Together and Apart in Pereiaslav
What about ethnic motives for the “reunification”? Were they entirely absent from Cossack negotiations with the tsar? Although Khmelnytsky defined certain elements of the uprising in ethnic terms in his letters to Muscovy, it appears that the hetman and his scribes never made the seemingly natural link between the two Rus' nations.
In a letter to the voevoda Semen Bolkhovsky in the summer of 1648, Khmelnytsky complained about the persecution of “our Rus' Orthodox Christians,” but in his attempt to involve the tsar in the Cossack-Polish conflict he made no use of the theme of ethnic affinity between the two parts of Rus'; instead, he invited the tsar to seek the Polish throne, which was vacant at the time.24That did not change in Khmelnytsky’s subsequent letters to Moscow.25 What changed was the way in which he referred to his homeland. If at first he called it Rus' (the name he also used in his letters to the Polish king), from the spring of 1653 he began to refer to it as Little Rus', thereby distinguishing between Ruthenia and Muscovy. In January 1654 he even introduced a corresponding change into the tsar’s official title, addressing him not as “sovereign of all Rus'” but as “sovereign of Great and Little Rus'.”26 The tsar accepted this change in his title.27 The beginning of the new war with the Commonwealth clearly freed him from the Muscovite envoys’ claim of 1634 that the Polish Little Rus' had nothing to do with the tsar’s “all Rus'.” Now the tsar claimed Little Rus' as well, and his title was changed accordingly to avoid the ambiguity of 1634.
In accepting the formula “Great and Little Rus',” did the tsar and his Muscovite entourage also accept the ethnic affinity of the two Ruses as an important element in their conceptualization of events? Available sources indicate that this is extremely unlikely.
The tsar’s ideologists continued to think not just primarily but almost exclusively in dynastic terms. They saw the Cossack territories as just another part of the tsar’s patrimony. In December 1653, the tsar’s chancellery addressed the voevodas dispatched to Kyiv as “boyars and voevodas of the patrimony of his tsarist majesty, the Grand Principality of Kyiv.” In April 1654, Aleksei Mikhailovich referred to Kyiv as his patrimony in a letter to Bohdan Khmelnytsky himself. His full title now included references to the principalities of Kyiv and Chernihiv.28 We do not know how Khmelnytsky reacted to these manifestations of the tsar’s patrimonial thinking. Nor are we certain of the meaning with which the hetman himself invested the terms Little and Great Rus', for even after Pereiaslav he occasionally referred to his homeland as Rus' (Rosiia) when writing to the tsar.29A further complication is that most of Khmelnytsky’s letters to Moscow are not available in the original but only in Muscovite translations “from the Belarusian.” What strikes one about those translations is that they contain no references to the “Rus' nation,” whose rights Khmelnytsky was eager to defend in his Polish-language letters to the king. We know that Ruthenian authors of the period freely used the term “nation” (narod), which had the same meaning in Ruthenian as in Polish. Did Khmelnytsky consciously avoid such references in his letters to Muscovy, replacing them with such formulae as “Rus' Orthodox Christians” or “the whole Rus' Orthodox community of Little Rus',” which were contrary to Ukrainian practice at the time?30 Or was the term lost in translation? Both possibilities suggest a breakdown of communication between the two parties.
Thus a nation-based dialogue was hardly possible, not least because of the lack of an appropriate vocabulary on the Muscovite side. If there was a reunion in Pereiaslav, it was an Orthodox one, declared but not yet implemented in numerous religious services, speeches, and pronouncements.
In fact, it was not even a reunion (that did not happen in institutional, liturgical or other terms until the last decade of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth) but an avowal of reconciliation. After the tumultuous struggle against the Union in the Kyiv metropolitanate and the shock of the Time of Troubles in Muscovy, the two sides had agreed to reestablish relations. The churchmen thereby provided the political elites with the common language required to begin a dialogue between the two nations, which by now were very different. It appears that lack of understanding in that regard was not the only disconnection between the two sides, as events in Pereiaslav demonstrated.A major crisis was provoked by Buturlin’s refusal to swear in the name of the tsar to the preservation of Cossack freedoms and liberties. Buturlin did his best to assure the Cossack officers that the tsar would not only preserve but actually increase their liberties, even though he refused to swear an oath in the name of his sovereign. Khmelnytsky left the envoy in church to await the results of his negotiations with the colonels. When it was conveyed to Buturlin that the Polish kings swore oaths to their subjects, the boyar stood his ground. He told his interlocutors that he represented the Orthodox tsar and autocrat, while the Polish king was neither; hence the two monarchs could not be compared.31
Khmelnytsky and the colonels were eventually obliged to consent. The Cossacks swore allegiance to the tsar without extracting an oath from the representative of their new sovereign. This was unprecedented in Cossack practice. Although the Polish king had indeed refused to sign agreements with them and recognize them as equals in negotiations, Polish commissioners took an oath in the name of the Commonwealth on whatever agreement they reached with the Cossacks, as was the case at Bila Tserkva in the autumn of 1651. The Cossacks would not swear their own oath otherwise.
At Pereiaslav, they did. It was their introduction to the world of Muscovite politics.Buturlin did not lie: tsars indeed never swore oaths to their subjects. At Pereiaslav the tsar’s representative applied to his sovereign’s new subjects the rules of steppe diplomacy—a set of principles inherited by Muscovy from the Golden Horde and practiced with regard to its eastern neighbors and vassals. As Andreas Kappeler has shown, those principles entailed “a loose protectorate, which was concluded by means of an oath, by installing a loyal ruler. From the Russian point of view that established a client status to which it could always refer in the future, whereas the other side saw it at the most as a personal and temporary act of submission.”32
Indeed, if the Cossack elite viewed the oath and service to the tsar as conditional (“voluntary” ∖povol'ne~∖, in their language) subordination to the ruler, with subsequent relations depending on the willingness of each party to keep its side of the bargain, Muscovite diplomacy regarded the oath as proof of eternal subjection. After all, the text of the standard oath included the following words: “And not to leave the Muscovite tsardom in treasonable fashion, and not to engage in double-dealing or treason.”33 Subsequent events showed quite conclusively that neither side in the Pereiaslav negotiations fully understood what it was getting into.