The Ghosts of Pereiaslav

In March 2000 the Ukrainian section of the BBC aired a special pro­gram devoted to Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his historical leg­acy. A number of historians in Ukraine, Russia, and Canada, as well as people on the streets of Kyiv, Moscow, and Warsaw, were asked the same question: what did the name of Khmelnytsky mean to them? While in Warsaw the hetman's name was associated first and foremost with the Cossack rebellion of 1648, in Kyiv and Moscow his legacy was viewed almost exclusively through the prism of the 1654 Pereiaslav Agreement, which placed the Ukrainian Cossack state under the pro­tection of the Muscovite tsar and initiated a long era of Russian domi­nation in Ukraine.¹

In Moscow Khmelnytsky was seen both by professional historians and by the 'man in the street' as the one who had brought Russia and Ukraine together by means of the Pereiaslav Agreement.

Before the beginning of glasnost and the dissolution of the USSR, the Pereiaslav Agreement was unanimously viewed by Soviet historians in both Russia and Ukraine as an important and positive event in their nations' histories. Why do scholars and ordinary people in Russia and Ukraine now regard its legacy so differently? The answer to this ques­tion is closely related to the fate of Soviet historiography in general and to the changes that affected historians and historiographic concepts in the post-Soviet space after the dissolution of the USSR and Moscow's loss of control over non-Russian cultures and historiographies. It also touches upon the more theoretically informed question of the interrela­tion between historical and national identities in the newly independent states of Eurasia in general, and in the Slavic republics of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine in particular. To what degree did changes in histor­ical paradigms in these countries influence nation-building projects (and vice versa), and to what degree did they promote or, on the contrary, retard the development of a common identity in the countries of the Sla­via Orthodoxa? In this chapter I do not intend to provide answers to all these questions but instead will try to enrich my analysis of a particular historiographic debate by adopting this broader theoretical approach.⁴

It would be difficult to find a better point of departure for discussing the importance of the Pereiaslav legacy in post-Soviet Ukraine than the events that took place in the town of Pereiaslav in the summer of 1992. On 21 June, 338 years after the conclusion of the Pereiaslav Agreement between Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Muscovite boyars, activists of the Ukrainian Cossack brotherhood from all over Ukraine descended on that sleepy provincial centre to convene a new Cossack council.

In historical and legal terms, the whole undertaking was completely anachronistic, as the Russo-Ukrainian treaty of 1654 was officially denounced by Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky in his 'Manifesto to Foreign Rulers' less than five years after the original Pereiaslav Council. Never­theless, the symbolic importance of the event becomes clearer when placed in the context of Ukrainian nation-building efforts, Ukraine's relations with Russia, and internal debates on both issues in the Ukrai­nian parliament. In that context, it comes as no surprise that the person who read the Pereiaslav declaration denouncing Cossack allegiance to the tsar was none other than Viacheslav Chornovil, a Soviet-era dissi­dent and a contender in the 1991 presidential elections. In 1992 he was also the hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks and the leader of the Rukh party, the main opposition force in the Ukrainian parliament. The pres­ence at the ceremony of a deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament also added to the symbolic significance of the event. The stain of Pere- iaslav was something that the activists and supporters of the Ukrainian national movement obviously wanted to remove from what they saw as the otherwise spotless image of Ukrainian Cossackdom.

The Ukrainian Cossacks' active intervention in the process of nation­building and Russo-Ukrainian relations did not end with the 1992 denunciation of the Pereiaslav Agreement. In 1995 the Cossacks, now led by the former head of the Political and Educational Administration of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, General Volodymyr Muliava, took an active part in the commemoration of the Battle of Konotop (1659), where Cossack detachments led by Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky and assisted by the Crimean Tatars defeated a numerically superior Muscovite army. The celebrations in Konotop featured, among other things, a scholarly con­ference on the history of the battle that was attended by some of Ukraine's leading experts on the Cossack past. The message that the par­ticipants were sending to their compatriots and the outside world was quite clear. They were turning to history in order to reveal the most glorious episode of their anti-Muscovite struggle, deliberately sup­pressed by Russian imperial and Soviet authorities. On the political level, Cossackdom, a non-governmental organization that had forged close links with the national-democratic political parties and organiza­tions, was also taking a strong stand against threats to Ukrainian territo­rial integrity then emanating from the Russian political establishment.⁶

