Complementing the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with a Ruthenian principality

(Continued from the previous issue)

This was in fact the beginning of the Ruin if the latter is to mean the period of struggle for political leadership in Ukraine. Prominent Ukrainian historian, Natalia Yakovenko, writes in her article, “A World Torn Asunder: The Culture of Ukraine-Rus’ on the Eve of the Khmelnytsky Revolution,” “The most essential thing is that both the heroics of Khmelnytsky’s days and the nightmares of the Ruin were the handiwork of the same characters.”

Unfortunately, historians still adhere to the stereotype of Prince Jarema Wiszniewiecki as the enemy not just of Cossack estate but the enemy of Ukraine. In reality, the Ukrainian Prince Jarema and Cossack Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky were the two main political leaders who represented two alternative ways of possible evolution for the Polish- Lithuanian Com-monwealth. Moreover, it remains to be seen who of these two main figures of the Ruin cared more about Ukraine’s independence and who about only reforming the Rzeczpospolita into a strong unitary state. For when the Warsaw Sejm was convened to elect the king, Bohdan Khmelnytsky actively intervened through his agents in the political intrigues, which swung the election in his favor: it is under his pressure that one of the contenders for the royal throne, Karl, withdrew his candidacy to give way to Jan II Kazimierz (also known as Kazimierz V).

In the next year, 1649, an army of 25,000 led by King Jan Kazimierz and a force of 15,000 by Wiszniewiecki marched into Ukraine. The initiative seems to have belonged to Prince Jarema, who acted on behalf of the ancient hereditary aristocracy ousted from Ukraine. But Jan Kazimierz, like his brother Wladyslaw IV before him, did not trust Wiszniewiecki and relieved him of command of all crown troops. He must have been wary about where the ambitious Wiszniewiecki might lead his army.

After their famous reverses at Zbarazh and Zboriv, two crowned rulers, the Polish king and the Tatar khan, reached an agreement to reconcile their respective protОgОs, Jarema Wiszniewiecki and Bohdan Khmelnytsky, or, in other words, agreed on the role of the hereditary nobility and Cossack estate in Ukraine.

The Zboriv agreement was the first to legalize the social hierarchy that came out of the original chaos of the 1648 war. The old gentry-magnate elite was almost abolished. The new political elite consisted thereafter of the Zaporozhzhian and registered Cossacks, while Bohdan Khmelnytsky was recognized as Hetman of the Zaporozhzhian Army, answerable only to the Polish king. Cossack senior officers began to add “by God’s grace” to this title; the church mentioned him in prayers as Hetman and Sovereign of Great Rus’, while foreign ambassadors called Khmelnytsky Prince of Rus’ or even more charmingly.

However, there was no question, of course, of any independence, or even the autonomy which, for example, Lithuania enjoyed, of the territory won back from the former Ukrainian magnates. Rather, Poland established direct royal rule in the region, granting the hetman the status of king’s representative. In other words, what was discussed near Zboriv was only a change in the hierarchic structure of the then Ukrainian society, or, to be more exact, in three districts for the time being. Of course, the former political elite could not tolerate with this.

Then came Berestechko.

The crown troops won a battle, by far the greatest in its history. But the magnates’ elite of Poland failed to reap the fruits of this victory. The king, instead of completing the rout of the separatists, unexpectedly turned to Warsaw. The Cossack territory was invaded by only the 30,000 zolnierzi (soldiers) of Potocki and Wiszniewiecki.

This was in fact a new political struggle for leadership in Ukraine between Khmelnytsky and Wiszniewiecki, which was indecisive due to the sudden death of Wiszniewiecki on August 9, following the outbreak of cholera in his military camp at Pavoloch.

The Ukrainian prince’s death undermined the very idea of establishing a Ruthenian principality. And, in general, it became evident that the Rzeczpospolita, as a type of multiethnic social system, had come to a dead end; it had lost momentum and could no longer evolve toward either a unitary state as conceived by King Wladyslaw IV and his loyal successor Khmelnytsky or an equal triadic confederation. This left the only possible option: being absorbed by the Tsardom of Muscovy, a centralized state with a system more suitable to imperial rule. Oddly enough, it was the Muscovite tsar who snatched a victory on the Berestechko field. From then on, practically all events developed under a scenario written in Moscow.

Perhaps the first to become aware of the new realities was Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who immediately speeded up his talks with the Muscovite tsar, and, as it became obvious later, at precisely the right time. The Pereyaslav Treaty of 1654 only finalized in legal terms what was already irreversible. But Khmelnytsky managed to rescue the Cossack estate which could have completely disappeared had the Rzeczpospolita been incorporated by the Muscovites.

The great hetman’s death in 1657 put an end to his political debate with Jarema Wiszniewiecki on the two alternatives for Ukraine’s political development.

Yet, the idea of a Ruthenian principality arose again under Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky. After breaking with Moscow and reorienting himself toward the Poles again, on September 16, 1658 he signed with Poland the Treaty of Hadiach. Under this treaty, the territory of the former Zaporozhzhian Army was to become the Grand Duchy (or Principality) of Ruthenia as part, together with Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in a tripartite Rzeczpospolita. In other words, Ukraine as this Rus’ Principality would become the third equal member of the federation with the same status as that of Lithuania, including all autonomous rights in the administrative, judicial, and financial spheres.

The title of a sovereign of the Ukrainian lands was one of the treaty’s focal points. The Rus’ Principality was to be headed by a hetman elected for life by the starshyna (top officers corps). It is this clause that testifies most vividly to absolute nonviability of this kind of a triangular confederation. For a principality to exist, it requires such a small detail as a prince: its representative or incarnation. “In the mentality of those times,” Prof. Yakovenko wrote, “the personality of a prince and the power he wielded by force of his birth were interpreted as being of the same consequence of God’s providence.”

Consequently, it is little wonder that the Hadiach Treaty ended in fiasco. And its most rabid enemies were by no means Moscow or Warsaw; the main opponents of the Ruthenian principality were the masses of Orthodox people: the archetype of prince had long been discredited in their collective mentality, irreversibly giving way to that of the “white tsar.”

The project of a Ruthenian principality was not only at least ten years too late: ten years before, it could still be represented by the ambitious separatist Prince Jarema Wiszniewiecki. The project was a whole epoch late, for 1648 marked the departure point for an entirely different historical epoch, the Ruin.