Category Archives: Russia

by Joel | 6 July 2026 · 2:51 am

Russian vs. Ukrainian Transitions, 1990s

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 43-44:

In Ukraine, as in Russia, the economy and public reaction to the dissolution of the USSR were the two key issues that turned national politics into a never-ending drama, casting president and parliament in opposing roles. But those issues played out differently in Ukraine, where, most importantly, the political elite enhanced rather than undermined the democratic institutions born out of the chaos of Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms. Russia’s “democratic moment” became an “era of democracy” in Ukraine.

Leonid Kravchuk was never the revolutionary that Yeltsin had become during the late Soviet period. If Yeltsin had served in the course of his party career as a regional boss responsible for administering large administrative and economic entities such as Sverdlovsk oblast (province) and Moscow, Kravchuk was a quintessential apparatchik, running the propaganda department of the Ukrainian Central Committee. While Yeltsin left the Communist Party early, protesting the slow pace of Gorbachev’s reforms, Kravchuk remained loyal to the end. If Yeltsin was elected to parliament and then became its chairman against the will of the party leadership, then Kravchuk took the helm of the Ukrainian parliament thanks to the support of the party bosses. And while Yeltsin ran for the Russian presidency against a communist candidate supported by the Kremlin, Kravchuk competed successfully against a pro-democratic candidate who also happened to be a former prisoner of the Gulag.

The differences between Yeltsin and Kravchuk extended to their styles of presidential leadership. If Yeltsin was a charismatic populist, highly voluntarist in his attitude to power, Kravchuk was a cunning apparatchik and consensus builder. He would need those skills in office, as he led a country very different from Russia and faced a very different parliament. Ukraine was divided by history, culture, and the political orientations and instincts of its people as the Russian Federation never was.

The east and south of Ukraine had been the industrial heartland of the Soviet Union, was highly Russified in culture, and had millions of ethnic Russians among its inhabitants. The center was largely rural and Ukrainian-speaking, a product of the Soviet Ukrainian national project of the 1920s, which tolerated Ukrainian cultural but not political identity. Then there was the west, which had long been part of central European states and empires. Its strongly exclusivist national identity had been strengthened by the interwar nationalist movement and the lengthy guerrilla war against Soviet rule waged by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

As in Russia, the Ukrainian “democrats” emerged as the most dynamic force in late Soviet and early post-Soviet politics. Their principal concern was not economic reform but state-building. By the end of 1991 Yeltsin had established control over all-Union managerial cadres and institutions that had plenty of experience in running an independent state; in Ukraine such institutions had to be built almost from scratch on the basis of ministries that in Soviet times had merely relayed orders from Moscow to the periphery, ensuring that production quotas and directives from the top were fulfilled in a timely manner.

When it came to market reforms, the Ukrainian parliament lacked a strong lobby to advocate or adopt them, and the public was not ready to support them. Economic reform meant hardship, which might very well split the country and scupper its independence. A poll conducted in 1993 suggested that only 19 percent of Ukrainians were prepared to endure economic reforms in order to strengthen and maintain independence, while 44 percent were not. Most of the former resided in the west, while most of the latter lived in the east and south. Thus, Ukraine found itself first resisting, then delaying, and finally emulating reforms.

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by Joel | 4 July 2026 · 11:17 pm

Ending the Soviet Empire

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 28, 31:

In 1995, in his review of Matlock’s memoir, titled Autopsy on an Empire, Kennan wrote: “I find it hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance more inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance from the international scene, primarily in the years 1987 through 1991, of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.” Kennan referred to the fall of previous empires as gradual. That of the Soviet Union was not. “How then to explain the extreme abruptness, the sharp quick ending, and not least the relative bloodlessness with which the great Soviet Empire came to an end in the four years in question, bearing with it those attributes of the earlier Russian Empire which it had contrived to incorporate into itself?” Kennan asked himself and his readers.

