Imagining Early Modern Ukraine

It would appear that present-day Ukrainian historiography remains a battleground between different political and scholarly agendas and approaches.¹ In the 1990s, communist historiography in Ukraine (unlike in Belarus) withdrew from the battlefield without accepting actual battle.

Today, after more than a decade of positioning and repositioning themselves on the battlefield, the practitioners of the historical profes­sion in Ukraine have split into four major groups. Most of them carry the banner of the national paradigm, which they constantly adjust and readjust to meet the demands of the changing political environment. Thus they slowly shifted from the promotion of Ukrainian state- and nation-building in the 1990s to the commemoration of the Pereiaslav Agreement with Muscovy (1654) in the early 2000s. A second, rela­tively small group of Soviet-era historians who remained active in the field protested the 'excessive' nationalization of the Ukrainian histori­cal narrative or tried to promote ideas of East Slavic commonality and unity. A third, much larger group criticized the professional establish­ment from the viewpoint of Ukrainian statist historiography of the interwar period.

Natalia Yakovenko emerged as one of the leaders of the latter group,³ and she had no peer among nonconformists in the profession who study early modern Ukrainian history - the 'golden age' of the Ukrainian national narrative and a highly competitive field in which the majority of Ukraine's most famous historians made their names. She came as close to playing the role of public intellectual as any of her professional colleagues in present-day Ukraine. Yakovenko emerged on the Ukrainian historiographic scene in the early 1990s after years of relative obscurity, when she was largely involved in archival work and the publication of documentary sources. Her first monograph, The Ukrainian Nobilityfrom the Late Fourteenth to the Mid-Seventeenth Century (Volhynia and Central Ukraine) (1993), impressed the Ukrainian reader with the novelty of its subject, focusing as it did on the nobiliary elite as opposed to those Soviet-era favourites, peasants and burghers, or the Cossack heroes of the national narrative.⁴ It also demonstrated the author 's deep knowledge of the sources (Yakovenko began as a stu­dent of classical philology and, in addition to researching Latin sources on Ukrainian history, she has co-authored a Latin textbook). The book also indicated that its author was at home in the vast, mostly pre- or non-Soviet, literature on the subject.

Natalia Yakovenko considers this book a continuation of the research undertaken in her monograph on the Ukrainian nobility. In it she moves on from examining the hard data on the history of the nobil­ity as a social stratum to studying the elusive world of its mental ste­reotypes, perceptions, opinions, and ideological paradigms. Most of The Parallel World deals with the nobility in the broad sense of the term, from princes and magnates to petty nobles, including the Cossacks (with their 'knightly' discourse, self-identification, and ethos), who aspired to gentry status.

What are the 'hard facts' about Yakovenko's new book? First of all, it was attractively produced by the Krytyka publishing house in Kyiv and won a number of prestigious publishers' awards in Ukraine in 2002. The Parallel World consists of eleven essays, most of them issued earlier but revised for the 2002 publication. Nine of these essays deal with Ukrai­nian history of the early modern period (from the second half of the six­teenth century to the mid-seventeenth), while the remaining two discuss the interpretation of some aspects of that period in twentieth­century Ukrainian historiography. In explaining the structure of her book, whose constituent essays differ widely in individual focus and scope, Yakovenko draws on the arsenal of postmodern historiography. She claims, for example, that the nature of the subject under investi­gation (things 'subjective, personal, and latent in the individual') precludes systematic description, which would only amount to over­simplification. The same applies, in her opinion, to the nature of the sources under study, which, as she puts it, are neither 'systemic' nor connected with one another.

Yakovenko certainly does not go so far as to proclaim the death of narrative. The object of her challenge is what she calls 'national his­tory,' meaning the national paradigm of Ukrainian history. There can be little doubt, however, that Yakovenko challenges certain elements of the national paradigm from within 'the system,' remaining faithful to the idea of Ukrainian history as such.

