Bohdan Khmelnytsky

Rarely do individuals dominate epochal developments as completely as did Bohdan Khmelnytsky the great Ukrainian uprising of 1648. Because of his great personal impact on events that changed the course of Ukrainian and East European history, scholars consider him to be Ukraine’s greatest military and political leader.

But a typical case of magnate acquisitiveness and arrogance completely altered Khmelnytsky’s life and with it the course of his country’s history. In 1646, during his absence from Subotiv, Daniel Czaplinski, a Polish nobleman backed by the local magnates, laid claim to Khmelnytsky’s estate, raided it, killed his youngest son, and abducted the woman that the recently widowed Cossack captain intended to marry.

The mesmerizing influence Khmelnytsky could exert on the masses became evident when, hounded by the Poles who had caught wind of his plans, he fled to the Zaporozhian Sich with a handful of followers in January 1648. In short order he persuaded the Zaporozhians to support him, expelled the Polish garrison from the Sich, and managed to have himself elected hetman. At first, the gathering rebellion had all the features of the previous, unsuccessful uprisings: a vengeful Cossack officer, wronged by magnates, making his way to the Sich and persuading the Zaporozhians to stand up for their (and his) rights. But, in Khmelnytsky’s case, his exceptional talents as an organizer, military leader, and politician made the crucial difference.

For more than a year before arriving at the Sich, he had plotted an uprising and established a network of supporters. Realizing that the Cossacks’ great weakness in fighting the Poles was a lack of cavalry, Khmelnytsky found an audacious solution to the problem: he approached the Crimean Tatars, the Cossacks’ traditional enemies, with a proposal for an alliance against the Poles. His timing was perfect. At precisely the time that his envoys arrived in Crimea, the khan’s relations with the Poles had become extremely strained and he sent Tuhai-Bey, a noted commander, with 4000 Tatars to the Cossacks’ aid.

In mid April 1648, at Zhovti Vody, not far from the Sich, a confident Polish advance guard of 6000 men confronted the combined Cossack/Tatar force of about 9000. On 6 May, after prolonged fighting, which resulted in the desertion to the rebels of several thousand registered Cossacks who had been sent to aid the Poles, the Polish advance guard was annihilated. Astounded by the news and convinced by a Cossack prisoner (planted expressly for the purpose) that the rebels greatly outnumbered them, Marcin Kalinowski and Mikołaj Potocki, the two commanders of the 20,000-man main army, abandoned their strong positions near Korsun and retreated through difficult terrain, led by a guide who was a secret agent of the hetman. Not far from Korsun, on 26 May, the Poles were ambushed by the Cossacks (whose forces had grown to 15,000 not including Tatar cavalry) and, once again, were completely crushed. Both Polish commanders, 80 important noblemen, 127 officers, 8520 soldiers, and forty-one cannons fell into Khmelnytsky’s hands. To add to the Poles’ misfortunes, only six days before the Battle of Korsun, King Władyslaw IV died. Just as hordes of rebels were gathering in the south, the Commonwealth had suddenly lost its king, its commanders, and its army.

While Khmelnytsky’s victories stunned the Poles, they electrified the Ukrainians. First on the Right Bank and then on the Left Bank, Cossacks, peasants, and burghers rushed to form regiments and either joined the hetman or, led by numerous local leaders, staged mini-rebellions of their own. Many peasants and Cossacks used the opportunity to vent pent-up hatred against their oppressors. The so-called “Eye Witness Chronicle” paints a frightful picture of these events: “Wherever they found the szlachta, royal officials or Jews, they killed them all, sparing neither women nor children.

Whenever they had the opportunity, the Polish magnates and nobles responded to the massacres in kind. The most notorious practitioner of szlachta terror tactics was Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, the wealthiest magnate in the land. When the rebellion caught him on his estates on the Left Bank, Wiśniowiecki mustered his well-trained private army of 6000, gathered together as many of the terrified nobles, priests, and Jews as he could, and set off on an epic, roundabout retreat to the west. Everywhere his forces moved, they tortured and killed Cossacks, peasants, women, and children, leaving behind them a grisly trail of corpses. Although Wiśniowiecki’s feats won him adulation in Poland, they so infuriated the Ukrainian masses that they would brook no talk of compromise and vowed to fight him to the death.

