Epitome of Cossackdom was the Zaporozhian Sich, a stockaded wooden barracks-town on a remote island south of the Dnieper rapids. Symbol of freedom for generations of Ukrainians, it was where the wildest outlaws gathered, the most daring raids were plotted, and the most horilka drunk. No women were allowed to enter the Sich, and important decisions were taken by the Rada, a rough-and-ready open-air assembly where, in theory at least, everybody had an equal voice. ‘This Republic could be compared to the Spartan,’ wrote a seventeenth-century Venetian envoy, Alberto Vimina, ‘if the Kozaks
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