The Orthodox Alliance
A new stage in relations between Kyiv and Moscow began in the summer of 1648 at the initiative of the Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky when he asked Muscovy to join forces with the Cossacks in the war against the Commonwealth.
The situation of 1632 was repeating itself, with the difference that it was now the Cossacks, not the tsar, who were eager to obtain support. After the defeat of 1634, Muscovy was more than cautious. Besides, the specter of a new Cossack-led uprising that might spread to Muscovy and provoke a new Time of Troubles discouraged the Muscovites from becoming openly involved in the conflict. They adopted a compromise tactic: those of the Cossacks and rebels who wanted to cross the border were welcomed in Muscovy (on one occasion, Cossack troops were even allowed to launch a surprise attack on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from Muscovite territory), but the tsar would not start a new war with the Commonwealth.Not until 1651 was Muscovy finally prepared to change its policy of noninterference in Commonwealth affairs. Preparations were even made to convene an Assembly of the Land to sanction the war, but the Commonwealth army’s defeat of the Cossacks at Berestechko put an end to the plan. By 1653, unable to obtain military assistance from the Ottomans and losing the cooperation of the khan, Khmelnytsky demanded that the Muscovite rulers finally make up their mind. That autumn, a special convocation of the Assembly of the Land decided to take Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks “with their towns” (meaning the territory of the Hetmanate) under the tsar’s “high hand.” An embassy led by the boyar Vasilii Buturlin was sent to Ukraine to administer an oath to the Cossack leadership and the rank-and-file Cossacks. In January 1654 the embassy met with Khmelnytsky in the town of Pereiaslav. After brief negotiations that were not very satisfactory to the Cossack side, a council was convened to formally approve Cossack submission to the tsar.
Historians still differ on what the Pereiaslav Agreement amounted to. Was it indeed an agreement? After all, no document was signed in Pereiaslav, and the tsar’s approval of the conditions of submission was given much later in Moscow. If it was an agreement, was it a personal union, real union, alliance, federation, confederation, vassalage, protectorate, or outright incorporation? How did that arrangement compare with previous ones, such as the Zboriv Agreement of 1649 with the king, or agreements concluded by Muscovy with previously incorporated territories and peoples?16
Of greatest interest to us is not the legal status of the Pere- iaslav Agreement but the discourse that accompanied its preparation and legitimized its conclusion. If Muscovy’s involvement in the war with the Commonwealth was the main goal of Cossack diplomacy, what ideological arguments did Khmelnytsky and his associates use to convince the tsar to send his troops against Poland-Lithuania? Khmelnytsky’s letters to the tsar and to his courtiers and voevodas provide sufficient information to answer this question. Thiey indicate that, from the very beginning of that correspondence in the summer of 1648, the religious motif had a prominent place.
The tsar emerges from the hetman’s letters as first and foremost an Orthodox Christian ruler duty-bound to assist fellow Orthodox Christians rebelling against Catholic persecution of their church. Khmelnytsky sought to lure the tsar into the conflict by invoking the mirage of a vast Orthodox empire including not only Cossack Ukraine and Polish-Lithuanian Rus' but also the Orthodox Balkans and Greece. All the Orthodox—Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Moldavians, and Wallachians—argued Khmelnytsky in his conversation with Arsenii Sukhanov, a Muscovite monk and one-time secretary of Patriarch Filaret, wanted to be united under the rule of the Muscovite tsar.17
Khmelnytsky also promised the tsar a rebellion in Belarus: as soon as Muscovy dispatched its troops to the front, the hetman intended to send letters to “the Belarusian people (Iiudi) living under Lithuania” in Orsha, Mahiliou, and other towns, setting off a revolt of forces two hundred thousand strong.18 If the tsar refused to take the Zaporozhian Host “under his high hand,” Khmelnytsky threatened to ally himself of necessity with the Muslim Turks and Tatars.
Since the prospective alliance with the “infidels” would be directed first and foremost against Muscovy, such threats prompted the Muscovite authorities to reach a final decision in the autumn of 1653.19How did the Muscovite authorities react to claims of confessional solidarity from people whom they regarded after the Time of Troubles not only as not entirely Orthodox but also as not entirely Christian, and whose representatives continued to be rebaptized once they crossed the Muscovite border? Surprisingly, given what we know about Muscovite religious attitudes of the earlier period, those appeals were heard, understood, and even welcomed. In fact, it was the common Orthodox discourse that created the ideological foundation for the Pereiaslav Agreement. How did that happen?
