Bourgeois Revolution or Peasant War?

In the autumn of 1920 Mikhail Pokrovsky, the leading Marxist historian of Russia, published the first Marxist textbook of Russian history to appear in the postrevolutionary Russian Empire, entitled Russkaia istoriia v samom szhatom ocherke (Russian History in Briefest Outline).¹ The book was based on Pokrovsky's lectures delivered a year earlier at the Yakov Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow and reworked during a brief leave from his duties as deputy people's commissar of education of the Russian Federation.

Pokrovsky's Russkaia istoriia v samom szhatom ocherke turned out to be a history of Russia proper to a degree not matched by any of the pre­revolutionary histories of Russia. In a sense Pokrovsky's neglect of non­Russian history in his popular survey was the logical culmination of an earlier tendency, associated with the names of Vasilii Kliuchevsky and his students at Moscow University, to 'Russify' the Russian imperial grand narrative. The outbreak of the 1917 revolution, the disintegration of the empire, and the establishment on its ruins of new independent states, including the Russian Federation, removed the old constraints that hindered the 'purification' of the Russian imperial paradigm by the removal of non-Russian elements.

In Ukraine there was a particularly strong demand for such a narra­tive, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of copies of brief text­books and popular historical studies produced during the revolution that presented Ukrainian history from the Ukrainian national point of view. Mykhailo Hrushevsky's Iliustrovana istoriia Ukrainy (Illustrated History of Ukraine) alone was reissued six times between 1917 and 1919.⁴ The task of constructing a Soviet Marxist narrative of Ukrainian history fell to one of the leading ideologues of the Soviet regime in Ukraine, Matvii Yavorsky. He was occasionally called the 'Ukrainian Pokrovsky,' but unlike his older colleague in Moscow, he was neither a professional historian nor an old Bolshevik. A lawyer by training, he formally joined the Communist Party only in 1920. Yavorsky was an ethnic Ukrainian who came to Eastern Ukraine from Galicia, where he had graduated from Lviv University (having attended Hrushevsky's lectures on Ukrainian history) and, in addition to his law degree, had completed a doctorate in political science (1912).5

Among the major battlegrounds in the struggle between the young Marxist historians and representatives of Ukrainian national historiog­raphy was the history of the Ukrainian Cossacks, especially of the Khmelnytsky Uprising.

turning point in the development of the Ukrainian nation. During the 1920s, the topic attracted special attention from Marxist historians, since it constituted the main focus of the scholarly activity of their principal opponent in Ukraine, the dean of Ukrainian national histori­ography, Mykhailo Hrushevsky. The Khmelnytsky Uprising was dis­cussed in the two books (more than 1,500 pages in toto) of volume 9 of his Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy. The volume, which was researched, written, and published between 1924 and 1931, was among the great scholar's works attacked by the Marxist establishment.

It is the historical debates on the history of Ukrainian Cossackdom and the Khmelnytsky Uprising that illuminate better than any other his­toriographic discussion of the period the main tendencies in the 'con­struction' of the Ukrainian historical narrative by Marxist historians in Ukraine. Consequently, the present chapter analyses the 'construction' of that narrative, as well as the formulation and reformulation of the Marxist paradigm of Ukrainian history.

Let us begin our discussion of that historiographic process by assess­ing the resources that Ukrainian Marxist historians could bring to bear against Hrushevsky's interpretation of the Khmelnytsky Uprising as a milestone in the formation of the Ukrainian nation. When it came to actual historical research, they could offer very little. None of them was a specialist in pre-nineteenth-century history, and those like Yavorsky, Volodymyr Sukhyno-Khomenko, and Mykhailo Svidzinsky, who dealt with the history of the uprising in their general surveys of Ukrainian history, lacked a basic grounding in the premodern period.

It is hardly surprising that in their analysis of the Khmelnytsky Uprising Ukrainian Marxist historians took the works of Mikhail Pok­rovsky as their point of departure. Before the outbreak of the First World War, living as an emigre in France, Pokrovsky wrote a multivol­ume history of Russia, Russkaia istoriia s drevneishikh vremen, which fol­lowed the tradition of Russian imperial historiography by including a number of chapters on Ukraine (southwestern Rus').⁷ In his book, Pok­rovsky developed a Marxist scheme of Russian history, applying a monistic, class-based approach to 'unlock' the meaning of Russian and Ukrainian history.

Pokrovsky strongly believed that until the sixteenth century Russia developed along the same path as the West but deviated from it once capitalism began to make headway in the West.⁸ He based his peri­odization of 'Russian' history on the Marxist idea of successive socio­economic formations: 'Russian' history, as part of world history, began with the dominance of the clan system of social relations, which was followed by feudalism, merchant/commercial capitalism, and eventu­ally industrial capitalism.

Although Pokrovsky did not use the term 'commercial capitalism' in his overview of early modern Ukrainian history, reserving it mostly for his discussion of the history of Russia, clear traces of the commercial capitalism approach can also be found in his discussion of the Ukrainian past. Commenting on the history of religious and social struggle in early modern Ukraine, Pokrovsky claimed that the main social conflict of the age resulted from competition between two forms of landownership and colonization: the Polish (magnate) model and the Ukrainian/'Rus- sian' (Cossack) one. That competition acquired an ethnic and religious colouration: accordingly, Pokrovsky interpreted the church union of 1596 as little more than an instrument in the hands of the large landown­ers.⁹ If prior to the 1917 revolution Pokrovsky's view of Ukrainian his­tory was only one of many, after the revolution, especially with the tightening of party control over historical scholarship in the course of the 1920s, his class-based approach to the history of Russia and Ukraine came to be considered the only legitimate one.

