• Українська
  • Русский
  • English
Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

The Broken Mace Of the Ruin

26 January, 1999 - 00:00

By Ihor SIUNDIUKOV,special to The Day

The Ruin... A terrible, bloody and ruinous time spell in our land. It embraces
approximately two decades after the death of Bohdan Khmelnytsky (1657-1676).
But what can we learn from that, by no means the most glorious, period
of Ukrainian history? Why then should we write about it now, during another
most acute all-embracing crisis?

The first and most obvious answer is this: the Ruin illustrates vividly
the great role of such a national leader as Bohdan Khmelnytsky. He knew
how to arouse feelings of national pride and the resolve to defend legitimate
interests in a people that very often lacked self-confidence and a clear
sense of national identity. The famous Hetman was full of this resolve,
when he carefully sought allies among the European states in the last two
years of his life (1656-1657), which would have let Ukraine preserve the
freedom and integrity she had just won at a great price.

That task was all the more difficult, for Muscovite Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich
had already shown quite clearly through many of his actions (stationing
Russian troops in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, active interference
in Ukrainian financial affairs, and, the main thing, treacherously signing
the Vilnius peace pact with Poland in 1656 without allowing a Ukrainian
Cossack delegation to participate in the talks) his true attitude to the
integral and inviolable rights of the Ukrainian people, including the right
to free relations with foreign states, laid down by the Treaty of Pereyaslav
in the spring of 1654. Even a heroic figure like Khmelnytsky found it extremely
difficult to work during a whole series of major wars - Russian-Polish,
Polish-Swedish, Turkish-Polish, and Polish-Hungarian - raging on the territory
of Eastern Europe in the mid-seventeenth century. Hence the Hetman's uninterrupted
search for a leader among Ukraine's neighbors who, contemplating no encroachment
on our country's independence (let us emphasize this), would have suited
it best, given the existing correlation of forces. What is most important
is that Khmelnytsky, not at all indifferent to power (as evidenced by his
policy to turn the Hetman's post from elective to hereditary), still put
Ukraine's interests and freedom above all. The importance of this was amply
illustrated by the death of the great Hetman later in July 1657 and the
activities of his successors that paved the way to the Ruin which absolutely
devastated our long-suffering motherland.

The tragedy of the situation was that pretenders, without even a fraction
of Khmelnytsky's popularity and prestige, began at once to struggle for
power, for the Hetman's mace, least of all thinking about the interests
of a still very weak nascent Ukrainian state. Eventually, power (and the
state itself) were weakened catastrophically; the mace, figuratively speaking,
was broken, and it was the common people who had to pay a tremendous price.
The next year, 1658, a conflict between the new pro-Polish Hetman Ivan
Vyhovsky (who saw Ukraine as an autonomous Kyiv Principality) and the pro-Moscow
Cossack leaders Yakiv Barabash and Martyn Pushkar cost Ukrainians a razed-to-the-ground
Poltava and a heavy toll of 50,000 human, mostly civilian, lives, given
Ukraine's total population 1.5 million at the time. Barabash and Pushkar
were executed.

And here we must look at another aspect. The Cossack officer corps -
the most educated and advanced segment of society - proved incapable of
overcoming their class egotism and being guided by the needs of the people
rather than by their own narrow interests. Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky, especially
"brilliant" in the internecine fighting between Ukrainians and Ukrainians,
agreed in September 1658 to sign the Treaty of Hadiach with Poland whereby
Ukraine would in fact restore the former Polish nobility regime (although
this was disguised as autonomous rights of a Rus' principality which would
become part of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as one of three constituent
parts). And although Vyhovsky managed (in alliance with the Poles and the
Crimean Khan) to utterly rout Muscovite troops near Konotop in June 1659,
it was the arrogance of the Cossack colonels (against the backdrop of the
poorer people's quite natural hatred for it) that again pushed the broad
masses of Ukrainian peasants and Cossacks into Moscow's embrace. The latter
also did not sit idly by: Moscow actively incited Vyhovsky's opponents
to rise up. As s result, in the fall of 1659 he was forced to renounce
the Hetmanate and leave for Poland, where he was executed by firing squad
four years later on a rather frivolous charge of high treason. What he
is guilty of before Ukraine is not this but dilettantish egotism that guided,
in the words of Hrushevsky, the "clumsy hand of the unfinished pupil of
a great master of diplomacy" (i.e., Khmelnytsky).

The new Hetman, Bohdan Khmelnytsky's son Yuri, restored the alliance
with Moscow under grass-roots pressure, who failed to see through the self-interested
political cunning of the Muscovite Tsar and much else. Moscow could now
dictate its conditions: the Hetman had to unconditionally make his troops
available at Moscow's order and, conversely, had no right to send them
anywhere without such an order; the Cossacks could not change their Hetman
without a Tsarist decree; Muscovite troops were to be stationed not only
in Kyiv but also in Nizhyn, Chernihiv, and Uman. Thus, in the early 1660s
the frail sprouts of Ukrainian statehood were nipped in the bud. This,
however, did not help either Yuri Khmelnytsky or his successors (Pavlo
Teteria, Mykhailo Khanenko, Ivan Briukhovetsky, Demian Mnohohrishny, et
al.), who rushed feverishly between Moscow, Poland, and Turkey, to wield
power for long. They replaced each other at a breathtaking speed, letting
go of the broken mace, and were gone in a year or, maximum, two. This lasted
until 1676, when both the left and right banks of a divided and pallid
Ukraine were reunited under the aegis of the Muscovite-sponsored Hetman
Ivan Samoilovych.

We can easily see the human suffering all this caused in the report
of a Polish general then very active in Ukraine. "In my estimation, the
number of dead infants alone found on the roads and in the castle reached
10,000. I ordered their burial in the field, and there were over 270 bodies
in one grave. All were less than one year old, for those a little older
had been carried away into captivity. Groups of still living peasants roam
about, weeping in grief." Moreover, one of the then battles, waged in a
severe frost, was full of such hatred that, in the words of Academician
Ivan Krypiakevych, soldiers fought to the death with horse-cart shafts,
and there were so many corpses that they were used for barricades.

Today the remote 340-year-old conflicts of the Ruin teach us an everlasting
lesson. Discord between greedy and power-hungry rulers ruins the state
and then always inflicts a horrible disaster on the people, and it makes
no difference to the people what kind of speeches draw a veil over the
struggle for power. The people always remember, deep in their hearts, a
simple and great Gospel truth: "A house divided against itself shall not
stand." (Matthew, XII:25).

 

Issue: 
Rubric: