The Course of the Bohdan Khmelnytskyi Uprising

The great uprising of 1648 was started by a Cossack captain (sotnyk) Bohdan Kmelnytskyi. Born around 1595 of noble Orthodox parents, he got an excellent education in a Catholic school, before joining the Polish army. In 1618 Khmelnytskyi took part in the Polish march on Moscow. In 1620 during the war between Poland and Turkey Khmelnytskyi was taken prisoner by the Turks and spent two years in captivity where he learned the Tatar language and customs. In 1632 in another Polish-Russian war the Polish king personally awarded the captain with a precious sword. Most of the time from 1622 till 1646 Khmelnytskyi spent rather peacefully in his family estate in central Ukraine. What made this respectable middle-aged man to start a rebellion that would desolate Ukraine, kill hundreds of thousands of people and almost destroy the Rzeczpospolita of which he had been a loyal and successful member?

In 1646 when Khmelnytskyi was over 50 and it seemed that his career came to an end, one event turned his life upside down. One day, when Khmelnytskyi was away on business, Daniel Czaplinsky, a polish nobleman, appropriated Khmelnytskyi’s estate and abducted the woman that the recently widowed Cossack captain wanted to marry. Khmelnytskyi sought justice in local courts and in Warsaw, but failed. Then the infuriated captain decided to start a rebellion.

The time for uprising was right. People in Ukraine, and especially the Zaporozhian Cossacks, were ready to take up arms to improve their lives. They needed only a leader and they found him in Khmelnytskyi who arrived at the Sich and was elected hetman.

Realizing that the Cossacks’ great weakness in fighting the Poles was a lack of cavalry, Khmelnytskyi proposed the Crimean Tatars, the Cossacks’ traditional enemies, an alliance against the Poles. The time was perfect as the relations between the Tatars and the Poles were extremely bad. Poland stopped paying tribute to the khan. Besides, there was famine in Crimea at the time. Thus, war could bring necessary resources to the hungry Crimeans. The Tatars readily agreed to support Kmelnytskyi and in this way to enrich themselves.

The Tatars were not reliable allies as they were not interested in the Cossacks’ victory. They were not interested in Polish victory either. They were interested in weakening both the Poles and the Ukrainians. They wanted the war to continue as long as possible without a definite winner because under such conditions it was easy for them to take iasyr (captives) from Ukraine. So the Tatars did not let the Cossacks to defeat the Poles completely when it was possible. Among the Ukrainian masses, the alliance with the Tatars was most unpopular because, as a price for Tatar aid, the hetman had to allow his allies to take iasyr. While Khmelnytskyi hoped to satisfy the Tatars with Polish prisoners, the Crimeans often took what was at hand and this meant that many thousands of Ukrainian peasants were driven into slavery.

The year of 1648 brought Khmelnytskyi three brilliant victories over the Poles (at Zhovti Vody, Korsun, and Pyliavtsi). These victories provoked a large-scale peasant rebellion all over Ukraine. The war woke up the darkest instincts of many peasants and Cossacks. The famous Ukrainian “Eye Witness Chronicle” paints a frightful picture of these events: “Whenever they found szlachta, royal officials or Jews, they killed them all, sparing neither women nor children. They pillaged the estates of the Jews and nobles, burned Catholic churches and killed their priests, leaving nothing whole. It was a rare individual in those days who had not soaked his hands in blood and participated in the pillage.” Within a few months, almost all Polish nobles, officials, and priests had been pushed out from Ukraine.

Jewish losses were especially heavy. Because Jews usually served as middlemen between the szlachta and peasants they became a symbol of oppression for the common masses. Tens of thousands of Jews were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytskyi uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history (only Germans under Hitler managed to kill more Jews).[1] According to Jewish chronicles many Jews (not only men but also women and children) died cruel deaths. Many of them were skinned alive and left dying slowly. Some had their arms and legs cut off; others were buried alive.[2]

Not only Poles and Jews suffered from Cossacks during this uprising. Many Greek Catholic (Uniates) and even Orthodox Ukrainians died or lost their property during Cossack attacks on towns and cities. The Cossack and Tatar troops usually looted captured towns without paying attention to the nationality or religion of townspeople. Especially notorious in this activity were the Cossacks of Colonel Martyn Nebaba who often ordered to kill not only Polish soldiers who defended towns but also every dweller (including women and children) irrespective of their religion and nationality.