The trouble with updating the methodological repertoire of national history at the beginning of the third millennium is that the latest and trendiest revisionist approaches were constructed in the West in opposi­tion to or in defiance of national history and the methods used to narrate it. Adopting them for the purpose of renewing a national narrative pre­sents a challenge and creates a tension that is often felt in Yakovenko's book. Declaring her method to be that of historical and anthropological research, Yakovenko lists a number of questions that informed her writ­ing, among them the motivations of social behaviour, the hierarchy of values, and the structure of cultural meanings. To deal with these ques­tions, Yakovenko marshals an impressive array of sources, much more varied in character than those used by her predecessors. Most of her narrative sources come from outside the canon of Ukrainian 'polemical literature' of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and are written more often in Polish and Latin than in the literary Ruthenian of the time.

As one would expect, Yakovenko's generally critical attitude towards the paradigm of 'national history,' her use of new sources and careful rereading of old ones results in the slaughter of quite a few sacred cows of the Ukrainian national narrative and in the presentation of a frag­mented but also new and credible image of early modern Ukraine as seen through the eyes of its nobiliary elite. One of those sacred cows is the image of the Poles and Polish culture as the ultimate 'other ' of early modern Ukrainian culture and identity. By situating the Ukrainian nobility's political, social, and cultural ideas and values in the broader context of the political and cultural perceptions and practices of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Yakovenko makes it possible to provide new explanations of a number of important phenomena of Ukrainian social and cultural life of the period. Those phenomena were defined by the political beliefs and conventions of pedagogical practice and the warrior ethos shared by all the noble elites of the Common­wealth irrespective of their religious and national traditions. This new approach certainly does not sit well with supporters of the traditional version of the Ukrainian historical narrative (built from its very incep­tion on the 'othering' of the Poles), which degenerated in Soviet times into the depiction of the Polish nobility as the ultimate colonizer of Ukraine and exploiter of the Ukrainian popular masses.

The methods of 'othering,' if not actually demonizing, the Polish nobil­ity and its state in twentieth-century Ukrainian history textbooks are dis­cussed in the last essay of the collection, entitled 'Poland and Poles in History Schoolbooks.' On the one hand, Yakovenko registers certain improvements in the treatment of Poland and the Poles in post-1991 Ukrainian historical surveys. These include a fairly objective assessment of the historical significance of the Union of Lublin between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1569), the inclusion of Pol­ish-language literature written by Ukrainians or on Ukrainian territory in the discussion, the presentation of historical Poland as a cultural 'bridge' between Ukraine and the West, and the reevaluation of the role of the church union in Ukrainian history. On the other hand, she points to the survival in textbooks of many anti-Polish stereotypes derived from Soviet and old Ukrainian historiography. One of them is the presentation of the Poles as an occupying force in Ukraine and of Poland as a state that con­sciously conducted a policy of subjugating and denationalizing Ukraini­ans. Another 'hiccup' of the previous approach is the treatment of early modern Poland and Ukraine as two absolutely separate entities whose relations consisted entirely of mutual animosity and perpetual conflict.

Why is it wrong to treat Poland as imperial power in the region and Polish policy in early modern Ukraine as colonial?⁷ Yakovenko believes that this anachronistic approach does not fit the historical real­ity 'on the ground.' She shows very convincingly how the stereotypes of Soviet historiography survive in post-Soviet textbooks, pointing out the Soviet-style depiction of the Jewish massacres during the Koliivsh- chyna Uprising (1768) as a war against leaseholders and tavernkeepers (368). Yakovenko is also highly effective in uncovering the roots of the demonizing of Poland and Poles in the Ukrainian national narrative of the nineteenth century. Her main argument appears sound and well presented. In essence, she argues that the two early modern peoples, the Poles and the Ukrainians/Ruthenians, had quite a few features in common. After decades of coexistence in a single state, the Polish and Ruthenian elites shared a common educational background and politi­cal culture; they also subscribed to the same 'knightly' ethos. More­over, they often dealt with similar problems, cooperated in the defence of the steppe frontier against Tatar incursions, and adhered to common social forms in town and country. Still, adopting an overtly polemical tone from time to time, Yakovenko herself does not avoid occasional oversimplification. She implies, for example, that Hrushevsky's focus on ethnos and territory in Ukrainian history led to the treatment of all non-Ukrainian elements on that territory as aggressors (369), and she claims without further explanation or qualification that at the time of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, the term 'Pole' was used not as an eth­nonym but as a political designation (373).

