Kozaks every man was free to speak his own mind, depending only on
the permission of his fellows. There was no set rule of procedure.
Human life was cheap and a man might easily pay with his own for an
unpremeditated insult. He had only himself to blame and no one else
cared a rap, if one Kozak or another perished in a brawl. Any man
could rise to prominence if he was able in one way or another to sway
the assembly. There was no post barred to him because of age or rank
or previous existence. It was a man’s world in the full sense of the
world. It was a free world in a way that was not true of life anywhere
else in the conquered and subjugated Ukraine.
Yet when we emphasize this side of life at the Sich, we can never
forget that the Sich was located in an exposed position subject at
any moment to the attack of powerful and unscrupulous enemies. It was
absolutely essential that there should be unrelenting vigilance and
strict discipline. If the Kozaks were to live at all in the area which
they had picked out, they could not engage in meaningless squabbles, in
martial disorder, and in perfect anarchy.
They met the situation in a democratic way. The general assembly would
meet and formally elect a hetman to whom they gave the horsetail
standard and the mace of office. His word was law. He had all the
powers of an army commander. He could punish even with death any who
disobeyed his orders or showed cowardice in the face of danger. His
power was absolute and limited by no constitutional restrictions. Yet
at the ending of his term of office, he was liable to be questioned
by the assembly and if he had not used his powers for the good of
the Sich, he could be tried by the rough justice of his comrades and
receive whatever punishment they desired to inflict.
It was a rough system administered by rough, brave men, and while it
was not fitted for a normal community of peaceful citizens, it was
admirably suited to men living beyond the established frontier, every
one of whom had faced death many times both from the enemy and from the
storms of nature. It was a new system which had nothing in common with
the elaborate system of aristocratic feudalism and the aristocratic
republic of the squires of Poland or with the personal autocracy of the
Muscovite tsar. The Kozak Host of the Zaporozhian Sich was a law unto
itself.
Vyshnevetsky had offered to combine with the Tsar against the Tatars of
the Crimea and had taken part in one expedition with the Muscovites but
had not received any support and it was a long while before the offer
was repeated. His successors as hetmans preferred to go their own ways
and build up and strengthen their Kozak system until it could stand
alone.
The Kozaks could not escape the attention of the Kings of Poland.
They were uncomfortable neighbors but they were also useful. The King
and the gentry of Poland had no taste for building up a military
establishment strong enough to protect the country. In earlier days the
bulk of the army was composed of Lithuanian forces, largely recruited
from Ukraine and White Ruthenia. Once the full union of Poland and
Lithuania had taken place and the golden liberty of the Polish szlachta
had been extended throughout the land, this resource was gone. Between
the weak Polish army and the Tatar and Turkish raiders there stood only
the Kozaks.
Common sense would have advised the King and the magnates of Poland to
come to terms with the organization or to have secured enough forces
of their own to render it useless and to destroy it. They did neither.
In times of war with Turkey or the Tatars they willingly took the
Kozaks into their service and welcomed their assistance. In times of
peace they were constantly striving to prevent their growth. They did
go so far as to register a few thousand Kozaks and consider them as a
separate part of the Polish army but even then they rarely paid them
the sums promised, because of the opposition of the gentry and the lack
of money in the treasury.
[Illustration:
ST. VOLODYMYR
ST. OLHA
(Victor Vasnetsov)]
[Illustration: The Zaporozhian Kozaks writing a letter to the
Sultan
(Ilya Repin)]
Even this slight support, however, gave the Kozaks the idea that they
owed only a general loyalty to the King and they were bound only to
obey their own elected hetmans. They came to feel that they were free
from all taxes levied by the Polish government and they refused to
draw a line of demarcation between registered and unregistered Kozaks,
for they well knew that at the first sign of trouble on any Polish
border, all the Kozaks, registered and unregistered alike, would be
called into service on the same footing.
