History of the Cossacks

"Poets and native bards were the chief historians of the Cossacks or 'Free People'. The guiding traditions of their race, like those of all pastoral peoples, are to be found in songs, ballads and folk stories, rather than in written records. Yet the national ideals thus orally maintained have lost nothing thereby in strength or influence. The Cossack ballads teach love of freedom, loyalty to comrades and hetman, and a sturdy devotion to the privileges which the courage of their forefathers obtained for them in the past. Cossack folktales differ in many respects from the heroic legends and peasant by-lines of the North. They possess, moreover, a characteristic strain – praise of joyous adventure and 'glad living' – all their own. Filled with the spirit of the 'Free Steppes,' they tell of hard knocks given and taken for the sheer love of fight; of struggles desperate and bloody, followed by Gargantuan feasting and debauch. In all these romances the dominant note is the praise of personal liberty and of a freedom often degenerating into license..." - William P. Cresson

Contents: The Origin of the "Free People". The Zaporogian Cossacks. Yermak and the Cossack Conquest of Siberia. Bogdan Hmelnicky, a Cossack National Hero. The Struggle for the Ukraine. Mazeppa. The End of the Free Ukraine: Little Russia. Pougatchev. The Hetman Platov. Organization and Government. The Don. The Frontiers Of Europe.