Was the Soviet experience unique? We can start by considering the British Empire, the most powerful such institution of the modern era, which offered the Russians a Commonwealth model for opting out of a traditional imperial project. British imperial disentanglement was gradual indeed. It began, arguably, with the eighteenth-century American Revolution, followed by slowly developing autonomism in the dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Attempts to crush South African and Irish movements for independence proved unsuccessful in the wake of World War I; in the decades after World War II Britain withdrew from India and subsequently from its African colonies.

…

To the surprise and relief of many, the Russians, led by Boris Yeltsin, refused to follow in the footsteps of the Serbs, who turned the former Yugoslav army into an instrument of Serbian aggrandizement and then of genocide. Nor did the Russians cling to the Soviet republics that Russia had dominated, as the French and Belgians did to their former colonies. Instead, the Russians seem to have taken a page from the dissolution of the Portuguese empire. Both empires ceased to exist as a result of relatively peaceful revolutions that took place in their capitals, where reformers tried to dismantle authoritarian government and initiate political, economic, and social reforms. In both countries, the existence of empire was an obstacle to such reforms.

Boris Yeltsin and his advisers sought to implement their reforms in Russia, not in the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev’s efforts to democratize the system were opposed by the conservatively minded communist elites that controlled most of the Soviet republics. To free his Russian reformers from the limitations imposed on them by Gorbachev’s vacillating political center, which was stymied by competing pro- and anti-reform factions, Yeltsin allied himself with pro-democratic reformers in the Baltic states and pro–status quo elites in Central Asia, all in an effort to undermine existing Soviet institutions. Yeltsin did not intend to subvert the Soviet Union in the process, but once the disintegration that he helped to set off developed a momentum of its own, he went along. His main political rival, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Soviet Union itself were swept away as a result.

Keeping the secessionist republics under Russian control by military force was an unlikely policy choice for other reasons as well. One of them was the enormous political, ideological, and economic influence that the United States wielded over the Soviet Union at this time, as well as the place that America occupied in the imagination of Soviet-era reformers, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin and beyond. Washington did not want the republics to fight one another, fearing the possibility of a “Yugoslavia with nukes”—a scenario that Gorbachev never tired of raising in his conversations with President George H. W. Bush.

The Russian president was prepared to use force against autonomous republics within the Russian Federation if they should attempt to secede, but not against similar aspirations of Union republics such as Ukraine. Moreover, the Soviet Army was short of resources, and Russians serving in it were not eager to fight.

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by Joel | 2 July 2026 · 12:03 am

Ukraine Votes for Independence, 1991

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 2-3:

While the disintegration of the Soviet Union had been underway for some time, it became irreversible on December 1, 1991, when the citizens of Ukraine, the Union’s second-largest republic after Russia, went to the polls to decide whether they wanted their country to become independent. The turnout exceeded 84 percent of eligible voters, and more than 92 percent of them chose independence. Even residents of the Ukrainian Donbas (Donets Basin), adjoining Russia’s western border, voted for independence by a margin of almost 84 percent. In the Crimea, the only region of Ukraine with a majority Russian population, 54 percent supported independence. Sevastopol, the home port of the Black Sea Fleet, did even better, registering 57 percent support for Ukrainian independence.

The vote came as a shock to Gorbachev but not to President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, Gorbachev’s onetime protégé and then his challenger and rival. Yeltsin had been briefed on the likely outcome a few days earlier by his adviser Galina Starovoitova, an anthropologist and pro-democracy activist. On hearing the projections, Yeltsin was incredulous. “It cannot be true!” was his first reaction. “This is our fraternal Slavic republic! There are 30 percent Russians there. The Crimea is Russian! All the people living east of the Dnieper gravitate toward Russia!” It took close to 40 minutes for Starovoitova to convince her boss that the polling data were pointing in one direction and one direction only, an overwhelming vote for independence. Yeltsin made his decision on the spot: he would recognize Ukrainian independence and meet with the soon-to-be-elected president of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, to forge an alliance and a new union different from the one led by Mikhail Gorbachev.