The Polish policy was more than shortsighted but it was in line with
the general attitude of the state. As the upper Dnyeper valley was
resettled and as agriculture began to revive, the magnates were able to
put forth claims for vast estates. They parcelled out among themselves
the new lands as they had done the older lands of Rus’ over which they
had assumed control centuries before. They shuddered at the idea that
the Sich might embrace all the liberty-loving Ukrainians who were
dissatisfied with their harsh rule. The Kozaks were furiously Orthodox.
They were zealous supporters of the Orthodox Church. Poland prided
itself on its Catholicism and particularly after the successful work
of the Jesuits and the establishment of the Church Union, the Polish
leaders did not want to do anything that would revive the Orthodox
Church.
The very existence of the Sich was a direct challenge to all for which
the Polish state, with its theories of the equality of the szlachta and
its religious interests, stood. The more the Sich became organized and
turned from a handful of bold frontiersmen into a definite military
force, the more it became the mouthpiece of the Ukrainian population
and a refuge for them against oppression. The more it protected the
Dnyeper valley and the regions to the east, the more it became a menace
and a problem to the Polish rulers. The free republic of the warriors
of the Sich was the direct antithesis of the aristocratic life of the
great estates which were known throughout Europe for their luxury and
their culture.
There was more than this involved. The Kozaks, though nominal subjects
of the King of Poland, maintained full freedom to harry the Turks
and Tatars at will. Every spring, with almost unfailing regularity,
they set out on expeditions down the Dnyeper to attack the Turkish
and Tatar settlements on the shores of the Black Sea. They invaded
Wallachia and Moldavia and interfered in the civil wars that were
raging intermittently in both lands. They constantly attacked Ochakiv
and plundered almost at will whatever city they wished to. They rescued
thousands of Christian Slavs from the Crimean slave mart of Kaffa.
As they grew more experienced, during the early part of the seventeenth
century, they dared to set out on longer expeditions, which carried
them into the harbors of Constantinople and Sinope. In their light
boats, which were barely a few feet above the water, they defied the
storms of the Black Sea, made sudden raids into the great Turkish
cities, left a small guard for the boats and plundered for periods as
long as three days before they saw fit to gather up the booty which
they desired and, having burned the rest, put out to sea. The larger
Turkish ships, if they attacked the Kozak boats in the daytime, could
deal terrible damage to them; but if the Kozaks could surprise them or
come upon them unexpectedly at dawn, their fierce bravery would carry
them to the decks of the better armed Turkish ships and in hand to hand
fighting, the Turks would be compelled to yield. Then, after plundering
at will, the Kozaks would sink them and their crews and return home
triumphantly. Of course their losses were terrific but the spoils which
were brought back from these raids well paid the survivors for their
hardships and their dangers.
It was in vain that the Khan of the Crimea and the Sultan of Turkey
remonstrated with the King of Poland and threatened war. The King had
no more power to restrain these raids than he had to wipe out the Sich
itself. Now and then he could capture some of the leaders and execute
them to satisfy the threats of the Turkish ambassador but this only
fanned the ill feelings between the Kozaks and the Poles. The next
spring the Kozaks would start again on their raids and the process
would be repeated.
On the other hand, in time of war, the Poles were only too glad of
their assistance. During the Troublous Times of Moscow, after the
death of Boris Godunov, the Kozaks were encouraged to interfere in
Muscovite affairs. Over forty thousand took part in the effort to make
Wladyslaw Tsar of Moscow in 1610. Despite the similarity in religion
the Kozaks fought as willingly against Moscow as they did at any time.
They brought back to their homes the richest spoils of the tsardom and
remained a continuous menace until the accession of Michael Romanov in
1613.
At the same time they were no peaceful citizens of Poland. They turned
with equal fury against the princes, Orthodox and Roman Catholic,
who were carving out estates in territory which they had made safe.
Even the great Orthodox lord, Konstantin Ostrozky, the bulwark of the
Orthodox in Poland, had to see his estates plundered and his serfs
freed by the invincible Kozaks, who cared nothing for the pattern of
rights set out by the King and the magnates.
