The Hetman’s Charter: Cossack Mythology and the Limits of Symbolic Legitimacy in Ukrainian State-Building, 1888 - 1921

Abstract

Research on Cossack mythology within Ukrainian nationalism has concentrated on two periods, the Romantic construction of the nineteenth century and the post-Soviet remobilization of 1989-91. This article bridges these two periods, tracing the continuities and ruptures between them. It argues that the Cossack past furnished the Ukrainian national movement with its principal symbolic resource between 1888-1921 and that the decisive test of that symbolism came not in literature or historiography but in April 1918, when Pavlo Skoropadskyi revived the hetman's position, which had been eliminated through imperial decree in the mid-eighteenth century. The rapid collapse of the Hetmanate is conventionally attributed to its dependence on German military power and to its land policy. This article proposes an additional and specifically symbolic explanation. Serhii Plokhy has observed, in the closing pages of his study of the History of the Rus′, that the aristocratic rendering of Cossack historical memory temporarily overshadowed its popular democratic counterpart during the revolutionary upheaval of 1918. The observation is registered rather than developed. This article develops it, tracing the mechanism by which a myth elaborated across the nineteenth century in a democratic and communal register came to be invoked by Skoropadskyi in an aristocratic and military one by showing that the register he chose was not an innovation but a recovery of the founding text’s original meaning, which the popularizers had inverted. The myth’s plasticity enabled the movement’s growth and simultaneously withheld legitimacy from the state that movement produced. The Cossack past could authorize the conceptual legitimacy of Ukrainian statehood as a political reality, it could not legitimize anyone.