Chapter 10 The Great Revolt

The Cossack uprising that began in the spring of 1648, known in history as the Great Revolt, was the seventh major Cossack insurrection since the end of the sixteenth century.

The Great Revolt began in exactly the same manner as the first Cossack uprising, led by Kryshtof Kosynsky in 1591 — with a dispute over a land grant between a magnate and Bohdan Khmelnytsky, a petty noble who also happened to be a Cossack officer. Aged fifty-three at the time, he was an unlikely leader of a Cossack rebellion, having served the king loyally in numerous battles and become chancellor of the Cossack Host following the uprising of 1638. After the servant of a prominent commonwealth official took his estate of Subotiv from him, Khmelnytsky turned to the courts, but to no avail. More than that, his powerful opponents put him in prison. He escaped and went directly to the Zaporozhian Sich, where the rebellious Cossacks welcomed him as one of their own and elected him their hetman. It was March 1648. The Golden Peace was over; the Great Revolt had begun.

Up to that point, developments resembled those of previous Cossack uprisings, but Khmelnytsky changed the familiar pattern. Before marching northward, capturing towns, and confronting the commonwealth army, he went south in search of allies. In a dramatic reversal of established steppe politics, he offered the Crimean khan his friendship and an opportunity. The cautious khan allowed his vassals, the Noghay Horde north of the Crimea, to join the Cossacks.

It did not take long for the alliance to prove its worth. In May 1648, Cossack and Tatar forces defeated two Polish armies, one near the Zhovti Vody (Yellow Water) River near the northern approaches to the Zaporozhian Sich, the other near the town of Korsun in the middle Dnieper region. A key to Cossack success, apart from the participation of Noghay cavalry (close to 4,000 horsemen) in both battles, was the decision of some 6,000 registered Cossacks to switch sides, abandon their Polish masters and join the Khmelnytsky revolt. The Polish standing army was completely wiped out. Its two chief commanders, the Crown grand hetman and the Crown field hetman, as well as hundreds of officers, ended up in Tatar captivity.

While the Cossacks’ sudden success shocked the commonwealth, Khmelnytsky and his closest supporters could not believe their luck. The hetman did not know what move to make next. In June 1648, with the Polish armies gone and the commonwealth in disarray, Bohdan Khmelnytsky took something of a summer hiatus and retired to his native Chyhyryn to consider what to do. But the rebels refused to take any breaks. With the old registered Cossacks gathered near Bila Tserkva, a town south of Kyiv, the popular uprising began in earnest in the rest of Ukraine. Inspired by the news of Cossack victories, the peasants and the townspeople took matters into their own hands, attacking the estates of large landowners, harassing their retreating private armies, settling scores with nobles, and hunting down Catholic priests.

The first letters that Khmelnytsky sent to the authorities as the revolt began already mentioned Jewish leaseholders. The Cossack hetman complained of the “intolerable injustices” that the Cossacks were suffering at the hands of the royal officials, the colonels — Polish commanders of the registered Cossacks — and “even” the Jews. Khmelnytsky mentioned the Jews in passing, placing them in the third or even fourth echelon of Cossack enemies, but the rebels in Right-Bank Ukraine, where Jews began to suffer attack en masse in June 1648, had their own priorities. They assaulted and often killed Jews (especially men), leading to the destruction of entire communities, which they all but wiped from the map in the course of three summer months of 1648. We do not know the number of victims, as we do not know the number of Jews living in the region before the revolt, but most scholars estimate Jewish losses at 14,000 to 20,000 victims — a very high number, given the time and place. For all its rapid economic development, seventeenth-century Ukraine was relatively sparsely settled.

Twentieth-century Jewish and Ukrainian historians have placed considerable emphasis on the underlying social causes of anti-Jewish antagonism in Dnieper Ukraine of that period. Rivalry between Jewish and Christian merchants and artisans in the cities and towns, as well as the Jewish leaseholders’ role as middlemen between nobles and peasants, did indeed contribute to the violence unleashed by the Cossack revolt. But one should not lose sight of religious motives in the attacks on Ukrainian Jewry. Religion was essential to social identity on both sides of the Christian-Jewish divide. It was not for nothing that the best-known Jewish chronicler of the massacres, Nathan Hannover, called the attackers “Greeks,” referring to their Orthodox religion, not their nationality. Some rebels felt that they were on a religious mission to convert those Jews who had escaped the massacre.

