4 Hadiach 1658: The Origins of a Myth

Few events in Ukrainian and Polish history have provoked as many “what ifs” as the agreement concluded between the Cos­sack hetman Ivan Vyhovsky and representatives of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth near the city of Hadiach in the au­tumn of 1658.

The Union of Hadiach, as the agreement became known in historiography, had the potential to influence all those processes. It envisioned the creation of a tripartite Commonwealth—the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as well as a Principality of Rus', with the Cossack hetman as its official head. The Union was the culmination of the activities of moderate forces among the Polish and Ukrainian elites and the embodi­ment of the hopes and dreams of the Ruthenian (Ukrainian and Belarusian) nobility of the first half of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, the compromise embodied in the Union was re­jected by mainstream forces on both sides. The Commonwealth Diet ratified the text of the treaty with a number of important omissions, but even in that form it was viewed with suspicion and rejected by the Polish nobiliary establishment, which could not reconcile itself to the prospect of Orthodox Cossacks enjoying equal rights with Catholic nobles. On the Ukrainian side, the Cossack rank and file rejected a treaty that proposed to give all rights in the new Principality of Rus' to a limited number of representatives of the Ukrainian nobiliary and Cossack elite at the expense of the Cossack masses and the rebel peasantry, which would have to submit once again to the noble landlords’ juris­diction and control.¹ The Union was a disaster for its Ukrainian sponsor, Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky, who succeeded Bohdan Khmel­nytsky in 1657 and was forced to resign in 1659.

Needless to say, the Union had its fair share of critics among Ukrainian scholars. The critical assessment of the Union by Via- cheslav Lypynsky and Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the two most influ­ential Ukrainian historians of the period, had a profound influence on the interpretation of the events of 1658-59 in twentieth-century Ukrainian historiography.³ Nevertheless, it had to compete with the well-established tradition of treating Hadiach as a largely pos­itive development in Ukrainian history. Quite a few Ukrainian political thinkers and historians of the second half of the nine­teenth century tended to see the Union of Hadiach as a mani­festation of Ukrainian autonomist and federalist aspirations. For example, the leaders of the Ukrainian movement in the Russian Empire, Mykhailo Drahomanov and Volodymyr Antonovych, were generally positive in their assessment of the Union. And scholars of the younger generation were particularly enthusias­tic. Hrushevsky’s student Vasyl Herasymchuk saw the Union not only as a major achievement of Ukrainian political thought but also as a step toward Ukrainian independence—a position shared by Ivan Franko, Ukraine’s leading literary figure of the period.⁴

Indeed, since its inception in the early nineteenth century, modern Ukrainian historiography has been largely positive in its assessment of the Union of Hadiach and the actions and in­tentions of its authors.

After the fall of the USSR and the collapse of Soviet histo­riography, whose practitioners condemned Vyhovsky as a “traitor to the Ukrainian people” and cited the Hadiach Agreement as proof of that treason, positive assessments not only of Vyhovsky but also of the Union of Hadiach made their way into histori­cal writing. One of the deans of contemporary Ukrainian histo­riography, Nataliia Iakovenko, sees the Hadiach Agreement as “a striking monument of the political and legal thought of its time, which, had it been realized, would indeed have had a chance of laying firm foundations for the future of the Polish-Lithuanian- Belarusian-Ukrainian community and renewing the Common­wealth by establishing new forms of coexistence for its peoples. This in turn would have guaranteed the protection of what had already been achieved—recognition of the right to freedom of the individual, property, and political expression.”⁶

There are a number of reasons, both scholarly and political, for the persistence of the positive image of the Union of Hadiach in Ukrainian historiography. The goal of the present study, however, is not to examine those reasons but to look into the origins of the Ukrainian myth of Hadiach. When did it come into existence? What functions did it perform in the historical thinking of the Cossack elites and their Ukrainian heirs? These are the questions I propose to address.

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In the second half of the seventeenth century, memories of the Union of Hadiach continued to flourish in Polish-controlled Right-Bank Ukraine.

