FOREWORD
This book is based to a considerable extent on the author’s previously published monographs such as — The Little-Russian Agency of the Russian State in the Seventeenth Century (1925), The Cossack Chief Officers in Left- Bank Ukraine of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1926), The Cossacks in Belorussia (1927), The Cossack General Assembly in Ukraine of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1929), The Cossack Officers’ Council in Hetman Ukraine of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1930), The Noble Army Fellowship in Hetman Ukraine of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1948), and The Ukrainian Hetmanate as a Form of Government (1948).
The materials for these works were collected in the years 1921 to 1933 when the author worked as a research scholar at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev. At that time he had an opportunity to explore archives in Kiev, Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Poltava, and also those in Moscow.
From 1945 to 1949 the author lectured at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich. His course on the history of Ukrainian constitutional law in the period of Hetman Ukraine was published in Ukrainian in 1947 (second printing, 1954). The present work is the author’s own translation into English of this lecture course, in a somewhat abbreviated from. In the author’s opinion this subject is comparatively little known in the Western World and could be of interest to students of Eastern European history.
The author would like to express his gratitude to Professor Dr. Jaroslaw Padoch for his assistance in publishing this work as well as for the bibliography which he kindly compiled, and to Professor Dr. Theodore B. Ciuciura, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada, for his editorial work.
Special thanks are due to the Senate of the Ukrainian Free University and its Rector, Professor Dr. Wolodymyr Janiw for bringing out this volume.