The meeting took place on December 7 and continued into the next day at the Belavezha hunting grounds on the Belarusian-Polish border. The Belarusian leaders, including the head of the republic’s parliament, Stanislav Shushkevich, hosted the Russian and Ukrainian presidents, who decided the fate of the USSR. Once Kravchuk refused to join the reformed Union proposed by Gorbachev, Yeltsin’s aide Gennadii Burbulis proposed to dissolve the USSR altogether. Frightened by this, the head of the Belarusian KGB reported the treasonous proposal to his bosses in Moscow, but there was no active response—by that time, Gorbachev had few remaining supporters in the Soviet capital. The Soviet Union was replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States, a regional international organization rather than a new state. Less than two weeks later, the leaders of the Central Asian republics joined the Commonwealth as its founding members. Now Gorbachev had no allies in the republics either. Bowing to the inevitable, he resigned on December 25, 1991.

Gorbachev’s foreign-policy aide, Anatolii Cherniaev, who was also the principal drafter of his superior’s resignation speech, later wrote in his assessment of the Soviet Union’s last year of existence: “What actually went on with the USSR that year was what happened ‘at the appointed time’ to other empires when the potential allotted to them by history expired.” The fall of empires was very much on Cherniaev’s mind when he introduced such phrases as “What is most ruinous in this crisis is the disintegration of statehood” and “We are heirs to a great civilization” into the draft of Gorbachev’s speech. But he also admitted the futility of any attempt to save the failing empire. “Gorbachev’s efforts to rescue the Union are hopeless spasms,” wrote Cherniaev in his diary in November 1991, going on to observe: “And yet it would all have blown over were it not for Ukraine, for the Crimea, which cannot be returned.”

The Soviet Union fell on account of the Ukrainian referendum, as the Ukrainians were the only ones who put the question of their independence to a vote. Gorbachev argued in favor of an all-Union referendum on the fate of the USSR, but there was no referendum in any other republic. Most of them, including Russia, simply accepted the results of the Ukrainian referendum as a verdict not only on the independence of the Ukrainian republic but also on the future of the USSR. Neither Gorbachev nor Yeltsin imagined the Soviet Union without its second-largest republic, a key element of Russian imperial and Soviet history and mythology. Restoring the imperial project in any form would depend on Russia’s ability to bring Ukraine back into the fold. “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire,” remarked Zbigniew Brzezinski a few years later.

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by Joel | 30 June 2026 · 12:06 am

Building a Ukrainian National Language

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 215-218:

AMONG THE UKRAINIANS prepared to fight Napoleon with arms in hand was the founder of modern Ukrainian literature, Ivan Kotliarevsky. A native of the Poltava region in the former Hetmanate, he formed a Cossack detachment to join the struggle. The son of a minor official, Kotliarevsky studied in a theological seminary, worked as a tutor of children of the nobility, and served in the Russian imperial army, taking part in the 1806–1812 Russo-Turkish War. In 1798, while on military service, the first part of his poem Eneïda appeared in print, a travesty based on Virgil’s Aeneid, whose main characters were not Greeks but Zaporozhian Cossacks. As one would expect of true Zaporozhians, they spoke vernacular Ukrainian. But the choice of language for the poem seems logical only in retrospect. In late eighteenth century Ukraine, Kotliarevsky was a pioneer—the first to write a major poetical work in the vernacular.

…

Kotliarevsky wrote the first part of Eneïda when the shell of Church Slavonic, which had dominated Russian imperial literature of the previous era, was crumbling and falling apart, allowing literatures based in one way or another on the vernacular to make their way into the public sphere. Russia found its first truly great poet in Alexander Pushkin; Ukraine got its own in the person of Kotliarevsky. Whatever his original motives for using Ukrainian, Kotliarevsky never regretted his choice. There would be five more parts of Eneïda. He would also author the first plays written in Ukrainian, among them Natalka-Poltavka (Natalka from Poltava), a love story set in a Ukrainian village. The language of Kotliarevsky’s homeland, the Poltava region of the former Hetmanate, would become the basis of standard Ukrainian for speakers of numerous Ukrainian dialects from the Dnieper to the Don in the east and to the Carpathians in the west. With Kotliarevsky, a new literature was born. The language received its first grammar in 1818 with the publication of the Grammar of the Little Russian Dialect by Oleksii Pavlovsky. A year later, the first collection of Ukrainian folk songs by Mykola (Nikolai) Tsertelev appeared in print.