Roman Rakushka-Romanovsky, a prominent Cossack officer, served both Left-Bank and Right-Bank hetmans. After becom­ing an Orthodox priest, he wrote the Eyewitness Chronicle—the first major monument of Cossack historical writing. Rakushka- Romanovsky, the first Cossack author to address the Hadiach Agreement as a historical subject, listed some of its prominent conditions in his chronicle but gave neither a positive nor a nega­tive assessment of it. His summary of the conditions of the Union is useful for understanding how it was assessed by the Cossack officer elite of the period. Rakushka mentioned the granting of the office of Kyivan palatine to the hetman, the ennoblement of a few hundred Cossack officers in every regiment, and the creation of special courts for the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Bratslav palatinates, which made it unnecessary to go to Lublin or at­tend Diet sessions in Warsaw in order to settle legal disputes. It would appear that the Cossack officers expected more from the agreement than it actually delivered, given that the number of Cossacks eligible for ennoblement was limited to one hundred in each regiment. It is also possible that these conditions were exaggerated in retrospect—after all, Rakushka wrote his account of the agreement many years after the event.⁸

By the turn of the eighteenth century, when Rakushka was completing his chronicle, the myth of Hadiach was already in the making.

Rakushka-Romanovsky completed the Eyewitness Chronicle at the beginning of the eighteenth century, before Ivan Mazepa’s revolt against Tsar Peter I in 1708 and the Battle of Poltava (1709). Mazepa’s revolt dramatically changed the political atmosphere in the Hetmanate and, by all accounts, promoted the development of the Hadiach myth. The revolt raised the question of an alternative to the tsar’s rule in Ukraine. It was approximately at this time that the Cossack officers rediscovered the text of the Hadiach Agree­ment and began a careful study of its provisions. Mazepa allied himself with Charles XII of Sweden and Stanislaw Leszczynski of Poland. Whatever the shortcomings of the Union of Hadiach as compared with the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, it looked clearly superior to the limited Cossack autonomy that survived under Russian suzerainty in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Once again, the Treaty of Hadiach became attractive to the Hetmanate’s elites, which had undergone “gentrification” in the ensuing half century and were dreaming of the noble status and rights associated with that process.

This new interest in the Union of Hadiach was short-lived but found its way into the Cossack chronicles written in the Hetmanate after the Battle of Poltava. Peter’s encroachment on Cossack rights and the anti-Polish propaganda that he conducted from his new capital of St. Petersburg placed clear restrictions on the chroniclers’ ability to express their thoughts on the subject. Nevertheless, it is clearly apparent that the post-Poltava chroni­clers paid much more attention to the Union of Hadiach than did Rakushka-Romanovsky prior to Mazepa’s revolt. Inspiration for the further development of the Hadiach myth came, not surpris­ingly, from Polish sources. Particularly influential in this regard was Samuel Twardowski’s rhymed chronicle, The Civil War, four parts of which appeared in print in 1681.¹⁰

Twardowski discussed the Union in connection with the de­cisions of the Diet of 1659, which approved the agreement for the Polish side. He believed that the Union had resulted in the creation of a “third Commonwealth” in Ukraine (along with the Polish Kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania). For his narrative, Twardowski used the agreement as negotiated at Ha- diach, not the final draft of the treaty approved by the Diet. Thus he referred to a Cossack Host of sixty thousand, not the thirty thousand stipulated by the Diet’s decision. He also listed a pro­vision on the liquidation of the church union, although it was reformulated in the final draft of the agreement to save the Uniate Church. Twardowski’s characterization of the Cossacks was high­ly favorable for the most part. He regarded the creation of a “Cos­sack Commonwealth” in Ukraine as the fulfillment of a predic­tion allegedly made by the sixteenth-century Polish king Stefan Batory. Twardowski also compared the Cossacks’ humble origins with those of the Macedonian Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, and even Polish nobles. He was clearly prepared to accept the Cossack officer elite as an equal partner in the Commonwealth.¹¹

It was only to be expected that Twardowski’s interpretation of the Hadiach Agreement would appeal to the Cossack chroniclers of the eighteenth century. Samiilo Velychko, a former secretary in the General Chancellery of the Hetmanate and the most pro­lific chronicler of the period, used Twardowski’s account in his Relation of the Cossack War with the Poles, probably written in the 1720s. He translated Twardowski’s verses from the Polish and used them almost verbatim, making reference to specific pages of Twardowski’s work. Velychko’s own contribution to the sto­ry consisted of a recontextualization of the Union of Hadiach, presenting it not as the outcome of the work of the Polish Diet of 1659 (as had Twardowski) but of negotiations conducted at Hadiach in September 1658. Velychko also supplied a lengthy commentary on the first provision of the agreement about the liquidation of the church union, arguing that it was an important measure intended to stop desertions from the Orthodox Church in Polish Ukraine. Finally, Velychko completely excluded from his account the speech delivered at the Diet by the Cossack rep­resentative Iurii Nemyrych.

