Chapter 11 The Partitions

The Khmelnytsky Uprising unleashed a long period of wars that led many historians to refer to the decades following the revolt as the Ruin. While the destruction and depopulation of the Ukrainian lands, especially on the Right Bank of the Dnieper River, indeed dealt a huge blow to the economic, political, and cultural life of the region, the main long-term consequence of the wars was the division of Ukraine along the Dnieper between Muscovy and Poland.

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

The drama that would lead to the partitions had begun. If Khmelnytsky had expected succession to the hetmancy to work as it did in Poland, with election to the throne of members of the same dynasty one after another, the system that came into existence was more like the one in the principality of Moldavia, where new leaders were elected and disposed of at the wish or with the approval of the Ottomans.

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

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

Many in the Cossack ranks were unhappy with the rise to power of the noble faction led by Ivan Vyhovsky. The Cossacks beyond the Dnieper rapids expressed open disapproval. They had elected Khmelnytsky hetman in the spring of 1648.

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

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

In September 1958, Vyhovsky summoned a Cossack council in the Left-Bank town of Hadiach that approved conditions for the Hetmanate’s return to the jurisdiction of the Polish kings. The resulting Polish-Cossack treaty, called the Union of Hadiach, was the brainchild of Vyhovsky’s right-hand man, Yurii Nemyrych. The treaty was nothing if not a realization of the dreams nurtured by the Ukrainian nobility of the first half of the seventeenth century. In the struggles over the Union of Brest, the Orthodox nobles had developed an anachronistic interpretation of the Union of Lublin as an arrangement that recognized not only the Grand Duchy of Lithuania but also the Rus’ lands of Poland-Lithuania as an equal partner in the commonwealth. Now Nemyrych decided to turn that vision into reality by refashioning the Hetmanate as the principality of Rus’, which would join the commonwealth as a coequal third partner along with Poland and Lithuania.

The Great Revolt had made some members of the Polish elite more open to the idea of a Rus’ principality than ever before, but the rise of Cossackdom had also made it difficult to reincorporate a realm that had developed its own distinct form of political and social organization. Thus, responding to the pre-1648 demands of the Cossack elite, the Union of Hadiach offered noble status to 1,000 Cossack families immediately and, after that, to a hundred Cossack families per annum in each of the Cossack regiments. Apart from satisfying Cossack social demands, the union also addressed Cossack and noble concerns about religion. Only the Orthodox would have the right to hold administrative positions in the new principality. Curiously enough, the treaty also contained a clause dealing with the Kyivan College founded by Peter Mohyla, recognizing it as an academy. The nobles negotiating the deal from the Cossack side were clearly interested in something more than Cossack rights.

News of the signing of the union with Poland prompted the tsar to issue an appeal calling on the Cossacks to rebel against the “traitor” Vyhovsky.

Vyhovsky never moved on Moscow. Despite his victory at Konotop, Muscovite garrisons in Ukraine held on, and the revolt against Vyhovsky among the Cossacks gathered strength. News about the Polish Diet’s ratification of the Union of Hadiach gave it further impetus. The version of the treaty approved by the Diet failed to deliver on a number of promises made to Vyhovsky by the Polish negotiators. It limited the lands of the new principality to the Kyiv, Bratslav, and Chernihiv palatinates, even though the hetman also wanted what is now western Ukraine, including Volhynia and Podolia. It also limited the Cossack register to 30,000, along with 10,000 mercenaries, for a total of 40,000, or 20,000 fewer than Khmelnytsky had negotiated with the tsar immediately after Pereiaslav. Yurii Nemyrych went to Warsaw in person to plead the case for the union before the Diet. “We were born in liberty, brought up in liberty and, as free men, we are returning to it,” he told the deputies. They approved the union but not in the form that Nemyrych and Vyhovsky wanted. When Vyhovsky received the revised text, he told the courier that he was bringing him death.

Most of the Cossack elite now saw Vyhovsky as a traitor.

Vyhovsky’s hetmancy opened a new page in the history of Cossack Ukraine — a page marked by internal strife and fratricidal war. Since Cossack forces were insufficient to defend the Hetmanate, whoever held the office of hetman had to keep Cossack ranks united while constantly maneuvering among the major powers in the region. It was a task that few could accomplish. Khmelnytsky had managed to keep the Cossack officers in line with such disciplinary measures as chaining troublemakers to a cannon, as he did with the firebrand of the 1648 massacres, Colonel Maksym Kryvonis, or even ordering the execution of Cossack rebels. Vyhovsky had failed to maintain the unity of the Cossack realm. The task passed once again to Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s son Yurii, who was reelected to the hetmancy after the ouster of Vyhovsky. The dynasty was back, but Ukraine’s problems were no closer to solution.