By the time Khmelnytsky and his armies began moving west of the Dnieper in the fall of 1648, they had annihilated Jews, Polish nobles, and Catholic priests throughout the region as far as the Polish strongholds of Kamianets in Podolia and Lviv in Galicia. The Uniates were gone as well, either retreating westward or converting to Orthodoxy. The latter was easy to do, as the two Eastern Christian churches differed in jurisdiction only. Few people understood or cared about dogmas. The newly assembled Polish army tried to stop the joint Cossack-Tatar march westward but suffered another major defeat at Pyliavtsi in Podolia. By the end of the year, Cossack and Tatar units were besieging Lviv and the town of Zamość on the Polish-Ukrainian ethnic border. But they did not proceed much farther. Political considerations dictated the end of the offensive, not military ones, as there were no troops between the Cossack armies and Warsaw.

Bohdan Khmelnitsky’s new agenda was no longer the mere defense of Cossack rights and privileges, as in the first months of the revolt, but neither was it the destruction of the commonwealth. The Cossack hetman spelled out his new program during negotiations with the Polish emissaries who visited him in January and February 1649 in the town of Pereiaslav southeast of Kyiv. Khmelnytsky declared that he was now the sole master of Rus’ and threatened to drive the Poles beyond the Vistula River. Khmelnytsky must have been thinking about himself as an heir to the princes of Kyivan Rus’.

Such was the mind-set that had led him to arrange a triumphant entrance into Kyiv for himself in December 1648. There the metropolitan of Kyiv greeted the hetman, as did the patriarch of Jerusalem, who addressed Khmelnytsky as a prince and gave him his blessing for war with the Poles.

The borders of the new state would be drawn in battle, and the battle most crucial to that process was fought in the summer of 1649 near the town of Zboriv in Volhynia. There Khmelnytsky’s forces, assisted by the Crimean Tatars under Khan Islam III Giray, attacked the army of the new Polish king, John II Casimir. The battle ended in victory for the Cossacks, who, with the help of their Crimean allies, forced the Polish officials to sign an agreement giving royal recognition to the officially autonomous but actually independent Cossack state within the commonwealth. The king agreed to increase the Cossack register to 40,000. (In reality, the Cossack army at Zboriv attained a strength of 100,000 Cossacks and armed peasants and townsmen.) The Cossacks received the right to reside in — effectively, to rule over — the three eastern palatinates of the commonwealth. Those were the palatinates of Kyiv, Bratslav, and Chernihiv, which constituted the territory of the new Cossack state, known in history as the Hetmanate. A good part of the Hetmanate happened to be in the steppelands that Polish and French cartographers of earlier decades had called “Ukraine.” The Hetmanate would soon come to be known by that name.

The head of the new state, as well as its military commander, was the hetman.

The old commonwealth administrative system was theoretically left in place, with the post of palatine of Kyiv going to an Orthodox noble loyal to the king, but the Cossack hetman actually ruled, without even informing the king about his actions. In the areas under their control, the Cossacks introduced an administrative system based on their borderland experience and military type of social organization and influenced by military/administrative models from the Ottoman Empire. They divided the territory of the Hetmanate into “regiments,” placing a colonel in charge of each regiment’s administrative, judicial, and fiscal bodies but, first and foremost, its military organization. Each of the twenty regiments, named after its principal town, was obliged to produce a battle-ready Cossack military regiment. The same combination of military, administrative, and judicial powers in one office was introduced on the level of smaller towns and villages. Cossack captains ran these, tasked mainly with mustering a company (a “hundred”) in time of war.

The alliance with the Crimean Tatars made the Cossack victories of the first two years of the revolt possible. This alliance drew Khmelnytsky into the geopolitical web of the Ottoman Empire, which had a number of dependencies in the northern Black Sea region. These included the Crimea, Moldavia, and Wallachia (part of today’s Romania), and their relations with Istanbul provided Khmelnytsky with a model for establishing his independence vis-à-vis the king without giving up the hard-won Cossack statehood. Cossack Ukraine was prepared to join other Ottoman dependencies as a protectorate of the sultans — that was the essence of the negotiations that Khmelnytsky conducted with Istanbul in the spring and summer of 1651. Preparing for another major confrontation with the commonwealth, he even signed a document recognizing the suzerainty of the sultan.

In exchange Khmelnytsky wanted immediate protection — Ottoman troops on the ground, attacking the Polish army, as they had done at Ţuţora in 1620 and at Khotyn in 1621. But the Ottomans were fully engaged in sea battles with the Venetians. Instead of sending their own troops, the advisers of the nine-year-old Sultan Mehmed IV ordered the Crimean khan to provide military support for Khmelnytsky. This was not what the hetman desired: the Crimeans were playing their own game, trying to sustain conflict in the area as long as possible so as to prevent the Cossacks from achieving a decisive victory over the commonwealth. That had been the case at Zboriv in 1649, where the khan negotiated a peace with the king instead of helping Khmelnytsky defeat the Polish army. The same situation could easily recur.

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 in 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 under 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.