Renegotiating the Pereiaslav Agreement

On 8 January 1654, a Cossack council assembled by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky in the town of Pereiaslav approved his proposal to sub­mit the Cossack polity to the authority of the Muscovite tsar.

There can be little doubt that the Pereiaslav legend influenced the development of Ukrainian political thought and historiography; it also promoted the integration of the Cossack elites into imperial Russian society with no loss of rights and privileges.

In fact, the first appeal for Ukrainian independence in the modern era used the 'Pereiaslav Constitution' as a point of reference in its attempt to establish grounds for Ukraine's separation from Russia. The essay in question, 'Independent Ukraine' (1900), was written by the Ukrainian lawyer and political activist Mykola Mikhnovsky, who argued that the 'Pereiaslav Articles' had established the union of Rus­sia and Ukraine as two equal states. Mikhnovsky admitted that Ukraine (the Ukrainian republic, as he termed it) had not been fully independent at the time, as it paid tribute to the tsar, but insisted that it was nevertheless a state under international law. He went on to claim that at Pereiaslav Ukraine had been looking for protection, not submis­sion, and had joined the Muscovite monarchy without relinquishing any of its prerogatives either as a state or as a republic. The 'Pereiaslav Constitution,' which, according to Mikhnovsky, could not be changed without the agreement of both parties, had been violated by Muscovite infringements on the rights of Ukraine. Consequently, Ukraine was free of its obligations under the 'Pereiaslav Constitution.' Moreover, its agreement had been made with the Muscovite tsar, not the Russian emperor, allowing Mikhnovsky to claim that Ukraine could now become free and independent.³

Mikhnovsky's essay is a good example of the political use of the Pere- iaslav legend by the rising Ukrainian national movement at the turn of the twentieth century.

This chapter deals with the development of Hrushevsky's views on the history of the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654 - views that shaped the Ukrainian outlook on Russo-Ukrainian relations of the early modern era and that Soviet historians considered a major threat to their con­cept of the 'friendship of peoples' in the USSR. The article 'Reunifica­tion of Ukraine and Russia' in the Soviet-era encyclopedia of Ukrainian history noted that 'Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist historians, espe­cially M.S. Hrushevsky, sought in all possible ways to depreciate the great historical act of reunification of Ukraine with Russia; to deny its significance in the history of the two fraternal peoples.'⁴ What were Hrushevsky's views on the Pereiaslav Agreement, and why were they so dangerous to generations of Soviet historians?

Hrushevsky's Critique of the Pereiaslav Decisions

Hrushevsky's first essay on the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Pere- iaslav Agreement appeared in 1898, two years before the publication of Mikhnovsky's brochure, on which it apparently had no impact.⁵ The young Hrushevsky treated the Russo-Ukrainian agreement of 1654 as an outcome of the confluence of Muscovite and Ukrainian interests at a particular moment.

Hrushevsky emerges in his essay of 1898 as a principled critic of Khmelnytsky's policies at Pereiaslav, accusing the hetman of advocat­ing the interests of the Cossack stratum alone and neglecting the needs of the popular masses. Thus, reasoned Hrushevsky, in 1654 Moscow recognized the autonomy of the Cossack estate but not that of the whole nation.

Volodymyr Antonovych was Hrushevsky's professor at Kyiv Uni­versity and the historian who had the greatest influence on him. In 1896, two years before the publication of Hrushevsky's essay on the Khmelnytsky Uprising, Antonovych's students issued a collection of his lectures on the history of Cossack Ukraine. Some of Antonovych's ideas directly influenced Hrushevsky's interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement. Not unlike Drahomanov before him and Hrushevsky after him, Antonovych believed that the Pereiaslav Articles demonstrated the limitations of the social agenda pursued by Khmelnytsky and his entourage. He maintained that Pereiaslav was the result of one of many foreign policy combinations undertaken by Khmelnytsky. He also believed that the Cossacks failed to obtain autonomy for Ukraine, as they paid little attention to the formal side of the agreement - some­thing not overlooked by the experienced Muscovite diplomats.⁹ These views of Antonovych's found their way into Hrushevsky's essay on the Khmelnytsky Uprising.

Hrushevsky adopted a more balanced approach to Khmelnytsky and his Pereiaslav legacy in works written during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the Illustrated History of Ukraine, a popular sur­vey published on the eve of the First World War, Hrushevsky explained Khmelnytsky's decision to enter into the agreement with Muscovy by the difficult military situation in which Ukraine found itself at the time. He offered no criticism of the hetman or his entourage for the mistakes that they allegedly committed at Pereiaslav: instead, he wrote that they expected assistance from Moscow in their struggle against Poland. They counted on the preservation of their freedoms under Muscovite rule and were disappointed by the tsar's aspirations to establish control over Ukraine.¹⁰ Hrushevsky was also supportive of Khmelnytsky's actions at Pereiaslav in his best-selling brochure, The Pereiaslav Agree­ment, which was reprinted several times during the Ukrainian Revolu­tion of 1917. Hrushevsky's earlier critique of social egoism on the part of Khmelnytsky and the Cossack elites gave way to a portrayal of the hetman as an advocate of the all-Ukrainian cause. Both the Illustrated History of Ukraine, which was first published in 1912, and the brochure of 1917 on the Pereiaslav Agreement were written with an eye to edu­cating the Ukrainian public and mobilizing it in support of the major Ukrainian political causes - first autonomy and then independence. But the popular character of those publications was not the only reason for Hrushevsky's gentler treatment of Khmelnytsky and the Cossack offic­ers. By the time of the 1917 revolution, Hrushevsky the political activist had completed his evolution from devoted populist to proponent of the unity of the Ukrainian nation. That metamorphosis could not help but influence his historical writings.¹¹

