The Pereiaslav Agreement
In the final days of 1653, a Muscovite embassy, led by the boyar Vasilii Buturlin, met with the hetman, colonels, and general staff of the Zaporozhian Host in the town of Pereiaslav, near Kiev.
On 18 January 1654, Khmelnytsky called a meeting of the Cossack elite and the final decision was taken to accept the tsar’s overlordship of Ukraine. On that day, drummers summoned the populace to the town square where the hetman spoke about Ukraine’s need for an overlord, presented the four potential candidates for such a position -the Polish king, the Tatar khan, the Ottoman sultan, and the Muscovite tsar -and declared that the Orthodox tsar was best suited for the role. Pleased that the choice had fallen on an Orthodox ruler, the crowd responded favorably to the hetman’s speech. Buturlin, Khmelnytsky, and the assembled Cossack dignitaries then proceeded to the town church to seal the decision with a mutual oath.At this point, an unexpected development created a tense impasse. Under the influence of Polish practice, Khmelnytsky expected the oath to be bilateral, with the Ukrainians swearing loyalty to the tsar and the latter promising to protect them from the Poles and to respect their rights and privileges. But Buturlin refused to swear in the name of his monarch, arguing that the tsar, unlike the Polish king, was an absolute ruler and that it was below his dignity to take an oath to his subjects. Upset by Buturlin’s refusal, Khmelnytsky stalked out of the church and threatened to cancel the entire agreement. Nonetheless, Buturlin steadfastly held his ground. Finally, Khmelnytsky and his colleagues, fearful of losing the tsar’s aid because of what appeared to be a mere formality, glumly agreed to take a unilateral oath of loyalty to the tsar.
Shortly thereafter, Muscovite officials were sent to 117 Ukrainian towns, and 127,000 people took a similar oath of loyalty to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and his successors.
The significance of the dramatic incident at the Pereiaslav church was that it highlighted the different political values and assumptions with which both parties had entered into the agreement. Yet, these differences notwithstanding, the Pereiaslav Agreement was concluded and it marked a turning point in the history of Ukraine, Russia, and all of Eastern Europe. Previously isolated and backward, Muscovy now took a giant step toward becoming a great power. And, for better or for worse, the fate of Ukraine became inextricably linked with that of Russia.Because of the conflicts that later developed between Russians and Ukrainians, the interpretation of the treaty that brought their two countries together has been the subject of frequent debate among scholars. The issue is complicated by the fact that the original documents were lost and only inaccurate copies and translations have survived. Moreover, the Russian archivist Petr Shafranov has argued that even these copies were falsified by the tsar’s scribes. In general, five major interpretations of the Pereiaslav Agreement have been proposed. (1) According to the Russian legal historian Vasilii Sergeevich (d. 1910), the 1654 agreement was a personal union between Muscovy and Ukraine, whereby the two parties shared the same sovereign but retained separate governments. (2) Another specialist in Russian law, Nikolai Diakonov (d. 1919), argued that by accepting “personal subjugation” to the tsar, the Ukrainians unconditionally agreed to the incorporation of their land into the Muscovite state and the agreement was therefore a real union.(3) Historians, such as the Russian Venedikt Miakotin and the Ukrainian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, believed that the Pereiaslav Agreement was a form of vassalage in which the more powerful party (the tsar) agreed to protect the weaker party (the Ukrainians) on condition that he not interfere in their internal affairs and that the Ukrainians provide him with tribute, military assistance, as well as other considerations.
(4) Another Ukrainian historian, Viacheslav Lypynsky, proposed that the 1654 agreement was nothing more than a temporary military alliance between Moscow and the Ukrainians.5The fifth interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement belongs in a class by itself. In 1954, during the elaborate celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the Ukrainian-Russian union in the USSR, it was announced – not by scholars but by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – that the Pereiaslav Agreement was the natural culmination of the age-old desire of Ukrainians and Russians to be united and that the union of the two peoples had been the prime goal of the 1648 uprising. In the official Soviet interpretation, Khmelnytsky’s greatness lay in the fact that he understood that “The salvation of the Ukrainian people lay only in unity with the great Russian people.”6 Although at least one Soviet scholar – Mykhailo Braichevsky – challenged this view in the mid 1960s (with catastrophic consequences for his career), adherence to the Party’s interpretation of the agreement remains mandatory for all Soviet scholars.7