by Anna Reid
That the relationship would end in acrimony was not a foregone conclusion, for the Poland that Ukraine joined with Iogaila’s marriage to Jadwiga was a country ahead of its time. Power was divided between the king and the Sejm, a representative assembly elected by the nobility or szlachta. Uniquely, the szlachta comprised around 10 per cent of the population, giving a level of representation that would not be bettered elsewhere until the nineteenth-century British Reform Acts, and forcing princely magnates to share power on an equal basis, in theory at least, with poor smallholders whose pride was the only thing differentiating them from the surrounding peasantry. Only the Sejm could make legislation, and the king could not raise taxes or troops without its consent. From the late sixteenth century onward the szlachta also appointed the king himself, at a rowdy gathering in a field outside Warsaw. Poland thus became that constitutional oddity, an elective monarchy, and a Republic of Nobles.
Compared to szlachta status, religion and race were unimportant. The nobility included Ruthenians (the Polish name for what were to become Ukrainians and Belarussians), Lithuanians, Jews, Germans, Moldovans, Armenians, Italians, Magyars, Bohemians and even Muslim Tatars. ‘One is born noble, not Catholic’ was the motto. Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox all served in the upper house of the Sejm, and the legal system used six different languages – Ruthenian (precursor to Ukrainian and Belarussian), Polish, Hebrew, Armenian, German and Latin. The Reformation saw an influx of recherché nonconformist refugees, who were allowed to build churches and proselytise. Lviv, in present-day western Ukraine, became the only city in the world besides Rome to host three Christian archbishoprics – Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian. Zygmunt August, last of Iogaila’s descendants, called himself ‘King of the people, not of their consciences’, and his father Zygmunt the Elder put down a bumptious cleric with the words ‘Permit me, Sir, to be King of both the sheep and the goats’.3
But the virtues of the Polish system were also its weaknesses. Unfettered by a strong monarchy, the wealthiest magnates – Ruthenians and Lithuanians as well as Poles – operated like independent rulers. In the wide, underpopulated eastern borderlands they accumulated vast estates as big as many a Western kingdom. Guillaume Le Vasseur, Sieur de Beauplan, a French military engineer who worked for the Polish crown in Ukraine through the 1630s and ’40s, wrote that these ‘kinglets’ had ‘the right to place crowns on their coats of arms, in the manner of minor sovereigns, to cast as much cannon as they please, and to build fortresses as strong as their means may permit. Neither the king nor the Commonwealth may prevent them. Indeed, they lack only the right to coin money to be sovereign.’4 Quarrels between ‘kinglets’ were frequent, and settled in full-scale battles involving thousands of armed retainers. Judicial rulings from Cracow were routinely flouted: one magnate paraded at court in a suit fashioned from all the writs he had received and ignored. Poles still use the expression ‘Write to me in Berdychiv’ – a small town west of Kiev – to mean ‘Catch me if you can’.
With the rise of the great landowners, Polish society, once so tolerant and inclusive, began to atrophy and fossilise. In the early sixteenth century, just as the rest of Europe was abandoning serfdom, Poland introduced it, the better to exploit an export boom in grain. Rather than extract money rents from peasant farmers, landowners preferred to take the land in hand and turn it over to wheat, using the peasantry as free labour. ‘Ukraine was treated,’ in the words of the historian Adam Zamoyski, ‘by its own elite as well as by the Poles, as a sort of colony.’5 Laws were passed making it difficult for peasants to leave the land, and they lost their rights of appeal, leaving them at the mercy of local manorial courts. De Beauplan described the results:
The local peasants are in a very miserable state, being obliged to work, with their horses, three days a week in the service of their lord, and having to pay him, in proportion to the land they hold, many bushels of grain, and plenty of capons, hens, goslings and chickens, at Easter, Pentecost and Christmas. What is more, they must cart wood for their lord, and fulfil a thousand other manorial obligations, to which they ought not to be subject . . . the lords have absolute power not only over their possessions, but also their lives, so great is the liberty of Polish nobles (who live as if they were in paradise, and the peasants in purgatory). Thus if it happens that these wretched peasants fall into the bondage of evil lords, they are in a more deplorable state than convicts sentenced to the galleys . . .6
The weirdest manifestation of the new exclusivity was the cult of ‘Sarmatism’, based on the lunatic notion that the Polish nobility were descended from a mythic eastern warrior-tribe called the Sarmatians, justifying an imaginary racial divide with the rest of the population. In line with their newly-invented Sarmatian credentials, the szlachta developed a bizarre taste for the bejewelled and exotic. Turkish carpets and enamelled coffee pots started appearing in wood-girt Polish manor houses; Polish knights shaved their heads, wore Arab-style chain-mail armour, and dyed their horses’ hides cochineal pink or patriotic red-and-white on special occasions. Poles ended up looking so oriental, in fact, that at the battle of Vienna in 1683 Jan Sobieski had to order his troops to wear straw cockades so as to distinguish them from the enemy Turks.