Yurii Khmelnitsky came power in the fall of 1659 with the support of Cossack officers who believed that they could reach an agreement with the tsar on conditions no worse than those negotiated by the old Khmelnytsky. They miscalculated. When Yurii Khmelnytsky and his supporters began negotiations with the Muscovites, they found themselves in a trap. A new Cossack council, called at the initiative of a Muscovite military governor (voevoda) and surrounded by a Muscovite army of 40,000, confirmed the election of the young Khmelnytsky but on conditions that reduced the rights and privileges given to his father. From now on, the hetman’s election required the express permission of the tsar, and he had no right to conduct foreign relations or appoint colonels without the consent of Moscow. Muscovite military garrisons were to be stationed in all major towns of the Hetmanate.

Vyhovsky’s defection to the Poles had resulted not in new concessions from the Muscovite side, as his opponents had hoped, but in the curtailment of the Hetmanate’s previous rights. The tsar’s officials wanted his subjects to realize that they would not tolerate breaches of the union with Muscovy under any circumstances. In January 1660, the Muscovite voevodas sent Khmelnytsky a message making that particular point. The corpse of Danylo Vyhovsky, a brother of the former hetman and a cousin of Yurii Khmelnytsky, who had fallen into Muscovite hands during a failed attack on the Muscovite garrison in Kyiv, was delivered to the young hetman’s residence on his ancestral estate of Subotiv. Danylo’s captors had tortured him to death. What the hetman saw in the coffin caused him to break down in tears. “His whole body was torn to pieces by whips, his eyes plucked out and the sockets filled with silver, his ears turned inside out with a drill and filled with silver,” wrote a Polish diplomat who happened to be there at the time. “His fingers had been sliced. His legs had been butchered along the veins. In a word, it was unheard-of savagery.”

If the tsar and his officials wanted to intimidate the young hetman and his entourage, they did not achieve their purpose. According to the same source, the arrival of the Cossack officer’s massacred remains not only made the young Khmelnytsky weep but also aroused outrage at his court. Danylo Vyhovsky’s young widow cursed her husband’s killers. Revenge came later that year. In the fall of 1660, during a battle between a Muscovite army and Polish detachments backed by Crimean Tatars, the young Khmelnytsky and his troops switched sides and swore allegiance to the Polish king. The Muscovite army was defeated. Its commander spent twenty years in Crimean captivity.

While this Polish victory gratified the Cossacks, it did nothing to secure the Hetmanate. The Cossacks returned to the king’s jurisdiction on conditions even less favorable than those offered by the version of the Union of Hadiach approved by the Polish Diet. The new treaty expunged the very name of the Rus’ principality, so important to the Cossack authors of the Hadiach union. Every time the Cossacks switched sides in the ongoing Muscovite-Polish war for control of Ukraine, they lost additional elements of their sovereignty. The pressure exerted on the Cossack polity by its much more powerful adversaries, the Tsardom of Muscovy and the Kingdom of Poland, soon became too strong for the Hetmanate to bear, and it split into two parts along the Dnieper River.

In 1660, as Yurii Khmelnytsky established his headquarters on the Right Bank of the Dnieper, the regiments on the Left Bank, with Muscovite support, elected their own acting hetman. Khmelnytsky organized a number of expeditions to subdue the rebellious regiments but failed to achieve his goal. The region was close to the Muscovite border, and the tsardom’s military governors solidified their hold on it. In early 1663, in utter despair, the twenty-two-year-old hetman resigned and entered a monastery. This was the official end of the united Hetmanate. That year, the Right-Bank Cossacks elected a hetman subordinate to Poland, while those on the Left Bank elected a hetman who recognized the sovereignty of Muscovy. Four years later, in 1667, Muscovite and Polish diplomats signed the Truce of Andrusovo, which divided Cossack Ukraine, with the Left Bank going to Muscovy and the Right Bank to Poland.

The old Hetmanate did not go down without a fight. Colonel Petro Doroshenko, a scion of one of the best-known Cossack families, led those opposed to the division of the state, which they considered their true fatherland, into battle. Doroshenko’s grandfather had been a Cossack hetman in the 1620s, his father a colonel under Bohdan Khmelnytsky. A native of Chyhyryn, Petro began his service at the hetman’s court. After his promotion to the rank of colonel, he took part in a number of diplomatic missions, including negotiations with the Swedes, Poles, and Muscovites. He even led one of the Cossack embassies to Moscow. A supporter of Yurii Khmelnytsky, he ended up in Right-Bank Ukraine, and in 1665 the local Cossacks elected him hetman.

News of the impending partition of Cossack Ukraine had shocked and galvanized the Cossack elite, and Doroshenko won election with an agenda of raising another revolt against Poland and uniting Ukraine on both sides of the Dnieper. Like Bohdan Khmelnytsky before him, Doroshenko counted on the support of the Crimean Tatars. Together they attacked the Polish armies in the fall of 1667, forcing the king to grant autonomy to the Right-Bank Hetmanate. Doroshenko then crossed the Dnieper and took control of Left-Bank Ukraine, which was already in revolt against Moscow. The tsar’s officials had aroused discontent by trying to conduct a census for tax purposes. News of the partition of Ukraine at Andrusovo had turned it into open revolt.

Doroshenko, already hetman of the Right Bank, was now elected on the Left Bank as well. The Cossack Hetmanate once again became united, despite the two partitioning powers. But the unity did not last long. Soon Doroshenko had to leave Left-Bank Ukraine to deal with a new Polish offensive and a new hetman sponsored by the Poles. Meanwhile, Muscovite troops occupied the Left Bank. The Ottomans were now Doroshenko’s only hope. In July 1669, Sultan Mehmed IV sent him new insignia of office, including a hetman’s mace and banner. The sultan took Doroshenko and his Cossacks under his protection on the same condition as the rulers of Moldavia and Wallachia: that they mobilize troops at his first summons. The lands claimed by Istanbul included not only Cossack Ukraine on both sides of the Dnieper but also the Rus’ lands all the way to the Vistula in the west and the Nieman in the north.

It was an ambitious agenda, but conditions seemed to favor Cossack efforts to realize Khmelnytsky’s dreams of twenty years earlier and bring all the Rus’ lands of the commonwealth under their control. This time, the Ottomans not only offered the hetman’s insignia but also put troops on the ground. In 1672, a 100,000-strong Ottoman army crossed the Danube and, with the support of its Crimean, Wallachian, Moldavian, and now Cossack vassals, moved against the Polish forces. They went much farther than Khotyn, the site of the crucial battle of more than half a century earlier, and besieged the fortress of Kamianets in Podolia. Located on a high cliff and surrounded by a deep ravine, it was considered impregnable but fell to the Ottomans after a siege of only ten days. Soon the sultan’s army was besieging Lviv. The Poles sued for peace and renounced their claim to Podolia and the middle Dnieper region. Doroshenko and his supporters were in a celebratory mood.

But Doroshenko’s hopes were not realized. The Ottomans took the fortress of Kamianets and the adjacent Podolia region under their direct control, while the Cossacks got their old possessions on the middle Dnieper in lieu of an independent state. There were no plans to extend the offensive to the Left Bank or northward to Volhynia and Belarus. But that was only the beginning of Doroshenko’s troubles. The Ottomans aroused indignation by turning some Christian churches into mosques and allowing the Crimean Tatars to conduct their slave-hunting raids in the region. Support for Doroshenko was dwindling as quickly as the population of the Right Bank under his nominal control. It was turning into a desert as inhabitants fled both east and west. Many crossed the Dnieper to the Left Bank, where the Muscovites crushed the opposition of the Cossack elites, installed a loyal hetman, and promoted an economic revival. The Right Bank became a ruin, giving that name to an entire period of Ukrainian history.

It was only a matter of time before Doroshenko left the Ukrainian political scene. Instead of uniting Ukraine under a loose Ottoman protectorate, he brought one more partitioning power into the region — one that turned out to be more destructive than any of its predecessors. In 1676, when Muscovite troops supported by their Left-Bank Cossack allies crossed the Dnieper and approached Doroshenko’s capital of Chyhyryn, the Cossack hetman resigned his office and swore allegiance to the tsar. His life was spared, and, as one who had “seen the light,” he received the title of voevoda and went to serve the tsar in Viatka (present-day Kirov), almost nine hundred kilometers east of Moscow. He was allowed to retire to the village of Yaropolets in today’s Moscow oblast. Married to a Russian noblewoman (one of their descendants was Aleksandr Pushkin’s wife, Natalia), he died there in 1698. Ironically, a society of natives of Ukrainian Podolia, the region that suffered most from the Ottoman rule that Doroshenko helped bring to Ukraine, rebuilt the small chapel over his grave in 1999.

Direct Ottoman rule over parts of Ukraine did not last long — the Ottomans gave low priority to that part of their frontier, and they needed resources elsewhere, especially in the Mediterranean. The year Doroshenko died, Podolia reverted to Polish control. The Ottomans were out of the picture, and the Muscovite-Polish border on the Dnieper, against which Doroshenko had rebelled in 1666, was now fully reestablished. The Cossack state did not disappear altogether, but its territory and autonomy, not to speak of its independence, were severely curtailed — it survived only in Left-Bank Ukraine. The Cossack land, which had been booming in the first half of the seventeenth century, could muster enough human, economic, and military resources to challenge the major powers in the region but not to defend the accomplishments of the Cossack revolution. When it came to foreign alliances, the Cossacks tried everything, starting with the Crimea and the Ottomans and ending with Muscovy, the Swedes, and Poland. Nothing worked — the unity not only of Cossack Ukraine but of the Ukrainian lands in general was lost. Until the end of the eighteenth century, most of Ukraine formerly controlled by Poland would remain divided between Poland and Russia. The division would have profound effects on Ukrainian identity and culture.