Muscovy and the Agreement of Pereiaslav

Khmel'nyts'kyi’s efforts to create an international coalition of the Cossacks, the Ottoman Empire, and its vassal states directed against Poland had failed. The ongo­ing military conflict with Poland moreover, had reached a stalemate.

Muscovy was only one, and initially not the most important, of the several northern Rus' lands which followed a separate historical development after the transformation of Kievan Rus' in the thirteenth century. At that time, Muscovy was a principality within the Grand Duchy of Vladimir-Suzdal', which, alongside Novgorod, was the most powerful center in northern Rus'. From their capital city, Vladimir-na-Kliazma, the rulers of Vladimir-Suzdal' claimed they were the succes­sors of the grand princes of Kievan Rus'. It was also to Vladimir-na-Kliazma that the head of the Orthodox Rus' church, the metropolitan of Kiev, went after the Mongol invasion, and eventually, in 1299, he transferred his residence there. But any possibility of the northern Rus' lands’ being united under the leadership of Vladimir-na-Kliazma or any other city was thwarted by the Mongols of the Golden Horde. The Mongols’ military strength enabled them to enforce a policy whereby the northern Rus' principalities, whose rulers were their vassals, remained inde­pendent of one another and dependent solely on the khans in their capital at Sarai, on the lower Volga.

The rise of Muscovy

It was precisely during the period of greatest Mongol political influence in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the various principalities within the Grand Duchy of Vladimir-Suzdal' (Rostov, Suzdal', Tver', and others) increas­ingly asserted their independence. Among them was Muscovy, which also proved the most deferential to Mongol rule. As a result, Muscovy was granted certain favors by the Golden Horde. In the fifteenth century, by which time the Golden Horde had itself broken up into three khanates (the Crimean, the Astrakhan', and the Kazan'), the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, led by a series of talented and able rulers, took the opportunity to begin uniting the northern Rus' lands. This proc­ess was largely completed during the reign of Grand Duke Ivan III (reigned 1462­1505) at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is important to note that Ivan III considered as part of his goal to gather together not only the northern, or Rus­sian, territories of former Kievan Rus', but the Belarusan and Ukrainian territo­ries as well. Muscovy, however, was not yet completely independent of the Kazan' and Astrakhan' Tatar khanates along its eastern and southeastern borders, which claimed the annual tribute formerly paid to the Golden Horde. Nor was Muscovy a match for the powerful Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which firmly controlled the Rus' (Belarusan and Ukrainian) lands in the west and south.

The Grand Duchy of Muscovy consequently had for the moment to be content with control only over the northern Rus' lands. But ideologists around Ivan III seemed to be preparing for the future. They emphasized Muscovy’s supposed right to the so-called Kievan inheritance, implicit in Muscovy’s considering itself a ‘Second Kiev’ - the political and cultural successor to Kievan Rus'. Also of sym­bolic importance was the marriage of Ivan III, a descendant of the Riuryk dynasty, to a Byzantine princess, which linked Muscovy (as similar marriages had linked Kievan Rus' centuries before) with the imperial heritage of Byzantium.

Thus, by the beginning of the sixteenth century, Muscovy had all the ideologi­cal symbols necessary for implementing its claim to be the political successor of Kievan Rus', the inheritor of the Orthodox mantle from Byzantium (which had fallen in 1453), and therefore the rightful ruler of all the East Slavs who inhabited the Rus' patrimony - Russians, Belarusans, and Ukrainians.

But much still had to be accomplished in the realm of politics. In large meas­ure, it was accomplished during the second half of the sixteenth century under the Muscovite ruler Ivan IV (reigned 1547-1584), known in history by the epithet ‘the Terrible,’ or, more precisely, ‘the Dread.’ Ivan IV was the first Muscovite ruler to be crowned as tsar, or absolute ruler in the tradition of Rome’s caesars. His realm was thereby transformed into the tsardom of Muscovy, with a nominal claim to universal rule. Under Ivan IV, the domination of the Tatars was finally broken as both the Kazan' and the Astrakhan' khanates were destroyed.