The 'return' of the Cossack myth during the last years of Soviet rule in Ukraine proved significant for the revival of the suppressed Ukrai­nian national identity on the eve of the disintegration of the USSR. Since then, the myth has faced a number of challenges in newly inde­pendent Ukraine. One of them is related to the fact that the Cossack period left a somewhat confusing legacy when it comes to Ukrainian relations with Russia, traditionally an important 'other' in Ukraine's self-identification. On the one hand, the Cossacks are known for numerous uprisings and wars waged against Russian rule: the revolt led by Hetman Ivan Mazepa in the early eighteenth century is seen as the most vivid example of Cossack antagonism towards Russia.

In Ukraine, the legacy of Pereiaslav and the Khmelnytsky revolt in general has been viewed as an important factor in the formation of a new paradigm of Ukrainian national history, closely linked with Ukraine's nation-building project.⁸ Since the early 1990s, the history of the Pereiaslav Agreement has become a politically sensitive topic in the sporadic but continuing discussions between Russian and Ukrai­nian historians. Generally speaking, since the disintegration of the USSR, representatives of the two national historiographies have taken profoundly different attitudes towards the historical role and impor­tance of the agreement.

One of the most controversial topics in Russo-Ukrainian discussions on the legacy of Pereiaslav has been the usage of the term 'reunifica­tion.' Ukrainian historiography has effectively rejected the old Soviet cliche of the Pereiaslav Agreement as a reunification of Russia and Ukraine, which was imposed on scholars by the Theses approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on the three-hundredth anniversary of the event in 1954. In Soviet histori­ography, the Khmelnytsky Uprising was known as the 'Ukrainian people's war of liberation.' This official term implied that the uprising was a war of the toiling masses against their overlords, as well as the climax of the struggle of Ukrainian society as a whole against Polish oppression and for 'reunification' with fraternal Russia. That message was also strengthened by the officially adopted chronology of the war, which allegedly came to an end with the decision of the Pereiaslav Council in January 1654.

In independent Ukraine, the term 'reunification' has been completely abandoned by scholars and politicians alike, resulting in its disappear­ance from scholarly and popular literature and the media. 'Reunifica­tion' has also been dropped from the official name of Dnipropetrovsk University, which was named in 1954 for 'the three-hundredth anniver­sary of the reunification of Ukraine with Russia,' as well as from the official titles of other Ukrainian institutions.¹⁰ Despite the clear unpopu­larity of the term in Ukraine, it continues to be used in Russia on both the popular and scholarly levels. The Moscow historian Gennadii Sanin stated in his previously mentioned BBC interview that he liked the term and was in favour of using it, since, in his opinion, it indicated the vol­untary nature of the Russo-Ukrainian alliance.¹¹

Qualified support for the term was also expressed by another Rus­sian historian, an expert on the history of Russian foreign policy of the mid-seventeenth century, Lev Zaborovsky. In his presentation at a con­ference of Russian and Ukrainian historians held in Moscow in May 1996, he stated that Russian historians had fewer reasons than their Ukrainian colleagues to revise their earlier approaches to the history of the Pereiaslav Agreement. He claimed that Soviet political control had been much stronger in Ukraine than in Moscow, and that he personally had never even read the notorious 1954 Theses.¹² Zaborovsky also said that he had always considered the term 'reunification' artificial and preferred not to use it in his writings. Nevertheless, in the last few years he had begun to rethink the matter, as new historical sources recently discovered by him and his colleagues revealed that if not the term itself, then its ideological significance was quite popular at the time of the Pereiaslav Council. According to Zaborovsky, this was reflected in statements by residents of the Cossack state recorded by Muscovite diplomats who visited Ukraine at the time. Zaborovsky suggested maintaining the term 'reunification' but freeing it from the ideological baggage of the past.¹³

What accounts for the continuing attractiveness of the term 'reunifi­cation,' which represents a set of views clearly misused by Soviet histo­riography, in the eyes of Russian historians? One possible explanation of ongoing Russian attempts to retain this part of the Soviet heritage is to be found in the fact that 'reunification' was not a Soviet invention. The term was borrowed from the works of nineteenth-century histori­ans, including the Ukrainian author Panteleimon Kulish, who wrote about the 'reunification of Rus'.' In the 1950s, the 'reunification of Rus'' was replaced with the concept of the 'reunification of Ukraine with Russia,' which combined some elements of the old pre-Soviet Russian nationalism with Soviet-era recognition of the existence of a separate Ukrainian nation.

