The Final Phase of the Great Revolt

One of the immediate results of the Pereiaslav Agreement was a radical restructuring of the political alliances in the region. In response to Khmelnytsky’s treaty with the tsar, the Poles and Tatars combined forces and a new, expanded phase of the conflict ensued.

During the campaign, an incident occurred that typified the intensity of the conflict. In October 1654, an overwhelming Polish force besieged the Cossack fortress at Busha, killed most of its garrison, and was about to overrun the castle. At this point, the wife of the slain Cossack commander, Zavisny, refused to surrender and instead, ignited the munitions dump, blowing up herself, the surviving garrison, and many of the attacking Poles. As a result of the savage campaigns that were fought on the Right Bank, the most highly developed of the recently colonized lands were left despoiled and practically depopulated.

Misfortune and devastation enveloped Poland as well. In the summer of 1655, the Swedes, taking advantage of the Poles’ involvement in the south and east, attacked from the north and occupied much of Poland.

Swedish and Ukrainian diplomats were soon discussing combined operations against the Poles, with the Swedes promising Khmelnytsky help in the creation of a Kievan principality. Sensing the imminent demise of the Commonwealth, another neighbor, Gyorgy II Rakoczi of Transylvania, also approached the hetman in 1656. Together they launched a combined operation into Poland with the goal of partitioning the land. With such powerful new backing, Khmelnytsky took a more uncompromising stand toward the Poles and insisted that all Ukrainian lands, including Galicia and Volhynia, come under his rule.

The Swedes, however, created complications for the hetman as well as opportunities. Eager to settle old scores, they also initiated a war with the Muscovites. With his overlord fighting his new ally, Khmelnytsky found himself in an awkward position. Tensions between Ukrainians and Muscovites began to surface. The stationing of a Muscovite garrison in Kiev and other Ukrainian towns and the interference of tsarist officials in Ukrainian financial affairs alarmed the Cossacks. Bitterness between the allies also grew in recently conquered Belorussia, where the population frequently preferred the Cossack system of government to the Muscovite and swore allegiance to the hetman instead of to the tsar. The competition of “one Rus’ [Ukrainians] with another [Muscovites] for control of a third [Belorussians]” nearly led to open warfare and it was some time before the Muscovites could force the Cossacks from the land.

But what infuriated the Ukrainian leadership most was the tsar’s conclusion of a peace with Poland in Vilnius in 1656 without consulting it, indeed, without even allowing a specially dispatched Ukrainian delegation to get near the negotiations.

It is difficult to overestimate Khmelnytsky’s impact on the course of Ukrainian history. Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian historians have compared his achievements to those of such giants of 17th-century history as Cromwell of England or Wallenstein of Bohemia. Studies of the hetman and his age frequently stress his ability to create so much from so little. Where a Ukrainian political entity had long since ceased to exist, he established a new one; out of hordes of unruly peasants and Cossacks he molded powerful, well-organized armies; from among a people abandoned by their traditional elite he found and united around him new, dynamic leaders. Most important, in a society bereft of self-confidence and a clear sense of identity, he instilled pride in itself and a will to defend its interests. An example of the momentous change in Ukrainian attitudes brought about by Khmelnytsky is provided by the words of a simple Cossack captain addressed to a high Polish official: “In regard to Your Grace’s recent letter stating that we, the common people, should not dare to address such high officials as a [Polish] wojewoda, it should be known that we are now, thanks be to God, no longer common people but knights of the Zaporozhian Host… and, may God grant Lord Bohdan Khmelnytsky health, we are now ruled by our colonels and not by your wojewody, by our captains and not by your starosty, and by our otamany and not by your judges.”¹⁰

Clearly, Khmelnytsky had his share of setbacks, mistakes, and miscalculations.

In contrast, Ukraine’s greatest poet, Taras Shevchenko, was critical of the hetman for bringing Ukraine into the Russian sphere. Even more extreme in his criticism was Panteleimon Kulish, another leading 19th-century Ukrainian intellectual, who blamed Khmelnytsky for initiating an era of death, destruction, anarchy, and cultural regression in Ukraine. In the 20th century, Hrushevsky raised doubts about Khmelnytsky’s consciousness of well-defined goals and argued that it was events that controlled the hetman rather than vice versa. Yet the majority of prominent Ukrainian historians, led by Viacheslav Lypynsky, concluded that the hetman consciously and systematically attempted to build the basis for Ukrainian statehood and that without his efforts, the modern rebirth of a Ukrainian state would have been impossible. Soviet historians are unanimous in their praise of Khmelnytsky, but for different reasons. They emphasize his role in leading an uprising of the oppressed masses and especially his unification (or rather “reunification,” as they put it) of Ukraine with Muscovy.

But the fine points of scholarly evaluation have had little effect on the Ukrainian people’s instinctive, unbounded admiration for “Batko (father) Bohdan.” For the vast majority of Ukrainians, both in his day and up to the present, Khmelnytsky has towered as the great liberator, as the heroic figure who by the force of his personality and intellect roused Ukrainians from a centuries-long miasma of passivity and hopelessness and propelled them toward national and socioeconomic emancipation.