28 Feb 2022 - The following is an excerpt from a piece I intend to put on the blog this summer about Repin’s epic painting of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. In the course of researching the picture, I dug deep into the history of Ukraine up until the late 1600s: the point in time at which the picture is set. What emerged was a fascinating, ferocious and extraordinarily tragic story of a people who would not, could not, ever lie down. Freedom was everything to them. And more.

That Zaporozhian legacy is very much alive today. Modern Ukrainians accord their Zaporozhian forebears pride of place in the nation’s history and culture. It’s a heritage which helps to explain how - right now, in the face of overwhelming odds - Ukrainian people up and down the country are displaying an almost inconceivable bravery on the battlefield.

In light of the invasion, I thought it wouldn’t be out of place to jump the gun and paste up the relevant section of the essay. It will, I hope, open a broad window onto a world which is unfamiliar to most people in the anglosphere.

Please bear in mind that the following has been snipped - fore and aft - from content specific to the painting rather than Ukrainian history. Hence the abrupt lead-in and end.

To get a feel for a people, it helps to first get a feel for the period and place in which they lived. This is exactly what Repin did in advance of beginning his enormous painting of the Zaporozhian Cossacks somewhere around 1880. He travelled into the lands which 200 years before had been their home. Once there, he threw himself into gathering information on his subject. Repin never shirked a heavy workload. Even so, it’s unlikely he foresaw how hefty his new project would become. Bit by bit, it grew in breadth until he found himself riding a behemoth. He fussed and fretted over it. He got lost in it. It’s an odds-on bet he had to navigate bouts of artist’s block. When at last he crossed the finishing line and painted the final strokes, he’d given a whopping 11 years of his life to the enterprise. They weren’t minor ones either. They were the prime real estate located between the ages of 36 and 47 - a gold-zone for most painters. Not for the first time in art-history, a picture had swallowed its maker. Clearly, there was something about the Zaporozhians of the 1600s which the man found all-consuming. Who, then, were these people? What did they represent? Like Repin, we may as well start with a visit to their untamed and often terrifying homeland.

***

The Dnieper river wends through Ukraine like a vast anaconda. It’s appetite is limitless. The instant it enters the country in the north, it guzzles down the river Pripyat. The Teteriv is next. Then, the Desna. These are not creeks, but mighty arteries that nourish cities on their banks. Over the next 500 miles, many others are likewise gulped down, as if they were shots on a 2 a.m. bar-counter, until at last, sated and fat, the Dnieper shakes off its shackles and glides out to meet the Black Sea. Herodotus was the first to write about this leviathan. After the Nile, he rated it the finest waterway known to man. Its waters were clear, bright and made for excellent drinking. That most precious of commodities, salt, formed in endless quantities at its mouth. The crops flourishing along its banks couldn’t be bettered. The pastures within its floodplains were the most luxuriant on Earth. Above all, it teemed with the finest species of fish.

Herodotus’ rave review was backed up in an assortment of accounts between the 1600s and 1800s. Some described sturgeon 18 feet long cruising the Dnieper’s tributaries. Others recounted how a man might take off his trousers and, using them as an ad-hoc net, drag a feast of crayfish onto the bank. Further inland, the lakes brimmed with such quantities of fish they often died in the water due to weight of numbers. On terra firma, we hear of grasslands so thick that cartwheels were entangled and jammed; so tall that children were easily lost. Herbs and flowers sprang up untended across these boundless meadows along with wild legumes. Cattle grew fat on the grazing. Hares, partridge, quail and grouse were so abundant they could be caught by hand. Wild boar were just as plentiful. In the forests, the hum of bees was everywhere. A copious quantity of honey could be had by anyone with the wit to search it out. It would be easy to suppose those who lived alongside this magnificent watercourse led gentle, carefree lives – how could they not? But that would be an error.

On either side of the Dnieper, the Ukrainian steppe stretched from east to west for hundreds of miles. These plains were called the Wild Fields. And their character was shaped as much by the weather as by the river. A harsh winter brought terrible trials. Away from the forests and ravines at the water’s edge, great tracts of land were as flat as a plate with no shelter to speak of. When covered in snow and scoured by wind, they transformed into a sprawling, horizontal blast-freezer. In 1646, an army of Poles on manoeuvres east of the Dnieper lost two thousand men and a thousand horses to the flesh-crunching cold. Those who tried to snatch a quick kip in the open were doomed if allowed to sleep too long. These people were outsiders, of course. Locals fared better. But even then, with so few landmarks to give a steer, many who trudged into the bitter inferno never found their way out. For those who did, there were other concerns. Especially when travelling to far-flung settlements. Plodding for days on end through a frozen wasteland was an open invitation to frostbite. For some, a sloppily performed piss led to the unwelcome loss of their penis. Others had worse luck. After prolonged contact with their iced-up armour, their bellies partially froze. They spewed up all they ate and died spluttering in agony. Afterwards, when their corpses were split open to uncover what killed them, their guts were found glued together in baffling black knots.

Summer could be just as unpleasant. To the east and west of the Dnieper, huge swathes of the open plains lacked any kind of river or stream. If July and August were hot enough, these areas would turn into an arid wasteland. Journeying horsemen had to bring enough water and fodder to sustain their mounts. This usually involved a wagon. Casual travellers and the ill-provisioned courted disaster. One of the region’s more famous poems tells the tale of three brothers escaping captivity by fleeing across the steppe. (The Escape of the Three Brothers from Azov.) It’s no coincidence it ends with the youngest of the trio dying of thirst beneath the boiling sun.

Where things were more humid, different problems arose. The Dnieper flood-plains were overrun with insects. Mornings were quiet. But by midday, giant horseflies up to an inch long were everywhere. Their bites were evil. In the evening, they were joined by blizzards of midges whose onslaught could swell a man’s head so he scarcely saw out of it. Not to be outdone, mosquitoes ruled the night in swarms so dense that cattle were sometimes drenched in their own blood. Frantic for relief, the animals waded into water deep enough to flush the pests from their hides. At any time, a headwind could carry these little monsters to distant parts of the plains, where they inflicted their torments on the people and livestock who lived more remotely. 

