http://www.day.kiev.ua/en/article/culture/danubian-cossacks-knightly-defenders-common-mercenaries
12 May, 1999
By Mykhailo AKSANIUK, The Day
A captured cannon and a few cannonballs from the English frigate Tiger mount a pedestal in front of the town hall. This is in fact the only old
monument that still reminds Odesa dwellers of the Danube Cossacks, the direct descendants of Dnipro Cossacks who were lucky enough in 1775 to
flee the Dnipro to wetlands beyond the Danube, rescuing themselves from a wanton attack on the Zaporizhzhia Sich by Tsarist satrap Tekely. However, there are still many dust-covered, inadequately studied documents from
1826 to 1868 in the archives of Moscow, Kyiv, Chisinau, and Odesa, a considerable
part of which have been opened up in the past few years and just published as a research paper The Danube Cossack Force by Candidate of Sciences
in history Olena Bachynska.
What makes it necessary at least to skim over some points in the history of one of the stranger branches of the Cossacks is, among other things, the fact that Russian history books, for example, A. Skalkovsky's The History of the New Zaporizhzhian Sich, refer to the Danube Cossacks
exclusively as "prosperous land tillers" without mentioning excruciating drills and economic hardships. Some facts were even distorted. Meanwhile, the true reason for the compromise between the surviving Cossack officer
corps (starshyna) and the Russian state personified in the early eighteenth century in Besarabia and northern Black Sea littoral by Governor-General
of Novorosiya might have been pragmatic considerations, among them one by the Tsarist General O. Langeron: "The Danubian Cossacks could cause more harm than the Turks and Tatars." At the time, in January 1807, Langeron
commanded the Russian corps that was storming the fortress of Brailov and failed to break down the resistance of the 3000 Danubian Cossacks who were defending it. It is in fact at that time that the Russian command began to promise the Danube Cossacks all privileges that the Black Sea Cossacks
had in the Kuban in order to win over and persuade them to be the allies of the regular army. On the other hand, some of the refugees were also
interested in legalizing their status, for they had found themselves between the hammer and the anvil during the Russo-Turkish clashes on the Danube
and saw joining the Russian army's voluntary formations as their best option.
The first to defect to the Russians in the Kiliya area was Trokhym Haidebura's Cossack company. To show his attitude to the Danubian Cossack gesture,
Governor-General Armand Emmanuel Richelieu immediately ordered the Cossack sotnyk (sergeant) Haidebura be promoted to khorunzhy (colonel).
The calculation proved correct: half a month later, in January 1807, the Kiliya Cossack detachment was manned by another 150 "Black Sea infantry
volunteers." And on February 20 Tsar Alexander I decreed the establishment of the Danubian Budzhak Cossack Force. This is how promptly (by the yardstick of those times) the monarch approved a joint initiative of the Moldavian Army Commander Michelson and Novorosiysk Governor-General Richelieu to begin forming a Cossack Army "patterned after the former Zaporizhzhia Cossacks"
on the basis of a volunteer regiment!
The rumors of a "New Sich" on the Danube triggered off massive flight of serfs from Podillia and what was then the Novorosiysk territory to Besarabia. Frightened with a new wave of "Cossackization" in Right-Bank Ukraine, the
government abolished "the Danube Sich" in the summer of the same year after managing to send some of the Cossacks to the Kuban by a well-trodden way. However, many of the repatriates (an estimated 1300 Cossacks) refused to become cannon fodder in the Tsarist wars to suppress the Chechens and other North Caucasian peoples, and settled in the steppes of Besarabia. Some Cossack descendants registered in the nearest villages and towns, others founded new villages, such as Akmanhit, Drakuli, Starokozache, etc. Among
the new settlers were Marko Tverdokhlib, Roman Sohutchevsky, Yosyp Huba, et al. Moreover, the repatriates turned a deaf ear to demands by local
authorities to pay taxes or execute other duties, thus making it clear to district police that they were not going to change their age-old economic traditions. In addition, they sought to restore a Sich between the Danube and the Dnister (with headquarters at Akmanhit), form their own local-government
bodies, and secure exclusive rights to land use and fishery. The Besarabian administration categorically refused to recognize the Cossacks' "border guards," for "their fellow countrymen are in the Turkish-occupied territories near the very border" and often even cross it. The stubborn confrontation ended in February 1827: the government gave in and exempted the Danube
Cossacks, in contrast to other Besarabians, from taxes, military billeting, and other duties for ten years, as well as allotted each household 30 desiatynas (1 desiatyna = 2.7 acres) of land.
