Pereyaslavl Rada was the result of wars, intrigue and trade, and not the call of the Cossack soul
In the film by Polish director Jerzy Hoffman, "With Fire and Sword", filmed about fifteen years ago based on the novel of the same name by Henryk Sienkiewicz, Bogdan Stupka, who played Khmelnytsky, addressing the captive Polish nobleman (it happened on the eve of the uprising of 1648), said: "Who is happy here? Tycoons and a handful of gentry! They have land, they have golden freedom, and the rest are cattle for them … Where are the Cossack privileges? They want to make free Cossacks slaves … I want to fight not with the king, but with the gentry and magnates. The king is our father, and the Commonwealth is our mother. If not for the magnates, Poland would have not two, but three fraternal peoples and a thousand faithful sabers against the Turks, Tatars and Moscow …"
Such a long tirade is not an idle fiction of the director, but the most that neither is the truth. It refutes the persistent myth that has been ingrained in the mass consciousness of our compatriots since pre-Soviet times, that the Ukrainian people, groaning under the yoke of the Polish gentry, literally slept and saw the reunification with fraternal co-religion Russia.
Zaporozhye freemen in robberies and murders
The Little Russian peasantry, perhaps, had similar aspirations, but the Cossacks did not. The Cossacks, in essence, fought for the restoration of their privileges, similar to those enjoyed by the gentry. Moreover, Khmelnitsky relied in this matter on the support of King Vladislav IV, who had once claimed the Russian throne, and both outstanding statesmen were old acquaintances: in 1618, the future hetman even took part in Vladislav, then a prince's campaign, against Moscow.
And a few years earlier, the Cossacks, together with the Polish gentry, fought in the army of Grigory Otrepiev against Tsar Boris Godunov. However, the actions of the Cossacks at that time could be explained by the desire to put on the Russian throne the "lawful", as it seemed to them, sovereign. But in fact, this argument does not stand up to criticism, if we recall that the Cossacks stained their sabers with Russian blood, also fighting in the ranks of the army of King Sigismund III - Vladislav's father, who officially entered the war with Russia in 1609. And Sigismund III was known as a zealous Catholic and a pupil of the Jesuits. And the service of the Cossacks to such a monarch somehow does not fit with their image of defenders of the "Orthodox faith" in which many of our compatriots believe so. That is why, when speaking of the people, the word "brotherly" has to be put in quotation marks. What kind of "brotherhood", when the Cossacks shed the blood of their fellow believers in the Russians?
During the Cossack campaigns of the Time of Troubles, the Cossacks "became famous" for robberies and violence against the civilian population, and in 1618 they burned and killed many residents of Lieven, Yelets, Skopin, Ryazhsk, and the "Orthodox" Cossacks did not disdain the robbery of temples and monasteries. Whoever doubts, let them leaf through the history of the Putivl Sofronievsky (in the 17th century, called Molchansky) or the Rylsky St. Nicholas Monasteries at their leisure …
The Russian people called the Zaporozhian people "godless zaporozhi". By the way, the campaign of 1618 was led by Hetman Pyotr Sagaidachny, now the national hero of Ukraine. Well, he takes a worthy place among the other "heroes" of the independent: Mazepa and Bandera. Their ideological followers are carrying out a monstrous genocide of civilians in the Donbass.
Someone will object: "Yes, but there are facts of service of the Cossacks - the same Cossacks - to the Russian Tsar." There are, we do not argue, but in their service to the Russian autocrat the Zaporozhian Cossacks were guided not by religious, as it is pleasant to believe, considerations, but rather materialistic - they were mercenaries. In this capacity, they were noted on the fields of the Thirty Years War, where, as you know, Catholics fought with Protestants.
But back to Khmelnitsky and his patron - King Vladislav. The latter took steps (albeit unsuccessful) aimed at strengthening the royal power in the country, and Khmelnytsky was his loyal ally here. When a delegation of the Cossacks, which also included Bogdan Zinovy, arrived in Warsaw in 1646 to complain about the tyranny of the gentry and the magnates, Vladislav said directly to the Cossacks: “Have you really forgotten what a saber is and how your ancestors gained fame and privileges with it?.
Orthodox Catholics
And the very next year, the monarch promised Khmelnytsky hetmanship and provided financial assistance - officially for the war that was being prepared against the Turks. Although we do not think that the king was not aware of the true plans of the leader of the Cossacks, directed against the headstrong gentry and essentially independent from the monarchy of the magnates.
