The Gates of Europe

by Serhii Plokhy

  In fact, it did, and in the worst possible circumstances. In the summer of 1651, in a battle near the town of Berestechko in Volhynia, the Crimean Tatars deserted the battlefield in the midst of the fray, leading to the encirclement and annihilation of the core of the Cossack army. Khmelnytsky, who retreated together with the khan, became a hostage of his ally until his release to reorganize his defenses and prevent a complete demise of Cossack statehood. His reliance on the Crimean Tatars had ended in disaster. In the fall of 1651, Khmelnytsky negotiated a new agreement with the commonwealth: his Cossack register was cut in half to 20,000 men, while Cossack territory was reduced to the Kyiv palatinate—those of Bratslav and Chernihiv were supposed to return to direct commonwealth jurisdiction. Since that condition was not fulfilled, another war was clearly in the offing.

  The Cossack state needed new allies. Khmelnytsky focused particularly on the principality of Moldavia, which, while officially a vassal state of the Ottomans, had traditionally carried on a balancing act between Istanbul and Warsaw. In 1650, the Cossack hetman forced Moldavia into a formal alliance by sending a Cossack army there and prevailing upon the Moldavian ruler, Vasile Lupu, to engage his daughter Roxanda to Khmelnytsky’s son Tymish. After the Cossack defeat at Berestechko, Lupu tried unsuccessfully to extricate himself from the arrangement. In 1652, Khmelnytsky once again sent thousands of Cossack “matchmakers” to Moldavia. On their way they defeated a large Polish army in battle at Batih and then celebrated the wedding of Tymish and Roxanda at the court of Vasile Lupu. By this expedient, Khmelnytsky joined the club of internationally recognized rulers.

  But there were limits to how much Khmelnytsky could achieve by allying himself with the Ottomans and their dependencies. This became painfully obvious in the fall of 1653, when the Cossacks fought another battle against the royal army near the town of Zhvanets in Podolia. Once again, the Crimean Tatars were on the Cossack side and prevented the Cossacks from winning the battle. It ended exactly how the Crimean khan wished, with no decisive outcome. The Kingdom of Poland and the Cossack Hetmanate returned to the deal they had made at Zboriv: a Cossack register of 40,000, and three palatinates under Cossack control. Everyone knew it was another cease-fire, not a meaningful compromise or a lasting peace. The Cossacks wanted all of Ukraine and parts of Belarus, while the king, and especially the Diet, resisted acknowledging Cossack rule even over the three eastern principalities that they actually controlled.

  Khmelnytsky and the Cossack state had to look for different allies. Reaching a compromise with the commonwealth authorities was turning out to be impossible, and the Cossacks could not survive in conflict with such a powerful enemy on their own. The Crimeans allowed them to stand up to but not to defeat the Poles. The Ottomans were not prepared to commit their troops, and the Moldavian alliance ended in a personal tragedy for Khmelnytsky. In September 1653 his eldest son, the twenty-one-year-old Tymish, was killed defending the fortress of Suceava (in present-day Romania) against the united forces of Wallachia and Transylvania, whose leaders were unhappy with the Khmelnytsky-Lupu alliance. In late December 1653, Khmelnytsky buried his son at his estate of Subotiv near Chyhyryn. The burial took place in the recently constructed Church of St. Elias, an example of baroque architecture on the Cossack steppes that still survives and is depicted on Ukrainian banknotes. With the burial of Tymish, the aging hetman’s plans to integrate his country into the Ottoman political network also expired.

  The turning point in the internationalization of the Khmelnytsky Revolt took place on January 8, 1654, in the town of Pereiaslav. On that day, Bohdan Khmelnytsky and a hastily gathered group of Cossack officers swore allegiance to the new sovereign of Ukraine, Tsar Aleksei Romanov of Muscovy. The long and complex history of Russo-Ukrainian relations had begun. In 1954, the Soviet Union lavishly celebrated the tricentennial of the “reunification” of Ukraine and Russia. The implication was that all of Ukraine had chosen at Pereiaslav to rejoin Russia and accepted the sovereignty of the tsar. What actually happened at Pereiaslav in 1654 was neither the reunification of Ukraine with Muscovy (which would be renamed “Russia” by Peter I) nor the reunion of two “fraternal peoples,” as suggested by Soviet historians. No one in Pereiaslav or Moscow was thinking or speaking in ethnic terms in 1654.

  Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s speech at the council of Cossack officers, recorded in the materials of the Muscovite embassy, gives some idea of how the Ukrainian hetman presented and explained his actions:

  We have convened a council open to the whole people so that you, together with us, might choose a sovereign for yourselves out of four, whomever you wish: the first is the Turkish tsar [sultan], who has often appealed to us through his envoys to come under his rule; the second is the Crimean khan; the third is the Polish king, who, if we wish, may still take us into his former favor; the fourth is the Orthodox sovereign of Great Rus’, the tsar, Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich, the eastern sovereign of all Rus’, whom we have now been entreating for ourselves for six years with incessant pleadings. Now choose the one you wish!

  No doubt, Khmelnytsky was playing games. The choice had already been made: he and the Cossack officers had decided in favor of the sovereign of Muscovy. According to the ambassadorial report, the hetman made his argument by appealing to the Orthodox solidarity of his listeners. Those taking part in the council shouted their desire for the “Eastern” Orthodox tsar as their ruler.

  It sounded like one of the many religion-based alliances of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation: the Thirty Years’ War, in which the countries of Europe lined up largely on the basis of their religious identities, had ended only five years earlier. There is no need to blame either the Muscovite elites or their Ukrainian counterparts for not considering each other brothers and members of the same Rus’ nation. The two sides needed interpreters to understand each other, and Khmelnytsky’s letters to the tsar survived in the Russian archives largely in translations prepared by such official interpreters. The tradition of Kyivan Rus’ as represented by historical memory and religious belief still existed, but it was embodied only in a few handwritten chronicles.

  Four centuries of existence in different political conditions, under the rule of different states, had strengthened long-standing linguistic and cultural differences that divided the future Belarus and Ukraine from the future Russia. Those differences came to the fore when Khmelnytsky and the colonels wanted to discuss conditions of the agreement with the Russian envoy, Vasilii Buturlin; he told them that the tsar would treat them better than the king had but refused to negotiate. Khmelnytsky objected, saying that they had been accustomed to negotiating with the king and his officials, but Buturlin responded that the Polish king, being an elective monarch, was not the equal of the hereditary Russian tsar. He also refused to take an oath with regard to the broad promises he had made to the Cossacks: the tsar, said Buturlin, swears no oath to his subjects. Khmelnytsky, who wanted Muscovite troops in battle as soon as possible, agreed to swear allegiance to the tsar with no reciprocal oath.

  The Cossacks thought of the Pereiaslav agreement as a contract with binding obligations on both sides. As far as Khmelnytsky was concerned, he and his polity were entering into a protectorate under the tsar’s authority. They promised loyalty and military service in exchange for the protection offered by Muscovy. The tsar, however, perceived the Cossacks as new subjects toward whom he would have no obligations after granting them certain rights and privileges. As for his right to the new territory, he thought in dynastic terms. As far as he and his chancellery were concerned, the tsar was taking over his patrimony: the cities of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav.

  Whatever the legal and ideological underpinnings of the Pereiaslav agreement, the tsar honored Buturlin’s promise and gave the Cossacks what the Polish king had never agreed to: recognition of Cossack statehood, a Cossack register of 60,000, and privileged status for the Cossack estate. He also recognized the liberties enjoyed by other social strata u
nder the Polish kings.

  First and foremost, however, the agreement laid the foundations for a military alliance. It established no western boundary for the Cossacks’ territory—they could go as far as their sabers would take them. The Muscovite and Cossack armies entered the war against the commonwealth on their separate fronts: the Cossacks, assisted by a Muscovite corps, led the offensive in Ukraine, within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Poland; the Muscovite troops launched an offensive near Smolensk and moved west through Belarus and then into Lithuania, north of the Lublin border between the grand duchy and the kingdom. The joint offensive of Muscovite and Cossack troops brought unexpected results. Whereas in 1654 the Polish and Lithuanian troops, assisted by the Crimean khan, had managed to resist the offensive from the east, in the summer and fall of 1655 the Polish-Lithuanian counteroffensive collapsed: the Cossacks once again besieged Lviv, and Muscovite troops entered Vilnius, the capital of the grand duchy.

