The Cossack people lived on a vast territory from the Dniester and Dnieper to the Don, Volga and Yaik (Urals), which the Cossacks called the Cossack Prisud or Cossackia.
Cossacks are an ancient people descended from the Scythians and Sarmatians, the famous ancestors of the Cossacks are Circassians, Khazars, Goths and Alans. The Cossack people lived on a vast territory from the Dniester and Dnieper to the Don, Volga and Yaik (Urals), which the Cossacks called the Cossack Prisud or Cossackia. For the first time in history, the term "Cossackia" was mentioned in 948 by the Byzantine tsar Constantine Porphyrogenitus (Porphyrogenitus), who called this country according to the Greek custom "Kasakhia". A little later in 978, the Persian geographer Gudud al Alam called it "the 3rd Kasak". Both indicated its central location in the North Caucasus, and at the first it was located behind the Caucasian Mountain from Alanya, and at the second it belonged to the Alans and rested on the Sea of Azov. The Arab author Masudi distinguished the Kasaki people from the mountain Kesheks. In the academic commentaries to Konstantin Porphyrogenitus (St. Petersburg, 1744), Sigfrid Bayer said about Kasakhia: "This is the most ancient of the Cossack people of the settlement mentioned." Russian historians of the Don are the first to recall the Cossacks A. Popov. In his "History of the Don Army" (ed. 1814) it is written: "We see that this Army has been called the Don Cossacks since ancient times, and their land is Cossackia, because in Persian Cossack means Scythian."
In the future, the Cossacks were divided into western and eastern, where two independent Cossack republics were formed – the Zaporozhian Sich (Ukraine) and the Don Army (Don), the conditional border between which was the fields between the Dnieper and the Don (now Donbass). Ukraine and the Don closely communicated with neighboring states Lithuania and Muscovy, sending their embassies there (Winter Villages), and since the XVII century. The Zaporozhye and Don Cossacks began to get closer to the Moscow tsar, concluding union agreements with him, the originals of which have not been preserved, which gave the basis to Russian historians to give out wishful thinking, presenting this co-religionist an equal union as the accession of the Cossacks to Muscovy. Since that time, a new forced history of the Cossack people begins, from which the Moscow tsars and boyars began to create a "military service estate". This did not suit the freedom-loving Cossacks, and therefore they not only went to the east in search of the Cossack will and share (this is how the Yaitsky Army was formed), but also often rebelled against the tsars, arranging full-scale uprisings led by Stepan Razin, Kondraty Bulavin, Emelyan Pugachev, etc. atamans and hetmans. For the first time, the Zaporozhye and Don Cossacks were subjected to mass extermination under Peter I, who spared neither the elderly, nor women, nor children. The colonization of the Cossack lands ended with the enslavement of one part of the Cossacks and the exodus of the other unconquered part of the Donets, led by Ataman Nekrasov, to Turkey. Later, the Russian tsars managed to tame and Russify the Cossacks in such a way that they turned from an independent people into devoted tsar's servants, who unfortunately became the main military-occupation force with which Moscow conquered other peoples of Eurasia, expanding the borders of its empire from the Baltic to the Pacific Ocean. As Leo Tolstoy said: "The Cossacks created Russia," i.e., "the prison of the peoples," in the words of the French Marquis de Custine.
And only after the fall of tsarist Russia in 1917, the Cossacks, along with other enslaved peoples, remembering their history, began to revive the Cossackia, creating their own sovereign republics on the Don, Kuban and other lands, but not for long, since already in 1920 the Red Horde seized the Cossack lands and liquidated these states. Most of the Cossacks ended up in exile, where the Cossack National Liberation Movement (KNOD) for the revival of Cossacks arose.
During the Second World War, with the favorable attitude of the Germans, the Cossacks tried to revive their state on the Don, but this time they failed. Another part of the Cossack people together with the Cossack Camp (nomadic republic) went into exile. In total, during the years of Soviet power, as a result of the genocide of the Cossack people (red terror, telling, famines, war, GULAG concentration camps and exile), the Cossacks lost about ten million. Russian Communists settled the Cossack lands mainly with Russians, who now represent the majority there.
And before and after the collapse of the USSR, there could be no question of any compact residence of Cossacks, they lived and live everywhere, and unfortunately, the largest part of them still considers themselves Russians. At the beginning of the 1990s, another attempt was made on the Don to revive the Cossack statehood as an autonomy of the Russian Federation, but the new Russian government did not allow this to be done. Moreover, Moscow has once again decided to turn Cossacks into obedient slaves of the Kremlin regime, recording everyone in a row (including Russians and other foreigners) to serve in the so-called "cossack register". At the same time, the authorities deny the Cossacks the right not only to self-determination, but even to be called a separate people. Thus, after the genocide, the Cossacks are experiencing an outright ethnocide, the purpose of which is to level out the remnants of the ancestral Cossacks in the Russian mass, preventing national identification. Nevertheless, the national liberation movement is growing in contrast to the fake Cossacks, which the ancestral Cossacks consider an alien and dangerous phenomenon. There are schools and textbooks of the Cossack languages(Don Hutor, Kuban Balachka, Ural kalyaka), Cossack history and culture are preserved (ethnography, myths, legends, epics, songs, dances, clothing, possession of weapons, horse riding, etc.).
At the moment, Cossacks are citizens of various post-Soviet states of Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, etc., many live in Western countries of Europe, America, Australia, where small enclaves called "villages" have been created. Among the nationally minded Cossacks who distinguish themselves from the Russian-imperial mass and advocate the revival of the Cossackia, there are two main trends – independentists and autonomists. The former stand for the sovereignty of the Cossacksia as a federation or confederation of Cossack republics, the latter for the autonomy of the Cossackia as part of Russia. Moreover, some of the independents are in favor of the Ukrainian-Cossack confederation from the Carpathians to the Caucasus and the Urals, assuming to restore the ancient unified Cossacks, consisting of equal states.