When speaking of the Cossacks returning to the fold of the Polish king, Nemyrych had invoked the story of the prodigal son returning to his father. The first of Velychkos changes put the agreement into a Ukrainian rather than a Polish historical context, the second strengthened the Union’s legitimacy from the viewpoint of the interests of the Orthodox Church, and the third helped deflect accusations that the Union was a mere sur­render of Cossack Ukraine to the king. All these changes not­withstanding, Velychko’s portrayal of Hadiach was inspired and heavily influenced by Twardowski’s favorable treatment of the agreement. Like Rakushka-Romanovskys account, Velychko’s positive assessment of Hadiach coexisted peacefully with his largely negative characterization of Vyhovsky, whom he depicted as a Ruthenian noble “of one spirit with the Poles for the sake of passing vanity and well-being in this world.”¹²

Especially interesting (and important for the present discus­sion) is the impact of Twardowski’s interpretation of the Union of Hadiach on another major Cossack chronicle of the period, Hryhorii Hrabianka’s The Great War of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, ap­parently written in the 1720s.¹³ If Velychko’s chronicle survived in a single copy, Hrabianka’s circulated widely in eighteenth-century Ukraine and became the most influential historical work of the period. Hrabianka, who was well acquainted with the Eyewitness Chronicle and used it in his work, shared Rakushka-Romanovskys negative attitude to Vyhovsky, calling him “an enemy and a bla­tant traitor.”¹⁴

But in his discussion of the Union of Hadiach Hrabianka por­trayed Vyhovsky as a victim of the Poles, who had made enticing promises to him. Thus, like Rakushka-Romanovsky and Velychko, Hrabianka did not extend his negative characterization of Vy- hovsky to the latter’s major diplomatic undertaking, the Union of Hadiach. He clearly liked the main ideas of the agreement and supplied additional details that enhanced his positive assessment of the Union. Some of those details were mere figments of the rich imagination of the Cossack elites, which were prepared to see much more in the Union than it had actually offered their forefathers.

Twardowskis work influenced Hrabiankas chronicle no less profoundly than it had affected Velychkos Relation. In some cas­es, Hrabianka was even less critical of his source than Velychko. For example, he failed to reconceptualize the history of the Union of Hadiach, introducing it to the reader in connection with the proceedings of the Warsaw Diet of 1659, exactly as Twardowski had done. Not unlike Velychko, Hrabianka used Twardowskis account of the conditions of the Union as the basis for his own account of the agreement. He also quoted from Twardowskis praise of the Cossacks, comparing their background to that of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Poles.

Unlike Velychko, however, Hrabianka never named his source. He also introduced many more changes into Twardowskis ac­count than had Velychko. Hrabianka dropped not only the ac­count of Nemyrychs speech to the Diet but also the provision of the agreement that obliged the Cossacks to conduct a defensive war against Muscovy, as well as the amnesty to the Cossacks who had sided with the Swedes during their invasion of the Common­wealth. If Hrabiankas failure to mention Nemyrych can be ex­plained by the same reasons as Velychkos, the other two changes reflect the new political sensitivities of post-Poltava Ukraine. In the wake of the defeat at Poltava, Hrabianka did not want to draw attention to the history of Cossack-Muscovite antagonisms or to past Cossack alliances with the Swedish king.¹⁵

If Hrabianka altered Twardowskis version of the treaty to eliminate items that he did not want his readers to know or re­member, his additions to the text of the agreement give a good indication of what he wanted the Union of Hadiach to repre­sent. First of all, Hrabianka introduced the concept of the Grand Principality of Rus'—a notion absent from Twardowskis work and probably borrowed from another Polish source, Wespazjan Kochowskis Climacters.¹⁶ Thus Hrabianka referred to the Cossack hetman of the agreement (that is, Ivan Vyhovsky) variously in his text as hetman of the Grand Principality of Rus'-Ukraine, hetman of the Ruthenian nation, and Ukrainian or Little Russian hetman.