Nevertheless, Hrushevsky's old criticism of Khmelnytsky, first man­ifested in his essay of 1898, reemerged in his postrevolutionary writ­ings, especially in the new volumes of his History. The revolution radicalized Hrushevsky, who became not only a staunch supporter of Ukrainian statehood but also a committed socialist. Moreover, the attempts of some conservative historians like Viacheslav Lypynsky to represent Khmelnytsky as a forerunner of Ukrainian monarchism inspired Hrushevsky to renew his critique of the hetman and his poli­cies at Pereiaslav. Thus, in volume 9 of his History of Ukraine-Rus', which was issued in two books in the years 1929-31, Hrushevsky revived and further developed some of the negative observations on Cossack policy at Pereiaslav that he had first made thirty years earlier. 'The Cossack officers,' he wrote, 'had made irreparable errors, having failed to counter Muscovite aspirations with an explicit constitutional formula of mutual relations. Having failed to realize the complete dis­similarity of the new relations to their old pre-revolutionary status within the Polish Commonwealth, occasionally they regressed from the new state pinnacles to the old precedents of their agreements with the king and the senators. While relations between the vassals of the Otto­man Porte and the sultan served as their lodestar, and the Cossack offic­ers wished to establish relations between the "Zaporozhian Host" as a state and the new protector, the Muscovite tsar, on that model, in prac­tice they occasionally strayed into the old administrative scheme of the Commonwealth, in which the Zaporozhian Host was only one of the social strata, and not the primary or the ruling one. They lost their way in establishing relations not only with Muscovite tsardom but also with other social strata of their own Cossack Ukraine. From this standpoint, the procedure of establishing direct relations between the tsarist govern­ment and the estate (class) institutions of Ukraine had great significance for the future.'¹²

Was There an Agreement?

'The Pereiaslav Agreement' is the title that Hrushevsky gave his bro­chure on the establishment of the Muscovite protectorate over Cossack Ukraine in the first months of 1654. The title amounted to a statement of Hrushevsky's position on one of the most hotly debated questions about Russo-Ukrainian relations of the period: was a treaty negotiated in Pereiaslav or not? This is related to the larger question of whether the Hetmanate joined the Muscovite state on particular conditions that the tsars promised to honour or whether the union amounted to an act of the tsar's generosity towards part of the Rus' population oppressed by foreign (Polish) occupation, and thus had no conditions attached to it. Sergei Soloviev, Russia's best-known nineteenth-century historian, believed that the unification of Great and Little Russia was a 'national/ popular act' and that the tsar took on no obligations towards his new subjects.¹³ Mykola Kostomarov, his counterpart in Ukraine, took a dif­ferent approach. Continuing the eighteenth-century Ukrainian histo­riographic tradition, he claimed that in January 1654 negotiations took place in Pereiaslav, resulting in the conclusion of an agreement con­firmed by a reciprocal oath.¹⁴ Kostomarov's position on the existence of a Muscovite-Cossack agreement was inherited by Hrushevsky. In volume 9, book 2 of the History, he stated that Kostomarov had been right to speak of an 'agreement of Pereiaslav.'¹⁵

Although Hrushevsky accepted Kostomarov's position on the issue, he was critical of the way in which his predecessor had gone about proving his case. Summarizing the historiographic discussion between Kostomarov and his Russian opponent, Gennadii Karpov, Hrushevsky agreed with the latter that Kostomarov had uncritically followed the tradition established by the Cossack chroniclers, including Samiilo Velychko, and the anonymous author of the History of the Rus'¹ Not only had Kostomarov accepted without criticism their claims that the Muscovite envoys at Pereiaslav confirmed the conditions of the agree­ment with the Cossacks by swearing an oath in the name of the tsar, but he had gone so far as to provide a list of those conditions and assert that they had been read at the council. 'However,' wrote Hrushevsky, 'as for those "pacts read at the council," Kostomarov, without offering any explanation to the reader, took the liberty of concocting a fabrication of his own invention, all the while creating the impression that he was using a documentary source, and in very detailed fashion set forth the contents of those conditions on which Ukraine was supposed to unite with Muscovy.'¹⁷ What Kostomarov actually did was to take the condi­tions presented by the Cossacks to the tsar in March 1654 and project them back to the Pereiaslav Council. While Hrushevsky could hardly accept such a 'creative' approach to the sources, he never doubted that negotiations of some sort had taken place at Pereiaslav.

As early as 1898, in his first essay on the Khmelnytsky Uprising, Hrushevsky used Muscovite documents published by Karpov but disregarded by Kostomarov to reconstruct the scope of the Cossack con­ditions at Pereiaslav. These included a request for the tsar's protection against the Commonwealth, the preservation of Cossack rights and free­doms, the acceptance of a Cossack register of sixty thousand, and the confirmation of the rights and privileges of the clergy, nobility, and burghers.¹⁸ However, expressing no doubt that there had been negotia­tions between the Cossacks and the Muscovite boyars, Hrushevsky did not speak of a Pereiaslav treaty or agreement. Only in his best-selling brochure of 1917 on the 'Pereiaslav Agreement' did Hrushevsky fully embrace Kostomarov's interpretation of the Pereiaslav negotiations as having resulted in a treaty.¹⁹ He stressed there that Cossack Ukraine had only accepted the Muscovite protectorate under certain conditions. In his interpretation of the Muscovite-Cossack agreements of 1654, Hrushevsky relied on research conducted by the leading Russian legal historian Boris Nolde and his student I.B. Rozenfeld. Nolde stated in his Essays on Russian State Law (1911) that the Muscovite boyars gave some assurances to their counterparts at Pereiaslav and had to fulfil them in the later negotiations. In a special study of the legal aspects of Ukraine's absorption by Russia (1915), Rozenfeld claimed that the oath sworn by the Ukrainians in Pereiaslav marked the opening stage of negotiations, not their conclusion. Hrushevsky reviewed both works positively upon their publication and adopted some of their arguments in his brochure of 1917.²⁰ It was these arguments that allowed him to adopt Kostomarov's view on the existence of a 'Pereiaslav Agreement.'