Despite her offhand remark that 'Poles' in mid-seventeenth-century Ukraine meant 'nobles,' irrespective of ethnic background, while Polish identity was not ascribed to Polish commoners, Yakovenko is careful not to throw her support behind the belief, popular in present-day Pol­ish historiography and often accepted in the West, in the existence of one Polish civic nation that allegedly crossed ethnocultural boundaries and amalgamated the Polish, Lithuanian, and Ruthenian (Ukrainian- Belarusian) nobility.⁸ For Yakovenko, however close the Ukrainian nobility was or could have been in political culture and practices to the Polish nobility, it remained Ukrainian (not even Ruthenian), and as such constitutes the subject of her research. In general, Yakovenko dem­onstrates exemplary knowledge of the Polish historiography of the sub­ject. It is here that she feels historiographically at home, and it is Polish historiography that often serves as her window on the West. It is also from Polish historical works that she borrows some of the ideas and approaches that irritate her critics in Ukraine.⁹ Her work shows how much Ukrainian historians could benefit from working together with, not in opposition to, their colleagues in Ukraine's 'near West.' As for Western scholarship, Yakovenko's research demonstrates how much more productive and accurate results can be obtained by comparing Ukrainian political and cultural realities with those of early modern Poland and Lithuania rather than with Western Europe of the period.

It would be hard to find a better example of interaction between Pol­ish and Ukrainian historical and political ideas in early modern times than the panegyrics devoted to Ukrainian princely families and analy­sed in Yakovenko's essay 'The Topos of "United Peoples" in Panegy­rics to the Princes Ostrozky and Zaslavsky (At the Sources of Ukrainian Identity).' The closely related princely families of the Ostrozkys and Zaslavskys (the latter took over the possessions of the former once the Ostrozkys' male line died out) began their 'public career' in the mid-sixteenth century as pillars of Orthodoxy but con­verted to Roman Catholicism in the course of the seventeenth century. As Yakovenko shows, conversion did not change their role as protec­tors of the interests and privileges, including religious rights, of the Ukrainian Orthodox nobility. Nor did it change the princes' image of themselves as heirs of the Rurikid dynasty of Kyivan Rus' and as lead­ers of the Rus' community in general. How do we know that? Partly on the basis of ideas presented in panegyrics written in honour of the Ostrozkys and Zaslavskys in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Of all the panegyrics analysed by Yakovenko, only six were written by Ruthenian authors, while thirty-nine were the work of Poles, most of whom were clients or servants of the princely families. By tracing the genealogy of the Ruthenian princes back to legendary times, those authors also tried to associate their family stories with Pol­ish founding myths. On the other hand, it was the same non-Orthodox and non-Ruthenian authors who tried to please their masters by articu­lating the latter's Rus' identity in writing. These same Polish panegy­rists created for their patrons the virtual space of Rus' - a territory rooted in the historical tradition of the thirteenth-century Galician- Volhynian state of Danylo of Halych and encompassing the Ukrainian lands annexed to the Kingdom of Poland.

It is in these writings of the Polish-educated and non-Orthodox pan­egyrists of culturally Polonized Rus' princes that Yakovenko finds the early modern origins of Ukrainian identity. Despite the somewhat par­adoxical nature of her argument, it makes a good deal of sense. No social group in Ukraine came closer than the princes to imagining their homeland within boundaries approximating the ethnic Ukrainian ter­ritories of the time. The Orthodox literati, by contrast, were promoting the concept of the unity of the Ukrainian-Belarusian Orthodox popula­tion throughout the Commonwealth (including the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), while in the 1640s the nobility, if one judges by the state­ments of its leader, Adam Kysil, was insisting on the commonality of four eastern palatinates of the Kingdom of Poland, with the notable exception of Galicia.¹⁰ The princes, on the other hand, could not imag­ine their Rus' without Galicia, for the medieval state of Danylo of Halych was the only link they could establish between themselves and the Rurikid glory of Kyivan times.