Then there were the locusts. Repin set his painting in the year 1676. During the 30 years before and the 15 that followed after, six spectacular plagues engulfed Ukraine. Each of them obliterated food supplies. Bystanders described how the sky was blurred out by clattering clouds six miles long and three miles wide. Where they touched down, they cloaked the landscape. Then, a great rustling began, as if hailstones were falling. Every scrap of worthwhile growth - vegetable, grain or grass - was munched. Harvests were devastated. Even travelling became tricky. The insects formed a churning carpet over roads and tracks, on which horses refused to tread unless whipped. In towns, they flew into faces. They clung to noses and eyebrows. Eating was impossible. So too speaking. Indoors or out, no sooner had a mouth opened than a locust as thick as a finger would crawl into it. Even the sturdiest souls were driven to despair.

Nature’s hardships were a brutal test. But those thrown up by the neighbours were worse. Just to the south, sitting atop the Black Sea like a colossal chicken drumstick, was the Crimean Peninsula. This was home to the Tatars of the Crimean Khanate. They were Muslims with a proud and violent heritage; the offspring of the Golden Horde, formed in the 1200s by Batu Khan, the cruel and clever grandson of Genghis. As a people, they didn’t like sitting around. During the summer, they usually journeyed north to raid and plunder. Cattle, horses and material goods were all on the loot list. The highest priority, however, was the capture of Slavic Christians, who were then brought south and sold into slavery at the markets which thrived around the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. This annual business trip – for it was precisely that -  was so well established it was given a sardonic name: the harvesting of the steppe. Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, even Finns were intermittently carried off by the Tatars. But the staple crop to which they returned over and over was the Ukrainian villager settled in the Wild Fields. Altogether, these unfortunates were taken and traded in such eye-watering numbers the traditional word for a slave, servus, was soon forgotten. The eponymous slav took its place.

The Tatars were slick operators. They excelled at slipping large bodies of horsemen deep into Ukraine without being spotted. When they reached their chosen theatre, they’d set up an operational base on an unseen part of the steppe. From here, they fanned out in smaller groups, before bursting without warning upon every settlement within a 30 or 40 mile radius. The locals had no chance. Whole villages were emptied in hours. Once the prisoners were rounded up, those who had little value or who might slow the return journey were set aside and dealt with immediately. In some accounts they were merely abandoned. Others paint a different picture. Ukrainian folk songs describe small children dragged from their mothers and pulverised beneath the hooves of the Khanate’s horsemen; no vengeful Orestes would ever come of age. As for the elderly, one source recounts an appalling fate. They were handed over to Tatar adolescents for killing practice. They might be stoned, drowned or done to death by any manner of lethal teenage amusement. Then, with the remainder of their human spoils roped together, the raiding party would set off. As quickly as they’d come, they were gone again. In the course of an average summer anything from 3000 to 30,000 people were swept away in this fashion. If a war broke out, the numbers might balloon into the hundreds of thousands. More telling perhaps is the estimate that a peasant hut in western Ukraine in the early 1600s could expect to stand for less than ten years before it was destroyed or abandoned in the face of a threat. The silent villages slid slowly into the grassland, leaving nothing behind but the ghosts of murdered toddlers.

As soon as they reached safe ground outside the orbit of hostiles, the Tatars divided their booty. A French cartographer who spent a few years in the area in the mid 1600s described what happened next. It was troubling stuff. Captives who’d survived the trip were sifted into separate groups. Husbands, wives, sons and daughters were torn from each other, never to meet again. Girls were raped in open view of their loved ones. Sons were forcibly circumcised before their parents. Then, it was onward once more. Some were herded into the Tatar heartlands for a life of agricultural or domestic labour, knowing that any attempt to escape might be punished with the mutilation of their ears and nose, the branding of their forehead and cheeks, or straightforward castration. Others, those who’d fetch a good price, were taken to the Ottoman controlled port of Kaffa.

Kaffa was infamous. One contemporary said the place was ‘ . . not a city, but a great vampire that drinks blood.’ This memorable line was penned with something specific in mind: the gigantic slave market that buzzed noisily within the town. It was first set up by Christians - Genoese traders - in the late 1200s. In the intervening years, however, the Ottoman Empire had taken control of the port. The Tatars who ruled the surrounding region became their junior partners, independent vassals at the beck and call of mighty Istanbul. Economic relations between the two revolved largely around slaves. The Ottomans needed a constant supply. The Tatars were happy to provide it. Kaffa was where the cash changed hands.

Upon arrival, captives were sorted by age, sex, skills and so on. For the few whose families had money, a pause followed while they tried to arrange a ransom. The rest were carted off to the market. Often naked and usually hungry, they were paraded in front of a crowd of brokers, reeves and private buyers. The valuable were auctioned singly, while the inferior were offloaded in batches. A slave’s origins could go a long way in deciding their price. In Istanbul in the 1700s, Circassians sat at the top of the heap, clearing as much as 1000 crowns a head. They came from the eastern edge of the Black Sea. It was taken for granted that people from that part of the world were modest, capable and good looking. At the other end of the scale, Germans were valued as low as 250 crowns. This, we learn with some surprise, was because they were thought to be too soft for proper work. Most Slavs, including the people of the Wild Fields, fell somewhere between the two.

The bright and the beguiling had the least to fear. The former were hoovered up by the empire’s enormous administrative machine, with some going on to run aspects of it. The latter, if beautiful enough, would be shipped to the Topkapi Palace and the Sultan’s seraglio. A few of these women rose high. In the 1600s, three Sultans had Slavic consorts who started out as slaves, and one a Slavic mother. Towering over all was the daughter of an Orthodox priest from western Ukraine called Roxelana, who lived during the previous century. In her mid-teens she was snatched by Tatar raiders and trafficked to Istanbul. By the time she was 30, she was the favourite wife of Suleiman the Magnificent. By all accounts, she was a looker. But what really endeared her to Suleiman was a passion for poetry. That, and her exceptional ability to combine a vizier’s intellect with a joyous personality. Her husband had complete faith in her judgement. She advised on matters of state, gave a steer to foreign policy, and corresponded with European kings. After her death, her son then grandson each went on to be Sultan. This was a woman of unparalleled influence.