…

The birthplace of Ukrainian romanticism was the city of Kharkiv, where the imperial government opened a university in 1805, inviting professors from all over the empire to fill vacant positions. Being a professor at that time often meant taking an interest in local history and folklore, and Kharkiv had a rich tradition. It served as the administrative and cultural center of Sloboda Ukraine, settled by Ukrainian Cossacks and runaway peasants in the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this land was often referred to as “Ukraine.”

…

The centrality of the Cossack past to romantic literary interests, already manifested by Kotliarevsky’s Eneïda, was further evidenced by the Kharkiv romantics’ readiness to embrace and popularize by far the most influential Ukrainian historical text of the period, Istoriia rusov (The History of the Rus’).

Well, my Kindle app has informed me that I’ve nearly reached the publisher’s limit in copying from the text of this book, and this seems a good place to end this series of excerpts—at the point where a national language begins to develop. So I have decided to buy the latest book by the same prolific author, and begin reading and posting excerpts from The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History (W. W. Norton, 2023), the first chapter of which summarizes many of the highlights that I have excerpted from this book.

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by Joel | 29 June 2026 · 12:05 am

Polish & Ukrainian Anthems

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 213-214:

THE UKRAINIAN NATIONAL anthem begins with the words “Ukraine has not yet perished,” hardly an optimistic beginning for any kind of song. But this is not the only anthem whose words do not inspire optimism. The Polish national anthem starts with the familiar line “Poland has not yet perished.” The words of the Polish anthem were written in 1797 and those of the Ukrainian one were penned in 1862, so it is quite clear who influenced whom. But why such pessimism? In both cases, Polish and Ukrainian, the idea of the death of the nation stemmed from the experience of the late eighteenth century—the partitions of Poland and the liquidation of the Hetmanate.

Like many other anthems, the Polish one was originally a marching song written for the Polish legions fighting under the command of the future emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, in his Italian campaigns. The song was originally known as the “Dąbrowski mazurka,” named for a commander of the Polish troops, Jan Henryk Dąbrowski. Many of the Polish legionnaires, including the commander himself, had taken part in the Kościuszko Uprising, and the lyrics were meant to lift their spirits after the destruction of their state by the partitioning powers. The song’s second line asserts that Poland will not perish “as long as we are alive.” By associating the nation not with the state but with those who considered themselves its members, the Polish anthem gave hope not just to the Poles but also to representatives of other stateless nations. A new generation of patriots in Poland and Ukraine refused to accept the disasters of the previous century as the final verdict on their nations. Both Polish and Ukrainian activists promoted a new understanding of a nation as a democratic polity made up of citizen patriots rather than a territorial state.

IN THE FIRST decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon and his soldiers brought the ideas of nation and popular sovereignty to the rest of Europe in their songs and at the points of their bayonets. In 1807, the dream of the Polish legionnaires came a step closer to realization when, after defeating Prussia, the French emperor created the Duchy of Warsaw out of territories annexed by that country during the partitions of Poland. To the Poles, this offered the exciting prospect of the restoration of their homeland. In 1812, after Napoleon’s invasion of the Russian Empire, Poles under Russian rule rose in support of the French invader, whom they considered a liberator. Adam Mickiewicz, the foremost Polish poet of the era, reflected the Polish nobility’s excitement at the advance of the French army into today’s Belarus in his epic poem Sir Thaddeus, which is still required reading in today’s Polish (but not Belarusian) schools. “Glory is ours already,” says one of the poem’s Polish characters, “and so we shall soon have our Republic again.”

In 1815, when entering the University of Vilnius, the sixteen-year-old Mickiewicz gave his name as Adam Napoleon Mickiewicz. By that time, Polish hopes of having “our Republic again” had been crushed. Napoleon, Dąbrowski, and their French and Polish troops had retreated from the Russian Empire in defeat.