First of all, even after the Time of Troubles, Orthodoxy remained a potent weapon in the Muscovite foreign-policy arsenal. As noted earlier, Orthodox connections and rhetoric were put to use by Moscow during the Smolensk War of 1632-34 between Muscovy and Poland-Lithuania to attract Zaporozhian Cossacks to the tsar’s side. Secondly, Muscovy entered into the union with Cossack Ukraine with very different views on Orthodoxy than those it had held in the aftermath of the Time of Troubles. Led by the new and energetic Patriarch Nikon, it was trying to open itself to the Orthodox world: the Kyivan Christianity once condemned by Patriarch Filaret could now serve as a much-needed bridge to that world. Nikon, bombarded by letters from Khmelnytsky, was in favor of extending a Muscovite protectorate to the Cossacks. But changes in the Muscovite attitude toward fellow Orthodox outside the tsar’s realm had begun even before Nikon assumed the patriarchal throne in 1652.
An important stimulus for change was the debate over the marriage of Prince Waldemar of the Netherlands to Grand Princess Irina Mikhailovna. The event that ended the career of that admirer of Kyivan learning, Prince Semen Shakhovskoi, also prompted the Muscovite church to reach out to fellow Orthodox abroad.
The debates with Lutheran pastors showed a lack of training, skills, and sophistication on the part of the Muscovite intellectuals. The church was in need of reform, and calls for it were coming not only from the capital but also from the regions. The movement of the Zealots of Piety was gathering strength in the provinces, and the ascension of Aleksei Mikhailovich to the throne in 1645 made its adherents influential at court as well. These new conditions called for a complete overhaul of Orthodoxdoctrine, and the formerly rejected Greek learning was now regarded as the solution to the problem. But where could one find enough polyglots to translate from the Greek? The eyes of the Muscovite reformers turned to the learned monks of Kyiv.
In the autumn of 1648 the tsar wrote to the Orthodox bishop of Chernihiv, asking him to send to Moscow monks who could translate the Bible into Slavonic. In the summer of the following year, with the blessing of Metropolitan Sylvestr Kosov of Kyiv, the learned monks Arsenii Satanovsky (it would be interesting to know what the Muscovites made of his “Satanic” surname) and Iepifanii Slavynetsky arrived in Moscow, becoming the founders of the Ruthenian colony there. (It later counted such luminaries as Simeon Polatsky among its prominent members.) The years 1648-49 also saw the publication or reprinting in Moscow of a number of earlier Kyivan works, including the Orthodox confession of faith (Brief Compendium of Teachings about the Articles of the Faith) composed under the supervision of Petro Mohyla and approved by the council of Eastern patriarchs. The Muscovite Orthodox were clearly trying to catch up with their coreligionists abroad, who were moving quickly toward the confessional reform of their church. They hoped for enlightenment from Greece, but what they got was the beginning of the Ruthenization of Muscovite Orthodoxy.20
The elevation to the patriarchal throne of Metropolitan Nikon, who was close to reformist circles in Moscow, strengthened the hand of those in the Muscovite church who were prepared to look to Kyiv for inspiration.
At the last prewar negotiations with Commonwealth diplomats, the Poles maintained that the Muscovites and the Orthodox Ruthenians were not in fact coreligionists, for the Muscovite faith was as far removed from Ruthenian Orthodoxy as it was from the Union and Roman Catholicism. The Muscovite envoys rejected their argument. They also ignored Polish accusations that Khmelnytsky had abandoned Orthodoxy and accepted Islam. Indeed, they turned the issue of the tsar’s right to protect the liberties of his coreligionists into the main justification for his intervention in Commonwealth affairs.21 When the Assembly of the Land finally approved the decision to enter the war with the Commonwealth in the autumn of 1653, it did so not only to defend the honor of the Muscovite tsar, allegedly besmirched by Commonwealth officials’ errors in citing his title (one of them consisted in calling the tsar Mikhail Filaretovich instead of Mikhail Fedorovich, as the secretaries used the monastic name of the tsar’s father instead of his Christian name), but also “for the sake of the Orthodox Christian faith and the holy churches of God.”22The Muscovite embassy dispatched to Khmelnytsky scarcely missed an opportunity to visit a Ruthenian Orthodox church or take part in a religious procession along its way. It was met not only by Cossacks but also by burghers solemnly led by priests, who welcomed the embassy with long baroque-style speeches and sermons. The conclusion of the Pereiaslav Agreement itself was accompanied by a solemn church service. In his speech at Pereiaslav the tsar’s envoy, Vasilii Buturlin, mentioned not only the Muscovite saints to whose support he attributed the success of the whole enterprise but also SS. Antonii and Feodosii of the Kyivan Cave Monastery and St. Barbara, highly venerated in the Kyiv metropolitanate, whose relics were preserved in one of the Kyivan monasteries.23