During the summer, Khmelnytsky, who was based near Bila Tserkva, concentrated on molding his numerous followers into a disciplined, well-organized army. Its core was made up of sixteen regiments of battle-tested Cossacks led by such proven and respected colonels as Filon Dzhalali, Maksym Nestorenko, and Ivan Hyria. However, experienced and gifted Ukrainian noblemen like Danylo Nechai, Ivan Bohun, and Mykhailo Krychevsky, and townsmen like Martyn Nebaba and Vasyl Zolotarenko, were also awarded colonels’ maces.

The Poles also made good use of their time. In order to hold off the rebels, they engaged Khmelnytsky in desultory negotiations and, at the same time, mobilized 32,000 noblemen and 8000 German mercenaries. As their forces, outfitted in the glittering finery that the szlachta so loved, gathered near Lviv, an observer remarked that the Poles were going to war not with iron but with gold and silver. The new Polish army was led by three magnates: the indolent, luxury-loving Dominik Zasławski, the erudite Latinist Mikołaj Ostrorog, and the 19-year-old Aleksander Koniecpolski. Khmelnytsky sarcastically referred to them as peryna (the feather-down bed), latyna (the Latinist), and dytyna (the child). On 23 September, the opposing armies met at Pyliavtsi. During the battle, the Polish commanders lost their nerve and fled and, as the news spread, the rest of the army followed suit. Within hours, this once splendid force was completely decimated by the Cossacks and their Tatar allies.

After Pyliavtsi, there was nothing to stand in Khmelnytsky’s way. As he advanced into the West Ukrainian lands of Volhynia and Galicia, the peasants welcomed him and joined the uprising. Even in southern Poland, downtrodden peasants were heard to utter, “If God were only so kind as to give us a Khmelnytsky also then we would teach those nobles what they get for oppressing peasants.”⁴ In early October, the Cossack/peasant armies besieged Lviv and were about to take it when a huge ransom and Khmelnytsky’s reluctance to destroy the beautiful city saved it. A month later, while preparing to besiege the Polish fortress at Zamość, news arrived that the man Khmelnytsky preferred to see on the throne, Jan Casimir, had been elected king and had offered the hetman an armistice.

It has always been a puzzle to historians why Khmelnytsky, who at this point was in a position to destroy the Commonwealth, chose to accept the offer and to return to the Dnieper. Apparently, he still hoped to modify the political system of the Commonwealth so that it would accommodate the Cossacks. Moreover, famine and plague were taking their toll of his troops and of the Ukrainian populace as a whole. And the hetman’s Tatar allies were eager to return home. Under these conditions, it seems that he did not wish to conduct a winter campaign. Early in January 1649, at the head of a triumphant army, Khmelnytsky returned to Kiev, where he received a tumultuous welcome and was hailed by the assembled Orthodox hierarchy as “the second Moses” who had “liberated his people from Polish slavery.” Rising complications

Even after Khmelnytsky’s dramatic victories, the relationship between Poles and Ukrainians remained unclarified. While the hetman had not yet decided to break off all ties with the Commonwealth, he knew that his followers were determined not to return to the pre-1648 conditions. For their part, the Poles were willing to make minor concessions to the Cossacks, but they still insisted that Ukraine return to szlachta rule. The impasse produced a recurrent pattern: year after year, the two sides would go to war, but because they were unable to defeat each other decisively, they would conclude their exhausting campaigns with negotiated, unsatisfying settlements, after which they would return home to prepare militarily and diplomatically for yet another war.

In the spring of 1649, it was the Poles who went on the offensive. As their main force of 25,000, led by King Jan Casimir himself, advanced from Volhynia, another force of 15,000, commanded by the notorious Jeremi Wiśniowiecki, moved through Galicia. Responding with his usual deceptiveness and speed, Khmelnytsky and his Tatar ally, Khan Islam Girei, blockaded Wiśniowiecki in the Zbarazh fortress with a force of 80,000. When the Polish king hastened to Wiśniowiecki’s aid, Khmelnytsky, in a surprise maneuver, attacked and surrounded Jan Casimir’s army near Zboriv. But, just at the point when the Poles were about to go down in defeat at both Zbarazh and Zboriv, the Tatar khan betrayed the hetman. Bribed by the Poles and worried by the growing strength of the Ukrainians, Islam Girei withdrew his forces and demanded that Khmelnytsky reach a negotiated settlement with the Polish king. Under the circumstances, the hetman had no choice but to comply.

Map 12 The campaigns of Khmelnytsky

On 18 August 1649, the Zboriv treaty was concluded. It set the register at 40,000, banned the Polish army and Jews from the provinces of Kiev, Bratslav, and Chernihiv where only the Cossack starshyna and Orthodox noblemen were allowed to hold public office, and promised the Orthodox metropolitan a seat in the Polish senate. Although amnesty was granted to all who had participated in the uprising, most peasants were required to return to servitude. Polish noblemen, in contrast, were allowed to reclaim their estates. Only Tatar pressure had forced Khmelnytsky to sign this unfavorable agreement, which caused great discontent throughout Ukraine. But as the Poles believed that they had given up too much and the Cossacks were convinced that they had received too little, the treaty was never fully implemented.

The Zboriv agreement highlighted an internal and an external problem that Khmelnytsky would have to face. The fact that peasant interests had practically been ignored at Zboriv was no oversight. Although Khmelnytsky, most of his commanders, and many of the registered Cossacks wished to improve the lot of the peasants, they had no intention of liquidating serfdom altogether. For the Cossack elite, Khmelnytsky included, such an act would have meant undermining the socioeconomic system in which it had a considerable stake. Thus, already at Zboriv, a conflict of interests arose between the Cossack starshyna elite and the chern, or rank and file. In time, it would prove to be the fatal weakness of the Cossack order that was emerging in Ukraine.

The relationship with the Tatars was the other major problem. Realizing their importance in his recent victories and in the continuing conflict with the Poles, Khmelnytsky wished to maintain his alliance with them at all costs. Among the Ukrainian masses, however, the alliance was most unpopular because, as a price for Tatar aid, the hetman had to allow his allies to take iasyr, or captives. While Khmelnytsky hoped to satisfy the Tatars with Polish prisoners, the Crimeans often took what was at hand and this meant that many thousands of Ukrainian peasants were driven off into slavery. Moreover, Tatar policy was not to let any Christian power grow too strong. Therefore, although they backed Khmelnytsky against the Poles, the Tatars would not allow him to defeat them completely. Having used Khmelnytsky to weaken Poland, the Crimean khan also planned to utilize the Ukrainian Cossacks in similar fashion against Moscow. But because Khmelnytsky had great hopes of obtaining aid from the Muscovites, he diverted the Crimean plans to launch a joint Tatar/Cossack attack against Moscow by proposing instead a joint campaign in 1650 against Moldavia, which was rich, more vulnerable, and more accessible. For the next few years, Khmelnytsky became intensely involved in Moldavian affairs and even hoped to make his son, Tymish, ruler of the land, thereby drawing it into close alliance with Ukraine. However, in 1653, Tymish’s death during the defense of Suceava brought the costly Moldavian venture to an unsuccessful end.

Meanwhile, in 1651, another round in the Polish-Ukrainian War had begun. Again it was the Poles, led by Jan Casimir, who went on the offensive and again it was in Volhynia, near the town of Berestechko, that the two armies clashed. By the standards of the time, the size of the opposing forces was huge: the Polish army numbered around 150,000 men, including 20,000 experienced German mercenaries, while the Ukrainians mustered over 100,000 men plus about 50,000 Tatar cavalry. On 18 June, an almost two week-long battle began that ended in a crushing defeat for Khmelnytsky’s forces. A deciding factor in the defeat was the actions of the Tatars who, at a crucial juncture, withdrew from the battle. To make matters worse, when Khmelnytsky entreated them to return to the fighting, they abducted him. He was released only after the battle. Under difficult circumstances, the Cossacks, ably led by Filon Dzhalali, managed to extricate some of the Ukrainian forces from Polish encirclement, but at a decisive moment panic broke out and a part of the Cossack army, numbering an estimated 30,000 men, perished under the Polish onslaught. The massive battle was also costly to the victorious Poles and near Bila Tserkva they initiated negotiations.

As might be expected, the Bila Tserkva agreement, signed on 28 September 1651, was much less generous to the Cossacks than the Zboriv treaty had been. The Cossack register was reduced to 20,000; the hetman’s authority was limited only to Kiev province; and he was forbidden to maintain foreign contacts, especially with the Tatars. This time, with the Cossacks in disarray and Khmelnytsky unprepared to offer resistance, it appeared that the conditions of the treaty would be implemented. Backed by Polish troops, the Polish nobility began to return to Ukraine. Except for the relative few who were included in the register, most of the peasants and Cossacks again faced serfdom. In order to avoid their inevitable fate, thousands fled across the border into Muscovite territory, where they were well received and allowed to establish the Cossack system, thus laying the foundation for what came to be called Sloboda Ukraine, with its locus in the present-day Kharkiv region.