Captives with less clear-cut qualities – in this case, everyone else - did worse. Most were bought as menials, dogsbodies, craftsmen and labourers. They led muted lives well below the horizon of record. But even they could offer a prayer of thanks. They’d avoided the fate awaiting those on the bottom rung of the ladder. These were the men manacled to the oars of the Sultan’s galleys: the human propellant that shunted Ottoman warships to and fro across the seas. In one important respect, these vessels were no different to supercars. The fuel tank needed constant topping up. This was especially true when new ships were due to come on line. While they were still under construction in dry dock, Istanbul would contract with the Tatars to raid the steppes for advance orders of slaves. The harvest was reaped and the consignments sent. A grim existence in a floating prison began for the new arrivals. Disease and exhaustion culled many. Misery blanketed all. The only hope of salvation lay in war, when Ottoman foes, if they overran a ship, might free the men below decks. There was a catch though. It was well illustrated off the Greek coast in 1571 at the Battle of Lepanto. The Holy League’s forces won well and took 137 Ottoman ships, liberating their captive oarsmen. But 50 enemy galleys were destroyed in the victory. Chained within wooden bellies, thousands of men had rowed in the hope of a lucky break. Instead, they were dragged to their deaths beneath a foaming sea. For all but a few slaves, the route that conveyed them from the Dnieper to the Bosporus was a strict one way system.

How on earth did the Ukrainian plains end up such a soft touch for pillaging neighbours? The problem was largely one of topography. An enormous portion of the steppe was bare and flat. Intruders had no need of roads or any of the other funnels which make a body of men tactically vulnerable. Instead, they could navigate as freely as a boat on a lake, heading in any direction they liked whenever they chose. The landscape granted them two invaluable advantages: freedom and unpredictability. By contrast, for the locals, the terrain was a handicap. Because there was no sustained high ground, there was no easily defended position from which a walled capital or fortress could command the surrounding region. Worse, huge areas had very little in the way of substantial, mature timber. (Settlers had to use kizyak for fuel: a mixture of dried dung and chaff.) With time and determination, it was possible to piece together a small settlement or village, even a modest town. But without vast amounts of cash, the burly citadels essential for gathering men and repelling raiders were a bridge too far.

The lack of a powerful regime that was native to the area didn’t help either. The city of Kiev had some sway during the 11th and 12th centuries. But it was regularly pushed around by outsiders. Then, in the 1240s, it was comprehensively clobbered by the Mongols and all but wiped from the map. Afterwards, what little was left bounced helplessly between Lithuanian and Polish overlords. This chapter was fleetingly interrupted by another sacking, this time at the hands of Tatars, who very nearly finished what the Mongols started. Finally, in the 1600s, the town ended up under the umbrella of the Tsar in Moscow. Kiev’s ping-pong fate was mirrored across the steppe. Whichever kingdom to the east or west was doing better would claim the Wild Fields for itself. On one side, there was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth led by Poland; on the other, there was Moscow. It can’t be said either of the two was particularly committed. Each saw the steppe as a source of agricultural cash, and a handy buffer zone to keep opponents at arm’s length. (An attitude preserved to this day in the name Ukraine, which came into usage in the 1500s and derived from the Old East Slavic for frontier-region.) All the while, the Tatars to the south behaved like a swarm of hyperactive kids carrying out hit-and-runs on the local orchard. What should have been a thriving territory the size of Texas was instead an ungoverned and ungovernable no-man’s-land. This, then, was the place and period where little by little the Zaporozhian Cossacks emerged into the light of history.

Their origin story was straightforward. Since the 7th century BC, when Scythian warriors built sui generis wigwams to smoke dope, the Wild Fields had been home to all sorts. But the crash of Mongol lightning and Tatar thunder narrowed the range to risk-takers. By the 1300s, a more rugged type of personality predominated across the steppe. There were tough Slavic peasants who’d fallen between the cracks. There were non-aligned Tatars who’d quit the Khanate for a life of their own. There were hunters, traders, fisherman and herders; people who could operate solo. There were the disinherited, the indebted, the jilted and the desperate. Then, there were roaming bands of mercenaries. Alongside them were adventurers of every stripe and language. Fugitives and renegades came too; men keen to escape their past and the reach of law. In dribs and drabs, they dotted themselves across the Wild Fields. But they clustered especially on a stretch of the Dnieper, where, for 40 miles, the river transformed from a glassy expanse into a roaring set of rapids that cascaded down a rocky course past 60 substantial islands. The entire area was heavily forested. All that was needed to survive could be found there beneath the trees: food, fuel, shelter. Above all, sanctuary.

For a century, these people lived an untamed existence. They fished the river and its tributaries. They took their chances on the open steppe. They hunted, grew crops and grazed herds. At all times, they’d a weapon in hand and an eye peeled for trouble. If raiders passed through, provided it was close by, they would scarper to join their compadres in the greenwood, just as Robin Hood’s outlaws made use of Sherwood Forest. There, in the Dnieper’s leafy glades, a small self governing power evolved. It was large enough to take care of itself. Just. But not so significant it bothered the overlords of Poland and Russia, who viewed it as an oddity too trifling to merit a response. Then, in the early 1500s, a shameful custom arrived in eastern Europe. It changed everything.

It began, as the worst blunders of wickedness generally do, with a grand plan calculated to better everyone’s lives. Each summer in Poland and Russia, thousands of noblemen with their peasant levies trudged south to repel Tatar raiders from their borders. With their homes stripped of manpower, there was a risk in many areas the harvest wouldn’t be brought in. To head off the problem, the great and good decided to curb the movement of agricultural labourers. It wouldn’t do to have the dolts wandering off willy-nilly, hiring themselves out to the highest bidder when crops were ripe in the field. There was a food supply to think of. Cock it up, and people would starve. Worse, there were taxes due to the realm on the sale of the harvest; cash that was vital to governance and ensuring the wisest people could administer the state in the wisest ways. No, no, no. It was for the best the idiots and clodhoppers stay put, do their bit, and support society. Decrees were signed. Laws were passed. Wherever there was scything or planting to be done, the rural poor were effectively imprisoned.