Inspired by support, Khmelnitsky decided to oppose the gentry, having secured a preliminary alliance with the Crimean Khan. Of course, the hetman knew very well that not only the gentry, but also the Little Russian Orthodox peasants would suffer from the ruinous actions of the Tatar cavalry, but the point was precisely that the fate and hardships of ordinary Little Russians did not particularly worry the Zaporozhians. For them, as well as for the gentry, the peasantry was cattle. And there is nothing surprising in this: the Cossacks saw themselves not as part of the Little Russian Orthodox people, but as a rather closed military corporation with their own traditions (very specific, by the way), internal structure and laws, and it was not easy to get into it. And the audience on Khortitsa gathered very motley, including ethnoreligious.
Regarding the phrase inserted by Goffman into the mouth of Khmelnitsky that if there were no tyranny of magnates in the Commonwealth, it would have had not two, but three peoples and sabers not only against the Tatars and Turks, but also against Moscow, then it must be admitted contradicts sources. So, the Cossacks took an active part in the Smolensk War of 1632-1634, again noting themselves with the devastation of Russian lands.
Again, an interesting detail: an Orthodox Christian and the future prominent statesman of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth Adam Kisel fought in the ranks of the Polish army at that time. It was he who repeatedly negotiated with Khmelnytsky when he began the fight against the gentry.
And again it turns out: did the Orthodox shed the blood of fellow believers? And how! It's just that our ancestors were in his eyes wild barbarians-Scythians, and Kisel imagined himself, like the entire Polish gentry, a descendant of the warlike Sarmatians. It is noteworthy that Prince Jeremey Vishnevetsky, one of the strongest magnates of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, was Kisel's ally in the campaign of 1632-1634. Suffice it to say that the maintenance of his court was much more expensive than that of the royal court, his personal guard numbered twelve thousand gentry, while the royal, according to the decision of the Diet, only two thousand.
Namely, speaking in modern language, the main Ukrainian oligarch Vishnevetsky became in 1648 the most serious opponent of Khmelnytsky. But 15 years before that, in the Smolensk war, Khmelnitsky, Kisel and Vishnevetsky were allies. Quite unusual at first glance. After all, we repeat, many in our country see Bogdan Zinovy as a defender of the Orthodox faith "from the Poles," who longed for reunification with Russia. But that's exactly how he sees it. In reality, this "Orthodox" Cossack received a saber from the hands of the Polish Catholic king for the ruin of Orthodox lands.
And Vishnevetsky, being a convinced Catholic who voluntarily renounced Orthodoxy, "became famous" in that war for total cruelty, implementing the scorched earth tactics on Russian lands, and voluptuous sadism towards prisoners - just in the style of the Wallachian ruler Vlad III Tepes, who remained in history under by the name of Dracula. And he also passed, however, not in his youth, like Vishnevetsky, but already at the end of his life from Orthodoxy to Catholicism.
Khmelnitsky was not the first
With the end of the unsuccessful Smolensk war for the Russian kingdom, the raids of the Cossacks into the Russian borders did not stop. For example, the largest Russian historian-Slavist, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Boris Florea in his article “Zaporozhye Cossacks and the Crimea before the Khmelnitsky Uprising” writes: “In the first half of the 17th century, attacks by Cossack detachments on Russian border territories, often undertaken with the connivance of local authorities, were commonplace … Since the beginning of the 40s, however, the number of such attacks began to increase sharply, covering an ever larger territory. The number of these attacks did not diminish even when negotiations on an alliance against Crimea and Turkey began between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1646.
Comments on this quote, which belonged to the pen of a respected scientist, are superfluous; it is equally frivolous to talk about the initial desire of the Cossacks to go “under the high hand of Moscow,” and to see them as defenders of the Orthodox faith is generally stupid.
Let's move on to the actual military component of the history of the Cossack rebellion, and this is how the Khmelnytsky uprising should be called, but certainly not the “liberation movement of the Ukrainian people”. First, there was no special movement of the Ukrainian people as such. Let's repeat, a motley audience gathered in Zaporozhye, a kind of elite of which, as we have already found out, did not go further in their demands than receiving gentry privileges.