In volume 9 of the History, Hrushevsky, who often quoted from his brochure of 1917, restated the main conclusions of that work. He wrote that 'Kostomarov was entirely correct when he spoke of the "agreement of Pereiaslav," and more recent historians and legal experts admit that independently of the formal aspect, i.e., the lack of a written treaty sanc­tion of what had been agreed upon, the process that was initiated in Pereiaslav and concluded in Moscow had the character of an agreement and was recognized as such by the Muscovites themselves, even though they endeavoured to imbue it with the character of a tsarist "grant" in response to the Ukrainian "petition."'²¹ There was a certain tension in this argument of Hrushevsky's, as Kostomarov (and Hrushevsky after him) spoke of a Pereiaslav Agreement, while the legal specialists referred to the agreements of 1654, which included the Pereiaslav negoti­ations but were mainly based on Cossack petitions to the tsar and his replies to them in March of the same year. Hrushevsky dealt with this anomaly by treating the 'agreement' as a set of formal and informal understandings. The latter were negotiated at Pereiaslav and were the most important ones, at least from the Cossack viewpoint. This was the main line of Hrushevsky's argumentation concerning the Pereiaslav Agreement.

The idea of distinguishing formal and informal aspects of the Cos­sack-Muscovite agreement was one that Hrushevsky most probably borrowed from Veniamin Miakotin's book on Ukrainian social history (1894). Hrushevsky quotes Miakotin's opinion about the Kostomarov- Karpov debate in volume 9 of the History. According to Miakotin, Kar­pov was formally right, as the conditions of the agreement could not have been read at Pereiaslav, the Muscovite boyars had refused to take an oath on behalf of the tsar, and the agreement was expressed in the form of a grant from the tsar. Nevertheless, this did not mean that Lit­tle Russia had unconditionally accepted the tsar's rule.²² In his bro­chure of 1917, 'The Pereiaslav Agreement,' Hrushevsky argued that both the Cossack hetmans and the Muscovite rulers, as well as their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century successors, considered the condi­tions of 1654 a de facto agreement. Khmelnytsky, for his part, had placed special emphasis on the Pereiaslav negotiations - 'treaties' (trak- taty), as he called them - and insisted that the freedoms and liberties guaranteed to the Cossacks at Pereiaslav be confirmed by decrees from the tsar.²³ Hrushevsky revived these arguments in volume 9 of the His­tory, writing that 'in his subsequent relations with Muscovy the hetman considered himself and the Host bound only by those points on which he and Buturlin had come to an understanding ('agreed upon') in Pereiaslav.'²⁴ Hrushevsky believed that there had been an agreement at Pereiaslav between the Cossacks and the Muscovite boyars that led to Ukraine's acceptance of the tsar's protectorate; further specifications were made to that agreement in the course of the later deliberations in Moscow. Consequently, the appropriate name for the accords of 1654 was 'the Pereiaslav Agreement,' which Hrushevsky used as the title both of his brochure of 1917 and of the corresponding chapter of vol­ume 9 of the History.

Long before Hrushevsky, the question of whether the Pereiaslav talks amounted to an agreement had been closely associated with the set of issues surrounding the Muscovite oath in Pereiaslav and the legal status of Ukraine under the accords of 1654. The oath had been a bone of contention in the debate between Kostomarov and Karpov. Kostomarov used evidence derived from the Cossack chronicles, writ­ten more than half a century after the event, to argue that an oath had indeed been sworn, while Karpov cited the ambassadorial report and other Muscovite documents to prove that the envoys had refused to take an oath in the name of the tsar. Karpov's point of view won the support of most historians, including Hrushevsky, but there was still no explanation for the legend maintaining that there had been an oath. Hrushevsky was the first historian to pose the question of the origins of the legend and suggest an answer. He accepted the version pre­sented in the ambassadorial report and admitted that at Pereiaslav, despite all their efforts, the Cossack officers had failed to obtain from Vasilii Buturlin and other envoys either an oath or a written declara­tion confirming their rights and privileges. Had there been such an oath, argued Hrushevsky, it would have been mentioned in the letters that Khmelnytsky and Ivan Vyhovsky wrote to the tsar after Pereiaslav. He traced the origins of Samiilo Velychko's story about the oath to rumours that circulated in Ukraine after the Pereiaslav Council. In 1659, on the occasion of new Cossack-Muscovite negotiations in Pere- iaslav, those rumours led the Cossack officers, now headed by Bohdan Khmelnytsky's son Yurii, to demand a reciprocal oath from their coun­terparts. The Muscovites refused, and the Cossack side renounced its demand. In Hrushevsky's opinion, the rumours about the oath had been spread in 1654 by Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his entourage as part of an effort to present the agreement to Ukrainian society in the best possible light. Those rumours later became part of the Ukrainian histo­riographic tradition and the Pereiaslav legend.²⁵

In volume 9 of the History, Hrushevsky referred to the events of 1654 as the transfer of Ukraine to the tsar's protectorate. He also claimed that at the time of the Pereiaslav Council Ukraine had enjoyed de facto inde­pendence - a fact recognized by Muscovy and one that figured in its for­eign relations.²⁶ Hrushevsky criticized the position taken on the issue by Nolde and Rozenfeld, who considered the Russo-Ukrainian agreement of 1654 an incorporation of Ukraine into Muscovy either as an autono­mous region or as a regular province. He emphasized that Ukraine had maintained all the attributes of a separate polity and supported the view of those historians who treated the relationship between Muscovy and Ukraine after Pereiaslav as a personal union or a protectorate. Hru- shevsky regarded Muscovite-Cossack relations as those between a suzer­ain and a vassal. He also believed that Khmelnytsky was trying to model his relations with Moscow on those between the Ottoman Turks and their Danubian dependencies. Moscow, on the contrary, was advancing its claim to Ukraine as a patrimonial possession of the tsar and thus pre­paring the ground for full incorporation of the Cossack polity.²⁷

