The Broken Mace Of the Ruin

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).