Secondly, the "liberation movement of the people" is too general and does not explain anything. As noted, it is unlikely that Khmelnitsky and his entourage associated themselves with Little Russian slaves. We already know that the arrogant gentry imagined themselves to be Sarmatians. But they considered their own "noble" class to be such. Of course, they did not classify their own peasants as Sarmatians. It is unlikely that Khmelnitsky and others like him treated the Little Russian peasants differently and certainly did not intend to wage a liberation war for them.
The course of hostilities itself is well known: at first, the troops of Khmelnitsky won a number of brilliant victories over the armies of the hetmans Pototsky and Kalinovsky. But in the same 1648 Vladislav IV died. Another turmoil began in the country - which invariably took place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between the death of one monarch and the accession of another.
The country, shaken by the anarchy and rebellion of the Cossacks, began to slide into chaos, and the first who turned to Russia for help was not Khmelnitsky at all, but Adam Kisel, already known to us. Finally, in the fall of 1648, Vladislav's brother, Jan Kazimir, ascended the Polish throne. Khmelnytsky was besieging Zamoć at that time. Soon he received the order of the new king to lift the siege and … immediately obeyed. This is not surprising: as we know, the hetman raised arms not against his monarch, but against the gentry and the magnates. Having retreated to Kiev, Khmelnitsky began negotiations with Jan Kazimir to end the bloodshed.
The requirements of the Cossacks were reasonable and moderate: the hetman's dependence solely on the king, which could not but impress Jan Casimir and irritate the gentry. The intrigues of the latter disrupted the negotiations, and the war continued. Khmelnitsky's army entered the crown lands proper, and with them the Tatars, the eternal enemies of the Commonwealth, came there. The transfer of hostilities to Polish territory, the arrival of the Tatars there were an obvious political mistake of the hetman - the king came forward to meet his army.
A battle took place near Zborov, in which the royal troops were defeated, and Jan Kazimir barely escaped captivity - thanks to Khmelnytsky, who did not want the Christian king to be captured by the Muslim Crimeans. In the end, the Zboriv Peace Treaty was concluded, which returned the Cossacks their liberties and increased the number of the Cossack Registered Army, that is, kept by the king, to 40 thousand. The Orthodox Kiev Metropolitan received the right to sit in the Senate.
To whom would it be more profitable to surrender?
It would seem that the conflict is over, but the politically short-sighted gentry, with a kind of voluptuous ecstasy, was digging the grave of its own country, doing everything to disrupt the realization of the peace achieved in Zborov. Metropolitan of Kiev was not admitted to the Senate. And then Pope Innocent X added fuel to the fire, summoning the gentry to fight the Orthodox and declaring Jan Casimir the defender of the Catholic faith, of course. The Orthodox did not remain in debt: the Corinthian Metropolitan girded Khmelnytsky with a sword consecrated on the Holy Sepulcher. Thus, the war took on a religious character. Let us recall that in the middle of the 17th century, the intensity of religious passions, crowned by the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants, had not yet subsided in Europe.
In 1651, hostilities in Little Russia resumed with renewed vigor. And it is not known how they would have ended if it had not been for the betrayal of the Crimean Khan Islam-Girey in the battle of Berestechko. The result is the Belotserkovsky agreement, which significantly reduced the number of the registered troops and led to the reduction of the provinces controlled by the Cossacks from three to one.
The rest seems to be known from the school bench - the war broke out again and, allegedly, on the part of the Cossacks, it still bore the character of "national liberation". But this explanation does not harmonize with the historical truth in any way. For the continuation of the struggle of the Polish crown against the rebellious vassal was caused by completely different reasons - one might say, family.
The hetman's son, Timofey, offered the hand and heart to the daughter of the Moldovan ruler Lupul. He answered with consent, and then took and refused the given word. The indignant Bogdan Zinovy set out to punish the obstinate ruler, threatening him with a ruinous campaign of the Zaporozhye-Tatar army. Let us remind you that the Moldovans also professed Orthodoxy, but Khmelnitsky, without a shadow of a doubt, was ready to bring down Muslim sabers on their heads.
What could the unfortunate gentleman do? Seek help from the Sultan? It would not help - an experienced politician Khmelnitsky had calculated everything in advance and was just going to act with the unofficial consent of Istanbul. Then Lupul asked for the protection of the Polish king. He sent the army of the full crown hetman (in other words, the deputy commander of the troops of the Commonwealth) Martin Kalinovsky, who blocked the way for the Cossacks to Moldova. As in the case of Vishnevetsky and Kisel, Kalinovsky and Khmelnitsky were once brothers in arms - Martin also participated in the 1618 Moscow campaign of Prince Vladislav. Perhaps that is why the leader of the Cossacks initially tried to convince his colleague hetman not to interfere in his almost "family showdown".