What was Pokrovsky's 'vision' of the Khmelnytsky Uprising?¹⁰ To begin with, he called it a revolution. He defined Cossack landowner­ship and the economy based on it as bourgeois and considered the Khmelnytsky Uprising a revolt of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie against Polish feudalism. The bourgeoisie, according to Pokrovsky, was com­posed of Cossacks and Ukrainian burghers, who not only served as one of the sources for the formation of Ukrainian Cossackdom but also had their own economic and political agenda. As a social group whose rights in the Polish-controlled towns were threatened by the church union, the burghers, he claimed, transferred their national religious ideology to Cossackdom. That development occurred in late 1648 and early 1649, when Khmelnytsky entered Kyiv after his spectacular vic­tories of the first year of the uprising. It was allegedly at that time that the 'bourgeois intelligentsia' took ideological control of the uprising, shifting its goals and slogans from exclusively Cossack ones to national and religious motifs. Setting a precedent for future Marxist historians, Pokrovsky downgraded the heroic image of Khmelnytsky, whom he characterized as a representative of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie and a leader despised by the popular masses.¹¹

In his account of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, Pokrovsky often drew on Hrushevsky's publications related to the Cossack era. While he took a generally positive attitude to Hrushevsky's findings, he disagreed on several points. He questioned Hrushevsky's view that the alliance with the Crimean khan had contributed substantially to Khmelnytsky's early achievements, claiming instead that its significance had been purely military: it was Khmelnytsky's alliance with the peasantry that prepared the political ground for the Cossack victories over the Poles. Pokrovsky thought it superficial of Hrushevsky to have asserted that Khmelnytsky failed to understand the importance of popular support for the success of the uprising. In Pokrovsky's opinion, Khmelnytsky's lack of interest in the popular masses was more a reflection of the incompatibility of Cossack and peasant class interests. Unlike Hru- shevsky before him, Pokrovsky went on to claim that only a continuing alliance with the popular masses could have ensured the success of the Khmelnytsky Uprising: once Cossackdom decided to reject that impor­tant ally after the victories of 1648-9, Khmelnytsky had no choice but to seek foreign support from Muscovy, Turkey, or Sweden.

Muscovy became a logical focus for Cossack diplomacy, in Pok­rovsky's opinion, not for religious or national reasons but for social ones. The tsar's realm, which Pokrovsky defined as a gentry state, was allegedly closer to the hearts of the Cossack officers than nobiliary Poland. To prove his point, Pokrovsky indicated that the Cossack offic­ers and the Muscovite gentry (deti boiarskie) lived under similar eco­nomic conditions. Nevertheless, Pokrovsky argued, negotiations between the Cossacks and Muscovy were fruitless during the first years of the uprising, as the Cossack revolution was also a peasant one at that time - a circumstance that frightened the Muscovite court. After 1649, when the Cossacks demonstrated that they could control the masses, the conclusion of a Russian-Ukrainian alliance became, in Pok­rovsky's opinion, simply a matter of time. Owing to the social bond between the Cossack officers and the Muscovite gentry, in the course of the next century Ukraine became as much a gentry-run territory in social and economic terms as Muscovy itself.¹²

Pokrovsky's views on the bourgeois character of the Cossack upris­ings were so unorthodox and so grossly contradicted historical fact and historiographic tradition that initially even leading Ukrainian Marxists refused to accept them in their entirety. For example, writing in 1923, a leading Ukrainian 'national communist,' Oleksander Shum­sky, accepted Pokrovsky's interpretation of the Khmelnytsky Uprising as an antifeudal revolt but refused to consider Cossackdom a bour­geois phenomenon. 'As for the bourgeois character of the old Cossack movements, this statement is probably too strong,' Shumsky remarked in an article that claimed the Ukrainian Cossack past for the new authorities.¹³ Those doubts, however, were soon dismissed as the lead­ing Marxist historian Matvii Yavorsky, who began working on a sur­vey of Ukrainian history in the early 1920s, decided to follow in Pokrovsky's footsteps. Like Pokrovsky, Yavorsky relied on the class­based method to uncover the 'true' meaning of historical events in Ukraine. He also fully introduced Pokrovsky's concept of 'commercial capitalism' into his interpretation of Ukraine's early modern history. When it came to the history of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, Yavorsky not only repeated some of the main points of Pokrovsky's analysis of the 'Cossack revolution' but also reinterpreted and further developed some of them.