A historian operating within the parameters of the traditional Ukrai­nian narrative could hardly imagine these Polonized princes, to say nothing of their Polish panegyrists, as early promoters of proto­Ukrainian identity. Yakovenko tackles another important mythologem of that narrative head-on in her essay ‘Religious Conversions: An Attempt at a View from Within.' There she deals with the conversion of the Ukrainian elites to Roman Catholicism, which was treated in tradi­tional Ukrainian historiography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a betrayal of the masses by the elites. In this view, religious conversion was equated with the abandonment of Ruthenian identity. Yakovenko's main targets here are Mykola Kostomarov and Mykhailo Hrushevsky. (The latter did indeed write about the 'betrayal of the elites,' but, contrary to Yakovenko's suggestion, never believed in the nobility's 'almost complete abandonment of Orthodoxy as early as on the eve of the Khmelnytsky Uprising' [13].) Yakovenko pledges to avoid such 'reflexive history,' claiming that there were no mass conversions of Ukrainian nobles to Catholicism. Most of her essay is concerned, never­theless, not with the nobility in general but with conversions and inter­marriages among its upper ranks - the Rus' princes and magnates. And here Yakovenko proves (significantly extending our knowledge of the subject in the process) that an absolute majority of the traditional leaders of Rus' was indeed abandoning the traditional religion of Rus'. Certainly that did not mean the automatic loss of Rus' identity, but it shows that Kostomarov was at least partly right in his interpretation. Where he went wrong was in generalizing his view to encompass the nobility as a whole. As has been shown by Henryk Litwin's research, which Yakovenko substantiates with her own calculations of the rate of intermarriage between Orthodox and non-Orthodox nobles, an abso­lute majority of the Ruthenian nobility (up to 90 per cent) remained faithful to Eastern Christianity.¹¹

Not trusting (and for good reason) the claims of the competing reli­gious parties regarding the numbers of actual conversions, Yakovenko also seems to reject those cases when the conversions in question involved a transfer from one Rus' church, the Orthodox, to another - the Uniate, created at the Council of Brest (1596) by the subordination of part of the Orthodox Metropolitanate of Kyiv to Rome. This approach cannot be accepted without further discussion. For Yakovenko, who seemingly regards the Orthodox and Uniate churches as two branches of one confession, divided by mere jurisdictional boundaries, these were not real conversions. Nevertheless, they were treated as such by Ruthe- nian contemporaries on both sides of the religious divide. The confes­sional border in Ukraine split the communities of the formerly united Metropolitanate of Kyiv, with the Uniates ending up on the Catholic side. The Uniate hierarchy accepted the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church and, in an era of advancing confessionalization, ceased to be Orthodox in the eyes of the guardians of both the Catholic and the Orthodox religious traditions. That development was reflected in state­ments of Jesuit proselytizers and Orthodox intellectuals alike.

Where Yakovenko seems perfectly right, however - and this would appear to be her main contribution to the study of early modern Ukrai­nian religiosity - is in claiming that the Rus' princes were highly tolerant in religious affairs, if not actually indifferent to the confessional quar­rels going on around them. They readily married outside their religion, allowed their wives and children to belong to different churches, and tolerated monks of different traditions at their courts. Although it would be hard to treat that phenomenon as 'ritual belief' (for the princes easily abandoned their own rite), the picture that Yakovenko presents with unprecedented clarity exposes the superficial nature of the religiosity of the Rus' princely elites, whose economic and political interests encouraged them to be flexible on the issue. This is especially true for the second half of the sixteenth century, when confessional borders were not clearly demarcated or guarded and the catechization of nominal Christians had yet to occur. The situation clearly changed with the advance of confessionalization in the first half of the seven­teenth century. The extent of change is well illustrated by the data on interconfessional marriages among the Rus' princes and nobility, care­fully assembled by Yakovenko. It appears that among the princes, mar­riages outside their confession diminished from approximately 50 per cent in the period 1540-1615 to 29 per cent in the years 1616-50. One explanation of that phenomenon could be the established fact that by 1616 most of the princely families had already abandoned Orthodoxy and proceeded to marry within their new confession (predominantly Roman Catholicism). But the same phenomenon can also be explained in other ways. Between the 1620s and the 1640s, the conflict over the church union among the Rus' elites clearly defined the boundaries between the two confessions in Rus' society and forced the elites to make a choice. At the same time, the confessionalization of religious life in the Commonwealth reached new heights, making interconfes­sional marriages and families an exception to the general rule. These developments should also be held responsible for the decline in the number of interconfessional marriages not only among the princes but also among the Ruthenian nobility in general. According to Yak­ovenko's calculations, they declined from 16 per cent in the years 1581-1615 to 12 per cent between 1616 and 1650 (36).

