Andrei Artizov; Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva
A hamlet in Subbotovo near Chyhyryn (now Cherkasy Region) was allocated to Bohdan Khmelnytskyi after the death of his father by the Chyhyryn starost. But according to Polish law, a starost did not have the right to donate land. He could only grant the right to own it, since he himself was a tenant of the crown lands. The son of the next starost, the Polish magnate Aleksander Koniecpolski, annulled the previous decision and gave the hamlet to Deputy Starost Daniel Czapliński. All Khmelnytskyi's attempts to defend his rights through legal channels were unsuccessful, as in the "Polish court of that time it was difficult for a Cossack to compete with a szlachcic with protection from an important pan." ; Khmelnytskyi did lose his case, though that was due to the absence of legal documents confirming his ownership rights. Khmelnytskyi himself, like most of the registered Cossacks, came from the szlachta. Tairova-Yakovleva also points out that at the end of the 1620s, the Cossacks were reconsidering their role in the Rzeczpospolita, with their chiefs seeking to extend the rights of the szlachta to registered Cossacks. This is all the more interesting because most of them were szlachta noblemen anyway, meaning they enjoyed the democratic freedoms and political rights of the privileged part of the Rzeczpospolita. During this period there seems to have been a turning point when, for the Cossack elite, the title of "Cossack" became no less meaningful than the title of szlachcic.
In their conflict with the Rzeczpospolita, the Zaporozhian Cossacks turned to Moscow for help. Back in 2017, Rosarkhiv published a volume with the full correspondence between the hetmans of Left-Bank Ukraine and Moscow dedicated to the hetmanship of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi. Starting from June 8, 1648, the Zaporozhian Cossacks (tellingly, in all the letters they refer to themselves as “Russian [Russkiye] people”) repeatedly requested having the Zaporozhian Host become a Russian subject. ; With regard to the collection of correspondence between the hetmans of Left-Bank Ukraine and Moscow, Tairova-Yakovleva offers a number of criticisms. She questions the subjectivity of the authors, who include figures from the central institutions in Moscow and St Petersburg, claims that the approach to selecting the documents for publication was unsystematic (a significant part of the correspondence was published earlier in academic publications in the 20th century), and calls superficial the overview of the problems of the history of 16th- and 17th-century Ukraine presented in the articles included in the collection like "Russia and Ukraine in 1654-57" and "Relations between Russia and the Zaporozhian Cossacks from the middle of the 16th century to 1654.” In the same period (November 1648), Khmelnytskyi declared to Y. Smyarovsky: “As my ancestors selflessly and with the shedding of blood served the kings of Poland, so I, without betraying them, with the knighthood subordinate to me, want to faithfully serve His Majesty the king, my gracious sovereign, and the Rzeczpospolita.” In addition, from 1649 to 1653 Khmelnytskyi carried on parallel negotiations with representatives of the Crimean Tatars, Sweden and Transylvania.
The tsar (Alexis Mikhailovich) and his advisers did not accept the requests of the Cossacks for five years. Only in October 1653, at the Zemsky Sobor, was it decided to accept the Zaporozhian Host "with their cities and lands" "under the high sovereign’s hand." This decision meant war with the Rzeczpospolita. ; For several reasons, Russia, according to Tairova-Yakovleva, took a wait-and-see position for a long time. Firstly, Russia was not ready for a war with the Rzeczpospolita, especially since the two states were bound by an agreement on military assistance. Secondly, the socio-political makeup of the Hetmanate was alien to the tsarist government (the traditions of the szlachta, liberty, an extensive and modern state apparatus, along with the absence of a tradition of serfdom). Only the emergence of Patriarch Nikon pushed Moscow to support fellow Orthodox believers. Moreover, Nikon proposed a “religious war” to Tsar Alexis so that Orthodoxy would triumph not only in Ukraine, but across all Orthodox lands to Constantinople. In addition, almost immediately after the Pereiaslav Agreement, disagreements began to emerge. The foreign policy priorities of the Hetmanate and the Muscovite State were the cornerstone that at first led the two states into an alliance but then provoked conflict. The issue of voivods was also problematic, i.e. who was in charge internally. It is conflicts with the voivods that became a key reason why the Cossack chiefs started looking for a new deal with the Rzeczpospolita.
Even contemporaries of the events repeatedly mention “unification” and even “reunification” – not of different countries – Ukraine and Russia – or different peoples, but about the unification of one “Russian people” that had been temporarily separated by borders. In this regard, the well-known speech of Nizhyn Protopope Maxim Filimonovich (the future locum tenens bishop of the Western Russian Metropolis), delivered in September 1654 at the tsarist headquarters near Smolensk, is telling. He considered the accession of the Hetmanate to the Russian state as the restoration of lost historical unity: “he gathered together the dispersed, divided Russian sons... into a single body of the Grand Russian Principality.” ; The Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654 was a military-political union for confederation, dictated by circumstances and concluded between two states with different goals. The union proved short-lived, but it legitimized Cossack statehood and can therefore be considered a diplomatic success for the movement. It was the motive of “liberty” (i.e. independence) that sounded in the well-known September 1658 declaration of the Zaporozhian Host to foreign sovereigns. It explained the need to retreat from "Muscovy" and move under the Rzeczpospolita. The declaration featured such remarkable lines: "For no other motives did we accept the patronage of the Grand Duke of Moscow, but only in order to preserve and expand for ourselves and our posterity our freedom that had been obtained with God's help by weapons and many times returned at the cost of blood."
After the death of Khmelnytskyi, the Cossack elite, seeking to preserve and expand the autonomy of the Hetmanate and solidify their own privileges maneuvered between their powerful neighbors. Khmelnytskyi’s successors repeatedly betrayed Moscow, concluded agreements with the Rzeczpospolita (including the infamous Treaty of Hadiach of 1658 and the Treaty of Chudnov of 1660, after which the Hetmanate split into right-bank and left-bank). ; The Moscow-Cossack agreements were made as between equals, so the Ukrainian side had all the legal grounds to unilaterally terminate them. In addition, a number of serious contradictions between the Hetmanate and Moscow, combined with the view of the Cossacks that Moscow had deceived them and wanted to conquer Ukraine, contributed to the Treaty of Hadiach. The existence of a clear division in the minds of the Cossack chiefs between the "fatherland" (Little Russia or Ukraine) and the Muscovite state was also reflected in the idea of the "Principality of Rus.” It lay at the heart of the Treaty of Hadiach concluded by Ivan Vyhovsky with the Rzeczpospolita in 1658 and in part the later Treaty of Chudnov of 1660.
Of course, there is no reason to idealize the relationship between Moscow and the Zaporozhian Host. It is wrong to deny that the Russian government pursued an "imperial policy" aimed at creating a unitary state. A similar policy was pursued by other major European powers as well. However, this did not stop Moscow for a long time from putting up with the existence of autonomous political entities on its territory. ; Thanks to the agreements with the Cossacks, the position of the Muscovite state was significantly strengthened. As a result, the conditions emerged for its transformation into one of the major world empires, as well as its westward and southern expansion. By the agreement with Khmelnytskyi, the Muscovite state attempted to spread its influence westward, reach the Black Sea and create a base for the struggle against the Porte and Rzeczpospolita. The direct motives for concluding the Treaty of 1654 for Moscow were the sharp tensions in relations with Poland and the fear of a rapprochement between the Zaporozhian Host and the Porte. Another consideration was the prospect of strengthening the position of the Moscow Orthodox Church (Ukrainian National Institute for Strategic Studies).