  This was the beginning of the era known in Polish history as the Deluge. Not only did the Muscovite and Cossack armies move deep into the commonwealth, but in July 1655 the Swedes launched an offensive of their own across the Baltic Sea. By October, both Warsaw and the ancient Polish capital of Cracow were in Swedish hands. Alarmed by the prospect of a complete Polish collapse and a dramatic expansion of Sweden, which now claimed the parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania conquered by Muscovite troops, in the fall of 1656 Muscovite diplomats concluded an agreement with the commonwealth in Vilnius that put an end to Polish-Muscovite hostilities. Khmelnytsky and the Cossack officials were enraged at being denied access to the negotiations. The separate peace with Poland was leaving the Cossacks one on one with their traditional enemy. As far as they were concerned, the tsar was reneging on his main obligation under the Pereiaslav agreement—the military protection of his subjects.

  Bohdan Khmelnytsky ignored the Muscovite-Polish deal and sent his army to help an ally of Sweden, the Protestant ruler of Transylvania, fight the Poles. Now, even the military alliance between the tsar and the Cossacks came into question. Khmelnytsky had been looking for new allies since Sweden’s entry into the war with Poland. The Swedes seemed determined to destroy the commonwealth, which Khmelnytsky also wanted. Negotiations to conclude a Ukrainian-Swedish agreement that would put an end to the commonwealth and guarantee the inclusion not only of Ukraine but also parts of what is now Belarus in the Cossack state gained new impetus from what the hetman regarded as the tsar’s betrayal of Ukraine.

  Khmelnytsky, however, did not live to see the conclusion of this new international alliance. He died in August 1657, leaving the state he had created and the Cossacks he had led at a crossroads. Although Khmelnytsky believed that his alliance with the tsar had already run its course, he formally abided by the deal he had made in Pereiaslav. Events there became an important part of the old hetman’s large and contradictory legacy. Cossack chroniclers of the eighteenth century celebrated him very much in the same vein as the professors and students of the Kyivan College had done on his entrance into Kyiv in December 1648. They extolled him as the father of the nation, the liberator of his people from the Polish yoke, and the hetman who had negotiated the best possible arrangement with the tsar: they considered the Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, approved by the tsar after Pereiaslav, a Magna Carta of Ukrainian liberties in the Russian Empire.

  chapter 11

  The Partitions

  The Khmelnytsky Uprising unleashed a long period of wars that led many historians to refer to the decades following the revolt as the Ruin. While the destruction and depopulation of the Ukrainian lands, especially on the Right Bank of the Dnieper River, indeed dealt a huge blow to the economic, political, and cultural life of the region, the main long-term consequence of the wars was the division of Ukraine along the Dnieper between Muscovy and Poland. The Dnieper boundary became a major factor in early modern Ukrainian history, and some consider it relevant even today, influencing the cultural and at times political preferences of Ukrainians on both sides of the former Polish border.

  Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s vision for the Cossack state was one of territorial expansion, not fragmentation. But the fissures within the Cossack officer class that eventually led to the division of the Hetmanate became apparent soon after the old hetman’s death in August 1657. The trigger was the contested succession to the highest office in the land—a problem that plagued more than one medieval and early modern polity. Khmelnytsky was thinking of creating his own dynasty, and shortly before his death, he engineered the election to the Cossack hetmancy of his son Yurii, a rather sickly sixteen-year-old youth who suffered from occasional bouts of epilepsy. What happened next will come as no surprise to anyone who has read Aleksandr Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. An experienced courtier, appointed to serve as the youth’s regent, removed him—in the Ukrainian case, without spilling any blood—and engineered his own election to the leadership.

  The drama that would lead to the partitions had begun. If Khmelnytsky had expected succession to the hetmancy to work as it did in Poland, with election to the throne of members of the same dynasty one after another, the system that came into existence was more like the one in the principality of Moldavia, where new leaders were elected and disposed of at the wish or with the approval of the Ottomans. Unlike in the case of Moldavia, three major powers would contest Ukraine—the Muscovites, Poles, and Ottomans. No matter which of these three powers won, the Cossacks would invariably lose. Their succession system was thoroughly dysfunctional, serving to destabilize the whole region.