The reason for this became clear a year later: the Tsarist government was preparing for a new war against Turkey. So Nicholas I's order to form
the Danube Cossack Army consisting of two regiments was issued as early as three months after the war began in June 1828. Cossack units were trained for hostilities against Egyptian pasha Mohammed Ali as long as 1833. Then three Cossack regiments participated in the defense of Odesa, successfully holding back in 1853-1855 "the outposts and the borderline from Quarantine
Harbor through Lustdorf to the Dnister." The port city's defense was headed by Colonel Ivan Ganhardt who acted as the appointed Otaman of the Danube
Cossack Army. According to eyewitnesses, this Kursk-born noble was a valiant and "tireless old hand," like most of the repatriates. Odesa dwellers remembered especially well the battles in April 1854, when the Cossacks with local inhabitants fought off an Anglo-French squadron. On the morning of April 30, the English frigate Tiger came under artillery fire near the Cartazzi country estate. Trying to get out of shelling range, the ship
ran "so close to the shore," wrote a historian who saw it, "that it could not fire its cannon. A few shots by our horse-drawn battery and a hundred
of the Danube Cossacks forced the English ship to lower its colors." The Cossack boats approached the Tiger and - "an unheard-of thing - took prisoner a steamship!"
Hundreds of the Danubians also served in Mykolayiv and Kherson, maintaining
communication with Ochakiv. In the Danube and Dnister mouths, the Cossack border guards would thwart enemy attempts to land search parties. Danube Cossack regiments Nos. 1 and 2 were awarded Standards of Gallantry by Alexander
II for heroism during the hostilities of September 1855. All Cossack military ranks were equated in rights with those in the regular cavalry units, 15
Cossacks were awarded medals, 38 enlisted men were commissioned officers, and 59 officers were promoted.
The direct descendants of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks (34% of the Danube Army personnel) were, naturally, a strike force. However, it is noteworthy that the Cossack regiments were sometimes "experimented with," in terms
of ethnic composition, by obtuse military administrators: it even went so far that the Cossack units were newly manned with not only Moldavians, Greeks, Albanians, Russians, Serbs, and Bulgarians, but also with Gypsy conscripts. Thus the government pursued its policy of colonizing the Black Sea littoral (some were invited and others resettled by force in Besarabia),
mixing nations in one imperial melting pot. Naturally, the Gypsies did not make good Cossacks (interpreters were used to translate orders into
the Gypsy language), but they made up as many as 22% of the force. Another "disciplinary" measure was to regularly send the Danubian Cossacks to the
Caucasian Corps which was waging battles in the lower Terek River, Stary Yurt, the Khankal valley, near Hot Springs, and the fortress of Grozny.
Here they, shoulder to shoulder with the Don Cossacks, were to "pacify" the Chechens, Ossetians, and other mountain peoples. This is what Major-General I. Ganhardt thought especially important to stress, among other things, when he characterized the achievements of Cossack officers in 1855: "The
Cossack community has fused into a whole as well as attained a military spirit and morale equal to that of the regular Caucasian army. Its feats of horsemanship outside the fortress of Grozny, daily skirmishes in the river's lower course, on the islands of Leti and Chetal, and on other banks
have proven that the Danube Army is needed." Let us add: the Russian command also took care that the uniform of Don Cossacks only differed in the color of cloth: the Danubian Cossacks' navy-blue coats bore royal-blue aiguillets and trouser stripes, and traditional high hats were replaced with hairy
or astrakhan hats, when their bearers were sent to the Caucasus.
Meanwhile, the history of the Danubian Cossacks, who emerged as a closely-knit force to defend the proper interests of the people and then became an instrument of suppressing other peoples (after the Tsar approved in 1814 the provision on the Cossack force), was inevitably drawing to a close. On July 11, 1856, the force was renamed as the Novorosiysk Cossack Force after Russia ceded
the Danubian part of Besarabia. And then the government altogether liquidated the force. Novorosiysk Governor-General Count Vorontsov insisted that the dangerous Danubian Cossacks, like the Black Sea Cossacks before them, be resettled to the Anapa area far from Ukraine. To celebrate the thirty fifth jubilee of the unit's founding, the Tsar's family declared profound gratitude for their "sympathy in subduing the Caucasus."
The last Cossack force on Ukrainian territory was disbanded on December 31, 1869. According to the Odesa researcher Bachynska, that force emerged
"owing to a coincidence of the interests of Cossack repatriates on the one hand and those of the Russian government on the other." Let us add, it also vanished in the same way, when this interest waned. The former Danubian Cossacks became tillers of the soil, while nine villages, land plots, and population included, were transferred by the military administration to the Akerman district sheriff Colonel Arendarenko.
Rubric: Culture
Issue: №17, (1999)
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