Kalinovsky did not listen to Khmelnitsky, although he was already beaten by him at Korsun. This is due to the Polish ambition and the inability to measure their own ambitions with real forces. Polish troops were utterly defeated at Batog. After that Timofey married the daughter of the Moldovan ruler. But soon Khmelnitsky faced a new merciless enemy - the plague. People died in thousands, and famine began on the war-torn land. To this was added the punitive actions of the equally talented and brutal Polish military leader Stefan Czarnecki, known for his addiction to scorched earth tactics.
Khmelnitsky understood that the noblemen, blinded by hatred, would hardly go to renew the Zboriv Treaty and would most likely lead a war of extermination - they had already begun to wage it, and not only with their own hands: Warsaw managed to dissolve the alliance of the Cossacks with the Crimeans, who had undertaken to devastate Little Russia. The hetman, driven into a corner, began to ask Russia for help more and more insistently.
Moscow and other options
The Kremlin hesitated: the Russian government, suffering from an influx of refugees from Little Russia, then offered Khmelnitsky to move to the Don, seriously fearing that he would become a subject of the Turkish Sultan, then asked Warsaw to comply with the terms of the Zboriv peace. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich did not want to get involved in a new war with the Commonwealth, but the transfer of the Cossacks to the rule of the Ottoman Empire was unacceptable.
In a word, the logic of events, and by no means free, as is commonly believed, the expression of the will of the Cossacks led them in 1654 to the Pereyaslavl Rada. Who does not already remember the classic: "Forever together." But the conditions of this "forever" were very remarkable. Let us dwell on them in more detail: Khmelnitsky gave an interesting argument regarding the need for subordination to Moscow, listing all possible options: allegiance to the Crimean khan, Turkish sultan, Polish king and Moscow tsar. The hetman noted that the first two are no longer due to Islam, and from now on it is also impossible to remain in the Rzecz Pospolita, because now it is "in the power of the nobles."
Thus, Khmelnitsky testified that the struggle he had begun for the political privileges of the Cossacks had not brought success, and that the king himself was not free from gentry arbitrariness. And in this situation, of all evils, the least of all evils is to submit to Moscow, which, however, was exposed to the following conditions: the registered army increased to 60 thousand, that is, 20 thousand more than under the Zborov Treaty. The Cossacks themselves choose the hetman, who retains the privilege of external relations. The rights granted by Polish kings and princes to clergy and secular persons remain inviolable. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich agreed with all these points, only forbidding to communicate with the Polish king and the Turkish sultan without a special royal decree.
Three years after the Pereyaslav Rada, Khmelnitsky died, the hetman mace passed into the hands of Ivan Vyhovsky, who hastened to conclude the Hadyach Treaty with the Poles, according to which the lands controlled by the Cossacks were returned to the Commonwealth under the name of the Grand Duchy of Russia.
It was indeed a real attempt to revive the Polish-Lithuanian state plunging into chaos. And Vygovsky, like Khmelnitsky, felt more like a Polish nobleman than a subject of the Russian tsar. But a significant part of the Cossacks did not support the hetman - for nine years of bloody struggle, the souls of the Cossacks and gentry were saturated with hatred for each other, which was largely facilitated by the irrational cruelty of Vishnevetsky and Charnetsky. In the end, Vygovsky lost the hetman's mace, which passed to Khmelnitsky's son, Yuri, but he also signed a Slobodischensky treaty with Poland, which transferred the Cossack lands under the rule of the white eagle.
However, the wheel of history could no longer be turned back: Russia, which was gaining strength, began to return the lost territories, including those of Little Russia, to its own hand. The once mighty Rzeczpospolita could only snarl at individual military victories, but Warsaw was no longer capable of seriously opposing Moscow on the military-political scene.
The fate of the Zaporozhye lands was a foregone conclusion. But this was far from such an unambiguous choice of the Cossacks, as evidenced by some episodes from the hetmanship of Bogdan and Yuri Khmelnitsky and Vyhovsky. And even with the end of the eventful 17th century, the Cossacks did not calm down, as an example - the fate of another hetman - Mazepa.