As usually happens when an elite succeeds in foisting anti-human measures onto a population via an appeal to a moral good, further sanctions were soon deemed essential. It took time of course – a few decades – but the twin blooms of liberty and aspiration gradually withered to dust under a steady spray of poison. A new status quo emerged. It couldn’t have been clearer: whoever owned the soil owned the souls of those who toiled upon it. Serfdom had arrived for the people of eastern Europe. The majority stayed put, helpless and passive, unwilling to risk the only life they knew, even though it had been mutilated and spat upon. Sturdier types took matters into their own hands. A great wave of peasants quietly packed their belongings and trickled off the estates to make their way into the unknown. An argument could be made they were the reactionaries of their age. When the road to a less hungry world was laid foursquare across their backs by their betters, they stuck up a middle finger and went their own way. Over the decades and in their multitudes, they headed to the Wild Fields and the Dnieper.

With their numbers beefed up, the men and women of the riverbanks evolved into something more weighty than a shabby assortment of flotsam and jetsam. They became a single entity. A people coherent to themselves and different to others. Given how many had spurned a life of bondage, it should come as no surprise that freedom was the value which bound together the community they formed. Before long, they set up a military structure to fend off anything that threatened them. The Wild Fields became home to an untidy little army. Tatar slave raids continued. But now the stakes were higher. The Khan’s horsemen found they were the hunted as often as they were the hunter. No one has pinpointed exactly when, but somewhere along the way, the fledgling society acquired a name: the Zaporozhian Cossacks. Each half of the phrase came from a different language; a telling glimpse of the group’s hodgepodge origins. Zaporozhye meant beyond the rapids, and came from Ukrainian. Cossack, on the other hand, was Turkic and meant free man.

Between the mid and late 1500s, the Cossack army grew, sorting itself into dozens of individual battalions, or kurins. A string of capable leaders shaped the emerging force into the warfaring equivalent of a spluttering but serviceable V8 engine. This caught the eye of Ivan the Terrible. He showered the Zaporozhians with cash and arms in return for their mercenary service in a war against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As much as it was a financial opportunity, this was a show of faith, one to fill the Zaporozhian breast with pride. But it’d come too soon. The Cossacks weren’t yet a match for Poland’s sophisticated military machine. In the aftermath of defeat, they looked on gloomily as a treaty was signed between the warring powers. New boundaries were drawn up. The victorious Commonwealth took control of the Wild Fields.

Backed by the crown in Krakow, a mob of Polish gentry galloped in to Ukraine to claim chunks of it for themselves. They were joined by old Ukrainian families well disposed to Poland, particularly those from the area around Kiev. There was a reason for the rush to settle the haunted and hazardous lands astride the Dnieper. The grain trade had become terrifically profitable. And the velvety black soil of the steppe was better suited to cereal crops than anywhere else in the world. The Tatar threat remained ever present. But mountains of cash were there to be made by anyone with funds to invest, and the balls to run a risk. Ambitious new landowners arrived in droves. They were known as the magnates. Some came in person to set up their estates. Others, those comfy enough to delegate their business, farmed out the management of their new croplands to middlemen. To ensure the soil was tilled, peasants were offered plots, which could be had rent free for thirty years in exchange for a portion of their annual harvest. Hamlets and towns were built to house the manpower necessary for the agricultural revolution. The steppe underwent an almighty transition.

Compromise - in so far as such a piffling concept ever stained the Zaporozhian mind – was not deemed an honourable activity. If the world was a cauldron of Heraclitean change, then they were Diogenes, sitting apart and frowning. They built an island fortress within the rapids to house their standing army and called it the Sich, a word which soon came to cover the Cossack Host in general. In spite of how busy the steppe had become, many of them remained outside the orbit of the new authorities, who they contemplated with simmering contempt. The feeling was mutual. The magnates considered the Zaporozhians a gang of feral plebs. They were insolent and uppity. They would brawl at the drop of a hat. They treated backstabbing as a harmless hobby, alongside lying, swindling and all manner of scumbag trickery. Commercially, they’d nothing to offer other than the fish and animal hides they hawked: things that stank. They also followed the Orthodox faith, a branch of Christianity which, as far as the Catholic Poles could see, was a doctrinal mosh-pit for simple-minded morons and spiritual anarchists.

Yet in spite of it all, the Zaporozhians possessed one gleaming gift. Nothing came so naturally to them as battering senseless their Muhammadan neighbours to the south. It wasn’t just a strategic issue. It was a moral imperative. The supreme Christian duty of every Cossack. No Tatar column could ride up from Crimea without having to clear this highly motivated hurdle. As often as not the raiders were picked up by Zaporozhian patrols then roughed up in ambuscades. To screen the steppe, it made sense for the magnates and the Polish Crown to clamp a clothes peg on their collective nose and keep the Cossacks onside. To achieve this, they came up with a plan.

Roughly speaking, the Cossacks who inhabited Ukraine could be split into three groups. The first was made up of those who spent their time around the river and Sich. The second comprised those who gravitated towards the towns and farms springing up across the steppe. And a third inhabited a grey area between the two. There were good reasons for the cleavage. Many Cossacks preferred a life of quiet predictability to one of turbulent adventure. As a new order enveloped The Wild Fields, they were determined to grasp a bit of it for themselves. They cultivated bourgeois aspirations and settled into civilian life. Meanwhile, the die-hard Zaporozhians stayed true to the Sich. Membership wasn’t exclusive. Any man, whatever his history and origin, could join. Like the French Foreign Legion, no questions were asked. All that was required was that the newcomer be able to take orders in Ukrainian and espouse the Orthodox faith. This, then, was the natural home of the restless, the carefree, the dysfunctional and the warriors. There was a snag though. At no time, could a woman or child set foot within the Host. The Sich was strictly a brotherhood of fighters. Men who married had to conduct their family life elsewhere, returning only now and then, perhaps when called upon to campaign, perhaps to catch up with friends. This demographic made up the third group. They built houses, raised children and planted seeds; all the while with a musket and sabre under the bed. The upshot was a sociological partition where established, often wealthier, Cossacks lived apart from their younger counterparts and the more rugged bachelors. The Commonwealth and magnates spotted the polarities and acted accordingly.

