Katsap [кацап]. Derogatory name applied historically to Russians by Ukrainians. According to some scholars (Aleksander Brückner, Max Vasmer) katsap was derived from the Ukrainian tsap (goat) and referred to the beards many Russian men used to wear; according to others (Ahatanhel Krymsky, Dmytro Yavornytsky) it comes from the Tatar kassap (butcher), where it had the connotation of ‘cruel person,’ ‘oppressor,’ and ‘executioner.’ The term appears to have been widely used among Turkic communities of the Eurasian steppe for centuries before being adopted by Ukrainians with respect to Russians (Yavornytsky). Most scholars today favor this second interpretation.

This word has been known in central and eastern Ukraine (in the Zaporizhia, Hetman state, and Sloboda Ukraine) since the eighteenth century, and later it spread to other parts of Ukraine. It is used often in Ukrainian folklore and folk oral literature. Panteleimon Kulish wrote about Taras Shevchenko: ‘He made us despise the Muscovites... We called them katsapy.’ Marko Vovchok wrote: ‘The market was seething with bustle..., the hucksters were jabbering, the Gypsies swearing, the katsapy railing.’ The word can also be found in the works of Shevchenko, Panas Myrny, Anatolii Svydnytsky, Stepan Rudansky, Nikolai Gogol, and Dmytro Bedzyk. Examples from folklore include: ‘God created the goat (tsap), and the devil created the katsap’; ‘If a katsap doesn’t lie, he won’t breathe.’ Despite repressions on the Ukrainian language and literature in the Russian Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century, the term remained widely used in Ukraine and even appeared in print. In Austrian-ruled Galicia, Galician Ukrainian national populists often used it to refer to local Russophiles. Nineteenth-century lexicographer and folklorist Vladimir Dal, also recorded the term in the Russian language in connection with the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church: both Old Believers and their opponents at times called each other katsapy/kotsapy, particularly in the Tula and Kursk gubernias.

Although the term was suppressed in the Soviet Union, it remained in circulation in popular culture. Two of the best-known satirical and absurdist plays by the counterculture artist Les Poderviansky, written in the 1980s and early 1990s, are Hamliet, abo Fenomen dats'koho katsapizmu (Hamlet, or the Phenomenon of Danish Katsapism) and Katsapy. Similarly, Soviet Russia and the Russian Federation have often been referred to as Katsapiia, Katsapshshyna, Katsapliandiia, or Katsapstan, with the latter two forms most likely emerging in the 1990s. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the term has largely lost its ethnic connotations and has come to refer more broadly to the population of the Russian Federation, and especially to its military, rather than to people of Russian heritage in Ukraine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
N.M. ‘O proiskhozhdenii slova “katsap,”’ Kievskaia starina vol 65 (December 1901)
Nakonechnyi, Ievhen. Ukradene im’ia: Chomu rusyny staly ukraїntsiamy, 4th ed. (Kyiv 2013)

Serhiy Bilenky

[This article was updated in 2026.]