In Yavorsky's opinion, the main reason for the Khmelnytsky Upris­ing was the inefficiency of Polish nobiliary agriculture, which hindered the development of a money economy. Nobiliary dominance led to the growing exploitation of the burghers and enserfment of the peasants: the latter escaped this ever more severe exploitation by fleeing to the unpopulated areas of eastern Ukraine and joining the Cossacks. Yavor­sky regarded Cossackdom as a defender of the interests of the burgh­ers and peasants. He divided it into three major groups: the registered Cossacks, who wanted to acquire equal rights with the Polish nobility; the Zaporozhians, who wanted to do away with all restrictions on their foraging rights (in their social aspirations they were close to the burgh­ers and runaway peasants); and, finally, the unregistered poor Cos­sacks of the settled area. According to Yavorsky, it was only the registered Cossacks who represented the interests of merchant capital, and as such it was they, with the assistance of the burghers, who became the driving force of the Khmelnytsky Uprising.¹⁴

Like Pokrovsky, Yavorsky called the Khmelnytsky revolt a Cossack revolution. In the opinion of both historians, it was a revolution because it brought about the end of one stage of human development, feudalism, and initiated a new capitalist era. Following Pokrovsky, Yavorsky claimed that the Cossack revolution had defeated feudalism, opening the door to the development of a money economy, the enserf- ment of the peasantry, and the advance of commercial capitalism with the autocratic monarchy as its political superstructure. Nevertheless, Yavorsky was not satisfied with the definition of the revolution as a Cossack one: following Pokrovsky's lead in his post-1917 writings, he attempted to find a more politically correct term for it. He eventually defined it as a gentry revolution, implying that the Cossack officers actually represented the emerging new class of the Ukrainian gentry. Yavorsky claimed that in the course of the Khmelnytsky Uprising the Cossack officers were fighting not only for land but also for the even­tual enserfment of their comrades-in-arms.

There were some important differences between Pokrovsky and Yavorsky in their treatment of the role played by the leader of the uprising, Bohdan Khmelnytsky. If in Pokrovsky's opinion Khmel­nytsky was not a hero, but still an important actor in the unfolding events of the uprising, for Yavorsky he was just one of the Cossack officers who happened to be in the right place at the right time. There were also minor differences in Pokrovsky's and Yavorsky's views on the Cossacks' relations with the rank-and-file rebels. Following Pok­rovsky's main argument, Yavorsky claimed that because the Cossacks (in his interpretation, only the registered ones) did not want to free the peasants from their obligations to the landlords, the Cossack leaders had to look for outside support. Unlike Pokrovsky, however, Yavorsky maintained that the Cossack officers sought foreign support not to win their struggle with Poland but to establish and maintain their control over the rebel masses. In his discussion of the Pereiaslav Agreement with Muscovy (1654), Yavorsky basically repeated Pokrovsky's inter­pretation, claiming that the Cossack officers and the Muscovite gentry were socially related groups.

Yavorsky's views on the nature of the Khmelnytsky era evolved as he produced one account of Ukrainian history after another with remarkable speed in the course of the 1920s. In the final revisions of his historical scheme he even tried to incorporate Pokrovsky's interpreta­tion of the role played by the Ukrainian burghers in the Khmelnytsky Uprising. It did not entirely work, as he was never able to reconcile his own interpretation of the registered Cossacks as the driving force of the revolution with the role attributed by Pokrovsky to the burghers and the 'bourgeois intelligentsia.' Generally speaking, Yavorsky proved a rather loyal student of Pokrovsky in his interpretation of the Khmelnytsky revolt. The differences between their interpretations were not significant and can be explained at least partly by the fact that Pokrovsky never returned to the study of Ukrainian history after the 1917 revolution, leaving it to Yavorsky and other Marxist historians to extrapolate his new approaches to Russian history to the realm of Ukrainian historiography.

Although Yavorsky generally adhered to the historical method devel­oped by Pokrovsky, in the late 1920s the two historians clashed over control of Marxist scholarship in Ukraine. In the atmosphere created by the major shift in Communist Party policy on the non-Russian national­ities, Pokrovsky accused his Ukrainian counterpart and his followers of sharing Mykhailo Hrushevsky's views on Ukrainian history. Yavor­sky's 'deviations' from Pokrovsky's scheme were then exploited by Pokrovsky's supporters to derail Yavorsky's academic and political career. During the discussions of Yavorsky's scheme of Ukrainian his­tory organized in Kharkiv in May 1929, Yavorsky's interpretation of the history of the Khmelnytsky Uprising was challenged by two Marxist scholars, Volodymyr Sukhyno-Khomenko and Heorhii Karpenko. The former criticized Yavorsky for underestimating the role of towns and burghers, while the latter stressed the importance of the peasantry.

Sukhyno-Khomenko presented his views on the Khmelnytsky era in detail in a collection of lectures delivered during the 1927-8 academic year at a school for party functionaries organized by the Central Com­mittee of the Communist Party of Ukraine. The lectures were published as a book in early 1929.¹⁵ Sukhyno-Khomenko also took an active part in the discussion of Yavorsky's historical scheme in May 1929, generally defending his former professor while presenting his own views on the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Later, he published a number of articles in which he presented a mild critique of Yavorsky and called upon Yavor­sky's opponents to fight Yavorskyism (Iavorshchyna) together with Yavorsky, while seeking to shield him from further hostile criticism. This was of no avail: not only was Yavorsky soon constrained to leave Ukraine, but Sukhyno-Khomenko himself and Mykhailo Svidzinsky, another of Yavorsky's students who tried to protect him from critical attacks during the May 1929 discussion, were accused of sharing their professor's views and succumbing to Yavorskyism.¹⁶