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by Joel | 27 June 2026 · 12:13 am

Russia Closes the Steppe Frontier, 1774

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 204-205:

The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarjae, signed in 1774, looked like a setback for Russian aspirations in the Black Sea region. Imperial troops had to leave the Danube principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. St. Petersburg also had to remove its troops from the Crimea. The reason was simple: a number of European powers were unhappy with the sudden growth of Russian influence in the region. But the treaty benefited the Russian Empire in other ways. It effectively expelled the Ottomans from the northern Black Sea region and the Crimea. Russia established its outposts on the Azov and Black Seas. The Crimean Khanate was now declared an independent state. That was a one-sided description: while the peninsula became independent of Istanbul, it now depended on St. Petersburg.

The formal annexation of the Crimea to the Russian Empire took place in 1783, with the Russian army entering the peninsula and sending the last Crimean khan into exile in central Russia. Bezborodko, by then a leading architect of Russian foreign policy, played an important role in this development. He was also an author of the so-called Greek Project, a plan to destroy the Ottoman Empire and establish a new Byzantium under Russian control, as well as to create Dacia, a new country on the Danube consisting of Moldavia and Wallachia. The project never came to fruition, but its echoes still resonate in the Greek names given by the imperial authorities to the Crimean towns, including Simferopol, Yevpatoria, and the most famous of them, Sevastopol—the Russian naval base established on the peninsula two years after its annexation.

Alarmed by Catherine’s trip to the Crimea in 1787 and rumors of the Greek Project, the Ottomans began a new war for control of the northern Black Sea coast. They lost once again, this time to allied Russian and Austrian troops. According to the peace treaty signed at Jassy in 1792 by Oleksandr Bezborodko, the Russian Empire extended its control to all of southern Ukraine. The Ottomans now recognized both the Crimea and the Kuban region across the Strait of Kerch as Russian territories. With a stroke of Bezborodko’s pen, the Russian Empire had closed the Ukrainian steppe frontier. The cultural frontier, however, remained in place, simply becoming an internal one.

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by Joel | 26 June 2026 · 12:07 am

Aftermath of Poltava, 1709

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 178-179:

THE COSSACK HETMANATE, which survived under the suzerainty of the Muscovite tsars only on the Left Bank of the Dnieper, served as a construction site for a number of nation-building projects. One of them, closely associated with the name “Ukraine” and a view of the Hetmanate as a distinct Cossack polity and fatherland, became the foundation for the development of modern Ukrainian identity. Another, associated with the official Russian name of the Hetmanate, “Little Russia,” laid the basis for what would later become known as “Little Russianism,” the tradition of treating Ukraine as “Lesser Russia” and the Ukrainians as part of a larger Russian nation.

Both intellectual traditions coexisted in the Hetmanate before the last major Cossack revolt, led by Hetman Ivan Mazepa in 1708. Mazepa’s revolt targeted Muscovy and the official founder of the Russian Empire, Tsar Peter I. It ended in defeat as the Russians overcame the Swedish army, which Charles XII led into Ukraine. The Battle of Poltava in 1709 profoundly changed the fate of the Cossack Hetmanate and Ukraine as a whole. The loss for Charles was a double loss for Mazepa and his vision of Ukraine as an entity separate from Russia. In subsequent years, the Little Russian interpretation of Ukrainian history and culture as closely linked to Russia would become dominant in the official discourse of the Hetmanate. The idea of Ukraine as a separate polity, fatherland, and indeed nation did not disappear entirely but shifted out of the center of Ukrainian discourse for more than a century.

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by Joel | 25 June 2026 · 12:27 am

Ukraine’s Magna Carta?

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 161-164:

WHATEVER THE LEGAL and ideological underpinnings of the Pereiaslav agreement, the tsar honored Buturlin’s promise and gave the Cossacks what the Polish king had never agreed to: recognition of Cossack statehood, a Cossack register of 60,000, and privileged status for the Cossack estate. He also recognized the liberties enjoyed by other social strata under the Polish kings.

