HETMAN DOROSHENKO’S HARD CHOICE
The last Cossack attempt to unify the whole Ukraine as a single integrated state is connected with the name of Petro Doroshenko (1627-1698), Hetman of Ukraine in 1665 to 1676.
The Ruin (1657-1676) became one of the most tragic landmarks in Ukraine’s history. Our g lorious Hetman, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, made what turned out to be a fatal mistake, taking a wholly erroneous decision to favor hereditary succession. After Khme lnytsky’s death Ukraine had to face a long series of hetmans concerned, above all, about their own interests than the destiny of their long-suffering fatherland. Civil war devastated the Cossack state. The epoch of Khmelnytsky had come an end, and it became more and more difficult to counter aggression from the neighboring countries. Poland, Muscovy, and the Crimean Khanate continued to vie for the tasty morsel that was Ukraine.
The future hetman of Ukraine was born in 1627 in the Cossack chancellery town of Chyhyryn into the family of a hereditary Cossack officer. His father Dorofiy was a Sich Army colonel and his grandfather Mykhailo had been hetman. Petro was a well-educated young man with good command of Polish and Latin.
As soon as a Cossack Revolution broke out in 1648, Petro Doroshenko took active part and was awarded the title of military clerk at the age of 22. In 1650 Doroshenko entered the Cossack senior officer corps during an expedition against Moldavia. The young Cossack carved out a brilliant career: as early as 1655 he was colonel of the Pryluky Regiment. But his time had not yet come: after being defeated by the Russian troops near Khmilnyk later in 1659, Doroshenko lost his regiment, rank, and was reduced to a rank-and-file Cossack.
Under Hetman Pavlo Teteria, Doroshenko came back from oblivion and was appointed as general osavul (deputy hetman) in 1663. Teteria’s program aimed at unifying the Cossack Ukraine (both on the right and left banks of the Dnipro) within the limits of Rzeczpospolita remained stillborn. Both the elite and the rank- and-file Cossacks and peasants were split due to uninterrupted intervention of the aforesaid external forces.
The 1664-1665 uprising against Teteria was of a pronounced anti-Polish nature and cost Ivan Vyhovsky his life. “Having traversed the thorny road of a prodigal son of the idea of Ukraine’s state independence, he fully embraced this idea with all his mind and heart at exactly this time, consciously placing his own life on the altar of its fulfillment” (V. A. Smoliy and V. S. Stepankov, The Ukrainian National Revolution of the Seventeenth Century {1648-1676}). After a long and bloody struggle, the uprising ended in victory, with the right bank lands preserving their independence within the borders of Cossack Ukraine. Petro Teteria fled to Poland, then to Istanbul, where he eventually met death by poison.
The struggle for the hetman’s mace intensified because most of the starshyna (senior Cossack officers) did not recognize Ivan Briukhovetsky’s rule as legitimate. Petro Doroshenko, chief oboznyi (quartermaster general) in 1665, took advantage of the situation and, aided by the Crimean Tatars and the Bila Tserkva commandant, Pole Jan Stachorski, overthrew new Hetman Stepan Opara on the night of August 29. In early 1666 the self-proclaimed hetman was proclaimed full-fledged hetman by the Cossack council in Chyhyryn. Petro Doroshenko began an active struggle against Ivan Briukhovetsky and called upon Left Bank Cossacks to come under his Right Bank jurisdiction.
The situation worsened catastrophically for Doroshenko after the Rzeczpospolita and Musvovy signed the Truce Andrusovo on January 30, 1667. The hitherto imaginary border along the Dnipro became reality, only leaving Kyiv under the tsar. The Right Bank was returned to the Polish king. The boyars behaved treacherously, advising the hetman, on the tsar’s behalf, to “be a loyal subject of the Polish king.” The hetman took measures to restrict the Polish military presence on the Right Bank and gradually improved relations with the Crimean Khanate, looking on the Tatars and Turks as an important counterweight against the Muscovites and Poles (what a mistake!). The attempts to trigger an uprising on the Left Bank and appeals for the Cossacks to accept the Right-Bank sovereignty ended up in failure. Signing the Andrusovo Truce, Poland in fact ended the hetman’s attempts to reunite the Right and Left Banks. Moreover, the idea of reunification under the Polish king’s patronage appealed to almost no Ukrainians.
In any case, the alliance with the Crimean Tatars led to the devastation of the Ukrainian lands, especially in western Ukraine. The ethnically Polish lands were far from the Crimean and Nogay murzas, and the Ukrainian lands proper were at their mercy, which by no means added to Doroshenko’s popularity. But even Bohdan Khmelnytsky, in the heat of the anti-Polish uprising, failed to keep the Ukrainian lands from being devastated by his “allies.” Slave markets in Constantinople, Caffa, Trabzon, and Alexandria all teemed with Ukrainian captives. It should be noted above all that most of the Sich Cossacks put up a stubborn resistance to the Tatars, Turks, and took a dim view of the hetman’s rapprochement with the khan and the sultan. Among the implacable enemies of the latter, there was koshovyi (regimental commander) Ivan Sirko, noted for his iron will, resolution, and even cruelty, who, according to V. Kokhovsky, was “feared by the Horde, for he had tremendous military experience and, in terms of gallantry, surpassed even Ivan Doroshenko.” Tatar women would use the name of Sirko to frighten their children. But the koshovyi’s daring actions (cruel massacres of both the Muslims and the Islamicized Ukrainians) repeatedly added fire to the political struggle. The year 1669 saw the outbreak of a civil war between the Left Bank Hetman, Demian Mnohohrishny, supported by Muscovite troops, and Petro Doroshenko. The Left Bank regiments (except those of Pereyaslav and Lubny) did not support Doroshenko, which again sealed the status quo along the Dnipro borderline.
