Kovalenko

Kovalenko is the patronymic of the koval, the Ukrainian blacksmith, the man at the anvil who made and mended the iron a settlement could not do without. The name says son of the smith and nothing further: no estate, no charter, no founding ancestor, because every village with a forge had one.

It belongs to the Dnieper country that governed itself between 1648 and 1764 as the Zaporozhian Host, where what mattered about a man's name was not what it meant but whether it had been written down. That state was founded by Registered Cossacks, and the register was a literal list: entered on it, a man was a free soldier with privileges; left off it, a peasant on another man's land.

The Hetmanate's official name was the Zaporozhian Host, Viisko Zaporozke; Hetmanate is a word historians coined in the late 19th century out of the title hetman. It was recognised in law inside the eastern territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by the Treaty of Zboriv, signed on 18 August 1649 by Bohdan Khmelnytsky for the Host and Adam Kysil for the Crown Forces, the year after Khmelnytsky rode into Kyiv at Christmas 1648.

The central clause of that treaty was a number. The register was to be raised to 40,000 men, and Crown Forces were barred from the ground east of Vinnytsia, Bratslav and Yampil as far as the Muscovite border. Forty thousand names was not a headcount but a franchise. Most Cossacks never rose out of it into the noble estate; those who did became the Distinguished Military Fellows, ranked by loyalty rather than ancient descent.

Supreme power belonged to the General Cossack Council, which at the outset took in all Cossacks, townspeople, clergy and even peasants, and which chose the hetman. By the end of the 17th century its role had gone ceremonial and the Council of Officers picked him instead; after the Battle of Poltava in 1709 the choice had to be confirmed by the tsar. The hetman held complete power over administration, judiciary, finances and army.

The territory was cut into regiments, polky, each a military and a civil district together; in 1649, holding both banks of the Dnieper, the Hetmanate ran 16. A colonel was the supreme authority on his ground, with a staff of quartermaster, judge, chancellor, aide-de-camp and flag-bearer. Under him came the sotnia and its sotnyk, named for the town where he kept his council.

The Hetmanate began by keeping its books in other people's terms: Polish currency, and Polish as the frequent language of administration and even of command. After the Truce of Andrusovo in 1667 the prosta mova, the plain spoken language of the country, began to be written down and used widely in official documents. There were clerks to write them because there were schools: in the 1740s, of 1,099 settlements across seven regimental districts, 866 had a primary school.

Paul of Aleppo, travelling the country in 1654 and 1656, wrote that throughout the whole of the Kozak Land almost all of them, even their wives and daughters, knew how to read. So the state counted itself. A census in 1666 found 26 per cent of the residents of 36 left-bank towns to be artisans, the class a village smith belonged to, and the General Investigation of Estates of 1729-1730 established that 518 settlements in five regiments had passed to the officer class before 1708.

The register was failing by the middle of the century. Weapons, gunpowder, horses and gear were expensive and the recruit had to find them himself, so from the 1720s the registers ran understaffed, and in 1735 the host was split between Elected Cossacks, who kept the privileges and the duty to serve in person, and Helper Cossacks, who supplied the army.

Catherine II abolished the office of hetman in 1764 and the regimental system was dismantled in 1781. Then the documents came back. Her Charter of the Nobility of 1785 required descendants of Cossack officers who wanted Russian noble rank to justify the claim, and once the Imperial Heraldry Office opened in 1797 applicants worked through the treaties between hetmans and tsars and the old charters. Families hunted their ancestors in the archive of a state that no longer existed, and the search fed the Ukrainian national revival of the next century.

Oleksii Oleksandrovych Kovalenko was born on 8 February 1981 in the village of Malokaterynivka in the Zaporizhzhia region, and was brought up by his grandmother after his mother died young of cancer. In 2003 he graduated from the Kharkiv National Air Force University of Ukraine and joined the 7th Tactical Aviation Brigade, the Petro Franko brigade, as a senior navigator. He never left it, rising to head of the flight safety service and first class pilot on the Su-24M frontline bomber.

From 2014 he flew combat missions in the Joint Forces Operation. When the full-scale invasion began he defended the skies over Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv and Kharkiv, and on 22 March 2022 his aircraft was shot down as he struck a column of enemy troops and equipment near Izium. Only after the liberation of Izium could his family bring him home; he was buried at Starokostiantyniv on 25 September 2022, and on 26 February 2023 he was made a Hero of Ukraine with the Order of the Gold Star.

Yuriy Viktorovych Kovalenko was born on 16 July 1977 in Bershad, in Vinnytsia, into a military family, a submarine officer's household. He went to the Odesa Military Institute of Land Forces and served at Dnipropetrovsk with the 93rd Mechanised Division, then at Kirovohrad as deputy commander of the 3rd spetsnaz regiment of South operational command.

He was in the Donbas from May 2014, from the first weeks of the fighting. His detachment guarded military facilities, escorted transports and ran intelligence operations; he was promoted to lieutenant colonel for taking his reconnaissance unit through the enemy's order of battle, and in one engagement carried a wounded soldier out himself. He was holding the Ukrainian-Russian border in the Sverdlovsk district of Luhansk Oblast when he was shot during a mortar bombardment on 15 July 2014. He left a wife and two daughters and was made a Hero of Ukraine.

Dmytro Hennadiiovych Kovalenko was born in Kyiv on 28 August 1977, and the American game set him down as Dema. He learned the game at the Dynamo Kyiv academy, was spotted by a college coach on a 1990 junior tour of the United States, emigrated in 1992 and played three years at Indiana University. Major League Soccer allocated him to the Dallas Burn, then gave way to his insistence on the Chicago Fire, where he came into his own in 2000 with ten goals and five assists in 31 games and a US Open Cup. Traded to D.C. United, he put up two goals and ten assists in 25 games in 2004, the year the club took the MLS Cup.

The rest of the roll is broad. Igor Kovalenko, born in 1988, is a chess grandmaster, Iryna Kovalenko a high jumper, and Bohdan, Kostiantyn and Yevhen Kovalenko have all played the Ukrainian professional game. A second Yuriy Kovalenko, born in 1966 and dead in 2023, is set down as scientist, archaeologist, local historian, teacher, musician and staff sergeant of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. It is a fair place to leave a surname that was never a family: the smith's son, coined a thousand times over in villages with nothing in common but a forge, in a country that wrote its people down.