First and foremost, however, the agreement laid the foundations for a military alliance. It established no western boundary for the Cossacks’ territory—they could go as far as their sabers would take them. The Muscovite and Cossack armies entered the war against the commonwealth on their separate fronts: the Cossacks, assisted by a Muscovite corps, led the offensive in Ukraine, within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Poland; the Muscovite troops launched an offensive near Smolensk and moved west through Belarus and then into Lithuania, north of the Lublin border between the grand duchy and the kingdom. The joint offensive of Muscovite and Cossack troops brought unexpected results. Whereas in 1654 the Polish and Lithuanian troops, assisted by the Crimean khan, had managed to resist the offensive from the east, in the summer and fall of 1655 the Polish-Lithuanian counteroffensive collapsed: the Cossacks once again besieged Lviv, and Muscovite troops entered Vilnius, the capital of the grand duchy.

This was the beginning of the era known in Polish history as the Deluge. Not only did the Muscovite and Cossack armies move deep into the commonwealth, but in July 1655 the Swedes launched an offensive of their own across the Baltic Sea. By October, both Warsaw and the ancient Polish capital of Cracow were in Swedish hands. Alarmed by the prospect of a complete Polish collapse and a dramatic expansion of Sweden, which now claimed the parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania conquered by Muscovite troops, in the fall of 1656 Muscovite diplomats concluded an agreement with the commonwealth in Vilnius that put an end to Polish-Muscovite hostilities. Khmelnytsky and the Cossack officials were enraged at being denied access to the negotiations. The separate peace with Poland was leaving the Cossacks one on one with their traditional enemy. As far as they were concerned, the tsar was reneging on his main obligation under the Pereiaslav agreement—the military protection of his subjects.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky ignored the Muscovite-Polish deal and sent his army to help an ally of Sweden, the Protestant ruler of Transylvania, fight the Poles. Now, even the military alliance between the tsar and the Cossacks came into question. Khmelnytsky had been looking for new allies since Sweden’s entry into the war with Poland. The Swedes seemed determined to destroy the commonwealth, which Khmelnytsky also wanted. Negotiations to conclude a Ukrainian-Swedish agreement that would put an end to the commonwealth and guarantee the inclusion not only of Ukraine but also parts of what is now Belarus in the Cossack state gained new impetus from what the hetman regarded as the tsar’s betrayal of Ukraine.

Khmelnytsky, however, did not live to see the conclusion of this new international alliance. He died in August 1657, leaving the state he had created and the Cossacks he had led at a crossroads. Although Khmelnytsky believed that his alliance with the tsar had already run its course, he formally abided by the deal he had made in Pereiaslav. Events there became an important part of the old hetman’s large and contradictory legacy. Cossack chroniclers of the eighteenth century celebrated him very much in the same vein as the professors and students of the Kyivan College had done on his entrance into Kyiv in December 1648. They extolled him as the father of the nation, the liberator of his people from the Polish yoke, and the hetman who had negotiated the best possible arrangement with the tsar: they considered the Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, approved by the tsar after Pereiaslav, a Magna Carta of Ukrainian liberties in the Russian Empire.

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by Joel | 24 June 2026 · 12:39 am

Cossacks Join the Tsar, 1654

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 159-161:

THE TURNING POINT in the internationalization of the Khmelnytsky Revolt took place on January 8, 1654, in the town of Pereiaslav. On that day, Bohdan Khmelnytsky and a hastily gathered group of Cossack officers swore allegiance to the new sovereign of Ukraine, Tsar Aleksei Romanov of Muscovy. The long and complex history of Russo-Ukrainian relations had begun. In 1954, the Soviet Union lavishly celebrated the tricentennial of the “reunification” of Ukraine and Russia. The implication was that all of Ukraine had chosen at Pereiaslav to rejoin Russia and accepted the sovereignty of the tsar. What actually happened at Pereiaslav in 1654 was neither the reunification of Ukraine with Muscovy (which would be renamed “Russia” by Peter I) nor the reunion of two “fraternal peoples,” as suggested by Soviet historians. No one in Pereiaslav or Moscow was thinking or speaking in ethnic terms in 1654. Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s speech at the council of Cossack officers, recorded in the materials of the Muscovite embassy, gives some idea of how the Ukrainian hetman presented and explained his actions:

We have convened a council open to the whole people so that you, together with us, might choose a sovereign for yourselves out of four, whomever you wish: the first is the Turkish tsar [sultan], who has often appealed to us through his envoys to come under his rule; the second is the Crimean khan; the third is the Polish king, who, if we wish, may still take us into his former favor; the fourth is the Orthodox sovereign of Great Rus’, the tsar, Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich, the eastern sovereign of all Rus’, whom we have now been entreating for ourselves for six years with incessant pleadings. Now choose the one you wish!