In 1670, the regiments of Uman, Kalnyk, and Bratslav elected Polish-backed Uman Colonel Mykhailo Khanenko as hetman. Turkish-supported Doroshenko still managed to defeat his rival, but only at the expense of a devastating Turkish invasion of the southeastern Rzeczpospolita populated primarily by Ukrainians. In 1672 King Michael Wisniowiecki signed the humiliating Treaty of Buchach whereby the sultan acquired Podillia and sizable tribute.
In 1668 Doroshenko had declined the Muscovites’ proposal to break with the Crimea but showed his respect for the tsar. The hetman was not against the tsar’s protectorate, but only provided all ethnic Ukrainian lands were united. Doroshenko supported Metropolitan Yosyp Pukalsky’s measures to set up an independent Ukrainian patriarchate, a very important condition for the making of an independent Cossack state. While Moscow was mounting its pressure with each passing year, the ideology of “Little Russianness” was finding ever more advocates among the starshyna, ordinary Cossacks, and peasants on the Left Bank. This factor was by no means conducive to the Ukrainian nation’s cohesion.
In March 1669, an extended starshyna council gathered near Korsun and opted for the Turkish sultan’s suzerainty, with the sultan’s envoy promising on his master’s behalf to formally recognize Cossacks’ freedoms and rights. On December 2, 1670, Sultan Mehmed IV accepted the oath of allegiance. It should be noted this was a forced step opposed by sizable Russian, Tatar, and Polish forces.
But as soon as May 1669, civil war again broke out, and the Sich elected Pavlo Sukhovy and then Mykhailo Khanenko as hetman. Doroshenko defeated the rebels on November 8 near Stebliv, continuing to avoid hostilities against the Poles, Muscovites, and Left Bank Cossacks. Doroshenko opposed the return of the Polish nobility to Ukraine, for the Cossacks “can in no way be in complete subordination and subjection to the Polish lords.” But even this kind of an autonomous Cossack state stuck in Poland’s throat. Doroshenko’s relations with the Left Bank and its Hetman, Demyan Mnohohrishny, who began to resist the Tsarist government’s hegemonic tendencies, were improving. But in March 1672 the pro-Russian starshyna hatched a conspiracy and toppled the Left Bank hetman. Returning to meet an invasion of Podillia by a 100,000- strong Turkish army (incidentally, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel Pan Wolodyjowski is set during the defense of the Kamyanets- Podilsky castle), it should be noted Doroshenko very soon understood that his alliance with the Porte had been a mistake. Nor did he manage to get along with the new Left Bank Hetman, Ivan Samoilovych, an ambitious politician who fought both against the democratic aspirations of the Sich and against Doroshenko himself. The latter decided in 1673 to accept the suzerainty of Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, but it was too late.
The showdown came in February 1674: almost a 70,000- strong army headed by G. Romodanovsky, the Tsar’s voyevoda (official representative), and Ivan Samoilovych broke through to the Right Bank. In a battle near Lysianka, Doroshenko was taken prisoner, which triggered a still more devastating Turkish foray. Romodanovsky and Samoilovych hastily lifted the siege of Chyhyryn, the hetman’s capital, where the hetman, who had just returned from captivity, was present. People, fearful of the Turks and Tatars, crossed the Dnipro en masse to resettle on the Left Bank.
As agreed upon with Koshovyi Sirko, on October 20, 1675, the hetman (who at last had made peace with the latter) waived Turkish protection and swore loyalty to the Tsar. But Moscow did not recognize the oath. In September 1676, Doroshenko left Chyhyryn, put down the mace, and surrendered. This was the beginning of the hetman’s over twenty years of disgrace, but this page in his life is a separate subject.
Doroshenko lived out his remaining years in a foreign land. From 1679 to 1682 the former hetman was even the voyevoda of Viatka, Russia; in 1684 he married with Agafia Yeropkina. Among the descendants from this late marriage are Aleksandr Pushkin’s wife, Natalia Goncharova, who was in fact Doroshenko’s great granddaughter. He died November 19, 1696, in his village of Yaropolche and was buried near the Church of St. Paraskevia. This raises the question of why the hetman was not interred in his hometown of Chyhyryn? Despite tragic mistakes, according to the historian and a descendant of the hetman’s, Dmytro Doroshenko, “his struggle became an unwritten testament to generations to come.”
Petro Doroshenko was a conscientious fighter for the cause of independent Ukraine, but he often relied on strategic allies rather than on his own people. This was the tragedy of his dramatic life.