It is hardly surprising that the politically motivated approaches to the Khmelnytsky revolt and the history of the Pereiaslav Agreement influ­encing the writings of Russian specialists on the seventeenth century were most articulately expressed in the works of those who wrote on policy issues. Some striking views on the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations, apparently shared by the Russian foreign-policy establish­ment, were presented by Sergei Samuilov, the head of a department of the Russian Academy's Institute of the USA and Canada. Writing in the Russian foreign-policy journal SShA: ekonomika, politika, ideologiia, he attacked the position taken by John Mroz and Oleksandr Pavliuk in their article on Ukrainian foreign policy that appeared in Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1996. Samuilov set himself the primary task of prov­ing that the Ukrainians were not a fully developed people and that Ukraine was never an independent state; hence it was never 'forcefully incorporated by imperial Moscow.' The more practical goal of his article was to challenge mistaken stereotypes of Ukraine and its history that allegedly enjoyed broad currency in the United States, as well as to warn 'interested circles' in the United States against possible errors in American foreign policy.¹⁴

In dealing with the history of Ukrainian statehood, Samuilov could not avoid a discussion of the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the meaning and consequences of the Pereiaslav Agreement. Seeking to revisit and revise the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations, Samuilov did not con­ceal his main source of ideological inspiration. He found it in the works of a well-known nineteenth-century Ukrainian historian and writer, Mykola (Nikolai) Kostomarov,¹⁵ who, despite his important contribu­tion to modern Ukrainian historiography, generally treated Ukrainians and Russians as parts of one Rus' nation. Not surprisingly, Samuilov praises Kostomarov highly as a ‘true scholar,' counterposing him to the founder of Ukrainian national historiography, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, whom Samuilov accuses of every conceivable deadly sin, including alleged racism.¹⁶ Inspired by Kostomarov's concept of the age-old struggle between Poland and Rus', as well as by his Orthodox religious sympathies, Samuilov writes that the Khmelnytsky revolt was moti­vated by Ukraine's desire to ‘save and protect itself as a Russian Slavic Orthodox ethnos from forcible Polish Catholic assimilation.'¹⁷

Samuilov, in fact, rejects the Soviet-era image of Khmelnytsky as a leader who allegedly dreamt of 'reunification' with Russia. Instead, he claims that Khmelnytsky conducted a pro-Polish foreign and domestic policy but was forced to conclude an agreement with the tsar owing to pressure from the ‘popular masses.' In his attempt to undermine the the­sis of Ukraine's forcible incorporation into the Russian state, Samuilov questions the independent status of Khmelnytsky's polity on the eve of Pereiaslav and claims that Ukraine joined the Russian state voluntarily. Seeking to counter the Ukrainian foreign-policy establishment's Euro­pean option and Ukrainian intellectuals' belief in the European character of their culture, Samuilov claims that Ukrainians have much more in common with Russians than with Poles, which allegedly explains why they emigrated in significant numbers not to the Catholic West but to Orthodox Russia during the Khmelnytsky Uprising. In bizarre fashion, Samuilov even finds an argument against Ukraine's claim to be a Euro­pean nation in the well-known fact that Khmelnytsky often fought the Poles in alliance with the Crimean Tatars.¹⁸ In Samuilov's opinion, 'the Little Russians (Ukrainians) were saved by Orthodox Russia, as a Rus­sian, Slavic, and Orthodox ethnos, from the threat of complete assimila­tion according to the Polish Catholic model.'¹⁹

Samuilov's views on the causes and outcome of the Khmelnytsky revolt not only reflect the influence of Kostomarov's ideas about the importance of nationality and religion in the forging of the Russo- Ukrainian alliance but also evince clear parallels with the Theses of 1954. According to the Theses, 'for the Ukrainian people, the historic importance of the Pereiaslav Council's decision 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.'²⁰ One of the major differences between the Theses and Samuilov's approach to the Pereiaslav Agreement lies in the fact that, unlike his communist forerunners, Samuilov rejects the existence of a separate Ukrainian nation and revives the nineteenth­century imperial paradigm, which treated Ukrainians as a subdivision of the Russian nation. The conclusion that Samuilov draws from his historical excursus is quite simple: Ukraine belongs to 'all-Russian culture and Slavic Orthodox civilization' and is destined to exist in 'close union with Russia.'²¹

