Bohdan Khmelnytsky

Rarely do individuals dominate epochal developments as completely as did Bohdan Khmelnytsky the great Ukrainian uprising of 1648. Because of his great personal impact on events that changed the course of Ukrainian and East European history, scholars consider him to be Ukraine’s greatest military and political leader. Yet, his debut as a major actor on the historical stage occurred late in life and was almost accidental. Born in about 1595, Khmelnytsky was the son of a minor Ukrainian nobleman named Mykhailo, who was the servitor of a Polish magnate. For his services, Mykhailo obtained an estate in Subotiv; he sent Bohdan to a Jesuit school in Iaroslav where he received a good education by the standards of the time, mastering Polish and Latin. In 1620, tragedy struck. In the great Turkish victory over the Poles at Cecora, the elder Khmelnytsky was killed and Bohdan was taken captive. After two years in captivity, Khmelnytsky returned in Subotiv, entered the ranks of the registered Cossacks, married, and concentrated on expanding his estate. Cautious and well established, he avoided involvement in the uprisings of 1625 and 1638. His good standing with the government led to a brief tenure in1638 as chancellor of the Zaporozhian Host and to his participation in a Cossack delegation to the Polish king, Wladislaw IV, in 1646. By the time Khmelnytsky, now a captain in the Chyhyryn Cossack regiment, had reached the age of 50, it appeared that the bulk of a moderately successful career was already behind him.

But a typical case of magnate acquisitiveness and arrogance completely altered Khmelnytsky’s life and with it the course of his country’s history. In 1646, during his absence from Subotiv, Daniel Chaplinski, a Polish nobleman backed by the local magnates, laid claim to Khmelnytsky’s estate, raided it, killed his youngest son, and abducted the woman that the recently widowed Cossack captain intended to marry. When numerous appeals to the court brought no satisfaction, the infuriated Khmelnytsky resolved to lead a revolt against Poles. This rapid transformation from a respected member of the establishment to a raging rebel was not completely out of character. In later years, observers often remarked about the Cossack leader’s split personality. Swarthy and stocky, “Khmel”, as he was popularly called, was usually reserved, unpretentious, courteous, and even somewhat phlegmatic. But he could unexpectedly explode in a torrent of passion, energy, and charismatic appeal. In such moments, his speech became mesmerizing, his ideas at once fascinating and frightening, and his will to have his way unshakable.

The mesmerizing influence Khmelnytsky could exert on the masses became evident when, hounded by the Poles who had caught wind of his plans, he fled to the Zaporozhian Sich with a handful of followers in January 1648. In short order he persuaded the Zaporozhians to support him, expelled the Polish garrison from the Sich, and managed to have himself elected hetman. At first, the gathering rebellion had all the features of the previous, unsuccessful uprisings: a vengeful Cossack officer, wronged by magnates, making his way to the Sich and persuading the Zaporozhians to stand up for their (and his) rights. But, in Khmelnytsky’s case, his exceptional talents as an organizer, military leader, and politician made the crucial difference.

For more than a year before arriving at the Sich, he had plotted an uprising and established a network of supporters. Realizing that the Cossacks’ great weakness in fighting the Poles was a lack of cavalry, Khmelnytsky found an audacious solution to the problem: he approached the Crimean Tatars, the Cossack’s traditional enemies, with a proposal for an alliance against the Poles. His timing was perfect. At precisely the time that his envoys arrived in Crimea, the khan’s relations with the Poles had become extremely strained and he sent Tuhai-Bey, a noted commander, with 4000 Tatars to the Cossacks’ aid. In the spring of 1648, forewarned of Khmelnytsky’s actions, the Poles moved their army to the south to nip the rebellion in the bud.

Khmelnytsky realized that if his uprising was to succeed, it needed foreign support. Therefore he turned his attention more and more to foreign relations. He scored his first diplomatic victory by drawing the Crimean Tatars into an alliance with the Cossacks. But the Tatar alliance proved to be unreliable and transitory. Moreover, it did not resolve Khmelnytsky’s key problem of defining Ukraine’s relationship to the Commonwealth. At first, the hetman was not ready for a complete break. His goal in dealing with the Commonwealth, ably represented by the leading Orthodox mandate Adam Kysil, had been to obtain autonomy for the Cossacks in Ukraine by making it a separate and equal component of the Commonwealth. But the stubborn refusal of the szliachta to accept their former subordinates as political equals precluded the possibility of his ever achieving that goal.

In Khmelnytsky’s opinion, a good candidate for the role of Ukraine’s patron and protector in the international arena was the Ottoman sultan. He was powerful enough to discourage Poles from attacking Ukraine and distant enough not to interfere overly much in its internal affairs. Thus, in 1651, after an exchange of embassies, the Ottoman Porte formally accepted the hetman and the Zaporozhian Host as its vassals on the similar loose conditions of overlordship that obtained with regard to Crimea, Moldova, and Wallachia. However, widespread animosity in Ukraine toward an “infidel” overlord, and internal changes in the Ottoman Porte, prevented this arrangement from ever taking effect.