It took Hrushevsky some time to arrive at this position: his earlier writings on the subject proposed a number of alternative views. In his essay of 1898, he maintained that the Muscovite government had accepted the full autonomy of Ukrainian Cossackdom but not of the whole Ukrainian nation, a goal that had not even been pursued by Khmelnytsky and his circle. On the other hand, referring to the work of the Russian legal historian V.I. Sergeevich, Hrushevsky claimed that after Pereiaslav Ukraine had treated its relationship with Muscovy as a personal union.²⁸ A few years later, in his essay on the 250th anniver­sary of the Pereiaslav Agreement (1904), Hrushevsky repeated his ref­erence to Sergeevich and personal union but also argued that Moscow had not been prepared to grant Ukraine even the status of provincial autonomy, while the Cossacks had allegedly desired full autonomy for their country.²⁹ Ukrainian autonomy also emerged as Khmelnytsky's main goal in Hrushevsky's essay of 1907 on the 250th anniversary of Khmelnytsky's death. There the historian directly associated Khmel­nytsky's struggles of the mid-seventeenth century with the desire of his own contemporaries to obtain autonomous status for Ukraine in a free union with other nations.³⁰ Autonomy was one of the demands of the Ukrainian national movement during the Revolution of 1905 in the Russian Empire, and Hrushevsky was prepared to see Khmelnytsky as a forerunner in that tradition. Not surprisingly, in 1915 he wrote a highly positive review of Boris Nolde's work, which made reference to the autonomous status of Ukraine after Pereiaslav.³¹

By the time of the 1917 revolution, Ukrainian autonomy had become a background theme in Hrushevsky's discussion of the legal nature of the agreement of 1654. In his brochure of 1917, he emphasized Ukraine's de facto independence before the Pereiaslav Agreement and claimed that it had preserved the essential features of statehood even afterwards. Ukrainian statehood became the most important theme for Hrushevsky, who now considered discussions on the legal nature of Russo-Ukrainian relations a mere 'debate about words.' In the brochure of 1917, Hrushevsky wrote that his sympathies lay with the legal schol­ars and historians who argued that relations between Cossack Ukraine and Muscovy were those of vassalage.³² This was a position that he restated and developed a decade later in volume 9 of the History. Hru- shevsky noted that he was not alone in adopting this interpretation, which was shared by such scholars as Mykhailo Slabchenko, Viacheslav Lypynsky, and Andrii Yakovliv in Ukraine and Venedikt Miakotin and Mikhail Pokrovsky in Russia.

The Price of Pereiaslav

In the History of Ukraine-Rus' Hrushevsky provides an account unsur­passed in its attention to detail of diplomatic relations and military action following upon the conclusion of the Russo-Ukrainian agree­ment. The years 1654-5 were a crucial period in which the strength of the new alliance was tested and the first cracks in its structure began to show. In dealing with the military side of the story, Hrushevsky brings in new sources and reinterprets the known ones to reconstruct the course of the joint Muscovite-Cossack campaign against the Common­wealth in the summer and autumn of 1654, the disastrous battle at Dryzhypil in early 1655, and the devastating Polish and Tatar raids on Right-Bank Ukraine. Hrushevsky also relates the complex history of diplomatic relations in the region on the basis of painstaking research. This involves an account of the further development of Russo- Ukrainian relations, as well as Cossack contacts with the Crimea, the Danubian principalities, and Sweden.

Hrushevsky dates the emergence of the first tensions between the Muscovites and the Cossacks to the autumn of 1654, when Khmel­nytsky disregarded the tsar's order to bring his army to Lutsk in support of the Muscovite troops that were supposed to operate in that region. The hetman, who did not consider such a move advantageous to the Cossack Host, offered excuses for not doing what the tsar expected of him. More importantly, the Muscovite troops that he was supposed to support were never actually dispatched to the Lutsk region: had Khmelnytsky followed the tsar's initial orders, a major military disaster would have ensued. The whole episode might be considered a simple misunderstanding, but it also demonstrated Moscow's disregard for its ally, as well as Khmelnytsky's reluctance to follow orders that did not correspond to his own understanding of the situation. In Hrushevsky's opinion, this was a sign of troubles to come. 'Thus,' wrote the historian, 'disagreement, mistrust, and, from the Muscovites' point of view, "inconstancy," if not outright "treason," had emerged at the very outset on this most important point of establishing a joint foreign policy, which was the actual reason behind this alliance or union.'³³ Further problems in Muscovite-Cossack relations were caused by the actions of the Cossack colonel and acting hetman of the Siverian region, Vasyl Zolotarenko, who was sent to assist the tsar's forces in Belarus. Zolotarenko's undeclared goal in the region was to extend the Cossack social and military order to the upper Dnipro and Sozh territories. Hrushevsky followed the development of Russo-Ukrainian competition in Belarus with close attention, bearing in mind Bohdan Khmelnytsky's later efforts to extend his authority over southern Belarus.

Hrushevsky was clearly upset when he described the devastation of the Bratslav and Kyiv regions by Polish and Tatar troops in the first months of 1655. He laid most of the blame for the atrocities on the Poles, commenting sarcastically that they betokened Poland's civiliz­ing mission in Ukraine - an echo of Hrushevsky's polemics with Polish historians in the previous volumes of the History. This time, however, Hrushevsky attacked not his traditional opponents but their forerun­ners, the authors of seventeenth-century Polish chronicles, Samuel Twardowski and Wespazjan Kochowski.³⁴ Hrushevsky correctly regarded the Polish-Tatar expeditions against the Hetmanate as the price that the Cossacks had to pay for their alliance with Muscovy, and he was aggrieved by Muscovy's failure to provide effective assistance to Cossack Ukraine. In Hrushevsky's words, 'The first weeks of the new year were one bloody orgy carried out by the Polish army. The Bratslav region was perishing in full view of everyone. The anniver­sary of Ukraine's transfer to "the high hand of the great sovereign" was marked by a great demise "of the holy churches of God and Orthodox Christians," such as Ukraine had not experienced in a long time. On balance, the first year of the military alliance between Ukraine and Muscovy appeared extremely dismal.'³⁵

