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This may in part have been due to the participation of some Zaporozhian and other Ukrainian exiles in Pugachev's rebellion. It also formally dissolved the Lower Dnieper Zaporozhian Cossack Host, and destroyed their fortress on the Dnieper (the Sich itself). After the Pugachev rebellion, the Empire renamed the Yaik Host, its capital, the Yaik Cossacks, and the Cossack town of Zimoveyskaya in the Don region to try to encourage the Cossacks to forget the men and their uprisings. The empire responded with executions and tortures, the destruction of the western part of the Don Cossack Host during the Bulavin Rebellion in 1707–1708, the destruction of Baturyn after Mazepa's rebellion in 1708, and the formal dissolution of the Lower Dnieper Zaporozhian Host after Pugachev's Rebellion in 1775. Cossacks such as Stenka Razin, Kondraty Bulavin, Ivan Mazepa and Yemelyan Pugachev led major anti-imperial wars and revolutions in the Empire in order to abolish slavery and harsh bureaucracy, and to maintain independence. The expansionist ambitions of the Empire relied on ensuring Cossack loyalty, which caused tension given their traditional exercise of freedom, democracy, self-rule, and independence. īy the 18th century, Cossack hosts in the Russian Empire occupied effective buffer zones on its borders. Cossack communities had developed along the latter two rivers well before the arrival of the Don Cossacks. The Don Cossack Army, an autonomous military state formation of the Don Cossacks under the citizenship of the Moscow State in the Don region in 1671–1786, began a systematic conquest and colonization of lands to secure the borders on the Volga, the whole of Siberia (see Yermak Timofeyevich), and the Yaik (Ural) and Terek rivers.
![modern cossacks modern cossacks](https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/140124114655-12-cossacks.jpg)
The Sich, with its lands, became an autonomous region under the Russian protectorate. Afterwards, the Treaty of Pereyaslav (1654) brought most of the Cossack state under Russian rule. The Hetmanate was initiated by a rebellion under Bohdan Khmelnytsky against Polish and Catholic domination, known as the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Under increasing pressure from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in the mid-17th century the Sich declared an independent Cossack Hetmanate. The Zaporizhian Sich became a vassal polity of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth during feudal times. There were several major Cossack hosts in the 16th century: near the Dnieper, Don, Volga and Ural Rivers the Greben Cossacks in Caucasia and the Zaporozhian Cossacks, mainly west of the Dnieper. Until at least the 1630s, these Cossack groups remained ethnically and religiously open to virtually anybody, although the Slavic element predominated. By the end of the 15th century, the term was also applied to peasants who had fled to the devastated regions along the Dnieper and Don Rivers, where they established their self-governing communities. Originally, the term referred to semi-independent Tatar groups ( qazaq or "free men") who inhabited the Pontic–Caspian steppe, north of the Black Sea near the Dnieper River. The origins of the Cossacks are disputed. 8.1.1 Registered Cossacks of the Russian Federation.5.10 Anticommunist Cossacks in exile and World War II, 1920–1945.5.9 Cossacks in the Soviet Union, 1917–1945.5.8 Bolshevik uprising and Civil War, 1917–1922.5.7 After the February Revolution, 1917.4.3 Black Sea, Azov and Danubian Sich Cossacks.
![modern cossacks modern cossacks](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4fXyyGJY-Nw/maxresdefault.jpg)
Between 3.5 and 5.0 million people associate themselves with the Cossack cultural identity across the world Cossack organizations operate in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, and the United States. In the 2002 Russian census, 140,028 people declared Cossack ethnicity, while 67,573 people identified as Cossack in the 2010 census. During the 1990s, many regional authorities agreed to hand over some local administrative and policing duties to their Cossack hosts. In 1988, the Soviet Union passed a law allowing the re-establishment of former Cossack hosts and the formation of new ones. During the Perestroika era in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, descendants of Cossacks moved to revive their national traditions. Īfter World War II, the Soviet Union disbanded the Cossack units in the Soviet Army. They inhabited sparsely populated areas and islands in the lower Dnieper, Don, Terek, and Ural river basins, and played an important role in the historical and cultural development of both Ukraine and Russia. The Cossacks are a group of predominantly East Slavic Orthodox Christian people who became known as members of democratic, self-governing, semi-military communities originating in the steppes of Eastern Europe (in particular the Dnieper, in the Wild Fields).