The Polish nobility also showed a lot of cruelty during the war. It applied the tactic of terror to the rebellious masses. The most notorious practitioner of szlachta terror tactics was Prince Iarema Vyshnevetsky, the wealthiest magnate of the Rzeczpospolita. He descended from a famous Ukrainian Orthodox family but decided to change his faith and be Polonized. He was the grandson of Dmytro (“Baida”) Vyshnevetsky, the legendary founder of the Zaporozhian Sich. His private army[3], whenever it moved, tortured and killed Cossacks, peasants, women, and children, leaving behind it a grisly trail of corpses. Many people were blinded or impaled alive upon wooden stakes. Iarema wanted them to ‘feel that they are dying.’ For his extreme cruelty Prince Vyshnevetsky earned the terrible nickname “Slavic Nero.”[4] Although Ukrainian historians consider the prince a fierce butcher of his own people, a large number of Polish historians still consider him a real knight. (Thanks to the popularity of his father, Iarema Vyshnevetsky’s son was elected Polish king). The example of Iarema Vyshevetsky is significant for understanding the tragedy of the Ukrainian nobility. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainian nobles was Catholicized and Polonized and fought on the Polish side against their own people. Many nobles had their own private armies consisted of ethnic Ukrainians (nadvirni Cossacks). Not only Catholicized nobles supported the Polish king in the war, he was supported as well by some Orthodox and Protestant nobles who fought against Khmelnytskyi’s armies. Hence, the Polish historians call the Khmelnytskyi revolt a civil war in which Polish subjects (szlachta and its armies) fought against Polish subjects (peasants, Cossacks and representatives of Orthodox szlachta).

At the beginning of the war Bohdan’s intentions were quite modest – he planned to create an autonomous Ukrainian principality within Polish borders. With time, after some impressive victories, he changed his previous intentions and started to think of an independent Cossack state under his own reign. He also planned to establish a hereditary monarchy in Ukraine, i.e. to found the Khmelnytskyi dynasty.

The Pereiaslav Agreement (1654)

As the war continued with varying fortune without a clear prospect for success (since the Tatars were against it) Khmelnytskyi started to look for another powerful and reliable ally. Two powerful neighbors – Turkey and Muscovy – were under consideration. There was a big problem with the Turks – they were Muslims. It was clear that the masses would not like such a union.

A much more popular candidate for the role of Ukraine’s protector was the tsar of Moscow, since Russians had the same religion. From the start of the uprising, Khmelnytskyi had asked the tsar to come to his aid. But Moscow’s response had been extremely cautious. Moscow lost a war with Poland in the 1630s and now it decided to wait for Cossacks and Poles to exhaust each other and only then to enter the war. However, by 1653, with the Ukrainians threatening to choose Turkey, the Muscovites could not put off a decision any longer. Tsar Alexei decided to help Ukrainians and in such a way to expand his territories.

In January 1654, in the city of Pereiaslav (present-day Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi in Kyiv region) a treaty between Russia and Ukraine was concluded. According to the Pereiaslav agreement Cossack Ukraine got wide autonomy under Russia’s protection. It had practically unlimited internal self-rule but was to pay tribute to Moscow as price for protection. As to foreign relations, Ukraine was free to establish them with any country except for Poland, Crimea and Turkey. But Khmelnytskyi often violated this rule and maintained close diplomatic relations with these countries. Moscow also allowed Ukraine to have a large army (60,000) of registered Cossacks.

After Khmelnytskyi concluded the Pereiaslav agreement with Moscow, the Crimean Tatars decided to support Poland. In the summer of 1656 Poland’s position sharply deteriorated. Swedish armies entered Poland from the north and occupied much of its territory. Poland, fighting on several fronts, seemed on the verge of collapse.[5] Under such circumstances Polish diplomats promised the Russian tsar to elect him their king and make Poland part of a common Russian-Polish-Lithuanian federation under Moscow leadership. Moscow accepted the proposal and declared war on Sweden (1656). The Polish-Russian union automatically closed all hopes for Khmelnytskyi to liberate Ukraine. He was infuriated and decided to break the union with Russia.[6] Only death (1657) prevented him from doing it. This fact is silenced in Russia for political reasons.

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