The Ukrainian Cossacks, often compared in historical literature to the pirates of the Mediterranean and the frontiersmen of the American West, constituted one of the largest Cossack hosts in the European steppe borderland. They became famous as ferocious warriors, their fighting skills developed in their religious wars against the Tartars, Turks, Poles, and Russians. By and large the Cossacks were Orthodox Christians, and quite early in their history they adopted a religious ideology in their struggle against those of other faiths. Their acceptance of the Muscovite protectorate in 1654 was also influenced by their religious ideas. This study examines the confessionalisation of religious life in early modern period Ukraine, and shows how Cossack involvement in the religious struggle between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism helped shape cultural identities not only in the Ukraine but also in Russia and Poland.

As I tried to answer the question of when this book originated and who helped me most in my work on it, my thoughts kept returning to a day in the early 1980s. I was in graduate school at the University of Dnipropetrovsk, and my undergraduate adviser, Iurii Mytsyk, showed up on my doorstep with two books in his bag. One of them was a pre- 1917 edition of Mykhailo Hrushevsky's Illustrated History of Ukraine, and the other was Mykola Zerov's Lectures on the History of Ukrainian Literature, published in 7977 by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. My guest had reason to believe that he was under investigation by the authorities for anti-Stalinist remarks that he had made at a private meeting. He was expecting a search of his apartment and wanted to get rid of the compromising publications in his home library. I agreed to take both books for safekeeping. I had read Hrushevsky before in the special collections of the Moscow, Kyiv, and Lviv libraries, but this was my first opportunity not merely to gulp down excerpts in the course of short research trips, but to read a whole book carefully at home, thinking about what I was reading. Hrushevsky's book struck me as a revelation about the Ukrainian past - a truth hidden from us by official Soviet historiography and the regime that it supported. It was my first encounter with an alternative account of East Slavic history, one that went far beyond the class-struggle-driven and Russocentric narrative of Soviet historiography. Its scholarly appeal and the fact that it was prohibited in the USSR made it especially attractive in my eyes. From that point on, I knew what the history of Ukraine was and how the Soviet version had to be reconstructed to meet the demands of historical scholarship.