Do these low figures, as well as the virtual absence of Ruthenian nobiliary marriages outside the Orthodox Church prior to 1581, indi­cate that the nobility at large was religiously and culturally more tradi­tional than the princes? Apparently they do, even allowing for the possibility that marriages between Orthodox and Uniates (whom Yak­ovenko treats as parts of the same 'Orthodox rite' [p. 38]) did not make it into her statistics. But were the nobles more religious in general and less 'superficial' in their faith than the princes? Yakovenko shows quite convincingly that they were not. She also argues that the Ukrainian nobility's religiosity was not so different from that of their Polish and Lithuanian counterparts. Although the Ukrainian nobles were much less integrated into Commonwealth society and culture than the princes and the magnates, Yakovenko demonstrates that they all shared a common knightly ethos, which she calls 'the soldier 's faith' (zhovnirs'ka vira).

What was that 'faith'? Yakovenko offers a reply to this and a number of other war-related questions in her pioneering essay 'How Many Faces Has War? The Khmelnytsky Uprising through the Eyes of Con­temporaries.' She draws the reader's attention to episodes usually overlooked by historians who write Ukrainian or Polish national his­tory. These include examples of Commonwealth troops looting Roman Catholic churches and monasteries, as well as Khmelnytsky's army going after the possessions of Orthodox churches and Ruthenian burghers. Indeed, the cases discussed by Yakovenko complicate or seriously undermine the traditional narratives of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. She rightly argues that in the seventeenth century church property was considered legitimate war booty regardless of the denomination to which it belonged, and that professional soldiers on all sides of the conflict shared that 'knightly' attitude towards it. All of them, whether Polish soldiers or Ukrainian Cossacks, took part in the same 'functionally specialized subculture.' This is a highly valid obser­vation, and Yakovenko should be complimented on applying it to the study of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. But can we go on to assert, as she does, that 'professional self-identification prevailed over ethnic or con­fessional identity' of the combatants (208)?

This statement raises a number of important questions about the hierarchy of identities in early modern Ukraine. Joint banquets orga­nized after or between battles by soldiers fighting on opposite sides and their occasional fraternization with the enemy, instances of which Yakovenko cites in her essay, are of course not limited to early modern times. It can also be said that throughout history, professional solidar­ity among warriors has rarely overridden their political, national, and institutional loyalties, to say nothing of cultural ones. Otherwise, why would they fight one another in armies divided along ethno-religious lines, as was often the case in the Khmelnytsky Uprising? If indeed the 'soldier's faith' prevailed over 'ethnic or confessional identity,' then why were there no Roman Catholic or Protestant colonels and officers among the rebel elite? Why did StanisLaw MichaL Krzyczewski have to change his name to Mykhailo Krychevsky and convert from Roman Catholicism to Orthodoxy in order to become a colonel in Khmel­nytsky's army? Why did Jews have to accept Orthodoxy to avoid being slaughtered by the rebels? Yakovenko recognizes that the religious purification of the land or, in other words, the creation of a monocon­fessional Orthodox polity was one of the goals of the Ukrainian side in the uprising. Nevertheless, she seems to ascribe that program to the leadership of the uprising, the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, and the peasant masses, which, in her opinion, were more susceptible to religious propaganda than were the Cossacks. The 'old' pre-1648 Cos­sacks, for their part, allegedly subscribed to the denominationally indifferent 'soldiers' subculture. What this interpretation does not take into account is that the leaders of the uprising were recruited from the same Cossack stratum; the pillaging of Orthodox churches and monas­teries was more often the work of peasant rebels than of the 'old' Cossacks; and that the Cossacks showed their readiness to use reli­gious slogans in politics as early as the 1620s.¹² But Yakovenko is cer­tainly right to argue that the professional soldiers (including nobles and Cossacks) were far removed from the image of fighters for religion and nationality presented in traditional historical accounts of the Khmelnytsky Uprising.