The Poles set up a military unit called the Registered Cossacks. Its membership drew on the tamer element outside the Sich. Enlistees were rewarded with first-rate perks: exemption from taxes, a guaranteed salary and, for a happy few, a first step on the ladder to ennoblement and the advantages that come with social altitude. To play upon the Cossacks’ sense of independence, the unit acted in a semi-autonomous fashion. It answered to Polish commanders, but operated free from meddlesome local authorities. Officially, The Registry had one task: to defend the Wild Fields from the Tatar menace. Unofficially, it was hoped the new elite would act as a soothing influence on the unruliest Zaporozhians. A head-banger element within the Sich was out of control, routinely leading raids into Crimea. This sparked a ferocious Tatar response. And the bulk of the counterattacks ploughed through the magnates’ estates during the summer months, transforming the southern end of Ukraine into a seasonal warzone. For the sake of prosperity and human happiness, the cycle had to be broken. The Registered Cossacks were just the men for the job. Cool heads who would offer their comrades cooler counsel. Better yet, thanks to the sweeteners they enjoyed, they’d exemplify the benefits of civic-mindedness.

Naturally, the plan backfired. The promise of a salary in exchange for bashing infidels was enough to excite every Cossack with a pulse and a purse. Fighting with Tatars was practically a pastime. And the cash on offer would make up for any income lost with raiding pared back. But it was immediately clear that the Registry lacked the funds to be open to all. Only a lucky few made the cut. And many of those were already well off with land of their own and no interest in watering down their standing by helping others into the fraternity. A fissure opened between the haves and have-nots. It wasn’t just the Zaporozhians of the Sich who felt excluded. The poor and unclubbable Cossacks of the steppe did too. Instead of soothing the hotheads, the Registry had enflamed them. Raids carried on unabated; each one of them testimony to an unfolding schism, where the Zaporozhian and his Polish neighbour had less and less in common. The pot boiled over in the 1590s. Two rows between high-handed magnates and marginalised Cossacks exploded into fully-fledged revolts. The violence was spectacular, often sadistic, and a great many people were killed. Order was restored only after battlefield showdowns. The high-ups in Poland were outraged. Yet the Zaporozhians remained a vital obstacle in the path of Tatar troublemakers. They couldn’t be given the thrashing they deserved without cracking open the Commonwealth’s defences.

In spite of the revolts’ failure, the Cossacks found themselves in a happy spot. The prolonged bloodshed had greatly enhanced their fighting smarts. Just like Ivan the Terrible years before, third parties began to see them as a useful partner. While relations with the Commonwealth dangled from a hair, the Zaporozhians were approached by the Habsburgs, the Russians and even the Vatican for help in combating Ottoman expansion along the Danube. Shiny gold ducats arrived on the Dnieper to cement relations. The Cossacks were chuffed: here were some allies who knew how to spread the love. They trooped out of the Sich, crossed southern Ukraine, and waded into the hot spot of Moldavia, where they marmalised local forces aligned with Istanbul. Their gritty triumphs brought a smile to faces in the Habsburg court and Rome. But they’d an unhappy effect elsewhere.

The Polish Commonwealth had a finely balanced relationship with the Ottoman Empire. Each side actively opposed the other. But each was also a superpower which had demolished every military challenge it’d faced for as long as anyone could remember. It was taken for granted a head-on collision between two such heavyweights would be calamitous. To avoid it, hostilities had been conducted for 60 years between the tramlines of statesmanship and diplomacy. To maintain the calm, each side expected the other to keep its delinquents – Tatar and Cossack alike - on a relatively tight leash. It was one thing for the teenagers to twat each other in tit for tat raids across the frontier. It was altogether another for one of them to march hundreds of miles from home to sow chaos in an Ottoman satellite. When news of the Cossacks’ antics arrived on the Bosporus, Istanbul went ballistic. The Commonwealth was held responsible for its brat’s behaviour. The Sultan’s emissaries demanded that one way or another the Poles put an end to Cossack raiding.

The Commonwealth was in a tricky corner. Yes, the Cossacks were a source of unending frustration. But their strategic importance was beyond dispute. And their economy was at a point where it depended on raiding. Darting frontier forays were a way of life. Increasingly, they were augmented by juggernaut expeditions, which pillaged territories up to 700 miles away. These sorties were conducted on water in a fleet of custom built longboats. Each Summer, the Zaporozhians navigated the rapids, dragging their vessels by rope over the rockiest spots, before rowing to the Dnieper’s mouth. From there, they swept out to the Black Sea, then hugged its shoreline, terrorising Ottoman port cities along the northern and western coast. These seaside jaunts went so well that twice in the early 1600s the Cossacks looted the outskirts of Istanbul in plain sight of the Sultan’s palace, forcing him on one occasion – so went the rumour - to flee. One could easily see why the Ottomans were cheesed off. On paper, their demand that the Commonwealth stop the raids was plainly reasonable. In the real world, things weren’t so straightforward. The spoils seized by the Zaporozhians were essential to them: coin to keep, goods to sell, clothing to wear, arms with which to fight. Hardly a man amongst them wasn’t self equipped in this fashion. Take away raiding and their culture would collapse. Yet, something had to give. It was clear the Cossacks were growing more headstrong. Wherever they’d the chance, they behaved as if they were the Commonwealth’s equal. To watch as their activities affected international relations was to gaze at a landmine going off at a bus stop. The only obvious solution to the problem they posed was annihilation, a course Istanbul chirpily encouraged. But how, then, would the frontier be held?

While Poland pondered this political Rubik’s cube, the Zaporozhians carried on forming a more confident picture of themselves. Their earlier revolts had birthed a narrative stuffed with heroes, myths and dreams. Their expeditionary achievements in Moldavia added to that hard won cultural capital. The dreams grew solid. Provided they were well equipped and turned up in numbers, they could challenge any rival army. At home, amongst the trees and islands of the Dnieper rapids, they were untouchable. Kings and popes sent envoys to their camps. In the gilded halls and courts of eastern Europe, their emissaries could count on an audience. They had standing. Whispers of a fresh future began to race across the Wild Fields; one where a Cossack republic would be founded in Ukraine. The Orthodox Christian would unshackle himself from the steppe’s Catholic master. Once again, freedom was the Zaporozhian’s watchword. Not as a romantic ideal, but as a must-have for his daily life, his sense of self and his godly soul.