No doubt, Khmelnytsky was playing games. The choice had already been made: he and the Cossack officers had decided in favor of the sovereign of Muscovy. According to the ambassadorial report, the hetman made his argument by appealing to the Orthodox solidarity of his listeners. Those taking part in the council shouted their desire for the “Eastern” Orthodox tsar as their ruler.

It sounded like one of the many religion-based alliances of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation: the Thirty Years’ War, in which the countries of Europe lined up largely on the basis of their religious identities, had ended only five years earlier. There is no need to blame either the Muscovite elites or their Ukrainian counterparts for not considering each other brothers and members of the same Rus’ nation. The two sides needed interpreters to understand each other, and Khmelnytsky’s letters to the tsar survived in the Russian archives largely in translations prepared by such official interpreters. The tradition of Kyivan Rus’ as represented by historical memory and religious belief still existed, but it was embodied only in a few handwritten chronicles.

Four centuries of existence in different political conditions, under the rule of different states, had strengthened long-standing linguistic and cultural differences that divided the future Belarus and Ukraine from the future Russia. Those differences came to the fore when Khmelnytsky and the colonels wanted to discuss conditions of the agreement with the Russian envoy, Vasilii Buturlin; he told them that the tsar would treat them better than the king had but refused to negotiate. Khmelnytsky objected, saying that they had been accustomed to negotiating with the king and his officials, but Buturlin responded that the Polish king, being an elective monarch, was not the equal of the hereditary Russian tsar. He also refused to take an oath with regard to the broad promises he had made to the Cossacks: the tsar, said Buturlin, swears no oath to his subjects. Khmelnytsky, who wanted Muscovite troops in battle as soon as possible, agreed to swear allegiance to the tsar with no reciprocal oath.

The Cossacks thought of the Pereiaslav agreement as a contract with binding obligations on both sides. As far as Khmelnytsky was concerned, he and his polity were entering into a protectorate under the tsar’s authority. They promised loyalty and military service in exchange for the protection offered by Muscovy. The tsar, however, perceived the Cossacks as new subjects toward whom he would have no obligations after granting them certain rights and privileges. As for his right to the new territory, he thought in dynastic terms. As far as he and his chancellery were concerned, the tsar was taking over his patrimony: the cities of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav.

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by Joel | 21 June 2026 · 3:17 am

Poles & Cossacks vs. Ottomans

From The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2017), Kindle pp. 127-131:

The Ukrainian Cossacks, who had begun their international career in the 1550s by serving the tsar of Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible, paid an unsolicited visit to Moscow during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Muscovy was then in turmoil because of an economic, dynastic, and political crisis known as the Time of Troubles. It began at the turn of the seventeenth century with a number of devastating famines caused in part by what we today call the Little Ice Age—a period of low temperatures that lasted half a millennium, from about 1350 to 1850, peaking around the beginning of the seventeenth century. The crisis afflicted Muscovy at a most inopportune time, when its Rurikid dynasty had died out and a number of aristocratic clans contested the legitimacy of the new rulers. The dynastic crisis came to an end in 1613 with the election to the Muscovite throne of the first Romanov tsar. But before the crisis was resolved, a number of candidates for the throne, some of them “pretenders” claiming to be surviving relatives of Ivan the Terrible, tried their political luck, opening the door to foreign intervention.

