Cult of the Cossack Helps Explain Ukraine’s Resistance

There is a saying that you can push a meek and mild Ukrainian all the way until his forehead touches the ground. Then he arises a Cossack. With Russia’s frontal attack on Ukraine, the foreheads of 40 million Ukrainians hit the ground. Now, as President Biden funnels an additional $1 billion in military aid into Ukraine, let’s look at the Ukrainians.President Putin evidently thought Russian troops would be welcomed as “liberators.” Eight years ago in Crimea, almost all Ukrainian navy personnel defected to the Russian Navy. When Info Sapiens conducted a poll of Ukrainians in early March, though, 78 percent of male respondents said they were “willing to put up armed resistance” to Russia’s military invasion. While the world focuses on the 4 million refugees from Ukraine, the State Border Guard reports that 400,000 men returned in the first month of the war.Ukrainian history gives insight into the fierce resistance we see today. Since 2014, Ukraine’s Army has been modernized with NATO training and equipment. It has been tested in the battlefront. Outsiders long saw the eight-year back burner war between Ukraine and its two secessionist areas as a “civil war.” Polls, though, indicate that most Ukrainians saw it as a war between Ukraine against Russia.Ukrainians like to say that their eastern border marks a cultural split between citizens in Ukraine and serfs in Russia. “Ukraine” means “borderland.” The culture that evolved on the untamed steppes was one of escaped serfs. These free-wheeling, answer-to-nobody people became Cossacks, and over the centuries, they wreaked cruelty on innocents, including Jews, as well as other foes.Often switching allegiances between Poland and Russia, though, the Cossacks protected the Slavic steppes from slave-raiding expeditions by the Turks. The cult of the Cossack and this anarchic culture helps to explain the unruliness and lack of deference to Moscow that characterizes Ukraine today.This Cossack legacy does not carry the anti-Semitic strain of one century ago. Ukraine’s freely elected president, Volodomyr Zelensky, his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, and his Defense Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, are all Jewish. Between 1919 and 1920, when most of the former Russian Empire was convulsed in a civil war between the Reds and the Whites, Ukraine had a third movement, the Blacks. Riding under the black flag of Nestor Makhno’s Revolutionary Insurgent Army, 100,000 Anarchists sought to create a stateless society. At its peak, this army controlled an area the size of Ireland with 7.5 million people.After the Reds prevailed, Stalin engineered a mass famine to bring Ukrainians to heel. Between 1932 and 1933, in “the breadbasket of Europe,” 4 million Ukrainians starved to death. Only in January 1934 did Stalin move the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to Kiev, in Ukraine’s heartland, from Kharkiv, 30 miles west of the Russian border.For decades, the Soviets suppressed information about the Holodomor, or “Kill by Starvation.” Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, a whole generation has grown up studying how their ancestors were starved to death on orders from Moscow. Today, in Kiev, yellow construction cranes loom over a building site on the West bank of the Dnipro River. The site is to hold Ukraine’s largest museum: the Holodomor Museum.In addition to discovering the truth about the Holodomor, Ukrainians also have learned the hidden history of anti-communist partisans who fought from 1944 to 1953, trying to block Moscow’s rule over Ukraine. These Ukrainian guerrillas killed about 15,000 Soviet security personnel. By comparison, the mujahideen killed 14,453 Soviet soldiers during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Today, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry says that 17,200 Russian soldiers have been killed in the first five weeks of the war.For the last decade, the post-World War II insurgent leaders have been glorified. As part of Ukraine’s thorough decommunization drive, Soviet names have been stripped off streets, often to be replaced with the names of insurgent commanders. Of greater impact to Ukrainians in their teens and 20s, a spate of popular movies glorified the men and women who took up arms against the “Moskal.”Into this hornet’s nest, Vladimir Putin has just stepped with his imperial boots. His strategy was to “decapitate” Ukraine’s government by killing or kidnapping President Zelensky. Today, the Western media lionizes Mr. Zelensky as “a Churchill in a T-shirt.” But, at least half a dozen politicians of national stature could take his place.In the last three decades, Ukraine has gone through three revolutions. Today, in an echo of Black flag anarchists of one century ago, Ukrainians with military training say they are fully prepared to wage a guerrilla war of leaderless resistance against Moscow.

Cult of the Cossack Helps Explain Ukraine’s Resistance

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