Sukhyno-Khomenko was much better prepared to deal with the Khmelnytsky Uprising than Yavorsky or any other of his students, as he was specifically assigned by his supervisor to research the seven­teenth-century history of Ukraine (especially the period of the so- called Ruin). In his interpretation of the uprising, Sukhyno-Khomenko adopted and further developed Pokrovsky's view of the role of the burghers. He considered the growth of the towns in sixteenth-century Ukraine to be the most important factor in its early modern history. According to Sukhyno-Khomenko, the towns had become an arena of fierce struggle of representatives of local commercial capital against the aggression of Polish and Jewish commercial capital. The competi­tion between these two groups acquired strong religious overtones. By accepting the church union with Rome, he asserted, the Orthodox hier­archy had sought to undermine the control established over ecclesiasti­cal affairs by Ukrainian commercial capital. The brotherhoods, which, by that logic, represented Ukrainian capital, did not want to give up religion as a means of rallying support in their struggle against foreign capital and managed to regain control over the church with the restora­tion of the Orthodox hierarchy in 1620.

According to Sukhyno-Khomenko, Cossackdom came into existence as a result of the development of commercial capital, which accelerated the pauperization of the poorest strata of the population in towns and villages alike. Those paupers eventually fled to the steppe regions, where they formed the first Cossack bands. Sukhyno-Khomenko stated in his lectures that he did not share the views of those historians (appar­ently meaning Yavorsky) who claimed that the Cossacks represented the avant-garde of Ukrainian capital because of their involvement in the Black Sea trade. He referred to the Cossacks as the brigands of the Ukrainian steppes and claimed that there was little commercial motive for their attacks on the Ottoman ports of the Black Sea littoral. Accord­ing to Sukhyno-Khomenko, because the Cossacks accepted many burghers into their ranks, some of whom eventually settled in the steppes and formed a group of well-to-do Cossacks, Cossackdom in general also incorporated some elements of burgher ideology, specifi­cally the idea of religious struggle against church union and Polish- Jewish capital. This development allegedly occurred during the times of Hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny. Sukhyno-Khomenko main­tained that the struggle between the two commercial capitalisms, domestic and foreign, was reflected in the rulings of the Orthodox council of 1640, which forbade the Orthodox to buy merchandise from Polish and Jewish merchants.

The Khmelnytsky Uprising was defined by Sukhyno-Khomenko as a great Ukrainian bourgeois revolution, a term that associated it with other 'bourgeois' revolutions of that period, including the English one. The historian rejected Pokrovsky's and Yavorsky's definition of the uprising as a Cossack revolution (and identified Nikolai Rozhkov as the first scholar to introduce the term).¹⁷ One could not define a 'great antifeudal, broad social revolution in Ukraine' as a gentry revolution, he claimed, because 'gentry' (dvorianstvo) was a legal concept. Nor could it be called a Cossack revolution, for Cossackdom was the name of a social order, not a class. In Sukhyno-Khomenko's opinion, there could be a Cossack or peasant revolt or a gentry coup d'etat, but not a revolution, for the latter could be defined only in class terms.

Sukhyno-Khomenko shared Yavorsky's scepticism about the signifi­cance of heroes in history and considered Bohdan Khmelnytsky's role in the uprising to have been rather marginal. Unlike Yavorsky, though, who limited the Khmelnytsky Uprising to the years 1648-54, effec­tively terminating it with the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654 between the tsar and the Cossacks, Sukhyno-Khomenko preferred to write and speak of the revolution of 1648, which in his opinion extended also to subsequent years and was not chronologically limited by the Pereiaslav Agreement. In his view, the first stage of the uprising was dominated by the registered Cossacks. From 1649, however, the leading role was assumed by the burghers. The peasantry was the driving force of the revolution but was unable to take control of it.

The historian's overall assessment of the outcome of the Khmel­nytsky Uprising, based on changes in the status of the burghers, was quite pessimistic. He believed that Ukrainian commercial capital had managed to mount a great revolution, even more radical in its conse­quences than the English one, but proved incapable of leading it to vic­tory and perished in the struggle, as the revolution eventually led to the decline of the Ukrainian towns. The reasons for the defeat of the burgh­ers, in Sukhyno-Khomenko's opinion, were the unreliability of their allies, the passivity of the village, the inconstancy of the lumpen ele­ments, and the treachery of the Cossack officer stratum. The latter sought support from either Moscow or Warsaw. The class struggle, claimed this national communist, was exploited by foreign elements to establish the rule of foreign (Muscovite) commercial capital in Ukraine.¹⁸

Sukhyno-Khomenko was in fact the main proponent of Pokrovsky's theory of 'commercial capitalism' in Ukraine. He applied it to the anal­ysis of the Khmelnytsky Uprising much more systematically than Yavorsky. Later, when political circumstances required, he employed his interpretation of 'commercial capitalism' as a means of criticizing Yavorsky for alleged inconsistencies and deviations from the Marxist approach to Ukrainian history.¹⁹ Sukhyno-Khomenko claimed that Yavorsky was mistaken in arguing that the main cause of the uprising was the inability of the Polish nobility to establish an effective agricul­tural economy - the factor that allegedly forced the Cossacks, a new landowning elite, to rebel. In Sukhyno-Khomenko's opinion, the Polish nobility was, on the contrary, too effective in its pursuit of new land and new serfs, which led eventually to peasant revolts. But it was the burghers who, according to Sukhyno-Khomenko, managed to turn the isolated peasant revolts into a successful revolution.