The apparent return of many Russian authors and politicians to the pre-Soviet concept of the existence of one Russian nation, which, in their opinion, has been unjustifiably divided by post-Soviet borders but will be reunited in the future, should be seen as one of the condi­tions contributing to the survival of 'reunification' terminology in post­Soviet Russia. By reviving ideas of pre-revolutionary authors on the unity of the 'all-Russian' nation and Orthodox Slavic solidarity, and by keeping the term 'reunification' alive, the Russian academic and for­eign-policy elite has been leaving the door open to new 'reunifications' in the future.

What are the main features of post-Soviet Ukrainian writing on the history of the Khmelnytsky Uprising? In independent Ukraine, the approach of the 1954 Theses to the history of the Khmelnytsky revolt was promptly rejected. The development of a new terminology and a new interpretation of the uprising has not, however, proved an easy task.²² One might assume that the easiest way for post-Soviet Ukrai­nian historiography to deal with these problems would be to go back to the pre-Soviet Ukrainian historiographic tradition or to borrow from diaspora writings on the topic, as Ukrainian historians have often done since 1991.

Indeed, in the case of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, post-Soviet Ukrai­nian historians have actively borrowed from the diaspora writings of adherents of the 'statist school' in Ukrainian historiography, often adopting the statist approach to the history of the uprising and the activities of its leader. According to that paradigm, the main outcome of the uprising was the formation of the Cossack Ukrainian state, and Khmelnytsky's principal accomplishment was the successful realiza­tion of the state-building project. The elements of the statist approach to the history of the uprising made their way to Ukraine in the late 1980s and became the dominant factor in historical and political discourse after Ukraine acquired its independence in 1991. In the autumn of 1995, the Ukrainian government sponsored official celebrations of the four- hundredth anniversary of Khmelnytsky's birth. Both the president of Ukraine and the head of its parliament took part in these celebrations, which were held in Khmelnytsky's capital, the town of Chyhyryn. In official pronouncements and articles published on the occasion, Khmel­nytsky was praised first and foremost as a state builder, the founder of early modern Ukrainian statehood.

Ukrainian views on the history of the Khmelnytsky Uprising at the turn of the twenty-first century present a curious combination of pre­Soviet, Soviet-era, and diaspora approaches to the history of that important era in Ukrainian history in general, and Cossack history in particular. While actively borrowing from diaspora writings, post­Soviet Ukrainian historians have also shown their dissatisfaction with some of the terms and concepts employed by the statists. This applies particularly to the official name given to the Khmelnytsky Uprising. The traditional term used in Ukrainian populist and statist historiogra­phy alike was 'KhmePnychchyna,' which diaspora authors translated into English as 'Khmelnytsky Uprising' or 'Khmelnytsky Revolt.'

For a number of reasons, the term 'KhmePnychchyna' was not revived in Ukrainian historiography after 1991. According to Yurii Mytsyk, one of the leading Ukrainian specialists on the period, 'Khmel'nychchyna' was politically unacceptable to the new Ukrainian historiography because of the negative connotation attached in Soviet-era discourse to the name of any movement or event derived from the surname of its leader. The communist authorities often used labels derived from the names of Ukrainian political leaders to discredit movements led by them. This was the case, for example, with 'Petliurivshchyna,' the term used to define the Ukrainian state of 1919-20 led by Symon Petliura, and 'Banderivshchyna,' the term applied to the Ukrainian Second World War-era insurgency associated with the name of the leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, Stepan Bandera. Another possible reason for the rejection of the term 'Khmelnychchyna' is the obvious reluctance of post-Soviet historians to use a conceptually neu­tral term to designate a revolt that played such a crucial role in Ukrai­nian history. Post-Soviet historians have clearly been looking for a term and chronological frame of reference that would reflect their new, inde­pendence-minded view of the Ukrainian past.²³