The only historical account of this period that appears to have brought Hrushevsky excitement and delight was the description of Ukraine in the diary of Paul of Aleppo, a son of Patriarch Makarios of Antioch who visited the Hetmanate in 1654 and 1656 on his way to and from Moscow. In Paul of Aleppo's diary Hrushevsky found what he missed in other sources - the story of everyday life in Ukraine, espe­cially the lives of ordinary people, or 'the masses' in the class­conscious vocabulary of Hrushevsky's day. The historian also found there an optimistic attitude that he ascribed, also in accordance with the conventions of his day, to the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses liberated by the Khmelnytsky Uprising. '[A]s a representative of a people who had been oppressed throughout the ages,' wrote Hru- shevsky, 'Paul had, to a remarkably intense degree, grasped the beauty of this heroic age in the life of the Ukrainian people: the pathos of revo­lution, popular revolt, and the struggle for liberation, full of sacrifice, self-denial, and idealism. To the Poles and anyone else looking through their prism, as well as to the Muslims and Muscovites, who supported the Cossacks for political reasons, both the Cossacks and the Ukrainian masses in general were nevertheless nothing more than rebellious slaves, despite all their acts of heroism, military prowess, and so on. However, in the eyes of this uncultured Arab they were bearers of the noblest human qualities, fighters for the dreams of liberation that are most precious to every individual.' Hrushevsky clearly preferred Paul's account not only to those of the Poles and Muscovites but also to those of the Ukrainians themselves, including the author of the famed Eyewitness Chronicle, who, according to the historian, 'querulously tallied the number of windowpanes that were smashed during this great conflagration.'³⁶

Hrushevsky's often uncritical reliance on Paul of Aleppo, as well his readiness to quote page after page from his diary, later made his account an easy target for critics. Indeed, in volume 9 Hrushevsky too often resorted to endless quotations from documents, leaving little space for synthesis. This is especially true of chapters 8 and 9, which teem with narrative detail, while Hrushevsky's interpretation of the main themes discussed in that part of the volume is deliberately reserved for the concluding chapter.

Class and Nation

When the last issue of the journal Ukraina appeared in print in 1932, it included none of the articles written or edited by Hrushevsky prior to his arrest and exile. Instead, it contained vicious attacks on the founder of the journal and his legacy. The whole interpretation of Ukrainian his­tory developed by Hrushevsky was now thrown into question. One of the critics of Hrushevsky's work was Lev Okinshevych, a former gradu­ate student in the Ukrainian Academy's department of history, chaired by Hrushevsky. In an article entitled 'The National-Democratic History of the Law in Ukraine in the Works of Academician M. Hrushevsky,' Okinshevych accused his former superior of subscribing to principles enunciated by Ukrainian statist historiography, led by Viacheslav Lypynsky. Okinshevych did not take account of the latest installment of Hrushevsky's History but attacked his brochure of 1917 on the Pereiaslav Agreement.³⁷ According to Okinshevych, that work served the interests of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie. He labelled the academician a 'national democrat,' which in that period was tantamount to a political denunci­ation. Okinshevych claimed that while Hrushevsky had presented his brochure as a response to requests addressed to him by representatives of all strata of Ukrainian society, he was in fact using the 'faded old scrap of paper' of the Pereiaslav Agreement as proof of the existence of a bourgeois Ukrainian state. 'The whole work, aside from its narrative and descriptive character,' wrote Okinshevych about the brochure of 1917, 'is meant to establish that Ukraine was a state after 1654; to prove that the Russian nobiliary government violated the constitutional sta­tus of the Ukrainian land. Behind these features it is not difficult to dis­cern the political line of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie in 1917: its striving for constitutional autonomy within the framework of bourgeois Russia and sovereign independence of the land of the proletarian revolution.'³⁸

Okinshevych's political accusations had much in common with the attack on Hrushevsky by another representative of the Ukrainian Marx­ist milieu, Fedir Yastrebov. In 1934, when the anti-Hrushevsky cam­paign was stepped up, Yastrebov published a long article under the title 'The National-Fascist Conception of the Peasant War of 1648 in Ukraine.' This was a critique of volume 9, book 2 of Hrushevsky's mag­num opus.³⁹ Its tone was even harsher than that adopted by Soviet pro­paganda in 1932: Hrushevsky's views were now treated not as those of a 'national democrat' but of a 'fascist.' By 1934, Hrushevsky's Marxist critics had abandoned even the pretence of objectivity and were pre­pared to attack their victims not only for actual deviations from the party line but also for imagined ideological 'crimes.' Yastrebov's article was largely based on the prevailing Soviet interpretation of the Khmel­nytsky Uprising. The founder of Marxist historiography in Russia, Mikhail Pokrovsky, considered Pereiaslav a union between two proxi­mate social strata, the Cossack officers and the Muscovite gentry (deti boiarskie), with whom the Cossacks had more in common than with the Polish nobility. The union could not take place as long as the Khmel­nytsky Uprising developed along the lines of a peasant war but became almost inevitable once the Cossacks managed to establish their control over the masses. This view of the Pereiaslav Agreement was adopted by the leading Marxist historian in Ukraine, Matvii Yavorsky, who developed Pokrovsky's interpretation by asserting that the Cossacks were seeking foreign assistance to maintain their dominance over the masses. At Pereiaslav they allegedly received that help.⁴⁰

