Option of the European Steppe Frontier in Modern Russian and Ukrainian Cossacks Studies

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to research the specific using of the frontier paradigm in the study on Cossack history by contemporary Russian and Ukrainian historiography. There are examined views of Russian and Ukrainian historians on the following issues: the genesis of the views on the Cossack communities as a special ethno-social organisms at Europe's Great Frontier, the characteristics of the inter-ethnic contact zone in the stretch of steppes from the Dnipro to the Terek, the views on the interaction between Cossack communities and the non-Christian Cossack formations on the other side of the Christian-Muslim frontier, the emergence of the research approach based on the conception of the balance of confrontational and non-confrontational contacts and mutual impacts.