Such foreign military campaigns were extremely costly to Muscovy, and at the time of Ivan IV’s death in 1584 the tsardom was in a shambles. The limited success of Ivan’s foreign ventures was matched by the disastrous results of his domestic policies. These policies were directed at weakening the power of the boyars, the wealthy magnates who had ruled Muscovy during his youth. Despite Ivan’s brutal methods, the boyars were not entirely eliminated as a political force. When the tsar died in 1584, he left no suitable successor. This was because he had murdered his eldest son with his own hands in a characteristic fit of rage in 1581; his succes­sor Dmitrii died under mysterious circumstances in 1591; and his only other legit­imate heir, Fedor, was mentally retarded. Consequently, the tsardom of Muscovy entered a period of boyar rule that was to last almost three decades. Marked by widespread civil war, famine, and foreign invasion, this period came to be known as the Smutnoe Vremia, or Time of Troubles. The very existence of the Muscovite state seemed to hang in the balance.

Muscovy, Poland, and Ukraine

It was during Muscovy’s Time of Troubles that Poland, strengthened after its uni­fication with Lithuania in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569, came to play a dominant role in Muscovite politics.

In 1613, Muscovy’s Time of Troubles came to an end with the election of a new tsar, Mikhail Romanov (reigned 1613-1645). He became the founder of a new dynasty, the Romanovs, who were to rule Muscovy and later the Russian Empire until 1917. Tsar Mikhail and his successor, Aleksei (reigned 1645-1676), succeeded in restoring order within the Muscovite tsardom. It was also during their long reigns that the basis of the modern Russian state evolved. That state was marked by one overriding characteristic - centralized authority. By the last years of Mikhail’s reign in the 1640s, the power of the aristocratic boyars (as expressed in their coun­cil, the Zemskii sobor) had diminished, and a bureaucratic structure had been set up throughout Muscovite territory to act as a conduit for all authority, which rested in the person of the tsar. Special chancelleries were established in Moscow to admin­ister towns and rural areas. It was through these chancelleries that the central government issued decrees (gramoty) instructing the residents of each town and rural district how to run their administrations. Soon nothing could be done in the tsardom without instructions from the chancelleries in Moscow. Complementing this administrative structure was a social structure that became highly stratified as well. Each individual from the tsar down to the peasant had a given place in society, and the primary function of each was service to the state.

Accordingly, by the mid-seventeenth century the two states which had come to control most of eastern Europe - Poland and Muscovy - had completely different political structures. Whereas in Poland the authority of the elected king was cir­cumscribed by the Polish nobility (magnates and gentry) through the central Diet (Sejm) and local dietines (sejmiki), and whereas in the countryside the resident magnates and gentry ran their properties as autonomous entities with almost no interference from a central government, in Muscovy the boyars (magnates) had lost their political prerogatives to a hereditary tsar who ruled the country through an increasingly complex bureaucratic system in which, correspondingly, it became more and more difficult to act without the approval of the central government.

In one respect, Poland and Muscovy were similar. Both came to establish socio­economic and judicial systems that transformed their respective peasant popu­lations into serfs. In Muscovy, that process began in the late fifteenth century and was complete by the mid-seventeenth century. In 1649, a new law code (the Ulozhenie) outlined fully all aspects of the service state, in which the primary function of each individual was service to the state. The code, which remained the basis of Russian law until as late as 1833, legalized serfdom and bound the peasants to the land. Land was often awarded to the Orthodox church or to indi­viduals within the military or civil service, and the serfs attached to land that became their property were forbidden to leave it.

It was during the Time of Troubles (1584-1613) that Ukrainians increased their contacts with Muscovy. Registered Cossacks who served in the Polish army participated in Poland’s numerous invasions of Muscovite territory, which thus became a source of booty. Before long, however, Muscovy became for Ukrainians not simply a place to raid, but a source of aid. This was particularly the case with regard to religious affairs.

As a result of the Union of Brest in 1595, the Orthodox church was outlawed in Poland-Lithuania. Although the church managed to survive in that country’s Ukrainian- and Belarusan-inhabited lands, thanks to the dedication of a few Rus' magnates, the brotherhood movement, the monasteries, and the political pres­sure of the Cossacks, its situation remained precarious. This continued to be true even after 1632, when the Orthodox hierarchy was finally permitted to function legally once again. Consequently, during the decades following the Union of Brest the beleaguered Orthodox church in Poland sought help from other Ortho­dox states, in particular Muscovy.