The Cossacks’ chatter about independence might have preoccupied the Commonwealth a tad more if other events hadn’t taken centre stage. At the start of the 1600s, Poland got snarled up in a series of wars: first in Moldavia, then with Sweden, and finally with Moscow. Halfway through, just for good measure, the Polish nobility rose against their king in a power grab that badly damaged the crown. For 20 turbulent years, it was all hands to the pump. Desperate for a fix, the Commonwealth turned to the Cossacks. It dug deep in its pockets, and directly hired them in as manpower. This turned out to be an excellent move. The Zaporozhians at the time were superbly led. At home in the Sich, they may have been a bunch of boisterous, booze-fuelled bandits. But on campaign they were sober, ruthless and unhesitating. Orders were carried out with granite discipline. Bystanders were stunned at their indifference to death and how readily they waded into danger. By 1618, they were practically unstoppable. On the Commonwealth’s behalf, they embarked on a blood-curdling romp through western Russia, tearing through cities at will and stopping only when they pitched up at the gates of Moscow. Then, three years later, they faced the greatest challenge of the era.

By 1620, Ottoman-Commonwealth relations were atrocious. Both powers realised a battle was inevitable. All eyes turned to Moldavia, where each side’s interests were in a state of perpetual collision. There, in autumn, two hastily assembled armies arrived beside the river Prut and went at each other tooth and nail for a fortnight. In the end, the Commonwealth’s men – fighting with only a token contingent of Cossacks – were annihilated. Nine in every ten were killed. Their general’s decapitated head was sent as a trophy to Istanbul. The next year, to finish the job, a colossal Ottoman army accompanied by the Tatars tramped north to invade the Commonwealth directly. But their route was blocked on the Dniester river, where a second Polish army had formed a defensive screen in front of the Moldavian fortress of Khotyn. This time, the Cossack Host was present in full. It was a bloodbath. The Zaporozhian portion of the Commonwealth line was singled out and pounded relentlessly. Day after day, for over a month, the Sultan’s elite Janissaries threw everything into smashing a path through. Astonishingly, the 30,000 Zaporozhians held firm. They fought like madmen from behind a barricade of wagons, returning every injury with venom. The only occasion on which they could be budged was when they spotted a chance to raid and loot the Ottoman camp; an act of such raving-mad bravado it would have surprised everyone. Except the Tatars, who were wearily familiar with Cossack habits.

As winter drew in, both armies were worn out. The Sultan had lost 40,000 men, and the Commonwealth 14,000. Fighting staggered to a standstill. The clerks whittled their quills and prepared to draw up a treaty. For the first time in living memory, an Ottoman army was going to leave the battlefield without a win. Polish heavy cavalry had played an important role in stopping the Janissaries. But everyone knew the Ottoman back had been broken primarily across a Zaporozhian anvil. For its service, the Host may well have expected some respect and reciprocity. It wasn’t to be. When the Polish and Ottoman bigwigs of either side met to chew over the treaty terms, the issue of raiding was once more a priority. This time, there was no wavering.  Cossacks and Tartars were forbidden from harrying Ottoman and Commonwealth territories. The Zaporozhians fumed, not only at their treatment, but also at Poland’s lily-livered failure to hound the heathen when he was down. They’d no intention of abiding by the shameful new rules. ‘The Polish King may have made peace with you,’ they announced darkly to Istanbul a couple of years later, ‘but we did not.’

After Khotyn, thousands of Cossack veterans returned home to find The Wild Fields crackling with tension. The free leases which had attracted so many to work the land were winding down. As they did, the Polish nobility refashioned themselves as feudal lords, and set about converting their tenants into serfs. Gone were the days when a steppe Cossack would accept a plot on the estate, then farm it as he saw fit, turning in a portion of his crop after the harvest. Instead, to keep the roof over his head, he now had to work directly for his overlord four days a week, if not more. He would be told what to do, when to do it and where. He also had to cough up tithes and tariffs. The latter were payable on every conceivable life event: the baptism of a child, the marriage of a daughter, the burial of the dead. The fees were gathered by stewards, who were entitled to pocket any cash they collected above a stipulated minimum. The role was usually taken on by Jews, who, because they’d been forbidden from holding land, weren’t exactly flush with alternative careers. Everyone knew the money was going to the magnates. But because it had to be placed first in a Jewish hand, because they took a cut for their living, a swell of bloodthirsty anti-Semitism took hold.

Only two groups were unaffected by the upheaval. The first was the Registered Cossacks, who retained their perks. Enrolment in their ranks, however, remained out of reach for the majority. The second group consisted of the Zaporozhians within the Sich, who’d had little involvement with the estates since the start, took immense pleasure in ignoring the will of the magnates, and were by now too dangerous to provoke. Yet even along the rapids, where the taxman feared to tread, a spectacular tide of resentment built up. Everyone in Ukraine could see human freedom was under siege. And this time, there were no new lands to escape to.

The divide was hastened along by religious differences. Ripples from the Reformation had gradually rolled into eastern Europe. Understandably, many Polish Catholics were keen to protect their faith, and so asserted it more aggressively than before. Just as understandably, the Orthodox Cossacks were unnerved by their neighbours’ sudden zeal. At the same time, Orthodox Christianity underwent a revival and morphed into the de-facto religion of Ukraine’s lower orders. The Zaporozhians took a keen interest in this development. They positioned themselves as the faith’s natural champions. As often happened where the Cossacks involved themselves, fighting broke out. The two denominations squabbled over the ownership of church properties. Orthodox and Catholic priests attacked and killed each other. An archbishop was murdered. Very clearly, the relationship between Cossack and Pole had reached a terminus.

The tinderbox whooshed into flame in the late 1640s. The history books would classify it as a revolt that spasmed and bubbled for ten years. In truth, it was an apocalypse. The sheer psychosis of what unfolded was summed up in an unthinkable alliance. The Cossacks and Tatars dropped their differences to come together. It was a gob-smacking move. No one within the Commonwealth could have seen it coming. It also revealed the soul-searing hatred the Cossacks had cultivated for the Poles; one which enabled them to park the oldest enmity of all. The arrangement was simple. In return for joining forces, the Zaporozhians offered their former foes a free run at the magnates’ estates, gathering up all the slaves and livestock they could lay their hands on, while the Cossacks satisfied themselves with cash and goods. The Khanate didn’t need a second invitation.