  The man who assumed the hetman’s mace after pushing Yurii Khmelnytsky aside in the fall of 1657 was Ivan Vyhovsky. His life trajectory and career differed greatly from those of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Born into a well-established Orthodox noble family, Vyhovsky had no problem with recognition of his noble status. His election as hetman was a victory for the nobles within the Cossack elite as opposed to the officers, who were veterans of the pre-1648 Cossack register. Very telling in this regard was his choice of a new general chancellor. The post went not to a veteran Cossack officer but to a Ukrainian magnate whose latifundia rivaled those of the Vyshnevetsky princes. His name was Yurii Nemyrych.

  Exceptionally well educated by the standards of the time, Nemyrych belonged to the radical wing of the Polish Reformation, the group known as Antitrinitarians. (A founder of the Unitarian Church, Joseph Priestley, would bring their brand of religion to the United States in the late eighteenth century.) Nemyrych studied in an Antitrinitarian school in Poland and then moved to western Europe, where he took courses at the universities of Leiden, Basel and, by some accounts, Oxford and Cambridge. At the time of the Deluge in Poland, he sided with a fellow Protestant, King Charles X of Sweden. Soon disillusioned with the Swedes, however, he converted to Orthodoxy, made friends with Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and moved to Cossack Ukraine, close to his possessions, which the hetman returned to him.

  Many in the Cossack ranks were unhappy with the rise to power of the noble faction led by Ivan Vyhovsky. The Cossacks beyond the Dnieper rapids expressed open disapproval. They had elected Khmelnytsky hetman in the spring of 1648. Since then, the new Cossack state that had arisen north of the steppelands, in the settled area of the middle Dnieper, had taken away not only their exclusive right to elect the hetman but also their very name—the Hetmanate was officially known as the Zaporozhian Host. The Zaporozhians, now marginalized, claimed that election of a new hetman should take place beyond the rapids. They questioned the legitimacy of Vyhovsky’s election, and some Cossack colonels were prepared to listen to them and offer support. No less importantly, Moscow was encouraging opposition to Vyhovsky by recognizing the right of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to communicate directly with the tsar’s officials. The Muscovite authorities sought to exploit the division in Cossack ranks to weaken the hetman and make him less independent than his predecessor, Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

  Vyhovsky would have none of it. In June 1658 his army, backed by
the Crimean Tatars, confronted the Zaporozhians and their allies among the Hetmanate’s Cossacks near the city of Poltava in Left-Bank Ukraine. Vyhovsky emerged victorious, but the death toll was enormous. According to some estimates, close to 15,000 people died. It was the first time since 1648 that Cossacks had fought Cossacks, establishing a precedent that would ruin their state. Vyhovsky had no doubt that Moscow was behind the rebels. But how was he to protect himself?

  The hetman believed that, like Khmelnytsky, he had entered into a conditional agreement with the tsar (he called it “voluntary subordination”) and could renounce it if the tsar did not keep his part of the bargain. The tsar, for his part, believed in no conditionality: the only conditions he recognized were those that he could impose on his subjects. While Khmelnytsky, dissatisfied with his arrangement with the tsar of Muscovy, had nowhere to turn but the Swedes and the Ottomans, his successors discovered another option—a new deal with Poland. They were part and parcel of the Polish political system, knew its strengths and weaknesses, and believed that an agreement reincorporating their country into the commonwealth while maintaining broad autonomy was not only desirable but possible.

  In September 1658, Vyhovsky summoned a Cossack council in the Left-Bank town of Hadiach that approved conditions for the Hetmanate’s return to the jurisdiction of the Polish kings. The resulting Polish-Cossack treaty, called the Union of Hadiach, was the brainchild of Vyhovsky’s right-hand man, Yurii Nemyrych. The treaty was nothing if not a realization of the dreams nurtured by the Ukrainian nobility of the first half of the seventeenth century. In the struggles over the Union of Brest, the Orthodox nobles had developed an anachronistic interpretation of the Union of Lublin as an arrangement that recognized not only the Grand Duchy of Lithuania but also the Rus’ lands of Poland-Lithuania as an equal partner in the commonwealth. Now Nemyrych decided to turn that vision into reality by refashioning the Hetmanate as the principality of Rus’, which would join the commonwealth as a coequal third partner along with Poland and Lithuania.