There is little doubt that the search of Ukrainian historians for a con­ceptually loaded and politically acceptable term for the Khmelnytsky Uprising should be viewed as a legacy of the old Soviet historiography. In the Soviet tradition, the discussion of terminological issues pertain­ing to the politically correct labelling of the Khmelnytsky Uprising can be traced back to the late 1920s, when the school of Ukrainian Marxist historians led by Matvii Yavorsky was defeated by the leader of Rus­sian Marxist historiography, Mikhail Pokrovsky, and his followers. At that time, at least three competing views on the name to be given to the Khmelnytsky Uprising were under discussion: Yavorsky defended the term 'Cossack revolution,' his student Volodymyr Sukhyno- Khomenko defined the uprising as a bourgeois and national revolu­tion, and Karpenko, another participant in the discussion, defended Pokrovsky's definition of the uprising as a peasant war. In the long run, it was Yavorsky and Sukhyno-Khomenko who lost the argument and Karpenko who won it,²⁴ for in the 1930s Soviet historians were forced to adopt the view according to which the peasants, supported by the urban toiling masses, were the 'hegemon' of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. This approach to the history of the uprising remained domi­nant in Soviet writing on the subject until the late 1980s. As the Theses had it, 'The chief and decisive force in this war was the peasantry, which was fighting both social oppression by the Polish and Ukrainian feudal landlords and alien subjugation.'²⁵

There are other parallels as well between the writings of post-Soviet Ukrainian historians and the ideas developed by their predecessors during the Soviet period. Consciously or not, some post-Soviet Ukrai­nian historians echo the official dogma of 1930s Soviet historiography, which considered the acceptance of the Russian protectorate a 'lesser evil' for Ukraine than the incorporation of the Cossack state into Poland or the Ottoman Empire. It was in this vein that Academician Petro Tolochko, one of the politically most active Ukrainian historians, stated in 1991 that there was no need to make a new hero of Ivan Mazepa so as to put him in the place traditionally occupied in Ukrai­nian historical consciousness by Bohdan Khmelnytsky. According to Tolochko, Khmelnytsky's contribution to the Ukrainian national renaissance was much more significant than Mazepa's. He also stated that, given the aggressive policy adopted against Ukraine in the mid­seventeenth century by Poland, Turkey, and the Crimean Khanate, and taking into account the allegedly unfavourable conditions of a possible Swedish protectorate, Khmelnytsky's choice at Pereiaslav was 'the only correct decision, that of union with Russia, with which we shared not only a common history but also one Orthodox faith.'²⁶

To a degree, variants of the same idea can be found in the writings of Tolochko's younger colleague, the director of the Institute of Ukrainian History of the National Academy of Sciences and a former vice-premier responsible for humanitarian issues, Valerii Smolii. In his scholarly writings Smolii declines to evaluate Pereiaslav as a mistake on Khmel­nytsky's part. He maintains that Khmelnytsky, faced with a choice between the Ottomans and Russia, decided on the Muscovite alterna­tive, taking the religious factor into account. His acceptance of the Mus­covite protectorate was, in Smolii's opinion, a step conceived 'in the process of painful reflection on the fate of Ukraine and its future.'²⁷ Smolii does not treat the Pereiaslav Agreement as one that subordi­nated Ukraine to Russia, thereby downplaying the controversy over the wisdom of the choice made by the hetman in Pereiaslav.²⁸

Probably the single most influential factor in post-Soviet Ukrainian historical writing on the Khmelnytsky Uprising is the impact of the ideas formulated back in the mid-1960s by the then dissident Ukrai­nian historian and later patriarch of Ukrainian national historiography, Mykhailo Braichevsky. He was the first in Soviet Ukraine to challenge the official paradigm of 1954. In the mid-1960s Braichevsky wrote an essay arguing in favour of replacing the politically loaded term 'reuni­fication' with a more neutral one, 'incorporation.' Braichevsky also advocated the restoration of the class-based approach to Ukrainian his­tory and attacked the legacy of Stalinism and Great Russian chauvin­ism in historical scholarship. The essay was never published in Ukraine but first found its way into samizdat and then was smuggled to the West, where in the early 1970s it appeared in print in Ukrainian and English. The author, meanwhile, was forced by the authorities to issue a statement protesting the publication of his work abroad and subsequently dismissed from his position at the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences.²⁹

