The fortified camp-republic of the Zaporozhian Cossacks below the Dnieper rapids (c. 1550s–1775): a male military brotherhood that elected and deposed its officers in general assemblies (radas), held its lands in common and served or fought Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy, the Crimean Khanate and the Ottomans.
In the sixteenth century the steppe south of the Dnieper rapids was a frontier between Poland-Lithuania, Muscovy and the Crimean Khanate, a vassal of the Ottoman Empire. Runaway peasants, townspeople, minor nobles and adventurers went there to fish, hunt and raid. They became known as Cossacks. The Zaporozhian ("beyond the rapids") Cossacks built a sequence of fortified camps, each called a Sich, on islands and river bends. A castle on Little Khortytsia island associated with Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky in the 1550s is often called the first Sich, though whether it fits the later pattern is disputed. Later Siches stood at Tomakivka, Bazavluk, Mykytyn Rih, Chortomlyk, Kamianka, Oleshky (under Crimean protection) and finally the New Sich (1734–1775).
The Sich was a self-governing military brotherhood, the Zaporozhian Host.
Membership was in principle open to any free Orthodox man who accepted the brotherhood's customs. Women were barred from the Sich itself; married Cossacks and their families lived in farmsteads (zymivnyky) in the surrounding lands. Viktor Horobets shows that by the eighteenth century the right of free election coexisted with imperial regulations and the growing weight of a wealthy officer group: elections were still held, but outcomes were negotiated with St Petersburg and among the starshyna.
Fishing grounds, hunting lands and pastures belonged to the Host and were allotted to kurins, often by lot. Income came from fishing, salt and cattle trade, levies on merchants crossing Zaporozhian lands, payments from foreign rulers who hired Cossacks, and booty from raids on Ottoman and Crimean towns, sometimes carried out in light boats that reached the Black Sea coast. The Host's treasury paid for the church, the school and the fortress artillery. By the eighteenth century inequality was marked: rich officers owned large herds and farmsteads worked by poorer Cossacks and hired labourers.
The Sich was always caught between larger powers. Poland-Lithuania tried to control Cossacks through a paid register of service Cossacks, which excluded most of the Zaporozhians and fuelled the risings that Linda Gordon describes in the late sixteenth century. The great revolt of Bohdan Khmelnytsky began at the Sich in 1648 and led to the Pereiaslav agreement with Muscovy in 1654; afterwards the Sich remained more autonomous than the Cossack Hetmanate on the left bank. Religion mattered: Serhii Plokhy shows how the Cossacks became defenders of Orthodoxy, which shaped their alliances. Internal disputes were settled by the rada or by the starshyna, but splits between the rank and file (holota) and the officers were persistent. After the Zaporozhians under Kost Hordiienko joined Hetman Ivan Mazepa against Peter I, Russian troops destroyed the Chortomlyk Sich in 1709.
The New Sich was allowed back under Russian sovereignty in 1734. Its autonomy clashed with imperial colonisation of the southern steppe after the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774. In June 1775 General Peter Tekeli surrounded the Sich on Catherine II's orders; the last kish otaman, Petro Kalnyshevsky, surrendered without a fight and was exiled to the Solovetsky monastery. A manifesto in August abolished the Host. Some Cossacks fled to the Ottoman Empire and formed the Danubian Sich (1775–1828); others were later organised into the Black Sea Host and resettled in the Kuban.
For more than two centuries the Host governed itself through elected and recallable officers, barracks-communities and common land, while acting as a military power courted and feared by its neighbours. It launched the 1648 revolt that remade the politics of Ukraine and became a central symbol of Ukrainian national identity. In its later decades a wealthy officer group increasingly dominated.
Russian expansion to the Black Sea removed the frontier that made the Host useful. In June 1775 Russian troops surrounded the New Sich; the otaman surrendered, was exiled, and a manifesto abolished the Host. Earlier, alliances with Mazepa (1709) had already brought the destruction of the Chortomlyk Sich. Internal tensions between rank and file and officers weakened resistance.
The Zaporozhian Host was governed by a general assembly (rada) that elected and could depose its senior officers, including the kish otaman, while Cossacks lived in kurins that elected their own otamans.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
By the eighteenth century, Cossack elections coexisted with imperial restrictions and the dominance of a wealthy officer group, so that the formal right of free election was constrained in practice.[1][2]
The term 'Cossack democracy' accurately describes the Sich as an egalitarian polity.[1][2][3][4]