A new ally wasn’t the only thing the Cossacks had in their favour. They also had a remarkable general. With tricks and disinformation, they bamboozled their opponents this way and that. A string of hideous battles unfolded across Ukraine. One Commonwealth army after another was put through a mangle. The Cossacks and Tatars advanced like a tornado, scouring the land of Polish influence. Massacres were constant. Magnates were top of the hit-list. So too anyone who worked for them or enforced their will. A lucky few managed to abase themselves enough to strike a deal with the rampaging host. Others fell into Tatar hands and were trafficked south to Kaffa, where a minority were ransomed. The rest, along with their families, were hunted down and slaughtered. Catholic clergy were put to death wherever they were found. The corpses of Polish women and children were heaped along the roadsides. Jews were subjected to an assault of such totalising evil it bears comparison with the Holocaust. Nathan Hanover, a young Jew in his mid-twenties was witness to the atrocities. He survived to write of them in a chronicle he titled Abyss Of Despair. It’s dreadful stuff.

These people died cruel and bitter deaths. Some were skinned alive and their flesh was thrown to the dogs; some had their hands and limbs chopped off, and their bodies thrown on the highway only to be crushed by wagons and trampled by horses; some had wounds inflicted upon them, and thrown (sic) on the street to die a slow death; they writhed in their blood until they breathed their last; others were buried alive.

The enemy slaughtered infants in the laps of their mothers. They were sliced into pieces like fish. They slashed the bellies of pregnant women, removed their infants and tossed them in their faces. Some women had their bellies torn open and live cats placed in them. The bellies were then sewed up with the live cats remaining within. They chopped off the hands of the victims so that they would not be able to remove the cats from the bellies. The infants were hung on the breasts of their mothers. Some children were pierced with spears, roasted on the fire and then brought to their mothers to be eaten.

Many times they used the bodies of Jewish children as improvised bridges upon which they later crossed. There was no cruel device of murder in the whole world that was not perpetrated by the enemies. All the four death penalties: stoning, burning, beheading and strangling were meted out to the Jews. Many were taken by the Tatars into captivity. Women and virgins were ravished. They lay (sic) with the women in the presence of their husbands. They seized comely women as handmaids and housekeepers, some as wives and concubines. Similar atrocities were perpetrated in all the settlements through which they passed. Also against the Polish people these cruelties were perpetrated, especially against the priests and bishops.

There was nowhere to hide; no clemency to shield the helpless. Wherever the Cossacks had a choice between moderation and murder, they reliably chose the latter. Their most infamous outing came after the battle of Batih, when several thousand Polish soldiers were taken prisoner by the Tatars. Upon hearing the news, the Cossacks came and purchased the lot. They tied up the unlucky captives, then, keeping them in a state of abject terror, spent 48 hours beheading or disembowelling them one by one. Even the Tatars were appalled.

In spite of the force and depravity of their exploits, the Cossacks couldn’t quite shake off the Commonwealth for good. At critical moments, the Tatars would jump ship or turn on them, while they themselves were often unsure of their strategic goals. A cycle began where each year a treaty was signed with the Poles, only for the warring parties to use it as a breathing space to plan the next desperate showdown. The struggle lumbered on. A cataclysmic human toll mounted. Over a million were dead, dispossessed or enslaved. A game changer was needed. It came when the Cossacks had enough of the Tatars and chose a new ally. They invited the Tsar in Moscow to rule the Wild Fields from afar. A formidable fresh power strode into the arena; one which was staunchly Orthodox. For the Commonwealth, it was a disaster.

Poland’s neighbours, like the Swedes, immediately sensed weakness and took advantage. Beset on all sides, the Commonwealth had to concentrate on home defence. Its foreign adventures tapered off, leaving Ukraine uncontested in the hands of the Cossacks. With the freedom they had so long craved just within reach, the Zaporozhians might well have cheered. But not for long. On the steppe, they discovered with alarm that Moscow was a hands-on ruler. A teeming horde of administrators arrived. Garrisons were stationed across the land. On key diplomatic decisions, the Cossacks were left out of the loop. Yet, for all the hiccups, half the Wild Fields were under the control of the Zaporozhian Host, a third under the steppe Cossacks and the rest under the Orthodox Church. Scarcely an acre remained with a Pole. Nor was there a tithe collector to be found. It seemed a new chapter had begun.

And it had. Without the old oppressor around to focus their minds, the Cossacks turned and promptly started to kick the stuffing out of each other. There had been scuffles before, but never of this magnitude. Two of the quarrels were especially serious. The first centred on the sort of society people believed in. Should the Cossack elite slide into the vacancy left by the magnates and retain some of the ways from before? Or should the steppe be a land of free farmers? Stability was up against aspiration. The second bust-up occurred when the Cossacks failed to agree on which foreign power they should defer to. A large faction insisted they stay tied to Moscow. But the Tsar’s bossy ways had angered a great many people. So much so, in fact, some tried to patch up relations with the Commonwealth. Others found both powers, east and west, so detestable they called for a coalition with the Ottomans. A tragic crisis unfolded. Instead of building the independent nation they’d dreamed of, the Zaporozhians, the steppe Cossacks, the elites and hoi polloi savaged each other in an impossibly complex civil war. Over a thirty year period, the Commonwealth, the Tatars, Istanbul and Moscow were all dragged into the violence. An endless kaleidoscope of alliances and enmities were formed, then broken, then formed again in different ways. The only constants were corpses and bedlam. Ukraine was brought to its knees. Afterwards, the period was simply – and tellingly – called The Ruin. It was at this time, two thirds of the way through the conflict, that Repin set his picture.

Repin selected a scene with a colourful back story. In 1675, the Ottomans reached a point where once again they were utterly fed up with the Zaporozhians’ antics. The Sultan, Mehmed IV, was advised by his vizier to settle on a nuclear solution and wipe them out. 15,000 crack Janissaries were sent up from Istanbul to join a larger Tatar army. The two crossed the frontier into the Wild Fields and headed for the Sich. It was December and the snows had arrived. Because no one ever campaigned at this time of the year, the invaders expected to catch their prey hunkered down, sleepily awaiting the spring. They skirted up the Dnieper some miles from its banks, avoiding the pickets that watched over the waterways and adjacent trails. A few days after Christmas, in the dead of night, they arrived outside the Sich. Here, they learned from captured guards the Zaporozhians had been celebrating the holiday season hard. They’d been on the bottle since early in the afternoon, and to a man were lying smashed and passed out in their battalion halls. A cakewalk was on the cards. While the Tatars remained outside, the Janissaries slipped into the Sich. Quietly, they surrounded each building, and awaited the order to fall on the comatose Cossacks.

