The Russian Empire 1450–1801

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half-century of warfare known in Ukrainian history as the“Ruin,”in Polish
history as the“Deluge”and in Jewish history as the“Abyss of Despair.”Although
often billed as afight for national independence, such consciousness was probably
limited to the educated ideologues of Church and some nobility. As Iakovenko
has suggested, the actual conflicts were diverse and dynamic. Cossack armies
attacked at will oblivious to the ideological claims of the Kyiv leadership, looting
Orthodox monasteries and Ukrainian and Jewish villages indiscriminately. Thou-
sands were killed on all sides. Ukrainian princely nobles identified more with the
warrior ethos of nobility than with ethnic or religious compatriots. Cossack
government dispossessed thousands of Polish noblemen and Jews, awarding
their property to Cossacks and Ukrainian peasants. The experience fatally weak-
ened the Commonwealth and transformed the Ukrainian lands. When the dust
settled at the Treaty of Andrusovo (1667) and its affirmation in 1686, lands along
the Dnieper were divided between Right Bank (remaining in the Common-
wealth) and Left Bank (ruled by Khmelnytsky and his successors). In 1654
Khmelnytsky negotiated an alliance with Russia at Pereiaslav, making the Left
Bank Hetmanate a protectorate of Russia. To the east the Hetmanate was edged
by Sloboda Ukraine in the Russian orbit and to the south by Cossacks in the still


Figure 3.1 This 1888 statue of Cossack hetman Bohdan Khmelytsky in Kyiv stands before
the majestic early eighteenth-century bell tower at the entrance to the grounds of the
eleventh-century Sofiia Cathedral. In the 1740s the bell tower was restored by St. Petersburg
architect Johann Gottfried Schädel and decorated by Ukrainian artisans with an ornate
baroque facade. Photo: Jack Kollmann.


76 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801

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