With serfdom and Sarmatism came the end of religious toleration. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, with the Counter-Reformation and Poland’s wars against the Swedes and Turks, Polishness became increasingly identified with Catholicism. Nonconformists were banished, entry to the szlachta was barred to non-Catholics, and a new chain of Jesuit colleges set about converting the sons of the Orthodox nobility. The high point of the Catholic push came when Piotr Skarga, an influential Jesuit divine, persuaded a group of Orthodox bishops, hopeful of being admitted to the upper house of the Sejm, to acknowledge papal supremacy while retaining their own Slavonic liturgy and their priests’ right to marry. In 1596 an Act of Union was signed at Brest creating the ‘Greek-Catholic’ or Uniate Church, which dominates western Ukraine to this day. The rest of the Orthodox were furious, denouncing the Union and calling for an anti-Catholic alliance with the Protestants. Alarmed by the uproar, two of the four new Uniate bishops turned tail and reverted to Orthodoxy. ‘Your dear Union,’ the chancellor of Lithuania wrote to one of the remainder, ‘has brought so much bitterness that we wish it had never been thought of, for we have only trouble and tears from it.’7
Though Catholic proselytising soured relations between the Commonwealth and Ruthenians in general, it did stunningly well within an important group – the Ruthenian nobility. A mournful work of 1612, entitled ‘Trenos or Lament of the Holy Eastern Church’, asked what had happened to the old families of ancient Rus:
Where are the priceless jewels of [Orthodoxy’s] crown, such famous families of Ruthenian princes as Slutsky, Zaslavsky, Zbarazky, Vyshnevetsky, Sangushsky, Chartorysky, Pronsky, Ruzhynsky, Solomyretsky, Holovchynsky, Koropynsky, Masalsky, Horsky, Sokolynsky, Lukomsky, Ruznya, and others without number? Where are those who surrounded them . . . the wellborn, glorious, brave, strong, and ancient houses of the Ruthenian nation who were renowned throughout the world for their high repute, power and bravery?8
It was a rhetorical question. Vyshnevetsky had turned into Wisniowiecki, Sangushsky into Sanguszko, Chartorysky into Czartoryski – the Ruthenian nobility, in other words, had adopted the faith, language and manners of the ruling Poles. By the mid seventeenth century, according to de Beauplan, Ukraine’s nobles seemed ‘ashamed of any religion but the Roman, to which more of them are converting every day, even though the great men of wealth and all those who bear the title of prince issue from the Greek religion.’9
Though as individual families the Ruthenian nobility flourished, providing many of the greatest names in Polish history, as a distinct group it disappeared. For the rest of the Ruthenians – later to re-identify themselves as Ukrainians and Belarussians – this was a long-term disaster. Shorn of their native élite – the class that founded and filled schools and universities, patronise
d the arts, built churches and palaces, invested in trade and manufacturing – they turned into a leaderless people, a ‘non-historic nation’. Ruthenian became the language of serfs and servants, barn and byre. Right up to the First World War the words ‘Ruthenian’ and ‘peasant’ were virtually synonymous, used interchangeably in Polish letters and memoirs. Ukrainians and Belarussians did not get their own national leaders again until the mid nineteenth century, when a great wave of ethnic consciousness, borne along by the Romantic fascination with all things folkloric and obscure, swept the whole of Eastern Europe. The new enthusiasts were not the descendants of the old Rus princes, but writers, teachers and antiquarians, offspring of a fledgling educated middle class.
