants of the Golden Horde, particularly the Crimean Khanate, would make its living off raiding Muscovy and modern-day Ukraine (which was made almost unlivable as a result).

The only option was fortify the periphery - hence the loyalty and effectiveness of the Cossacks - both ‘Russian’ and ‘Ukrainian’ - became highly important, since their entire function was to ‘protect Christendom from the Tartar onslaught’.

And on fortifications, a matter of no little importance back in the present. One of the most interesting sections of Carol Stevens’ Russia’s Wars of Emergence regards the Russian superiority in frontline fortifications vis a vis its western neighbors. This emerged already in the late 16th centuries, with Moscow’s fortifications in the area of the modern-day Donbass allowing it to resist Tartar onslaughts more effectively than Polish attempts. No deja vu with current events involving trench fortifications in the very same region?

Fortification literally structured society in the southern borderlands. Even as Cossack settlements both fought against the eastern nomads and learned from and practiced their nomadic raiding tactics. It created a siege mentality, one for whom expansion was the only way to avoid demise.

The fortified settlements inexorably grew, both on Muscovy’s urging and without it (sometimes even against it). The whole problem of the Eurasian steppe is space - the fact that there is so much means that there is never enough. The best way to ensure the failure of enemy offensives is to control so much space that their onslaughts collapse under the weight of logistics. In the context of endless defeats against the seemingly invincible Tartar and Ottoman armies, territorial expansion was the only way forward.

War and society

Muscovy is often compared to a mafia boss, which destroyed the more economically developed Novgorod and Pskov through purely military means. Muscovy, and then Russia, is hence seen as a sort of historical anomaly. Brute force destroyed economic rationality.

But in the conditions of the Eurasian steppe, how valid can such a teleology be? Is it not inevitable that it was a militarized, not simply ‘economically rational’ state took control of a region that until then was in constant flux due to military onslaughts from essentially all directions?

The military revolution of the 16th-18th centuries, transforming armies from horse-back nobles to peasant infantry conscripts, is commonly recognized to have greatly contributed to state centralization and tax collection in Europe.

But an island like Britain was transformed by the pressures of war quite differently to the state taking form in the Eurasian steppe. Britain, protected by the sea, could maintain a small army and rely mainly on mercenaries. Instead of spending money on the army, it could focus on capitalist development, from whose revenues it in turn could pay foreign armies and take on war credits.

The British sea power could focus on colonizing the earth, unlike those states preoccupied with land war in the Eurasian steppe. And British imperialism was certainly motivated by economic, not security concerns - India never set London on fire…

But Muscovy/Russia had no such option. It needed a vast army to take on the world’s largest and most powerful army at the time - that of the Ottoman Empire. While it battled the Porte, it was also engaged in dealing with what one might call the Wehrmacht of the 18th century - the Swedish army, whose blitzkrieg cavalry tactics were nigh unstoppable. And, of course, endless wars with the Crimeans, Poles, and rebellious Cossacks - both Russian and Ukrainian.

One of the most interesting arguments that Stevens’ Russia’s Wars of Emergence: 1460-1730 makes, is that it was military concerns which necessitated the legal codification of serfdom. While this period saw Russia’s slow transition from a noble cavalry army to a modern conscript army, there was still no doing without the nobles.

But endless war devastated the peasantry, forcing many to flee their lands and masters to escape taxation, mobilization and conflict. But this meant that the nobles whose job it was to fight for the Tsar - the pomeschiki- now had no source of revenue. They thus petitioned the Tsar to restrict the mobility of their peasants. The pomeschiki even launched a full scale urban rebellion in Moscow demanding the legal immobilization of their peasants in 1648. This resulted in the 1649 Sobornoye Ulozhenie, officially tying the peasants their land.

Serfdom had massive implications for Russia’s economic history, most obviously that it restricted the ability for any would-be businessmen to create a wage-relation with landless proletarians. The fate of capitalism in Russia isn’t the point of today’s post. But I do find it remarkable how much specifically military considerations have had such a crucial role in economic, and particularly agricultural relations in Russian history. At some point, I hope to write a post about the military motivations behind Soviet collectivization as well.