A much more popular candidate for the role of Ukraine’s protector was the Orthodox tsar of Moscow. From the start of the uprising, Khmelnytsky had entreated the tsar, in the name of their shared Orthodox faith, to come to his aid. But Moscow’s response had been extremely cautious. Badly mauled in a recent war with Poland, the Muscovites preferred to wait for the Cossacks and Poles to exhaust each other and then to take appropriate action. However, by 1653, with the Ukrainians threatening to choose the Ottoman option, the Muscovites could not put off a decision any longer. Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich called a general assembly, which decided that, “for the sake of the Orthodox Faith and God’s Holy Church, the Gosudar [monarch] should accept them under His High Hand.” In reaching their decision, the Muscovites also expected to regain some of the lands they had lost to Poland, to utilize Ukraine as a buffer zone against the Ottomans, and, in general, to expand their influence.

In the final days of 1653, a Muscovite embassy, led by the boyar Vasilii Buturlin, met with the hetman, colonels, and general staff of the Zaporozhian Host in the town of Pereiaslav, near Kyiv. On 18 January 1654, Khmelnytsky called a meeting of the Cossack elite and the final decision was taken to accept the tsar’s overlordship of Ukraine. On that day, drummers summoned the populace to the town square where the hetman spoke about Ukraine’s need for an overlord, presented the four potential candidates for such a position – the Polish king, the Tatar khan, the Ottoman sultan and the Muscovite tsar – and declared that the Orthodox tsar was best suited for the role. Pleased that the choice had fallen on an Orthodox ruler, the crowd responded favorably to the hetman’s speech. Buturlin, Khmelnytsky, and the assembled Cossack dignitaries then proceeded to the town church to seal the decision with a mutual oath.

The Pereiaslav Agreement was concluded and it marked a turning point in the history of Ukraine, Russia, and all of Eastern Europe. Previously isolated and backward, Muscovy now took a giant step toward becoming a great power. And, for better or for worse, the fate of Ukraine became inextricably linked with that of Russia.

It is difficult to overestimate Khmelnytsky’s impact of the course of Ukrainian history. Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian historians have compared his achievements to those of such giants of 17^th-century history as Cromwell of England or Wallenstein of Bohemia. Studies of the hetman and his age frequently stress his ability to create so much from so little. Where a Ukrainian political entity had long since ceased to exist, he established a new one; out of hordes of unruly peasants and Cossacks he molded powerful, wellorganized armies; from among a people abandoned by their traditional elite he found and united around him new, dynamic leaders.

For the vast majority of Ukrainians, both in his day and up to the present, Khmelnytsky has towered as the great liberator, as the heroic figure who by the force of his personality and intellect roused Ukrainians from a centuries-long miasma of passivity and hopelessness and propelled them toward national and socioeconomic emancipation.

Task 2. Pronounce the words and learn their meanings:

minor [mainә]	to persuade [pә’sweid]
nobleman [‘noublmәn]	vengeful [‘vend ful]

Task 3. Pay attention to the pronunciation of the following words, placing the stress on the first syllable:

Influence, evident, separate, impact, tenure, regiment, patron, embassy, vassal, recent, assembly, final, candidate, entity.

Task 4. Give Ukrainian equivalents for the following word combinations and find the sentences with them in the text:

Impact on events; to be taken captive; to catch wind of smb’s plans; to stand up for smb’s rights; to call a meeting of the Cossack elite

Task 5. Give English equivalents for the following word combinations and find the sentences with them in the text:

Український шляхтич; трапилась трагедія; за короткий час; кращої нагоди й бути не могло; здобути перемогу.

Task 6. Explain word-building for:

Uprising, unshakable, unsuccessful, forewarned, overlordship.

Task 7. Give synonyms for:

To master, revolt, aid, ruler, alliance.

Task 8. Give 3 forms of the irregular verbs and learn them by heart:

To catch, to flee, to stand, to lose, to find, to become, to send, to draw, to choose, to meet, to fall, to break.

Task 9. Translate the following words of the same root:

change – to change; name – to name; master – to master; register – to register;

widow – to widow; remark – to remark; split – to split; plot – to plot.

Task 10. Answer the following questions:

1. What family did Bohdan Khmelnytsky descend from?

2. What education did B.Khmelnytsky receive?

3. Why did Khmelnytsky resolve to lead a revolt against the Poles?

4. How can you characterize B. Khmelnytsky?

5. Why did Khmelnytsky turn his attention to foreign relations?

6. “For the sake of the Orthodox Faith and God’s Holy Church” the Orthodox tsar of Moscow accepted Ukraine “under His High Hand”, didn’t he?

7. Could the Ukrainian people free themselves from the yoke of the Polish nobility without help of Russia?

8. When and where did a Muscovite embassy meet with the hetman of the Zaporozhian Host?

9. What services has B. Khmelnytsky done to Ukraine?

Task 1. Read the text to yourself: