Ecclesiastical Changes

Initially, the Orthodox church in Ukraine benefited from the 1648 uprising. Khmelnytsky repeatedly stressed that the defense of Orthodoxy was a major goal of the revolt and both he and his successors were quite generous in providing the church with land and privileges.

Under the rule of the early hetmans, the metropolitans of Kiev (such as Sylvester Kosiv and Dionysii Balaban) had almost complete freedom of action. The Cossack leadership did not interfere in ecclesiastical affairs and the clergy and church peasants constituted an almost autonomous segment of Ukrainian society. Even in relations with the tsars and the kings of Poland, where there were still many Orthodox, the Kievan metropolitans pursued their own policies. But eventually the question arose of who should exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the Ukrainian church. It was occasioned by Metropolitan Balaban’s decision in 1658 to follow Hetman Vyhovsky over to the Polish side. In the view of Moscow, for the spiritual head of the Ukrainian Orthodox to be based on the territory of its Polish archenemies was unacceptable. Therefore, the tsar appointed Lazar Baranovych, archbishop of Chernihiv, as the “temporary” metropolitan of the Left Bank, thereby splitting the Orthodox hierarchy in two. Furthermore, the Russians applied pressure to have the Ukrainian church removed from the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Contantinople and placed under the patriarch of Moscow.

At first, the Ukrainian clergy on the Left Bank was vehemently opposed to being subordinated to the Muscovite church, which it regarded as being culturally inferior. But by 1686, after decades of careful and tactful persuasion, the Left-Bank clergy capitulated and the newly elected metropolitan, Prince Gedeon Sviatopolk-Chetvertynsky, agreed to place his church under the patriarch of Moscow.

During the period of the Ruin, the newly established Cossack polity in Ukraine experienced a catastrophic reversal of fortune. A powerful, aggressive force in the days of Khmelnytsky, it became in the twenty years following his death the helpless object of civil strife, foreign incursions, and partitions. Among the underlying causes for the setbacks suffered by Ukrainians during the Ruin were the following: (1) the internal contradictions between the elitist and egalitarian tendencies in Cossack society; (2) the intense external pressure applied on the incompletely formed Cossack society by Muscovy, Poland, and the Ottomans – Eastern Europe’s three greatest powers; and (3) the Cossacks’ lack of well-defined political goals and of adequate institutions to govern effectively all segments of Ukrainian society. As a result, Cossack Ukraine was able to preserve only a part of the gains it had achieved in 1648.