The Cossacks by Shane O'Rourke (review)

Abstract

548 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 20IO period. His subtle and insightfulhistory attempts to clarifywhat being Bosnian has meant for successive generations ofMuslims, Serbs, Croats and Jews. He shows how Bosnians related to the territoryfrom the arrival of theOttomans to the 1992 declaration of independence in a book that is likely to generate debate, as well as being an important reference source for some time to come. Universityof Bradford Tom Gallagher O'Rourke, Shane. The Cossach. Manchester University Press,Manchester and New York, 2007. xiv + 303 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. ?16.99 (paperback). Shane O'Rourke, author of Warriors and Peasants: The Don Cossach inLate ImperialRussia (London, 2000), offersgeneral readers thisbroader treatment of the history ofmost of themajor Cossack hosts (Don, Zaporozhian, Iaik, and * the hosts created by theRussian Imperial government) from the emergence ofCossack life in the sixteenth century down through the late Soviet and post Soviet periods. This is an enormous undertaking and the author struggles to engage general audiences unfamiliar with much of the basic narrative while also sharing with scholars and students the fruitsof his original research on Cossack community lifeand Cossack relations with the army and government in the late Imperial period. He ismore successful in the latter than the former. The firsthalf of the book is a sketchy treatment of the formation of the original Cossack hosts on the southern steppe frontierand theCossack revolts led by Khmernitskii, Razin, and Pugachev. There is very litde here on the role of small voluntary vataga/stanitsa solidarities in the construction of Cossack identity, early Cossack economy and the spread of siabr land tenure, or how theMuscovite government used its semiannual Don Shipment subsidies to promote host centralization and host dependency. Preoccupation with the independent hosts means that the larger populations of csetded' Cossacks in the southernMuscovite garrison towns and in Polish-Lithuanian Ukraine are neglected, and thismakes itharder to explain the role of Cossack insurgency in Muscovy's Time ofTroubles or theKhmernitskii Revolt. There isno real attempt to explain what happened to theHetmanate after the 1654 Pereiaslav Rada; no critical unpacking of Soviet historiography's insistence on social stratificationwithin the hosts; no discussion of how the Bakhchisarai and Constantinople treaties finally redefined the southern frontiers as borders and suppressed Cossack raiding on theKhanate and Ottoman domains; and nothing on the reasons for the Bulavin orMazepa revolts. The second half is farmore valuable. Itmakes greater use of archival and published primary sources, focuses on Cossack institutions in the long nine teenth century, and makes several interesting and original observations. The author notes a serious disconnect between the Imperial bureaucracy's impulse to bring Cossack populations under the same administrative norms as the rest of the Empire and themythology of the Emperor's special bond with the REVIEWS 549 Cossacks as the symbolic ataman of all theirhosts; this mythology was eventu ally invoked to block the extension of the zemstvosystem to theCossacks. He examines the government's creation from above of new Cossack hosts to assist imperial expansion inCentral Asia and the Far East, noting that thesewere largely involuntary agglomerations of very heterogeneous elements (peasants, Buriats, Chinese immigrants) with no previous experience with Cossack service or Cossack culture and therefore no strong commitment to theirnew corporate identity.An interesting chapter on women, family and household economy describes how women formed small comraderies mirroring the arteliof theirhusbands off in service and filledpart of the vacuum leftby the removal of male manpower and by the comparative weakness of bol'shak patriarchy. O'Rourke also shows how themilitary service reforms of the 1870s had the unwitting consequence of undermining Cossack economy and eventually turningCossacks against the Imperial government: while it was the government's intent to better integrate the Cossack hosts into the regular army by standardizing Cossack qualifications for preparatory, active and reserve service, the costs ofmeeting some of these qualifications were beyond the productive capacity of Cossack agriculture, especially given new popula tion pressure upon the land fund and the decline in average allotment size. This was similar to the crisis of odnodvorets economy in the late seventeenth century, which had led Peter I to reduce strategic reliance on odnodvorets frontiermilitary service and convert most of the odnodvortsy into...