Under Mehmed IV, drink was generally a no-no for the subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The only alcohol to pass a Janissary’s lips was boza, a malty concoction too light to trouble a toddler. Perhaps this was why the Janissaries failed to appreciate when a group of men drink their way into oblivion, there will always be those who, far from keeling over, grow stronger with every sip and shrug off the night. So it was, a group of booze-hounds were passing the small hours playing cards, and spotted the infiltration. They woke their companions. In perfect silence, the best shots were sent to the windows while the rest loaded their weapons and handed them up so the marksmen could lay down a continuous blanket of fire. As soon as the first shots rang out, other barracks woke and did the same. The unlucky Janissaries, packed together so they could hardly move, were blitzed at close range. A handful survived. The rest dropped where they stood. The Tatars, being sensible fellows, turned on their heels and sped away for home.

The following day, after prayers of thanks were offered to the Virgin Mary, the Cossacks argued long and hard with each other. The bone of contention was not their staggering lack of vigilance, but the altogether trickier question of what to do with many thousands of bodies in the dead of winter. The ground was too hard to dig a pit. Collecting enough fuel for a mass cremation was out of the question. Leaving the carcasses out for the wild animals was also ruled out. They decided in the end to cut holes in the ice sheet covering the Dnieper and feed the corpses one by one into the currents below. For two days, they flushed away their human detritus, sending the dead army back to the Black Sea. Then, in July, to get even with the Tatars, they stomped into Crimea and trashed the place. In Istanbul, Mehmed IV was apoplectic. The loss of so many Janissaries was grim enough. The sacrilegious treatment of their bodies and the brass-necked expedition into Crimea would have added insult to injury. He sent a cease and desist letter to the Host, demanding an unconditional surrender. The Zaporozhian leadership, in a jovial frame of mind, sat down and penned a letter of their own in response. To this day, it remains the most offensive piece of diplomatic correspondence in human history. And it went a little something like this:

Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan.

Oh Sultan, Turkish Satan, brother and companion of the damned devil, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the Hell kind of knight are you that couldn’t slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. You will not - you son of a whore - turn Christian men into your subjects. We don’t fear your army. By land and sea we will fight you. Fuck your mother!

You Babylonian skivvy, Macedonian wheel-fitter, beer-brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia. You Podolian thief, sheath  of Tartary, hangman of Kamyenets, clown of all the world and underworld, a moron before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our cock. Pig's nose, mare's arsehole, butcher’s mutt, unchristened brow. Fuck your mother!

This is what the Zaporozhians have to say to you, scum. You’re not fit to herd a Christian’s pigs. Now we'll finish up, for we don't know the date and don't own a calendar. The moon's in the sky, the year with the Lord. The day's the same over here as it is over there. Now, kiss our arse!

Ivan Sirko and the Zaporozhian Host

It’s fair to say some of the insults here are a little odd. Why, for example, are the Zaporozhians so hung up on the Sultan’s inability to put garden animals to death with his arse? Was this a pastime they thought proper to a man of breeding? Or has something gone missing in translation? But reflect a moment, and a method emerges from the madness. Mehmed IV was famously obsessive about hunting. So much so, in fact, he was known to many as Avci Mehmed, or Mehmed The Hunter. The Cossacks, keen to land an early boot in the nuts, target this right away, telling him he couldn’t kill the humblest, smallest  prey even if he sat upon it. And with the tone set, they take off at a canter, tweaking a selection of the Sultan’s grand titles. The Viceroy of God , the great sovereign of Babylon, of Macedonia, of Jerusalem and Egypt is remodelled as a lowly kitchen scullion, an axle-greased mechanic, and an irreligious beer peddler. Given Mehmed IV was renowned for both his piety and sobriety, the last sneer is personal enough that lesser men might have laid down the quill at this point and congratulated themselves on a job well done. But no Cossack could satisfy himself with a rapier where there was room to swing a sledgehammer. And so we rush on to a zoological assault. The Sultan, we discover, is an animal fucker, an animal herder and indeed an animal. It’s an amusing descent. Especially in the light of Mehmed IV’s predatory relationship with animals. It’s also, it has to be said, a touch formulaic. But that’s not the case with the next string of abuse.

When the Cossacks declare the Sultan a Podolian thief, they’re zoning in on something specific. Podolia was an area of The Wild Fields just adjacent to Moldavia. Four years before, the Ottomans had overrun it and placed it permanently under Istanbul’s authority. Kamyenets was the territory’s chief town. Clearly, the loss of the region rankled. This helps explain the feisty ‘sheath of Tartary’ barb, with its sexual connotations - the Sultan, the Zaporozhians imply, has been shamelessly pumped by his Tatar allies. At this point, they burst into a series of mighty biblical taunts; a mark of raw outrage. But, to their credit, after likening Mehmed IV to a pain in their cock – a peculiar charge, which says as little of them as it does of him - the Cossacks recover. They settle back into the groove with a lightening round of dirty animal zingers and a dash more motherfucking. The best is kept for last. The Zaporozhians boast of how backward they are, without so much as a calendar to their name, and invite the Sultan, a man of immense cultivation, to lower himself and kiss their ignorant – doubtless flyblown - arses. It’s the most brazen passage of the lot.

If ever an epistle of this kind reached the royal court in Istanbul, it’s a good bet the reaction would’ve wiped the smile from Cossack faces instantly. But no such document has been found in the Ottoman archives. That’s because the whole story, from start to finish, is likely a fiction. Outside Cossack folk memory, there’s no record of a crushing victory over the Janissaries, an event so eye-grabbing it would have been front page news across 17th century Europe. As for the infamous letter, it turned up only in the late 1800s, when, out of nowhere, several versions of differing length started circulating within a few years of each other. (The rendition above is the juiciest.) Repin, was present at a friend’s house when one of them was given a reading. As far as we can tell, he’d not had an especial interest in the Zaporozhians before. Afterwards, however, he was transfixed. As sometimes happens with painting, a source of inspiration had found its artist.

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