Yakovenko's reinterpretation of the sources opens new vistas in the study of the largest Cossack uprising in Ukrainian history. Hers is probably the first attempt by a Ukrainian historian to discuss the human costs of the war. This approach challenges many of the tradi­tional Ukrainian interpretations of the uprising as a struggle for national and social liberation, as well as Polish attempts to depict the war as the heroic epic of their forefathers. It also undermines the inter­pretation of the uprising as a struggle for the preservation of the Orthodox faith or for the reunification of Ukraine with Russia - para­digms characteristic of imperial Russian and Soviet historiography. Furthermore, Yakovenko's research shows how careful one should be in taking contemporary narratives of the revolt at face value. Telling in that regard is her discussion of an episode in Wawrzyniec Rudawski's seventeenth-century chronicle account of the uprising. As Yakovenko demonstrates, Rudawski's comments on the Polish hero and Ukrainian villain, Prince Jeremi Wisniowiecki (Yarema Vyshnevetsky, the scion of a Ruthenian princely family who converted from Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism), were based not on the chronicler's acquaintance with contemporary sources but on his reading of Roman authors. The phrase attributed by Rudawski to Wisniowiecki, who allegedly encouraged his soldiers to torture the captured rebels with the injunc­tion 'Torment them so that they feel they are dying,' was in fact based on words attributed to Emperor Caligula by Suetonius. Rudawski's description of the attack of the rebel army led by Maksym Kryvonis on the town of Polonne, with its considerable Jewish population, was based on Tacitus's description of the fall of Cremona. Polish historians clearly followed ancient models in their descriptions of the war, as did Jewish writers, who modelled their stories on instances of martyrdom for the faith borrowed from the rich Jewish tradition - a practice recently documented by Edward Fram.¹³ In their turn, the Orthodox authors of the period (including Paul of Aleppo and the author of the Eyewitness Chronicle) stressed the religious motives of the Cossacks in their struggle with the non-Orthodox.¹⁴

The reality on the ground was considerably more complex than the picture presented by confessionally minded authors on all sides of the conflict. A telling indication of this is the archival data cited by Yak­ovenko about the losses inflicted on the Volhynian town of Kyselyn by a joint rebel and Tatar attack in the autumn of 1648. As Yakovenko notes, of thirty-five Christian dwellings in Kyselyn, only fifteen sur­vived; out of thirty-seven Jewish dwellings, twenty survived. The rest were burned. What lies behind these figures and this strange selection of victims, which challenges every traditional narrative of the Khmel­nytsky Uprising? Was it the religious indifference of the rebels, as Yak­ovenko claims, the unpredictable Tatar factor, or the direction of the wind on a given day? We do not know, but the tragedy of Kyselyn obliges us to pose new questions, seek new answers, and challenge existing interpretations of the war. Indeed, it is Yakovenko's analysis of the sources, pioneering and provocative in many ways, that has placed these questions on the agenda of historians of early modern Ukraine.

Not all the essays collected in Natalia Yakovenko's latest book have been considered here, and even those discussed in some detail contain important points omitted in my survey, partly for reasons of space. But the incomplete and fragmented character of the 'parallel world' of early modern Ukraine, skilfully reconstructed by Yakovenko, also could not but influence the nature of this review. One cannot help thinking how fortunate it was that Yakovenko wrote a 'systematic' survey of Ukrai­nian medieval and early modern history before she decided that many of the topics and phenomena discussed there precluded such an enter­prise by their very nature, to say nothing of the incompleteness of the sources. Yakovenko is rightly sceptical of the prospect that her book might win over opponents in the ranks of the Ukrainian historio­graphic establishment or persuade them to eradicate the 'virus of con­temporaneity.' Her hopes lie with the younger generation of Ukrainian scholars, whom she encourages to study the 'second reality' or 'paral­lel world' of human views and ideas. Here, the prospects are clearly more favourable.

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