THE SWEDISH CONNECTION 353
Chmielnicki's role to that of an angry passer-by who happened to blunder into
the already tottering structure of the state by accident.
The destructive effects of the Rebellion are undeniable. For the Republic as a
whole, it precipitated a process of decline which was never successfully reversed.
For all the Republic's citizens, it provoked an orgy of destruction of life and
property commensurate to that of the Thirty Years War in Germany. For the
Jews and Protestants it brought bloodshed and persecution on an unprece-
dented scale. The scattered and defenceless Jewish settlements attracted the
wrath not only of Chmielnicki's Cossacks and of the peasant bands, but also of
the Tsar's army. The entry of the Muscovite soldiery into Wilno on z8 July 1655
was attended by the indiscriminate slaughter of its remaining inhabitants. The
death-toll of some twenty thousand persons included a large proportion of
Jews. The total number of Jewish casualties in the period 1648-56 has been put
at 56,000; the over-all decrease in the Jewish community through death, flight,
and destitution approached 100,000.
Chmielnicki's reputation largely derives from the scale of these catastrophes,
rather than from any practical achievement. He is claimed by a number of com-
peting interests. In Ukrainian history, as 'Khmel'nyts'kyy', he appears as a pio-
neer of national liberation. In Soviet Russia, as 'Khmyel'nitskiy', he is
remembered as a Moses who led his people's exodus from Polish bondage
towards the great Russian homeland. In the Valhalla of Marxist and sociologi-
cal heroes, he is presented as a champion of social conscience and protest. He
was none of these things. He was a deserter from the army of the Republic where
he had obtained the rank of pisarz or 'scribe', and the son of an officer who had
fought at Chocim in 1621. He harboured a deep, personal, and understandable
grudge against Jarema Wisniowiecki, whose men had assaulted his property;
and he gravitated to the Sich as the natural haven for all such fugitives and mal-
contents. Then, having failed to obtain redress by his initial resort to force, he
had no alternative but to fight to the end. Otherwise, he would have been
hanged as a traitor. The sparks of his resistance fired a conflagration whose
spread he could not possibly have foreseen. Soon, in the Ukraine, his Cossacks
would be fighting for their own survival against their Muscovite protectors. In
1657, by the Treaty of Hadziacz, their leaders sought to reincorporate the
Ukraine into the Republic as an autonomous duchy. But it was too late. Their
rebellion had so encumbered the Republic with other, more pressing problems,
that it was unable to help. The Cossack horse, having thrown its Polish rider,
was now to be bridled by a far more demanding master. And by that time,
Chmielnicki himself was dead. Like the Polish insurrectionaries of the nine-
teenth century, Chmielnicki's main achievement was to have brought the prob-
lems of his homeland to the attention of the world at a time when they were
largely ignored and neglected.
Ten years later in 1667, that other great rebel, Jerzy Lubomirski lay dying. He
complained of a headache. 'Those that live by the head', he sighed, 'must die
by the head.' It was a fitting comment on the state of the Republic to whose