By the 1620s, Ukrainian monasteries were making frequent requests to the Orthodox tsar in Moscow for money to build churches or to purchase vestments. Then, beginning in 1623 ^and each year thereafter Ukrainian monks arrived in Putivl', Okhtyrka, and other towns along the Polish-Muscovite border begging the tsar to allow them to come to Muscovy in order to practice ‘the Christian [Ortho­dox] faith, which the Poles want to suppress.’¹ At the same time, Orthodox hier­archs like Metropolitan lov Borets'kyi of Kiev and Bishop Isaia Kopyns'kyi of Przemysl, both secretly consecrated in 1620 but not recognized by the Polish gov­ernment, sent messages or traveled personally to Muscovy, asking the tsar to take their land and its inhabitants under his ‘mighty hand.’ Even after the Orthodox church hierarchy of Poland-Lithuania was legalized in 1632, traditionalist hier­archs continued to express pro-Muscovite attitudes, especially as they were in opposition to the pro-Polish and Latin-oriented policies of the new Orthodox metropolitan of Kiev, Petro Mohyla.

Finally, large numbers of peasants and discontented Cossacks sought refuge by fleeing to Muscovy. Even before the outbreak of the revolution, in the decade between 1638 and 1648, as many as 20,000 people emigrated from the Left Bank to Sloboda Ukraine, the free-settlement frontier just north of what is today Kharkiv and the Russian-Ukrainian border. The migrants went east for several rea­sons. They were fleeing the spread of Poland’s expanding manorial system, or they were refugees from the Cossack uprisings, the most recent being the unsuc­cessful ones in 1637 and 1638. Also, in general they hoped to find greater psycho­logical and physical security under tsarist rule.

Precisely what kind of psychological and physical security? First, the Orthodox Ukrainians and Belarusans of Poland-Lithuania would no longer be discrim­inated against or persecuted for their religion under tsarist rule. Second, Mus­covy offered greater protection against Tatar raids, which, despite the existence of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, still took their annual toll of the Ukrainian popula­tion. The Polish response to the Tatar threat was to build fortified centers near the edge of the steppe zone, staffed, usually, with registered Cossacks. The Tatars naturally could and did ride around these centers. In contrast, the Muscovites, beginning in the late sixteenth century, built a series of solid walls (zasechnaia cherta) consisting of felled trees and palisades of sharply pointed logs inter­spersed with fortified cities. These lines were built progressively farther south until a major defense system known as the Belgorod Line had been constructed, between 1635 and 1651. The Belgorod Line ran for more than 480 miles (770 kilometers) from Okhtyrka, near the Polish border, straight across Sloboda Ukraine through Belgorod and on to Voronezh, father northeast (see maps 16 and 20). Along this line twenty cities were founded between 1637 and 1647, half of them in Sloboda Ukraine. An extension of the Belgorod Line was built farther south toward the Donets' River. Behind these lines emigrants from Ukraine sought refuge. Thus, Orthodox inclinations and migrational patterns revealed that a pro-Muscovite attitude among Ukrainians had existed long before Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi ever came on the scene.

Khmel’nyts'kyi and Pereiaslav

Khmel'nyts'kyi himself had become part of this pro-Muscovite trend. Despite his victories in May 1648 over the Polish armies at Zhovti Vody and Korsun', the Cos­sack hetman remained concerned that the conflict with Poland was not yet over. Hence, between June 1648 and May 1649 he addressed seven letters to Muscovy asking for military assistance, offering Cossack services to the tsar, and expressing the hope that at the very least the Muscovite army would not attack his Tatar allies. At that very moment, however, the tsar was incapable of action, since Mos­cow itself was facing a serious revolt that was to last through the summer and early fall of 1648. Moreover, the nineteen-year-old, still politically weak Tsar Aleksei was reluctant to antagonize Poland, which he would certainly do if a Muscovite- Zaporozhian alliance were concluded.

While it is true that at the beginning of the seventeenth century Muscovy had succeeded in reestablishing internal order after the Time of Troubles, in foreign affairs the tsardom remained on the defensive, especially vis-à-vis Polish military might. For instance, as late as 1634, Polish kings still laid claim to the Muscovite throne, and after military campaigns in 1618 and again in 1633-1634 Muscovy was forced to give up to its western rival territories around Smolensk and Severia (including Starodub and Chernihiv). Faced with continual Crimean Tatar raids from the south and a potential Swedish invasion of Livonia, along the Baltic Sea, Muscovy did not feel it could afford to alienate Poland. Thus, Tsar Aleksei’s refusal of Khmel'nyts'kyi’s requests in 1648-1649 was understandable.