Despite appearances to the contrary, Khmelnytsky had no intention of accepting these humiliating conditions and, in April 1652, a secret meeting of the major Cossack leaders was held at his residence in Chyhyryn where it was decided to assemble new forces and to renew hostilities against the Poles. Within weeks, Khmelnytsky’s forces attacked a 30,000-man Polish army stationed at Batih on the border of Podilia and Moldavia, and on 1 May completely demolished it. As revenge for the defeat at Berestechko, the Cossacks killed all their Polish prisoners.

As news of the victory spread, uprisings against the Polish nobility again flared up and Cossack troops occupied much of the territory they had held before Berestechko. However, by now it was evident that the years of tremendous bloodletting and destruction were taking their toll. Both Poles and Ukrainians were less eager to fight and campaigns dragged on inconclusively as the two sides circled each other like exhausted boxers, unable to administer the decisive blow. Foreign relations

Khmelnytsky realized that if his uprising was to succeed, it needed foreign support. Therefore, he turned his attention more and more to foreign relations. He scored his first diplomatic victory by drawing the Crimean Tatars into an alliance with the Cossacks. But the Tatar alliance proved to be unreliable and transitory. Moreover, it did not resolve Khmelnytsky’s key problem of defining Ukraine’s relationship to the Commonwealth. At first, the hetman was not ready for a complete break. His goal in dealing with the Commonwealth, ably represented by the leading Orthodox magnate Adam Kysil, had been to obtain autonomy for the Cossacks in Ukraine by making it a separate and equal component of the Commonwealth. But the stubborn refusal of the szlachta to accept their former subordinates as political equals precluded the possibility of his ever achieving that goal.

To the modern mind, which views national sovereignty as a natural condition (although the concept did not gain wide currency until after the French Revolution of 1789), the question arises of why Khmelnytsky did not declare independence for Ukraine. During the uprising there were, in fact, rumors to the effect that he wished to reestablish the “old Rus’ principality,” and even that he planned to form a separate “Cossack principality.” Although such ideas may have been considered, it would have been impossible under the circumstances to realize them. As the interminable wars demonstrated, the Cossacks, although able to administer severe defeats to the Poles, were incapable of permanently preventing the szlachta from launching repeated efforts to regain Ukraine. To assure themselves of a lasting victory over the Poles, Khmelnytsky needed the continuing and reliable support of a major foreign power. The usual price of such aid was acceptance of the overlordship of the ruler who provided it. In the view of the masses, the main thrust of the uprising was to redress socioeconomic ills, and to many in Ukraine the question of whether these problems were to be resolved under their own or under foreign rule was of secondary importance. Finally, in 17th-century Eastern Europe, sovereignty rested not in the people, but in the person of a legitimate (that is, generally recognized) monarch. Because Khmelnytsky, despite his popularity and power, did not possess such legitimacy, he had to find for Ukraine an overlord who did. At issue was not self-rule for Ukraine, for Ukrainians already had gained it. Their goal was to find a monarch who could provide their newly formed autonomous society with legitimacy and protection.

In Khmelnytsky’s opinion, a good candidate for the role of Ukraine’s patron and protector in the international arena was the Ottoman sultan. He was powerful enough to discourage Poles from attacking Ukraine and distant enough not to interfere overly much in its internal affairs. Thus, in 1651, after an exchange of embassies, the Ottoman Porte formally accepted the hetman and the Zaporozhian Host as its vassals on the similar loose conditions of overlordship that obtained with regard to Crimea, Moldavia, and Wallachia. However, widespread animosity in Ukraine toward an “infidel” overlord, and internal changes in the Ottoman Porte, prevented this arrangement from ever taking effect.

A much more popular candidate for the role of Ukraine’s protector was the Orthodox tsar of Moscow. From the start of the uprising, Khmelnytsky had entreated the tsar, in the name of their shared Orthodox faith, to come to his aid. But Moscow’s response had been extremely cautious. Badly mauled in a recent war with Poland, the Muscovites preferred to wait for the Cossacks and Poles to exhaust each other and then to take appropriate action. However, by 1653, with the Ukrainians threatening to choose the Ottoman option, the Muscovites could not put off a decision any longer. Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich called a general assembly, which decided that, “for the sake of the Orthodox Faith and God’s Holy Church, the Gosudar [monarch] should accept them under His High Hand.” In reaching their decision, the Muscovites also expected to regain some of the lands they had lost to Poland, to utilize Ukraine as a buffer zone against the Ottomans, and, in general, to expand their influence.