He maintained that Yavorsky's gravest mistake was his neglect of the role of the burghers, who fought the advance of Polish and Jewish capital during the Khmelnytsky Uprising. He also rejected Yavorsky's attempt to introduce the 'commercial capital' factor into his analysis of the uprising not through the burghers but through the Zaporozhian Cossacks, whose headquarters in the lower Dnieper region (the Zapor- ozhian Sich) Yavorsky regarded as a commercial outpost. Sukhyno- Khomenko claimed that, while the Sich indeed performed that role in the eighteenth century, in the mid-seventeenth century it attracted more fugitive peasants and Cossack rabble than merchants. Indeed, Sukhyno-Khomenko ridiculed Yavorsky's claim that the Khmelnytsky Uprising had cleared the way for nobiliary landholding represented by the Cossack officer stratum, asserting that in fact it had helped destroy feudalism and undermine the nobility to clear the way for the capital­ist mode of production.

In a number of his writings and public disputes (especially during the May 1929 discussion of Yavorsky's scheme of Ukrainian history), Sukhyno-Khomenko not only made use of Pokrovsky's earlier views on Russian and Ukrainian history but also developed them in a man­ner hardly intended by the founder of Russian Marxist historiography. Sukhyno-Khomenko's main departure from Pokrovsky's scheme was his definition of the Khmelnytsky Uprising as a national revolution or a revolution of national liberation. To be sure, Pokrovsky had written about the national and religious character of Cossack conflicts with the Polish authorities, but for him the Cossacks were 'Russians,' represen­tatives of the all-Russian nationality, not Ukrainians. Sukhyno- Khomenko, by contrast, argued for the Ukrainian national character of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, heavily loading his argument with Marxist terminology. He maintained that, because the Khmelnytsky revolution took place during the era of commercial capitalism, there was suffi­cient reason to define it as a national revolution. It was general knowl­edge, argued the young Marxist historian, that nations were formed in the era of commercial, not industrial, capitalism. 'The Ukrainian nationality takes part in this revolution as a nation and stands up against the Polish lordship with the demands of national liberation,' stated Sukhyno-Khomenko during the Yavorsky discussion. He coun­tered the accusations of his opponents, who claimed that his definition of the revolution as a national one reflected the views of Hrushevsky, with the words: 'So what? Certainly we cannot reject everything that the bourgeois historians say when it is the truth.'²⁰

It can scarcely be doubted that Sukhyno-Khomenko was influenced by many elements of Hrushevsky's interpretation of early modern Ukrainian history in general and the Khmelnytsky Uprising in particu­lar. Not only did he avoid criticizing Hrushevsky, but he also tacitly favoured some of Hrushevsky's interpretations of the Ukrainian past over those of his Marxist teachers and colleagues. For example, he ignored Yavorsky's attempt to divide Ukrainian Cossackdom into three groups on the basis of their social status and instead followed Hrushevsky's less confrontational approach, which divided the Cossacks into two groups: well-to-do and rank-and-file Cossacks. Fol­lowing Hrushevsky, Sukhyno-Khomenko wrote about the denational­ization and Polonization of the Ukrainian elite and used the term 'Ukrainian national revival' to define Ukrainian cultural activity of the 1620s. Like Hrushevsky, he referred to that period as the 'first revival,' viewing the rise of the national movement in nineteenth-century Ukraine as the 'second revival' of the Ukrainian nation.²¹ Sukhyno- Khomenko depicted Ukrainian burghers and commercial capital in general as champions of the idea of Ukrainian nationhood and state­hood, and even implicitly blamed the class struggle for the loss of Ukrainian independence.

In presenting his views on the Khmelnytsky Uprising, Sukhyno- Khomenko made heavy use of Marxist argot, often applying ana­chronistic terminology borrowed from the Soviet analysis of the 1917 revolution. That clearly undermined his argument in the eyes of non­Marxist historians of Ukraine, who must have considered him just another communist propagandist, but legitimized the national version of Ukrainian history in the eyes of the regime and the Ukrainian politi­cal elite of the day. Needless to say, that legitimization of the national paradigm of Ukrainian history was eventually challenged and con­demned by the official establishment. Even Yavorsky ridiculed his former student's insistence on the leading role of the burghers in the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Much more important, however, during the Yavorsky discussion of May 1929, Sukhyno-Khomenko was severely criticized for overestimating the role played by national movements in the age of commercial capital. It was also claimed that he had empha­sized the national factor at the expense of class - one of the most serious accusations that could be made against a Marxist historian at the time.²²

A very different paradigm of the Khmelnytsky Uprising was put for­ward during the Yavorsky discussion of 1929 by Heorhii Karpenko, Sukhynko-Khomenko's colleague at the Kharkiv Institute of Marxism­Leninism. In presenting his interpretation of the uprising, Karpenko crit­icized Yavorsky for failing to understand and appreciate Pokrovsky's views.²³ Karpenko defined the Khmelnytsky Uprising as a Cossack war, claiming that it was the peasants who had actually won it. In the long term, he argued, Ukraine was indeed heading in the direction of capital­ist development, but at the time of the Khmelnytsky Uprising there were two ways to reach that goal. One was associated with the destruction of feudalism and the development of a peasant-based economy. The other way consisted in adjusting the feudal economy to the demands of cap­italist development. According to Karpenko, it was the peasantry that fought for the first option, while the Cossack officers preferred the second, which would have turned them into a new class of land- and serf-owners. In Karpenko's opinion, the peasants originally won the competition and the war, but in the subsequent decades serfdom was reintroduced into Ukraine with Russian connivance.²⁴

