The Ruin and the Hetmanate

The great Ukrainian uprising of 1648 succeeded where most mass uprisings in early modern Europe had failed: it expelled a magnate-elite from most of the land and replaced it with a regime based on a native model. But while this epochal event brought about a great many changes, much remained unresolved. Sharp differences arose among the Cossack leaders as to whether Ukraine should remain under Moscow or seek the overlordship of another neighboring power. Pressing socioeconomic issues also came to the fore. Was Ukraine to become a unique society of free Cossack farmers, as envisaged by the peasants and Cossack rank and file, or would the Cossack starshyna simply take the place of the expelled nobles and thereby cause the destabilized social order to revert to the elite-dominated models typical for the period?

In the decades following Khmelnytsky’s death, bitter conflicts over these issues pitted Ukrainians against each other. Civil strife, foreign intervention, and further devastation of an already despoiled land ensued. In Ukrainian historiography, the tragic spectacle of Ukrainians dissipating the tremendous energy and resolve that had been generated by the 1648 uprising in seemingly endless, self-destructive conflicts is often called the Ruin (Ruina). Twenty years after Khmelnytsky’s death, the successes that had been scored against a common foe were cancelled out by the woeful inability of Ukrainians to unite towards a common goal. Their failure resulted in the loss of the promising opportunity created by the Khmelnytsky uprising to attain political self-determination.

After the chaos of the period of Ruin subsided, the Hetmanate on the left bank of the Dnieper emerged as the center of Ukrainian political, cultural, and economic life. The focus of historically significant development in Ukraine now shifted completely from the westernmost lands to the easternmost. The Hetmanate was an autonomous political entity, not an independent one. Nonetheless, it provided Ukrainians with a greater measure of self-government than they had enjoyed since the days of the Galician-Volhynian principalities. As part of the Russian Empire, it existed in what was for many Ukrainians still relatively new political environment. It was no longer the fractious and failing Commonwealth of the Polish nobles that Ukrainians had to deal with; rather, since the collapse of the Polish and Ottoman options during the Ruin, they now had to contend with the exacting rulers of expanding Russia.

Intent on monopolizing power, the tsars were inherently opposed to the idea of Ukrainian, or any other, self-rule. This attitude was reinforced by the spread of absolutist principles and practices throughout Europe in the 18^th century. Such committed proponents of absolutism as Peter I and Catherine II, two of Russia’s foremost rulers, believed that centralized government was the most efficient and enlightened. This view, however, ran counter to the form of self-government – based on uniquely Ukrainian institutions and traditions – that existed in the Hetmanate. Thus, the central political issue of Ukrainian life in the 18^th century became the struggle, long and drawn out, between imperial Russian centralism and the Ukrainian desire for autonomy.