For what failings did Yastrebov condemn Hrushevsky's treatment of the Pereiaslav Agreement? First of all, Hrushevsky allegedly ignored manifestations of class struggle and emphasized strivings for national liberation. He ignored documents that contained information about social conflicts and supposedly praised Paul of Aleppo for presenting the exploiters' viewpoint in his diary.⁴¹ According to Yastrebov, Hru- shevsky's account of diplomatic and military relations was in fact a paean to the creation of a Ukrainian nation-state, with the Cossack officer stratum as the protagonist of the story. In order to mislead his readers, Hrushevsky occasionally criticized the Cossack officers, but he actually considered them a positive force, bearers of the idea of Ukrainian independence and builders of an independent state. Yastre­bov agreed with Hrushevsky that at Pereiaslav the Cossack officers had yielded too much to Moscow and shared his criticism of the Cos­sack elites for forcing the masses to swear an oath of loyalty to the tsar. Nevertheless, he dismissed Hrushevsky's criticism of the Cossack officers' actions as mild and misdirected. Yastrebov claimed that the elites should be criticized not because they had conducted a weak for­eign policy but because they acted in their class interests. For him, opposition to the Pereiaslav Agreement in Ukrainian society was a manifestation either of the social struggle of masses against elites or of tensions among the exploiters themselves. Since official Marxist dogma of the period maintained that a nation-state could only be the product of a bourgeois revolution, and the Khmelnytsky Uprising was no longer so defined by Marxist historians, Yastrebov insisted that the Cossack officers at Pereiaslav could not have been striving to establish a Ukrainian nation-state. Instead, he asserted, the officers had sought 'to obtain firm guarantees of a warm place for their class.'⁴²

Interestingly enough, Yastrebov never questioned Hrushevsky's term 'Pereiaslav Agreement' (Pereiaslavs'ka umova), which he used throughout his review. At the same time, he dismissed Hrushevsky's discussion of the legal nature of that agreement as 'idealism' and 'Tal­mudism,' asserting that its content had been determined by the bal­ance of social forces. He accepted Hrushevsky's claim that Muscovy recognized the 'all-national' authority of Bohdan Khmelnytsky but maintained that it could not have been otherwise, as nobody asked the toiling masses whether they wanted the Cossack officers to represent their interests or not. In Yastrebov's opinion, the Pereiaslav Agreement itself demonstrated the absence of a national program, for the Cossack officers were pursuing their own 'feudal program.' This proved the absence of an 'all-national' front in Ukraine, contrary to Hrushevsky's claims but in full conformity with the laws of history. The same laws determined the timing of the Pereiaslav Agreement itself: it came into being when the class struggle of the popular masses, coupled with international factors, made such an agreement possible. Yastrebov claimed that Hrushevsky, as a nationalist and a bourgeois historian, did not recognize the laws of history and drew his conclusions on the basis of 'an idealist dissolution of historical causality and conformity to laws in the accidental wherever this is inconvenient for his conception - and that is, in effect, everywhere.'⁴³

Yastrebov's review fully demonstrated the shift in Bolshevik propa­ganda and historiography away from the policy of coexistence with national historiographies towards their suppression. Given the party's complete control over media and scholarly publications, by the early 1930s opponents of that course had no forum in which to challenge the new approach. Thus the attacks on Hrushevsky went unanswered in the USSR, and favourable responses to book 2 of the History were pub­lished only abroad. The reviewer in the Prager Presse called Hru­shevsky's History 'a Cyclops' edifice to which his latest work has added a new rough-hewn stone slab.'⁴⁴ The Lviv-based Literary and Scholarly Herald, a journal once edited by Hrushevsky, welcomed the publication of the latter book of volume 9 as the 'most eminent phenomenon in the field of Ukrainian historiography, both in significance and in the labour invested in it.' Semen Narizhny, the historian of the Ukrainian emigra­tion and the author of the review in the Herald, noted that the volume was devoted to the study of a great transformation - Ukraine's transi­tion from the rule of the Commonwealth to that of Muscovy, and the corresponding shift of the centre of political gravity in Central Europe. He praised Hrushevsky for his improved literary style but also noted that the text was overloaded with source quotations and discussion of details that might be the focus of a separate monograph. Narizhny observed that the last chapter of the volume was the most interesting but also the most controversial. He stopped short of endorsing or chal­lenging Hrushevsky's views on the specific problems discussed there.⁴⁵

The last chapter of the volume was devoted largely to Hrushevsky's polemics with alternative interpretations of the Khmelnytsky Upris­ing. His opponents were not Polish or Russian historians, as in previous encounters, nor, for that matter, the Marxist and left-leaning historians of the 1920s. Instead, Hrushevsky directed his fire against Viacheslav Lypynsky, whom he considered his main opponent and challenger. In his Ukraine at the Turning Point (1920), Lypynsky presented Bohdan Khmelnytsky as a major protagonist of Ukrainian history who had almost single-handedly built a Ukrainian state.⁴⁶ Lypynsky and Hru- shevsky were in agreement on some aspects of the Russo-Ukrainian union of 1654. Both referred to it as the 'Pereiaslav Agreement' and con­sidered it one of Khmelnytsky's diplomatic initiatives in the search for allies against the Commonwealth. They disagreed, however, on its sig­nificance among Khmelnytsky's policies. If Lypynsky considered it a major achievement that established a basis for the existence of Ukrainian statehood in international law, Hrushevsky claimed that at Pereiaslav Khmelnytsky had shown his inability to defend the interests of the Het- manate. Hrushevsky claimed that Khmelnytsky lacked the capacity to develop a state-building program and criticized his failure to serve as a representative of the entire Ukrainian nation in his dealings with the tsar, his tendency to make promises to the Muscovite boyars without considering the consequences, his acquiescence in separate deals between Moscow and the Ukrainian estates, and the readiness of his government to allow the extension of the Moscow patriarchate's juris­diction over the Kyiv metropolitanate.⁴⁷