Karpenko claimed that Yavorsky had misinterpreted the Khmel­nytsky Uprising as a gentry revolution, which implied that during the war the peasants were fighting for their own enserfment. Yavorsky's error, argued Karpenko, lay in a misguided approach to analysing the class nature of the uprising. Allegedly, Yavorsky assessed it from the perspective of economic development instead of class struggle, thereby following Rozhkov and not Pokrovsky. In his attack on Yavorsky, Karpenko referred not to Pokrovsky's interpretation of the Khmelnytsky revolt, which Yavorsky basically followed, but to his interpretation of the Time of Troubles in Russia, which he had further developed during the 1920s. Karpenko claimed that Pokrovsky viewed the Time of Troubles as a peasant war like the one that took place in Germany in the sixteenth century and that Marxist historians should regard the Khmelnytsky Uprising in the same way. Karpenko's emphasis on Pokrovsky's new approach and his critique of Pok­rovsky's 'old' theory of commercial capitalism showed that he was well acquainted with the latest developments on the 'historical front' in Moscow.

Back in 1925, in an article published in Pravda, Pokrovsky had changed his definition of Emelian Pugachev's uprising from 'early bourgeois revolution' to 'great peasant uprising.'²⁵ He had also revised his earlier interpretation of the Time of Troubles from a peasant revolu­tion to a peasant war. In 1928-9 Pokrovsky was attacked for main­taining that commercial capitalism was a distinct socio-economic formation. His critics claimed that it had not in fact constituted a mode of production and was incapable of developing a superstructure of its own. Pokrovsky tried to defend himself and his theory but eventually was forced to recognize his 'errors' and admit that his definition of the Muscovite autocracy as 'commercial capital in a Monomakh hat' was wrong, as it failed to take account of the feudal mode of production dominant at that time.²⁶ In his critique of the theory of commercial cap­italism during the May 1929 discussion in Kharkiv, Karpenko repeated the main points raised against it in Moscow but avoided criticizing Pokrovsky directly and turned his wrath against Yavorsky, whose interpretation of the Khmelnytsky Uprising he forcefully rejected.

Even though Karpenko's views on the Khmelnytsky Uprising as a peasant war were gaining influence and eventually even became the 'only correct' interpretation of the Khmelnytsky era, in the late 1920s the most popular interpretation of the Khmelnytsky revolt was still that of a revolution - the key term used by both Pokrovsky and Yavorsky. 'Revolution' became the battle cry of Marxist and leftist historiography in general, for revolutionary transformations of society were endlessly fascinating to historians who had survived one of the bloodiest revolu­tions in history. Not surprisingly, that was what almost all of them found in the Khmelnytsky Uprising. The only question was what kind of revo­lution it had been - bourgeois, gentry, Cossack, peasant, or national. At the time Karpenko and Sukhyno-Khomenko were presenting their views on the Khmelnytsky Uprising, the outcome of the Moscow-based discussions on the role of commercial capitalism in Russian history was far from clear, and Sukhyno-Khmenko was in no hurry to change his assessment of the social character of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. Never­theless, echoes of the Moscow discussions on the mode of production and its relation to socio-economic formations may be heard in his state­ments in the discussion. These included his views on the inadmissibility in the discussion of the Khmelnytsky Uprising of such terms as 'Cossack revolution' or 'gentry revolution,' which were widely used first by Pok­rovsky and then by Yavorsky. One can also discern traces of the Moscow discussions in Sukhyno-Khomenko's rejection of both Pokrovsky's and Yavorsky's views on the 'Cossack revolution' as a precondition for the victory of the gentry-based economy and the enserfment of the peasants.

While Sukhyno-Khomenko used Marxist theory and the class-based approach to history in order to present the Khmelnytsky period as one of the most important periods in the early modern history of Europe, legitimizing the interpretation of that uprising as a national revolution in Marxist terms, one of his younger colleagues, Fedir Yastrebov, also a beginning Marxist historian, took the class-based approach as a point of departure in deconstructing and discrediting the national paradigm of the revolt in the eyes of Marxist historians and the political estab­lishment alike.

Fedir Yastrebov's review of volume 9, book 1 of Hrushevsky's Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy, which covered the Khmelnytsky Uprising from 1650 to 1653, appeared in the journal Prapor marksyzmu (Banner of Marxism) in early 1930. That review should be considered a direct echo of the discussion of 1929 concerning Yavorsky's scheme of Ukrainian history. Yastrebov, an apprentice Marxist, was in fact the first historian to offer a Marxist critique of Hrushevsky's Istoriia Ukrainy-Rusy. The charges he made differed considerably from those presented in previ­ous indictments of Hrushevsky. If earlier Marxist authors had criti­cized Hrushevsky for neglecting Marxist methods of historical analysis and ignoring the role of class divisions and class struggle in Ukrainian history, Yastrebov now accused him of being a nationalist historian and an ideologue of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie. 'This work is to the advan­tage of nationalism. And that is why we draw the conclusion that the first book of volume 9 is a book hostile to us,' concluded Yastrebov.²⁷