Polish rule robbed Ukraine of its nobility. But it also saw the emergence of a new power in the region – the Cossacks. Outlaws and frontiersmen, fighters and pioneers, the Cossacks are to the Ukrainian national consciousness what cowboys are to the American. Unlike the remote and sanctified Rus princes, the Cossacks make heroes Ukrainians can relate to. They ranged the steppe in covered wagons, drawing them up in squares in case of Tatar attack. They raided Turkish ports in sixty-foot-long double-ruddered galleys, built of willow-wood and buoyed up with bundles of hollow reeds. They wore splendid moustaches, red boots and baggy trousers ‘as wide as the Black Sea’. They danced, sang and drank horilka in heroic quantities. ‘No sooner are they out of one state of inebriation,’ wrote de Beauplan, ‘than they set about drinking again as before.’10 Though the historical Cossacks ceased to exist in the eighteenth century, they lived on powerfully in the Ukrainian imagination. The anarchic peasant armies of the Russian Civil War called themselves ‘Cossacks’, as do a few fringe nationalists today, turning out in astrakhan hats and home-made uniforms at anti-communist rallies. Khokhol – the name of the long pony-tail, worn with a shaven head, which was the Cossack hallmark – is still derogatory Russian slang for a Ukrainian.
Cossackdom had its beginnings in the early fifteenth century, when the Grand Dukes of Lithuania built a line of forts on the edge of the empty ‘wild field’ between the Duchy and Tatar-ruled Crimea. Initially garrisoned with Tatar mercenaries called ‘kazaks’ or ‘free adventurers’, they soon attracted runaways of every class and nationality – escaped serfs, indebted nobles, defrocked priests. By the end of the century these makeshift frontier communities had turned into a semi-independent society with its own elected leaders – called ‘hetmans’ and ‘otamans’ – army, laws and vocabulary. Epitome of Cossackdom was the Zaporozhian Sich, a stockaded wooden barracks-town on a remote island south of the Dnieper rapids. Symbol of freedom for generations of Ukrainians, it was where the wildest outlaws gathered, the most daring raids were plotted, and the most horilka drunk. No women were allowed to enter the Sich, and important decisions were taken by the Rada, a rough-and-ready open-air assembly where, in theory at least, everybody had an equal voice. ‘This Republic could be compared to the Spartan,’ wrote a seventeenth-century Venetian envoy, Alberto Vimina, ‘if the Kozaks respected sobriety as highly as did the Spartans.’11
Despite Ukrainian wishful thinking, Cossackdom never formed anything approaching a state in the modern sense of the word. It had no borders, no written laws, no division between army and administration, and no permanent capital (the Sich moved several times in its career). Nor, since not all Ukrainians were Cossacks and not all Cossacks Ukrainians, did Cossackdom form an embryo Ukrainian nation. As Zamoyski says, the Cossacks were not a people, but a way of life.
What they also certainly were was a military power. Most of the time they worked on the land as ordinary farmers and craftsmen. ‘Among these people,’ wrote de Beauplan, ‘are found individuals expert in all the trades necessary for human life: house and ship carpenters, cartwrights, blacksmiths, armourers, tanners, harnessmakers, shoemakers, coopers, tailors, and so forth.’12 But when inclination and the hetman dictated, they took up horse-tail banners and spiked maces, and launched fearsome raids deep into Poland. In 1498 they reached Jaroslaw, west of Lviv; four years later they got all the way to the Vistula.
Poland’s response, never more than partially succesful, was to try to redirect Cossack aggression eastwards, towards the Muscovites and Turks. In 1578 King Stefan Batory granted the wealthier, town-dwelling Cossacks stipends in exchange for military service against Muscovy and the wild outlaws of the Sich. The move split Cossackdom into three – the 3,000 ‘registered’ Cossacks loyal to the Poles, the 5,000 or 6,000 independent Cossacks of the Sich, and the remaining 40,000 or so who pitched in on either side as whim and circumstance dictated.
As far as attacking Turkey was concerned, Batory’s arrangement worked brilliantly. Between 1600 and 1620 the Cossacks mounted sea-raids against Akkerman, Trabizond, Kaffa, Pere-kop, Varna, Kilia and Ismail, and burned Constantinople twice. The price of captured slaves fell so low, according to Paul of Aleppo, that ‘Every gentleman of fortune owns seventy or eighty Tatar males, and every rich matron fifty or sixty women or girls’.13 Europe rang with the Cossacks’ praises: from scrubby renegades they had turned into latter-day Crusaders, new paladins in a holy war against the godless Mohammedan. ‘The horrible Turk opened his mouth,’ wrote a Polish polemicist approvingly, ‘but the brave Rus thrust his arm within. When Turkey rushed upon Poland with a mighty army, it was stopped by the Ruthenian force.’14 But what the Polish stipends signally failed to do was to stop the Cossacks attacking Poland herself. A series of uprisings – in 1591, 1595, 1625, 1635 and 1637 – was met with equally vicious pacification campaigns, culminating in 1648 with the biggest and bloodiest Cossack rebellion of them all, under Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
Of all the endlessly mythologised figures of Ukrainian history, Khmelnytsky is both the most influential and the most mysterious. For Ukrainians he is the leader of the first Ukrainian war of independence; for Poles he is the misguided peasant rebel who split the Commonwealth, pushing Poland into her long pre-Partition decline. For Jews he is the prototype pogromshchik, author of the infamous Khmelnytsky massacres; for Russians he is the founder of the Great Slav Brotherhood, the Moses who led Ukraine out of Polish bondage into the welcoming arms of Muscovy. In Kiev, the tsars erected a statue of him astride a rearing charger, pointing his mace towards the north-east and Moscow. According to its original design, the hetman was to have been represented trampling the cowering figures of a Polish nobleman, a Catholic priest and a Jew. Wiser councils prevailed, and today a solitary Khmelnytsky slices the uncomplaining air on a traffic island outside Santa Sofia Cathedral.