During the lengthy interregnum, the Cossacks supported the two pretenders seeking the Muscovite throne, False Dmitrii I and False Dmitrii II. Up to 10,000 Cossacks joined the army of Field Crown Hetman Stanisław Żółkiewski of Poland when he marched on Moscow in 1610. The election to the Muscovite throne three years later of Tsar Mikhail Romanov, founder of the dynasty that lasted until the Revolution of 1917, did not end Cossack involvement in Muscovite affairs. In 1618, a Ukrainian Cossack army of 20,000 joined Polish troops in their march on Moscow and took part in the siege of the capital. The Cossacks helped end the war on conditions favorable to the Kingdom of Poland. One of them was the transfer to Poland of the Chernihiv land, which the Grand Duchy of Lithuania had lost in the early sixteenth century. By the mid-seventeenth century, Chernihiv would become an important part of the Cossack world. As always, however, the Cossacks both helped and hindered the Polish kings in advancing their foreign-policy agenda. In its war with Muscovy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth never got the support it hoped for from the Ottoman Empire, partly because of continuing Cossack seagoing expeditions and attacks on the Ottoman littoral.

In 1606, descending the Dnieper and entering the Black Sea on their longboats, called “seagulls” (chaiky), the Cossacks stormed Varna, one of the strongest Ottoman fortresses on the western Black Sea shore. In 1614 they pillaged Trabzon on the southeastern shore, and in the following year they entered the Istanbul harbor of the Golden Horn and pillaged the suburbs, much as the Vikings had done some 750 years earlier. But whereas the Vikings had also traded with Constantinople, the Cossack expeditions were akin to pirate attacks on seashores from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. They came to rob, take revenge, and, as Ukrainian folk songs related, liberate long-suffering slaves. In 1616, they attacked Kaffa, the main slave-trading center on the Crimean coast, and liberated all the captives.

The sultan, his court, and the foreign ambassadors who witnessed one Cossack attack after another on the mighty Ottoman Empire were stunned. The Christian rulers could now take the raiders seriously as potential allies in a war against the Ottomans. The French ambassador in Istanbul, Count Philippe de Harlay of Césy, wrote to King Louis XIII in August 1620, “Every time the Cossacks are near here on the Black Sea, they seize incredible booty despite their weak forces and have such a reputation that strokes of the cudgel are required to force the Turkish soldiers to do battle against them on several galleys that the grand seigneur [the sultan] sends there with great difficulty.”

While Count Philippe was informing his king about the inability of the Ottomans to curb the Cossack seagoing expeditions, advisers to sixteen-year-old Sultan Osman II were considering how to wage war on two fronts: against the Polish army on land and the Cossacks at sea. In the summer of 1620, the Ottoman army marched toward the Prut River in today’s Moldova against the commonwealth, whose troops included private Cossack armies of Polish and Ukrainian magnates. The campaign aimed ostensibly to punish the commonwealth for not curbing Cossack attacks on the Ottomans. In reality, the agenda was much broader. The Ottomans were trying to protect their vassals in the region from the growing influence of the commonwealth. The Polish army, numbering some 10,000 soldiers, and the Ottoman force, twice as large according to some estimates, clashed in September 1620 near the town of Ţuţora on today’s Moldovan-Romanian border. The battle went on for twenty days, ending with a crushing defeat for the commonwealth.

Since the commonwealth had no standing army, the court and the entire country panicked. Everyone expected the Ottomans to continue their march on Poland. Indeed they did. In the following year, a much larger Ottoman army, estimated at 120,000 soldiers and led by the sultan himself, passed through Moldavia on its way to the commonwealth. The Ottomans met a commonwealth force approximately 40,000 strong, half of it made up of Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, hero of the Cossacks’ raid of 1616 on Kaffa and commander of their march on Moscow two years later. The battle lasted a whole month, waged on the banks of the Dniester River near the fortress of Khotyn, which the Ottomans besieged.

The Battle of Khotyn ended with no clear victory for either side, but that uncertain outcome was regarded in Warsaw as a triumph for the Kingdom of Poland. The Poles had stopped the huge Ottoman army at their borders and signed a peace treaty that involved no territorial losses. Everyone understood that this result would have been all but impossible without the Cossacks. For the first time—and a short time at that—the Cossacks became the darlings of the entire commonwealth. Books that appeared soon after the battle would lionize Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny, whose monument stands today in the Podil district of Kyiv at the head of the street named after him, as one of the greatest Polish warriors.