Yastrebov argued that Hrushevsky regarded nationalism as the prin­cipal motive force of history and denounced him with all the naivety and aggressive fervour of a convert: 'It was proved almost a century ago that the main driving force of human history is class struggle, by means of which mankind proceeds first to the dictatorship of the proletariat and then to socialism.'²⁸ Developing his argument, Yastrebov linked Hrushevsky's nationalism with his alleged sympathies for social oppression and those responsible for it. He argued that Hru- shevsky refused to admit the counterrevolutionary nature of some of the actions taken by Cossack officers in the course of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, thereby expressing solidarity with the oppressors. 'We say that it is the predicament of every nationalist to become an ideologue of the oppressors, not of the oppressed,' asserted Yastrebov.²⁹

Yastrebov's review was written after the Kharkiv discussion on Yavorsky's historical scheme but before the publication of its proceed­ings. It is interesting in its own right as an attempt to develop, in the midst of the ongoing discussion, a coherent Marxist account capable of competing with Hrushevsky's interpretation of the Khmelnytsky era. What Yastrebov attempted was to bring together all the existing Marxist interpretations of the uprising, as long as they did not directly contra­dict one another. The starting point for the writings of all Ukrainian Marxist historians on the history of Ukraine was the corpus of Pok­rovsky's writings. Not surprisingly, in his extensive review of Hru- shevsky's Istoriia, Yastrebov wrote that Pokrovsky's brief chapter on the Khmelnytsky Uprising had done more to reveal its true significance than Hrushevsky's voluminous treatment. Thus Yastrebov based his interpretation of the Khmelnytsky era on Pokrovsky's theory of com­mercial capitalism and defined the Khmelnytsky revolt as a commercial capitalist revolution. In examining its causes, he also drew on the views of Yavorsky and Sukhyno-Khomenko, claiming that the revolution had been brought about by two factors: competition between large Polish and small Ukrainian landowners and the struggle of Ukrainian com­mercial capitalists against Polish, Jewish, and other foreign competitors.

His definition of the revolution's driving force was also far from original: according to Yastrebov, it was the commercial bourgeoisie, assisted by the Cossack landowning elite and the popular masses - poor peasants, tradesmen, and rank-and-file Cossacks. The bourgeoi­sie and the popular masses allegedly strove for the complete victory of the revolution, while the Cossack elite was prepared to betray the revo­lutionary cause. According to Yastrebov, the Cossack officers were ene­mies of the popular masses and double-dealers who could not decide whether they wanted an independent Ukrainian state or would settle for a foreign protectorate. As Yastrebov described the revolution, it began with a revolt of the registered Cossacks (the Cossack elite), who used the Zaporozhians as their 'military specialists.' By early 1649, fol­lowing Khmelnytsky's triumphant entrance into Kyiv, the commercial bourgeoisie had taken control of the revolution, but the Cossack offic­ers remained its official leaders. In this case, as in other instances, Yastrebov sought to reconcile Sukhyno-Khomenko's and Yavorsky's views on the social leadership of the Khmelnytsky Uprising.

If Yastrebov made use of Sukhyno-Khomenko's and Yavorsky's works to present a Marxist view of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, he drew on Pokrovsky's comments about Hrushevsky's alleged misunder­standing of the uprising to launch a critical attack on Hrushevsky. Yastrebov summarized the differences between Ukrainian Marxist his­toriography and Hrushevsky in the following statement: 'Thus, for Academician Hrushevsky the revolution of 1648-54 was a national revolution that led to the national liberation of Ukraine from Poland. He does not see the class-based, bourgeois nature of that revolution. For us this is one of the many revolutions brought about by commer­cial capital in many countries of the world. The revolution of 1648-54 destroyed the remnants of feudalism in Ukraine and cleared the way for the development of commercial capitalism, which was [previously] severely obstructed by magnate landownership, Polish commercial capital, and the semi-feudal Polish state with its szlachta particular­ism.'³⁰ As I have noted, Yastrebov's views on the Khmelnytsky Upris­ing lacked the originality shown by some of his Marxist predecessors. His only contributions to the Marxist interpretation of the era were the suggestion that the Orthodox struggle against church union was a struggle for a 'Ukrainian bourgeois state independent of Poland' and the assertion that, while the Cossack officers chose to ally themselves with the Muscovite gentry, the Ukrainian bourgeoisie preferred an alli­ance with Sweden. Yastrebov's interpretation of the Khmelnytsky Uprising was far more anachronistic than those of his Marxist prede­cessors, and his text was loaded with expressions borrowed from the vocabulary of the Bolshevik revolution, including terms such as 'mili­tary specialists,' 'unprosperous peasants' (nezamozhnyky), and 'the rightward wavering (khytannia) of the revolutionary forces.'

In 1934 Yastrebov produced a long review of the second book of Hrushevsky's ninth volume. Its title, 'Natsional-fashysts'ka kont- septsiia selians'kol viiny 1648 roku na Ukralni' (The National-Fascist Conception of the Peasant War of 1648 in Ukraine), was a clear indica­tion not only of a new stage in the officially sponsored demonization of Hrushevsky but also of the unequivocal triumph of the 'peasant war' conception in Marxist historiography of the Khmelnytsky era. That conception had been advocated by Karpenko in 1929 but virtually ignored by Yastrebov at the time. In his new review, Yastrebov did not limit himself to criticizing Hrushevsky's ideas, as in 1930, but admitted and repented his own 'errors' in the interpretation of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. He wrote that he had shared some of the assessments of the uprising made by Mykola Skrypnyk and had viewed it as a 'great bourgeois revolution' along the lines suggested by Sukhyno- Khomenko. By that time, both Skrypnyk and Sukhyno-Khomenko had been condemned by the authorities.