Hrushevsky's debate with Lypynsky was certainly on the mind of Vasyl Herasymchuk, who wrote the most positive review of the book. A former student of Hrushevsky's and an associate of the archaeo- graphic expedition, Herasymchuk saw the importance of the volume in the data that it offered for a comparison of two of 'our great revolu­tions,' the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-20. Herasymchuk praised Hrushevsky's work as a 'feat of titanic energy,' noting the complexity of his task and the abundance of litera­ture and sources that he had consulted to produce the most complete narrative of the period. He defended Hrushevsky's decision to incor­porate numerous and lengthy quotations from the historical sources into his text and praised his decision to treat the Ukrainian people, rather than Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, as the protagonist of the volume. According to Herasymchuk, Hrushevsky's reevaluation of Khmelnytsky's role was 'one of the most sensational tableaux of the History... [I]t is also an act of courage, in the interest of scholarship and truth, to touch critically on the taboo of an "ideal sanctified by cen­turies."' 'Many readers here in Galicia,' noted Herasymchuk, having in mind the followers of Viacheslav Lypynsky, 'find it somehow difficult to accustom themselves to this novelty as an "incomprehensible, nonpedagogical act."'⁴⁸ Herasymchuk also defended Hrushevsky's work against the attacks of its Soviet critics, which he characterized as 'abusive reviews overemphasizing Marxist dialectics, even appealing for official intervention against the spread of counterrevolutionary atti­tudes and the glorification of petty-bourgeois ideals.' Herasymchuk claimed that those attacks were unjustified, as it was impossible to study the seventeenth century without touching upon the question of nationality, which in his opinion was the leitmotif of the period. Hera- symchuk questioned the Marxist credentials of Hrushevsky's critics, claiming that true Marxism did not deny the existence of nationality but considered the national question fully resolved. He concluded his review by asking whether 'feigned concern for the proletarian cause is not allowing the poorly concealed old black militant nationalism of imperialist vintage to emerge.'⁴⁹

Herasymchuk's review, written soon after the publication of volume 9 of the History, was not published during his lifetime. There were prob­ably too many people in Lviv who did not appreciate his praise of a work that challenged taboos and removed the halo from heroes such as Khmelnytsky. After all, it was a direct attack on views held by most leading Ukrainian Galician historians of the day. Many of them, including former students of Hrushevsky's such as Ivan Krypiakevych and Ivan Krevetsky, rejected the left-leaning concepts of their professor and embraced the anti-egalitarian doctrines of his opponent. This explains in part why Hrushevsky concentrated his attack on Lypynsky's view of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in general and of his role in the Pereiaslav Agreement in particular. As the last volume of the History demonstrates, at the end of his career Hrushevsky was no longer primarily concerned with Polish attacks on Khmelnytsky, nor did he polemicize with Russian historians, new or old. He also completely ignored Franciszek Rawita- Gawronski's new writings on the subject and even cited Kliuchevsky in support of his own interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654 and its consequences. Was this because Hrushevsky no longer consid­ered Polish or Russian interpretations of the Khmelnytsky era a threat to the Ukrainian national paradigm? Or did he think Rawita-Gawronski and Russian emigre historians unworthy of attention, given the poor professional quality of their writings on the subject?⁵⁰ Hrushevsky's lack of interest in Marxist interpretations of the Khmelnytsky era seems less surprising, given the lack of professional historians in their ranks.

Thanks to his prominent position in the academy and his editorship of a number of scholarly publications, Hrushevsky effectively controlled a significant portion of academic activity in the historical field, including the training of specialists in early modern Ukrainian history and the conduct of much of the research on that period. A number of 'progres­sive' left-leaning historians who worked in close contact with Dmytro Bahalii and included Mykhailo Slabchenko in Odesa, as well as Olek- sander Ohloblyn and Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko in Kyiv, avoided Hrushevsky's domain of pre-eighteenth-century history and occupied themselves predominantly with socio-economic topics. As a result, Hrushevsky had no rivals in the field of seventeenth-century Ukrainian history. The only real challenge came from western Ukraine, where some of Hrushevsky's own students, who had grown into first-class historians of early modern Ukraine under his guidance, went on the offensive against their former professor. Their attack was led by Viacheslav Lypynsky, and it was his views on the Khmelnytsky era with which Hrushevsky polemicized in the last volumes of the History. The vigour of his response shows that while he considered his former students' rebellion a continuation of the prerevolutionary conflict in the Shevchenko Scientific Society, he also treated the advent of elitism and social conservatism in historiography as a political and intellectual challenge powerful and influential enough to deserve a response in the pages of his academic History.

The Legacy

When it comes to the long-term impact of Hrushevsky's views on the historiography of the Pereiaslav Agreement, Fedir Yastrebov was naive at best when he wrote in 1934 that the issue of the character of the Khmelnytsky Uprising had been definitively resolved by Marxist histo­riography. By the late 1930s the nation was again an element of the Soviet Ukrainian historical narrative, with Bohdan Khmelnytsky emerging as the main representative of the Ukrainian people. The the­ory of the 'lesser evil' was now recast in national terms.⁵¹ By the early 1950s, the concept of the 'reunification' of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples had emerged as the only 'true' approach in Soviet historiogra­phy. The Pereiaslav Council of 1654 was now regarded not as the embodiment of a 'lesser evil' but as a symbol of the triumph of friend­ship between the two fraternal peoples. That view was promoted by the 'Theses on the Three-Hundredth Anniversary of the Reunion of Ukraine with Russia,' which were approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1954).⁵² In the USSR the time had come to criticize Hrushevsky's interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement not only as devoid of class analysis but also as undermining the age-old friendship of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples.