Given all that, is it really logical to assume that the ‘natural’ course of history in the Eurasian steppe is the development of a merchant republic? All historical attempts to do so failed under external threat (and no little internal disarray), from ancient Rus to Novgorod to the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The Cossacks

I mentioned in my timeline how Ukraine’s orthodox Cossacks endlessly petitioned the Moscow Tsar for aid against their Catholic Polish overlords. But to no avail. Muscovy was too weak, wracked by rebellions at home, and did not wish to get embroiled in a war with the powerful Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. It also had enough experience with Cossack uprisings at home rallying the peasantry against the elites to take on yet another bunch of even rowdier Cossacks.

In this, I have to be explicit about my armchair analogizing - I can’t help but recall the reluctance of the modern Russian state to respond to the pleas for military aid by the pro-Russian ‘separatists’ in the Donbass. The anti-capitalist populism of the ‘Russian spring’ leaders that took power in the Donbass in 2014, however ill-defined and unappealing it might look to my western readers, was not something that technocratic modern Russia wanted to deal with.

It took decades of hesitation for Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich to take on the Poles in support of Cossack leader Khmelnytsky. And it took eight years for Putin to recognize the Lugansk/Donetsk People’s Republic and take on another group of Ukrainians allied with Poland and Sweden (not only, but the analogy still stands).

Apart from all that, there was another reason Russian leaders were reluctant to come to the defense of Ukraine’s Cossacks in the early 17th century. The memory of recent Ukrainian Cossack rampages - in alliance with either the Poles or the Tartars - was too strong.

The Ukrainian Cossacks modelled almost everything on the traditions of Turkic nomads like their regular ally (and just as often enemy) the Crimean Khanate. This goes for attire, traditions, military tactics, and societal organization. The long ‘sharovary’ pants shown here, so iconically Cossack, were also borrowed from eastern nomadic steppe peoples.

The Cossacks of right-bank Ukraine under the control of the Poles were then called Cherkesy, itself a term pointing to the Turkic/Tartar origins/influence of the Ukrainian Cossacks. The term ‘Cossack’ itself is Turkic, coming from the word Kazak, or free man. As opposed, of course, to those enslaved - by the Cossack.

Russian historians such as Nikolai Ulyanov even claim that if the Tartars at least spared citizens who would convert to Islam, the Cherkesy would slaughter or enslave all no matter religion, so as to better loot the city. All quite amusing, given the current narrative of ‘European Ukraine against Mongoloid Russia’.

The Cossacks represented an alternative form of governance in the Eurasian state - one of stateless anarchy. While understandably appealing for many peasants fleeing serfdom in Poland and Muscovy, it was also quite vulnerable to outside threats. And life wasn’t particularly nice inside Cossack society either. Its history is one of endless civil war, murder, betrayals, mercenary slaughter, and all the other delights of anarchic society.

The other alternative, of course, was that offered by Muscovy - a militarized state. One that certainly didn’t value ‘freedom’, but did value security, stability. As the alert reader might notice, this is itself not without contemporary echoes.

Failure until victory

One thing I haven’t had space to talk about here is the amount of failures the Russian military machine went through over these centuries of warfare. Its western and nomadic enemies were far from weak, and it took centuries of military debacles and learning through failure to overcome them. But it did eventually overcome them.

And perhaps the ultimate truth of Cossack society - like that of the other nomadic steppe peoples - was that it was overcome by Muscovy. Because the Cossacks, no matter their military prowess, were still incapable of defeating a state army on the field, even if its enemy was the maximally anarchist Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth.

And the Eurasian steppe is not a place which tolerates weakness. Which is why I want to end with some thoughts on empire. In the late 17th century, Ukraine became divided for the first time between east and west. In the east, Russia was preoccupied with dealing with the state of ongoing civil war between various Cossack factions.

But it was Switzerland compared to what was happening in west Ukraine, under control of Hetman Doroshenko. He was a vassal of the Ottomans from 1672 onwards, when Poland ceded control of west Ukraine to its Turkish allies in return for their aid against Muscovy. In return for protection from Moscow and, to an extent, Poland, Doroshenko welcomed the Tartars to their lands, offering the bountiful resource of human slaves. This part of the world, by the way, is where the famous Roksolana came from, though that term is simply what the Tartars called any slave woman from the area.

Tens of thousands hence fled west Ukraine to the comparatively stable part of Ukraine under Russian control. No doubt I will now be suspected of 'excusing Russian imperialism’. Far from it. All I wish to do it draw attention to the choices one must make as a resident of the Eurasian steppe.

Brilliant concepts of freedom and human rights are regularly concocted on secure Anglo-Saxon islands. But other considerations come into play elsewhere.