In his pamphlet Braichevsky undertook a generally successful attempt to deconstruct the pan-Russian 'reunification' myth by means of a class-based methodology. He claimed that the term 'reunification' had helped establish the idea of the superiority of the Russians to other peoples of the USSR, idealized the Russian autocracy, and neglected the positive aspects of the Ukrainian people's liberation struggle. While deconstructing the pan-Russian myth, Braichevsky attempted to develop a Ukrainian national paradigm of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, making use of the class-friendly national-liberation mythology. Brai- chevsky suggested replacing the officially approved definition of the Khmelnytsky Uprising as the 'Ukrainian people's war of liberation' with a new one, 'war of national liberation.' He was not alone among Soviet Ukrainian historians in suggesting this change. About the same time as Braichevsky wrote his pamphlet, some of his colleagues, including the subsequently persecuted historian of Ukrainian Cossack- dom Olena Apanovych, attempted to apply this politically attractive term to early modern Ukrainian history, thereby stressing the priority of the national factor in the war over the officially favoured social ones.³⁰ The use of the term 'war of national liberation' had clear positive connotations in the USSR of the mid-1960s, when national-liberation movements in the Third World were viewed as a positive phenomenon by Soviet ideologists.

The ideas expressed by Braichevsky in the 1960s managed to influ­ence a relatively large number of Ukrainian historians in the 1970s and 1980s and naturally found their way into the writings of historians in independent Ukraine. This was the case not only with Braichevsky's use of 'national-liberation' terminology but also with his employment of a class-based method to deconstruct the pan-Russian paradigm of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. It was with the aid of this method that in the late 1980s a historian from Kamianets-Podilskyi, Valerii Stepankov, challenged the Soviet-era chronology of the Khmelnytsky revolt, declining to accept the Pereiaslav Agreement as the end of the uprising. In the course of his study of peasant revolts of the mid-seventeenth century, Stepankov became convinced that the peasant war that began in 1648 did not end after the Pereiaslav Agreement but continued into the 1670s. He initially suggested the later terminus of the war on the basis of a class-oriented approach but later modified his position and made an argument grounded in the Ukrainian statist paradigm to sup­port his original view. He claimed that the resignation of Hetman Petro Doroshenko in 1676 signalled the failure of Cossack attempts to reunite the Ukrainian lands into a single state and should be seen as marking the end of the period that began with the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 1648.

The new term suggested by Stepankov to define the period of Ukrai­nian history between 1648 and 1676 was 'Ukrainian national revolution.' This term, as well as Stepankov's periodization of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, gained considerable notice in Ukraine, partly because he often published his works in co-authorship with Academician Valerii Smolii. Stepankov's idea of a Ukrainian national revolution also found its way into the seventh volume of the multi-volume series 'Ukraine through the Centuries,' written by Stepankov and Smolii and entitled The Ukrainian National Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (1646-1676).³¹ In adopting the term 'revolution,' Stepankov actually outdid Braichevsky in his application of the class-based approach and returned to the Ukrainian historiographic tradition of the post-revolutionary decade, when that term was accepted and used both by representatives of the old populist school, led by Mykhailo Hrushevsky, and by some practitioners of Ukrainian Marxist historiography, including Volodymyr Sukhyno- Khomenko.³²

Not surprisingly, in the new post-Soviet Ukraine, Stepankov's reli­ance on the 'revolutionary' terminology closely associated with the old regime met with reservations. Stepankov's colleague Yurii Mytsyk rebelled against the use of the term 'revolution,' declining to use termi­nology implying the primacy of the social factor in the uprising. Chal­lenging Stepankov's choice of 1676 as the terminal date of the revolution, Mytsyk took a statist approach to the problem. He argued that the Cossack state did not disappear with Doroshenko's resigna­tion but continued to exist in Right-Bank Ukraine until the 1720s, while in Russian-ruled Left-Bank Ukraine it survived even longer, until the second half of the eighteenth century. Instead, Mytsyk suggested that the Hadiach Agreement of 1658 between Poland and the Cossacks be taken to mark the end of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. In Mytsyk's opin­ion, that agreement officially ended the Polish-Ukrainian conflict that began in 1648 and terminated the short-lived period of Ukrainian inde­pendence.³³ Following in the footsteps of Braichevsky and Soviet Ukrainian historiography of the 1960s, Mytsyk defined the period between 1648 and 1658 as a 'war of national liberation.'