The section of the 'Theses' devoted to the events of 1654 may be con­sidered an 'antithesis' to Hrushevsky's interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement. The term itself was replaced with the references to the 'Pereiaslav Council' and the 'reunification of Ukraine with Russia.' Contrary to Hrushevsky's research, it was claimed that the Pereiaslav Council 'was attended by representatives of various social strata of all the Ukrainian territories liberated from the Polish nobility.' The 'The­ses' also stated that 'the decision taken at Pereiaslav was enthusiasti­cally received by the Ukrainians.' Hrushevsky's assertion of Ukrainian statehood was countered with a statement on the historical importance of the Pereiaslav Council, which 'lay primarily in the fact that union with Russia within a single state, the Russian state, saved Ukraine from subjugation to the Polish nobility and from annexation by the Turkish sultans.' Countering the earlier Marxist interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement, the 'Theses' proclaimed that 'though Russia in those days was governed by the tsar and the landlords, the reunion was of immense progressive importance for the political, economic and cultural development of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.' Finally, the interpretation of Pereiaslav as a product of elite politics - one of the few issues on which Hrushevsky and his early Soviet critics agreed - was replaced with an almost mystical treatment of the Pere- iaslav Council as an event that 'crowned the people's struggle for the reunion of Ukraine with Russia' and constituted the realization of the 'age-long hope and aspiration of the Ukrainian people.'⁵³

Not surprisingly, Hrushevsky was portrayed in Soviet historiogra­phy of the 1950s-1980s as the main opponent of the theory of the 'reunification of Ukraine and Russia.' The article on the 'Reunification of Ukraine and Russia' in the Soviet-era encyclopedia of Ukrainian his­tory noted that 'Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist historians, especially M.S. Hrushevsky, sought in all possible ways to depreciate the great historical act of reunification of Ukraine with Russia; to deny its signif­icance in the history of the two fraternal peoples.'⁵⁴ When in the 1960s, in the wake of the Khrushchev cultural thaw, the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Braichevsky attacked the Russocentric concept of 'reunifica­tion,' using arguments drawn from Ukrainian Marxist historiography of the 1920s, he was fired from his position at the Institute of History of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences and condemned by his colleagues in a 'scholarly dispute' not unlike those staged by the authorities to 'unmask' the views of Hrushevsky himself in the 1930s. In fact, Braichevsky, whose view of Pereiaslav was far removed from that of Hrushevsky, was accused of following Hrushevsky's line in the interpretation of developments in the second half of the seventeenth century - the so-called Ruin.⁵⁵

With the advent of Ukrainian independence in 1991, Ukrainian his­torians rejected the concept of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia. Also discarded was the notion of the age-old drive of the Ukrainian people to reunite with the Russians, as well as the concept of 'the peo­ple' as the main agent of Ukrainian history. Instead, most Ukrainian historians advanced new interpretations of the Khmelnytsky Uprising that adopted numerous features of Hrushevsky's outlook. Today Ukrainian historians generally treat the Khmelnytsky Uprising as a national revolution or as a war of national liberation. Under the influ­ence of statist historiography, special attention is paid to the role of the revolt in creating a national state that obtained legitimacy through the Pereiaslav Agreement. New research has been done on the interna­tional situation that contributed to the conclusion of the agreement. Not unlike Hrushevsky, contemporary Ukrainian historians regard the Pereiaslav act as one of Khmelnytsky's diplomatic measures intended to promote the interests of the Cossack polity created by him or by his nascent dynasty.⁵⁶

Not all of Hrushevsky's interpretations are equally accepted in the present-day historiography of Pereiaslav. A case in point is the use of the term 'Pereiaslav Agreement,' which is crucial to Hrushevsky's argu­ment. It was promoted by Hrushevsky in his brochure of 1917 and in volume 9 of the History and subsequently adopted by most twentieth­century Ukrainian historians writing outside Soviet Ukraine. With some qualifications, the term was used by Viacheslav Lypynsky, Rostyslav Lashchenko, Andrii Yakovliv, and Oleksander Ohloblyn.⁵⁷ On the other hand, while not questioning the existence of the agreement, modern Ukrainian historians try to avoid the notion itself, opting instead for terms like 'Pereiaslav Council,' 'Russo-Ukrainian treaty,' or 'Pereiaslav- Moscow Agreement.'⁵⁸ The same holds true for modern Russian histori­ography. One of its leading representatives in the 1990s, Lev Zaborovsky, argued in favour of abandoning the term 'Pereiaslav Agreement.' In his opinion, verbal promises made by the Muscovite envoys at Pereiaslav could not be considered a treaty. Instead, he suggested the term 'Moscow Agreement,' referring to the negotiations and complex of documents adopted in Moscow in March 1654.⁵⁹ A different situation emerged in the West. In the 1950s, through the works of Yakovliv and Ohloblyn, the term entered English-language historiography, where it was rendered for some time as 'Pereiaslav treaty.'⁶⁰ This was replaced in the 1980s and 1990s with the term 'Pereiaslav Agreement,' which is widely used in the introduction to this book.⁶¹ The same term has also been used occasionally in Polish historiography.⁶² Whatever the term used by historians to describe the Russo-Ukrainian union of 1654, none of them seems to question the existence of the agreement itself or its negotiated character - a clear indication that Hrushevsky's understand­ing of the agreement, if not the term itself, is widely accepted by present- day Ukrainian historians.

Hrushevsky's copious use of primary sources allowed him to give the most complete available account of political, military, and diplo­matic developments in Cossack Ukraine during a crucial period of its development.⁶³ Moreover, his discussion of diverse ways in which the Pereiaslav Agreement was understood by its authors and contemporar­ies introduced a new theme into the study of an 'old' subject. Hru- shevsky's research on the development of national consciousness, based on the analysis of official documents and rumours circulating among the populace at large, helped open a new stage in the development of Ukrainian historiography. His work on the Pereiaslav Agreement con­tinues to be the most important influence on present-day Ukrainian his­toriography of the problem both in Ukraine and abroad. This influence is likely to continue. Even the shift of Ukraine's foreign policy towards Russia during the last years of the rule of President Leonid Kuchma and his half-hearted attempts to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Council in January 2004⁶⁴ did not change the dominant trend in Ukrainian historiography of the Pereiaslav Agreement.

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