Khmel'nyts'kyi’s victories during the next two years, however, revealed that Poland’s armies were not invincible after all. Consequently, when the Cossack leader, having exhausted his Balkan and Ottoman foreign policy ventures, turned to Tsar Aleksei on numerous occasions between 1652 and 1653, much had changed. The Russian Orthodox church, led by its new and enterprising patriarch Nikon (reigned 1652-1681), was anxious to reform itself by using the intellectual talents of Rus' churchmen trained in Mohyla’s Collegium at Kiev. Nikon, who was the tsar’s closest adviser on Ukrainian matters, urged the Muscovite government to support the Cossacks’ requests. It is not surprising, therefore, that it was the Russian Orthodox patriarch who was serving as the mediator when in April 1653 Khmel'nyts'kyi’s envoys asked the tsar to extend his protection over the Cossacks. Finally, in June of that year, Tsar Aleksei agreed to accept the Zaporozhian het­man and his Cossacks ‘under the tsarist majesty’s high arm.’

As a result of this decision, Muscovite ambassadors were dispatched in late December 1653 to meet with Khmel'nyts'kyi. The meeting place chosen was the town of Pereiaslav, along the Dnieper River, halfway between Kiev and the het­man’s capital of Chyhyryn. According to Muscovite sources, on the day of the ambassador’s arrival the local archpriest led a multitude of Pereiaslav’s citizens to greet the Muscovite envoys and to ‘thank God for having fulfilled the desire of our Orthodox people to bring together Little and Great Rus' under the mighty hand of the all-powerful and pious eastern tsar.’²

The negotiations at Pereiaslav lasted for several days during the month of Janu­ary 1654. Disagreements arose because the Cossacks expected that the tsar would swear an oath to them, as was the practice for Polish kings. Moreover, the Ortho­dox metropolitan of Kiev, Syl'vestr Kosiv (reigned 1647-1657), was opposed to negotiations that he feared would lead to the subordination of his jurisdiction to the patriarch of Muscovy. In the end, Khmel'nyts'kyi and the Cossacks did swear an oath of allegiance to the tsar, after which the Muscovite envoys were sent to sev­eral other Ukrainian cities to administer the oath.

The 1654 agreement of Pereiaslav, which resulted in the union of the Cossack- controlled territory of Ukraine with Muscovy, actually consisted of three elements: (1) the oath sworn by the Cossacks and the people of Pereiaslav and other Ukrain­ian cities in January 1654; (2) Khmel'nyts'kyi’s twenty-three ‘Articles of Petition,’ brought to Moscow by his delegates in March 1654; and (3) the tsar’s response in the form of eleven articles issued later that same month. In addition, several char­ters were issued between March and August 1654. These various charters included agreement as to certain basic principles. The Cossacks and the Ukrainian people as a whole swore allegiance to the tsar. The Zaporozhian army was granted confir­mation of its rights and liberties, including the independence of Cossack courts and the inviolability of Cossack landed estates. The Zaporozhian army was to elect hetmans, who must swear allegiance to the tsars. Chyhyryn was to remain the het­man’s capital, from which relations with foreign countries (with the exception of Poland and the Ottoman Empire) could be conducted. The number of registered Cossacks was fixed at 60,000, all of whom were to receive wages from that part of the revenue from Ukraine to which the tsar was entitled. The tsar would provide the Cossacks with military supplies. The traditional rights of the Ukrainian nobility were confirmed. Urban dwellers could elect their own municipal govern­ments. Finally, the Orthodox metropolitan and other clergy throughout Poland- Lithuania were to be ‘under the blessing’ of the patriarch in Moscow, who promised not to interfere in ecclesiastical matters.

When the negotiations between the Cossack envoys and the Muscovite govern­ment were finally completed in August 1654, the tsar’s title was changed from Tsar of All Rus' (vseia Rusii) to Tsar of All Great and Little Rus' (vseia Velikiia i Malyia Rusii). Thus, without having made any special effort, Tsar Aleksei had taken a sig­nificant further step toward Muscovy’s goal, set out in the late fifteenth century by Grand Duke Ivan III, to unite under one Orthodox ruler all the lands formerly within the sphere of medieval Kievan Rus'.

The agreement of Pereiaslav subsequently proved an important turning point