Mytsyk's revival of this term reflects the trend that became dominant in post-Soviet Ukrainian historiography.³⁴ Nevertheless, Ukrainian his­torians are far from unanimous on this point, with Stepankov and occa­sionally his co-author Smolii continuing to use the term 'revolution.' Both terms and chronological divisions are used concurrently. For example, Stepankov has published a paper on the Ukrainian national revolution in a collection of articles that not only bears the title 'The National-Liberation War of the Ukrainian People of the Mid­Seventeenth Century' but also includes an article by his colleague Valerii Smolii entitled 'The National-Liberation War in the Context of Ukrainian Nation-Building.' In that article, contrary to all of Stepankov's argu­ments and even to some of his own writings, Smolii defined a short period at the beginning of the uprising, between January and May 1648, as a national revolution.³⁵

Despite obvious sloppiness in the use of historical terminology, the disagreements among Ukrainian historians on the character and chro­nology of the Khmelnytsky revolt point to a number of major changes occurring in post-Soviet Ukrainian historiography. First of all, they indi­cate the growing maturity of the historical profession, which is gradu­ally overcoming the Soviet heritage of ideological uniformity. They also reveal not only differences among historians in treating the course of the revolt and the Pereiaslav Agreement but also signs of growing con­sensus on a number of important issues pertaining to the problem. Quite obviously, most Ukrainian historians reject the view that the Pere- iaslav Agreement was the paramount event of the war and accept the use of the term 'national' in their definition of it. The latter point may serve as an indication of an important development that was under way in Ukrainian historical discourse in the 1990s. In the second half of that decade, Ukrainian scholars began to pay special attention to the role of the national factor in the history of the Khmelnytsky revolt and other Cossack uprisings of the period. If in the late 1980s and early 1990s Ukrainian historians mainly emphasized the state-building ele­ment of Khmelnytsky's policies,³⁶ in the late 1990s significantly more effort went into portraying Khmelnytsky as a nation builder.

In Valerii Smolii's article 'The National-Liberation War in the Context of Ukrainian Nation-Building,' which appeared in 1998, when Smolii was serving as vice-premier, he made the following statement in that regard: 'Today, hardly anyone needs to be convinced that the liberation epic of the mid-seventeenth century began a new epoch in the people's struggle for independence. Its main goal was the creation of an inde­pendent national state that would include all Ukrainian ethnic territo- ries.'³⁷ Smolii, in fact, was not only summarizing previous debates in Ukrainian historiography on the history of the Khmelnytsky revolt but also giving his official blessing to the 'nationalizing' approach to the history of the uprising. As the Russian historian Lev Zaborovsky noted with respect to the nationally oriented Ukrainian interpretation of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, it has acquired clear characteristics of an official dogma and become a standard definition of the goals of the Khmel­nytsky Uprising in textbooks and popular writings alike.³⁸ Interestingly enough, some Russian scholars, including Zaborovsky himself, have accepted the term 'war of national liberation,' popularized by Ukrai­nian historians. Applied to the Khmelnytsky Uprising in order to denote a war for the liberation of the East Slavic population from the Polish yoke, this term apparently does not contradict the paradigm of the reunification of Rus'.

Ukrainian and Russian historians dealing with the Pereiaslav Agree­ment have focused mainly on issues of terminology and chronology. Paradoxically, the legal nature of the Pereiaslav Agreement and the sub­sequent Muscovite-Cossack agreement concluded in Moscow in March 1654 has received little if any recent attention in either Russia or Ukraine. While Russian and Ukrainian historians of the early decades of the twentieth century could hardly agree whether the Pereiaslav Agreement constituted a protectorate, suzerainty, military alliance, per­sonal union, real union, or complete subordination, post-Soviet histori­ans have preferred to leave this topic alone. In Russia, Zaborovsky declared the whole discussion of the issue a 'scholarly pathology,' while other historians, such as Sanin, agreed with the Ukrainian definition of the Ukrainian-Russian agreement of 1654 as a kind of confederation.³⁹ Even though this definition is clearly a historical anachronism that does not correspond to the realities of the 1654 treaty, it is considered politi­cally expedient by Ukrainian historians, as it satisfies their desire to underline the de facto independence or semi-independent status of the Hetmanate within the Muscovite state in Khmelnytsky's day.⁴⁰