With regard to the nature of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, Yastrebov wrote that since his first review of Hrushevsky's Istoriia, the issue had been 'finally settled.' 'It has been shown,' he stated, 'that this revolu­tionary movement was a peasant war and that along with the peasant masses, the oppressed artisan element in Ukrainian towns participated in it.'³¹ Yastrebov referred specifically to the resolutions of the Ukrai­nian Society of Marxist Historians, in which Yavorsky's interpretation of the uprising, first as a gentry revolution and then as a revolution of commercial capital, was condemned and rejected, and Sukhyno- Khomenko's interpretation of it as a bourgeois and national revolution was dismissed as erroneous. The 'final settlement' of the issue com­pletely removed the Cossacks from the leadership of the uprising, in which they were now overshadowed by the peasantry. References to Cossackdom remained only in the official name given to the Cossack revolts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, now des­ignated as the 'era of peasant-Cossack wars of 1591-1638.'

In his 1934 review of Hrushevsky's Istoriia, Yastrebov found it neces­sary to repudiate the 'erroneous' position he had taken in his review of book 1, published four years earlier. This time he tried to be more care­ful in his assessments, but again he was in no position to predict future turns in the party line and their ramifications for historiography. Ironi­cally, many of the historical issues that Yastrebov considered 'finally settled' in 1934 were soon reinterpreted by Soviet historiography, and Yastrebov was again obliged to adjust his views to the new orthodoxy. For example, in Narys istorii Ukrainy (Survey of Ukrainian History), written in 1942, the Khmelnytsky Uprising was presented not as a 'peasant war' but as a 'national-liberation war of the Ukrainian peo­ple,' and Khmelnytsky was treated as a major hero. Ukraine's incorpo­ration into the Muscovite state after the Pereiaslav Council was viewed as a 'lesser evil,' not in comparison with a popular uprising, as Yastre­bov had maintained in 1934, but in relation to the conquest of Ukraine by Poland or the Ottoman Empire.³²

Yastrebov's review of 1934 was one of the last examples of an exclu­sively class-based critique of Hrushevsky. The historian was not yet accused of being an enemy of the Russian people and of Russo- Ukrainian brotherhood and friendship - accusations that soon became obligatory in Soviet propaganda attacks on Hrushevsky. In his review, Yastrebov consistently presented Muscovite policy as a 'gradual take­over of Ukraine.'³³ 'For us,' he wrote with reference to the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, 'this is a pact between two exploitative forces - Muscovite landowners and Ukrainian (to some extent also Polish) landowners.'³⁴ Yastrebov's treatment of the Pereiaslav Agreement as a 'lesser evil' casts light on the prevailing balance between class-based and nation-based elements in the Marxist interpretation of Ukrainian history. For him, Pereiaslav was a lesser evil from the viewpoint of the Ukrainian Cossack officers, who had to choose between Muscovite suzerainty and the prospect of a popular uprising.³⁵

What does the Marxist critique of Hrushevsky's views on the Khmel­nytsky Uprising indicate about changes in the Marxist interpretation of Ukrainian history as a whole? One point that emerges quite clearly from a reading of the officially sponsored reviews of Hrushevsky's works and Marxist debates on the history of the Khmelnytsky Uprising is that after a relatively short period of unsupervised and chaotic efforts on the part of various groups of Marxist historians to apply the Marxist paradigm to Ukrainian history, the centre succeeded in imposing a uni­form and obligatory interpretation of the Ukrainian past. That interpre­tation would change dramatically in the course of the 1930s, but open competition among various interpretations of history was effectively banned and became a thing of the past. The main victim of the new uni­formity was the concept of nationhood and all historical symbols con­sidered too closely related to the national paradigm of Ukrainian history. Cossackdom, for example, became a symbol of all that was wrong with the national paradigm in the eyes of Marxist historians: nationalism, statism, elitism, and lack of interest in problems of social differentiation and class struggle in Ukrainian society.

The rejection of Pokrovsky's theory of commercial capitalism and the refusal to see the burghers as leaders of the Khmelnytsky Uprising ('bourgeois revolution') reflected a major shift in party discourse on the bourgeoisie, which was no longer considered a progressive force. The bourgeoisie was now regarded not only as the main enemy of the Soviet state but also as a major antagonist of the proletariat and the toiling masses in the past. The peasantry emerged as a major benefi­ciary of all these changes. On the one hand, the shift towards treating the peasantry as the protagonist of premodern history was influenced by a rereading of Marx and Engels, especially the latter's classic study of the peasant war in Germany. On the other hand, the further politici­zation of scholarship meant that the peasant issue, so crucial to the communist politics of the 1920s, was read back into the history of Ukraine. As a result, the new Marxist interpretation of the Khmel­nytsky Uprising, as it emerged in late 1920s and early 1930s, had much more in common with the interpretation of that event in populist histo­riography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than it did with Marxism.

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