In 1920, the prominent Ukrainian historian and political activist Viacheslav Lypynsky (Waclaw Lipinski) published a book entitled Ukraine at the Turning Point.
In it he discussed the dramatic changes brought about in mid-seventeenth century Ukraine by the Khmelnytsky Uprising, the rise of the Cossack state known in historiography as the Hetmanate, and the ensuing military confrontations, first with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and then with Muscovy.
Thie book was later treated as a manifesto of the “statist” school of Ukrainian historiography.Among Lypynskys contributions to the study of the period was the introduction into historiographic discourse of the concept of the Pereiaslav Legend—a body of historical myths that developed in the eighteenth century around the Cossack-Muscovite agreement proclaimed in the town of Pereiaslav in January 1654. The agreement, formalized during the Cossack delegation’s visit to Moscow in March of the same year, established the tsar’s protectorate over the Cossack polity led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Lypynsky argued that by presenting the Pereiaslav Agreement as an act of voluntary union between the Little Russian (Ukrainian) nation and the Muscovite state, whose Orthodox religion it shared, the eighteenth-century Cossack elites eased the process of integration into the Russian Empire for themselves but compromised the interests of their state and opened the door to the creation of the concept of an all-Russian nation.1
What Lypynsky left out of his analysis were the ever-changing political circumstances under which the Pereiaslav Legend functioned in Ukraine after the defeat of Hetman Ivan Mazepa’s revolt against Tsar Peter I. Twenty years after the Battle of Poltava (1709), the Pereiaslav myth provided historical ammunition for Cossack attempts to restore the “rights and privileges” guaranteed by the “Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.” Thiat myth helped the Cossack elites restore not only some of their own rights and privileges but also the institution of the hetmancy, abolished by Peter I after the death of Mazepa’s successor, Hetman Ivan Skoropadsky (1722).2
Another element of the Pereiaslav mythology that escaped Lypynsky’s attention was the development of the “reunification of Ukraine with Russia” paradigm—the official formula that defined the purpose of the Pereiaslav Agreement in Russian imperial and Soviet historiography.
The origins of the reunification paradigm, which dominated the Soviet historiography of Russo-Ukrainian relations for decades, can be traced back at least to the end of the eighteenth century. After the second partition of Poland in 1793, Empress Catherine II struck a medal welcoming Polish and Lithuanian Rus' into the empire. The inscription read: “I have recovered what was torn away.”3 The same statist approach was reflected in the writings of the nineteenth-century Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin, a leader of the Pan-Slav movement. He claimed that the leitmotif of Russian history was the reclamation of those parts of the Russian land that had been lost to western neighbors since the times of Yaroslav the Wise. The first scholar to fully merge the statist and nation-based elements of the reunification paradigm in his historical survey of Russia was Nikolai Ustrialov, who maintained that all Eastern Slavs constituted one Russian nation and that the various parts of Rus' professed a “desire for union.”Ustrialov’s ideas shaped the interpretation of Russia’s relations with its East Slavic neighbors for generations of Russian historians. At the turn of the twentieth century, a modified version of the Ustrialov thesis made up the core of Vasilii Kliuchevsky’s argument.4 Even some Ukrainian historians, such as Panteleimon Kulish, the author of the History of the Reunification of Rus', bought into the idea. The same is true of nineteenth-century Russophile historiography in Galicia, but most Ukrainian historians, led by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, rejected the reunification paradigm.
They regarded Ukraine as a separate nation whose origins reached back to Kyivan Rus': it had not been torn away from any other nation and thus had no need to be reunited with its other parts.5
Early Soviet historians concurred with Hrushevsky in regarding Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus as separate nations and kept their historical narratives apart in every period except that of Kyivan Rus'. But in the 1930s, as Russian nationalism (in its Great Russian form) returned to the political scene, that view was revised and elements of the old imperial approach reintroduced into the interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement.
The view of the agreement as a continuation of Russian imperial policy was abandoned in favor of the “lesser evil” formula, whereby the annexation of Cossack Ukraine by Muscovy was viewed as a better alternative than its subordination to the Ottomans or to the Kingdom of Poland. After the Second World War, when class-based discourse declined and the Russocentric nation-based approach reemerged in Soviet historical works, the concept of “annexation” was dropped altogether and that of “reunification” reintroduced into historical discourse. A new formula was invented to describe the Pereiaslav Agreement, which was now to be called the “reunification of Ukraine and Russia.”6After the Second World War, there were two commemorations of the event in the Soviet period. The first, in 1954, was a large-scale event held with great fanfare and accompanied by the transfer of sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula from Russia to Ukraine. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union approved a collection of “Theses on the Three-Hundredth Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia” that shaped the interpretation of Russo-Ukrainian relations until the end of Soviet rule. In 1979, when the 325th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Council rolled around, only the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine issued a resolution outlining the commemoration program and restating the interpretation established in 1954.7
This new/old reunification paradigm took into account the Soviet treatment of Ukrainian history as a distinct subject and accepted the view that by the mid-seventeenth century there existed two separate East Slavic nations. But the attempt to merge pre-1917 and post-revolutionary historiographic concepts produced a contradiction. How could Ukraine reunite with Russia when, according to the official line, there had been no Russians, Ukrainians, or Belarusians in Kyivan Rus'? Soviet historians were discouraged from asking questions of that kind.
The reunification concept became official doctrine in 1954, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union approved the “Theses on the Three-Hundredth Anniversary of the Reunification of Ukraine with Russia.”Scholarly discussion of the meaning and historical importance of the Pereiaslav Agreement resumed only in the late 1980s, following the advent ofglasnost. Ukrainian historians overwhelmingly rejected the reunification paradigm, replacing the imperial- and Soviet-era “reunification” with the terms “Ukrainian Revolution” and “National-Liberation War” to denote the Khmelnytsky Uprising and its aftermath. Both terms stressed the national characteristics of the uprising. No less decisive in rejecting the term and the concept symbolized by it were Belarusian specialists in the early modern history of Eastern Europe. Their Russian colleagues remained much more loyal to the old imperial and Soviet interpretations of the Pereiaslav Agreement. One of them, a specialist in Russian diplomatic history named Lev Zaborovsky, supported the continued use of the reunification terminology by arguing that the desire of the Ukrainian population for union with Muscovy was apparent from the historical sources of the period. Yet Zaborovsky had no objection to calling the Khmelnytsky Uprising a “war of national liberation” as long as it was considered to have been anti-Polish.8
The reunification terminology seems to have made a comeback in Russian historiography after the fall of the Soviet Union. But was there indeed a reunification in Pereiaslav? And if there was, who reunited with whom? These are the questions I shall address, approaching them through a study of the construction and evolution of East Slavic group identities in the first half of the seventeenth century. An answer to this question must be based on a long view of Muscovite-Ruthenian relations and the Pereiaslav Agreement, going back at least to the turn of the seventeenth century.