The debates over the legacy of the Pereiaslav Agreement in Russian and Ukrainian historiography show that both Russian and Ukrainian historians are heavily dependent on approaches to the history of Russo-Ukrainian relations developed by their predecessors. No partic­ipant in this debate has yet managed to reject the heritage of Soviet his­toriography in its entirety. On the contrary, by making selective use of the Soviet heritage and 'recycling' ideas associated with different stages of development of Soviet historiography, both sides have attempted to legitimize and strengthen their respective arguments in the course of the discussion. If Ukrainian authors build upon the inter­nationalist and class-based approach of Soviet historiography in order to deconstruct the Russian nationalist and imperial paradigm of Ukrai­nian history, Russian authors develop those aspects of Soviet historiog­raphy that gained prominence in the last years of Stalin's rule and were influenced by prerevolutionary Russian historiography.

No less selective has been the use by both Russian and Ukrainian his­torians of the heritage of non-Soviet historiography. While post-Soviet Ukrainian authors readily adopt many concepts produced by the 'stat­ist' school of Ukrainian historiography, which perforce developed for most of the twentieth century beyond the borders of Soviet Ukraine, Russian authors go back to the writings of the prerevolutionary impe­rial historians. In particular, they rely on the intellectual heritage of some nineteenth-century Ukrainian writers and scholars who regarded

Ukraine and its history as parts of a larger all-Russian national and his­torical tradition. The changing assessments of the historical legacy of Pereiaslav advanced by post-Soviet Russian and Ukrainian historians reflect and coincide with major changes in the development of national identities and nation-building projects in both countries.

It may be said that in Ukraine official historiographic discourse has followed the major trends of state-sponsored ideology, gradually strengthening state-building and nation-building elements of the national historical narrative. It became quite clear in 2002, when Presi­dent Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine, unpopular both at home and abroad, decided to make a gesture of good will towards one of his major sup­porters in the international arena, President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Kuchma signed a decree on plans for the official commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Council. The Kremlin liked the idea, and in January 2004 a delegation headed by Putin descended on Kyiv to take part in celebrations marking the anniversary of the agree­ment and the beginning of the Year of Russia in Ukraine. The celebra­tions, however, had to be scaled down because of the controversy that the decree provoked in Ukrainian society. Kuchma's critics accused him of reviving the tradition of celebrating anniversaries of the 'reuni­fication of Ukraine and Russia' and selling out Ukraine's national interests to its northern neighbour. A significant portion of the Ukrai­nian intellectual and political elite rebelled against the spirit, if not the letter, of the decree, and the authorities were obliged to listen. A Rus­sian television crew sent to Kyiv to cover Putin's participation in the Pereiaslav celebrations had to report back that 'nothing in the streets of Kiev reminds one either of the 350th anniversary of the Pereiaslav Council, which is described by historians as a moment of union of the two countries, or about the Year of Russia in Ukraine, or about the Rus­sian president's forthcoming visit.' 'Near the monument to Bohdan Khmelnytsky,' stated the RenTV news anchor, 'an old man approached us to ask when picketing in protest against Putin's visit would start.'⁴¹

The failed celebration of the Pereiaslav Agreement in 2004 demon­strated that even Ukraine's supreme political authorities have not managed to turn back the clock on the major changes that have occurred in Ukrainian historiography and society since independence. In the post-independence years, one of the main characteristics of the Ukrainian nation-building project has been the restoration and rein­vention of national tradition, orienting the nation's culture towards the West and stressing its distinctiveness from Russian culture and tradition. In Russia, on the contrary, the nation-building project has recently taken on a clear anti-Western orientation, with a strong emphasis on the idea of the Slavic and Orthodox unity of the Rus­sians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. So far, it is clear that Ukraine has been the odd man out of this projected civilizational triangle. But it is equally obvious that the ghosts of Pereiaslav, unleashed by the col­lapse of communist ideology and the advance of Pan-Russianism, have become an ever more corporeal presence in contemporary Rus­sian and Ukrainian political and cultural discourse.

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