It is hard to make out what kind of man Khmelnytsky was in real life. Polish tradition paints a lurid picture of a half-mad drunkard surrounded by necromancers, terrified by his own runaway success. But contemporary accounts from outsiders describe a quite different figure: plain, judicious and oddly at variance with the chaotic rebellion to which he gave his name. The Venetian envoy Vimina, in Ukraine in 1650, reported Khmelnytsky to be ‘of more than middle height, with wide bones and of a powerful build. His utterances and his system of governing indicated that he possesses judicial thinking and a penetrating mind. In his manner he is gentle and unaffected, thereby winning the love of the Kozaks.’ Though the hetman conversed happily in Latin, his surroundings were austerely military: ‘There is no luxury of any kind in his room; the walls are bare. The furniture consists of rough wooden benches covered with leather cushions . . . A damask rug lies before the hetman’s small bed, at the head of which hang a bow and a sabre,’15 A couple of years later, Paul of Aleppo was surprised to find this ‘old man, possessing every quality of a leader’ having dinner in ‘a small and mean shelter . . . with the table spread before him and no other dish laid on it but a mess of boiled fennel’.16
For the first fifty years of his life, Khmelnytsky pursued a perfectly conventional szlachta career. Born around 1595 of noble Orthodox parents, he was educated by Jesuits at Jaroslaw, before joining the Polish army. Serving in Moldova, he fell prisoner to the Turks and spent two years in capt
ivity. In 1622 he came home to the family estate in central Ukraine, where he spent the next twenty-five years farming and bringing up his family, avoiding involvement in the uprisings of the 1620s and ’30s and climbing steadily up the ranks of loyal registered Cossacks. What induced this respectable middle-aged figure to start a rebellion that would last eight years, lay waste Ukraine, kill hundreds of thousands of people and almost destroy the Commonwealth of which he had hitherto been a loyal and successful member?
The answer, apparently, was a personal grudge. In 1646, while Khmelnytsky, now a widower, was away on business, a Polish neighbour with whom he had quarrelled raided his estate, beating to death his young son and kidnapping the woman he had been planning to marry. Having failed to win redress from the local courts or the Senate in Warsaw, in January 1648 the infuriated Khmelnytsky fled to the Sich, where he succeeded in persuading the Zaporozhians to rise once more under his leadership. At the same time he concluded an alliance with the Tatar khan, giving him a force of 4,000 cavalry, vital against the Poles’ fearsome Husaria, who galloped into battle with twenty-foot lances and feather-covered wooden wings hissing above their heads. Forewarned, the Poles marched south, and in April the two sides came face to face at a village north-west of the Sich called Yellow Waters, where a 3,000-strong Polish advance guard was surrounded and cut to pieces.
That spring and summer Khmelnytsky seemed invincible. Marching north-west towards Warsaw, his raggle-taggle army scored victory after victory, leaving the Commonwealth in tatters. Registered Cossack troops came over to the rebels in droves, and all over the country peasants took the opportunity to loot and massacre. ‘Wherever they found the szlachta, royal officials or Jews,’ says the nearly contemporary Eye-Witness Chronicle, ‘they killed them all, sparing neither women nor children. They pillaged the estates of the Jews and nobles, burned churches and killed their priests, leaving nothing whole. It was a rare individual in those days who had not soaked his hands in blood . . .’17 Jarema Wisniowiecki, leader of an earlier pacification campaign and the most powerful magnate in Ukraine, raised his own army and instituted savage reprisals, ordering captives to be tortured ‘so that they feel they are dying’. Imitating the Tatars, both sides took to using prisoners for target practice, or impaled them alive upon wooden stakes.