Hrabianka also added to Twardowskis text of the agree­ment the ideologically important statement that the Cossacks were joining the Commonwealth as “free men with free men and equals with equals,” a formula that had entered Ruthenian political discourse in the first half of the seventeenth century and remained important in the eighteenth. Now, however, it was rein­troduced to establish that the Cossack elites had enjoyed special rights under the Polish kings and to claim those rights from the Russian tsars. The same purpose underlay another of Hrabian- ka’s additions to Twardowskis text—the statement that the king himself had signed the conditions of the Union, and then, as was the custom among monarchs, both sides had sworn to the agree­ment. Given the controversy over the refusal of the tsar’s envoys at Pereiaslav to swear an oath in the name of the sovereign, this addition was also politically significant.¹⁷

The addition of Hrabianka’s that had the most lasting impact on subsequent historiography and led to confusion in nineteenth­century historical writing pertained to the origins of the Hadiach Agreement. In his chronicle, Hrabianka claimed that the agree­ment had originally been submitted to the Poles by none other than Bohdan Khmelnytsky (the hetman’s first name was not given in the chronicle, but “Khmelnytsky” was Hrabianka’s standard form of reference to him).¹⁸ Whether this was taken from a writ­ten source, garbled, or invented outright, it helped Hrabianka argue his case that the Union indicated the Poles’ acceptance of a treaty originally proposed by the Cossacks. That could well explain why the Cossacks ultimately fell for a Polish trap.

However, in Hrabianka’s scheme of things, neither the canni­ness of the Poles nor Cossack naιvet6 nor even treason on the part of Vyhovsky could undermine the good ideas put into agreement by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. The reference to Khmelnytsky, whose cult as hero and savior of Little Russia reached its peak in the 1720s, could not but add legitimacy to the Union of Hadiach.¹⁹ An­other factor that bolstered the reputation of the Hadiach Agree­ment in post-Poltava Ukraine was the opposition to the Union on the part of the Catholic hierarchy, registered by Twardowski and duly repeated by Hrabianka. In general, Hrabianka portrayed the Hadiach Agreement in a way that shielded it from accusations of disloyalty to the tsar or betrayal of the Orthodox Church.²⁰

This was especially important, given that Hrabianka presented the Union of Hadiach as a viable alternative—and, one might conclude after comparing his texts of the Pereiaslav and Ha- diach treaties, a more attractive one—to the Pereiaslav Agree­ment. The elites of the Hetmanate were fed up with Muscovite encroachment on their rights and privileges, which culminated in the abolition of the hetmancy in 1722 and the introduction of direct rule by the Little Russian College. They looked to histo­ry for alternatives to Russian rule, and the Union of Hadiach certainly fit the bill. Hrabiankas interpretation of Hadiach had a strong impact on the formation of Ukrainian historical identity in the Hetmanate. His chronicle was extremely popular among the Cossack elites, but even more popular were different variants of its condensed version, known as the BriefDescription of Little Russia.²¹ Together they contributed to the formation of a Hadiach myth that represented the Polish-Cossack agreement of 1658 as an alternative to Pereiaslav and helped form an identity rooted not only in Little Russia’s experience under the tsars but also in its long tradition of existence under Polish kings.

This interpretation of Hadiach had little to do with the ac­tual text of the treaty, which curtailed the Hetmanate’s rights and Cossack liberties—a reality so obvious to Vyhovsky and his contemporaries. The popularity of the Hadiach myth can be prop­erly understood only in the context of historical writing and the politics of memory. That myth was created and kept alive by gen­erations of chroniclers and historians who desperately searched the past for an alternative to Russian rule. Despite the numerous flaws of the Hadiach Agreement, which were particularly glaring when compared with the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, it even­tually began to be seen as a viable alternative to Pereiaslav and, even more importantly, to the subsequent Cossack-Muscovite treaties, which further curtailed the fragile autonomy of Ukraine.