The Polish government paid no attention until the Kozaks began to
plunder the land of the Roman Catholic lords, like the Potockis to the
east of the Dnyeper, and until they began to advance to the west and
plunder in Volynia and White Ruthenia. Then it sent against them the
Hetman of the Republic, Zolkiewski, and finally defeated them at the
battle of Lubny in 1596. It was a crushing blow to the Kozaks but it
was only temporary, for it was not long before the King, in sore need
of troops for foreign wars, called again upon the Kozaks for support
and again the whole process of endeavoring to use them in war and
suppress them in peace was resumed.
In actual practice the Kozaks controlled practically all of Eastern
Ukraine and much territory west of the Dnyeper. They represented
the conscious active elements of the Ukrainian people and it was no
accident that the Archimandrite of the Monastery of the Caves called
in the followers of Nalyvayko to protect the Monastery when the King
of Poland was trying to seize it for the Uniats. Had they formed a
consistent policy, they could at any time have dominated a large part
of Poland and forced their will upon the lords.
Yet the very strength of the Kozak movement as a military organization
was its main weakness. The Kozaks had developed as frontiersmen but
it was a long while before they definitely tried to influence the
government or to take over the administration of the territory which
they controlled. The rough democracy of the Sich was little interested
in problems of administration. Even the families of many of the
leading Kozaks lived on farms not far from the estates which they
were plundering. They had a purely military organization divided into
regiments and companies, formed on a territorial basis and they called
it the Zaporozhian Host. Thus this powerful force which might cooperate
with the various townsmen and interfere in behalf of the peasants
rarely went further and it did not attempt to take over many functions
of the Polish local administration that it could have done.
For its part the Polish government contented itself with sending
commissioners to represent it at the meetings of the Host. At times it
sent parts of its regular army to discipline the Host or to garrison
forts in the areas where it dominated. Yet most of these troops were
registered Kozaks and it was a fairly general rule that in case of any
emergency, the registered Kozaks would abandon their Polish commanders
and take sides with the unregistered.
It seems incredible that neither the King nor the magnates saw the
danger inherent in the possibility that the Kozaks with their fanatical
Orthodoxy would interfere in the struggle between the Orthodox and
Uniats, after the first attempts of the Kozaks to prevent the turning
over of the monasteries and churches. Yet they did not. The magnates
and the Roman Catholic authorities continued to think that the Kozak
movement was unable to think of anything but plunder and war. Perhaps
they relied upon the fact that many of the Ukrainian townspeople and
the last of the Ukrainian Orthodox lords shared the same opinion.
The Zaporozhians had pillaged many of the estates of Prince Ostrozky
and others of his friends and it may have seemed that there was no
possibility that anything constructive would come out of the movement.
It was however as a result of the understanding between the Kievan
Brotherhood and the Hetman Sahaydachny that this was finally brought
about. For its part the brotherhood insisted that the Kozaks were
the direct descendants of the people of Rus’ who had fought against
Byzantium on land and sea, the same people whose ancestors had fought
with Volodymyr and with Volodymyr Monomakh and who were still devoutly
Orthodox.
When there came the desire to restore the Orthodox hierarchy which
had almost completely died out, it was Sahaydachny who came to the
assistance of the brotherhood. When the Orthodox learned that the
Patriarch Theophanes was going to Moscow, they induced him to come to
Kiev. For a time the Patriarch hesitated from fear of the King and
the Poles but Sahaydachny as Hetman promised him safe conduct and
under armed protection, the Patriarch consecrated new bishops for the
Orthodox. Still not influenced by this fact, the government refused to
allow the new bishops to enter their dioceses.
The government may have counted on the fact that there was a certain
conflict within the Kozak organization. On several occasions, the
Kozaks below the rapids, the Zaporozhians in the strict sense of the
word, had chosen hetmans who were different from the hetmans elected
by the Kozaks in the more settled regions to the north. The latter,
living in the more settled portions of the country, were often deeply
interested in the cultural and religious aspects of the problem. They
were more settled people who were more interested in the cultural
development of the Orthodox Ukrainians than were the Zaporozhians, who
in this respect were nearer to the original conception of the Kozaks.
Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, there continued
more or less constant disturbances. There were a number of armed
outbreaks of the Kozaks against the Poles in which the Kozaks presented
modifications of their essential demand, a constant increase in the
number of registered Kozaks. Most of these were finally put down by the
Poles under the leadership of Koniecpolski and Potocki and after each
new setback the Poles carefully restricted the number of registered
Kozaks. More important than that, they worked constantly to weaken the
rules about the election of the Kozak hetmans and sought to restrict
their choice to the Kozaks of good family, who came of gentry stock.
In this way they hoped to drive a wedge between the Kozak officers and
the rank and file and thus to prevent the movement from taking a more
serious turn. They also arranged to build a fort near the rapids of the
Dnyeper, so as to prevent free passage between the Zaporozhian Sich and
the rest of the Kozaks.
This perpetual conflict seriously weakened Poland, which still declined
to take any measures which would either solve the Kozak problem or
put the state in a position to defy them. In general the King was
more inclined to support or compromise with the Kozaks than were the
magnates and the gentry, who usually demanded severe measures against
both the Kozaks and the Orthodox, but who were equally against any
measure that would carry their policy into effect. It was no more
favorable to the Kozaks, for the hetmans were continually forced to
sign agreements which they could not and did not wish to carry out,
while at the same time no hetman was strong enough to plan and carry
through any policy which might allow him to win any real concession
from the Poles. The ordinary Kozaks could not secure any permanent
improvement in their status, and so there commenced a general exodus
of the lesser Kozaks from the Ukraine and the Dnyeper valley to the
so-called Slobidshchina, the land of free communes, a region in the
neighborhood of Kharkiv but which was under the jurisdiction of
Moscow. For years this region was weakly governed for it was still
on the border of the Muscovite state and it offered many of the same
advantages that Ukraine and the Dnyeper valley had a century earlier.
A definite defeat of the Kozaks in 1638 finally brought this series
of wars to an end. For ten years of peace there was little change in
the situation. The Poles had succeeded in forcing the bulk of the
unregistered Kozaks back into the hands of their masters and the
number of registered Kozaks was not full. It seemed as if the problem
had finally been settled and that it would not arise again. On the
other hand, the Orthodox had succeeded in recovering their bishops
and in getting them at least in part restored to their dioceses. The
educational policies had taken a new lease on life with the development
of the Kiev Academy under the leadership of Peter Mohyla. There were,
however, grave doubts as to the extent to which the cultural and
religious movements and the Kozaks were integrated.
All this was but a preliminary to a new struggle which was destined to
start, for there soon appeared at this moment of apparent quiescence a
new leader, who was to take a long step forward in coordinating all the
movements and also in outlining a definite program for the Ukrainian
people, Kozak and non-Kozak, which was to give them temporary success
and then lead to a more complete fiasco. This new leader was Bohdan
Khmelnitsky.
CHAPTER SIX
_BOHDAN KHMELNITSKY_
In 1638 it might have seemed to a superficial observer that the cause
of the Kozaks had been crushed once and for all. The old liberties
and rights on which they had prided themselves had been abolished and
a surface calm had been attained. The King of Poland and the Polish
magnates seemed to have reached their goal and to have ended a force
that was both valuable and threatening, valuable in case of war and
threatening in time of peace.
Yet a more careful observer could easily have predicted trouble in the
future. Michael Romanov was steadily increasing his power in Moscow
and his agents were already looking for ways of extending the country
to include the easternmost provinces under the Polish crown. The feud
between the Roman Catholic and Protestant branches of the royal family
of Sweden was taking an ever sharper course and Sweden was seeking to
turn the Baltic Sea into a Swedish lake. To the west the Thirty Years
War was raging and devastating country after country, while still
further off Richelieu was at the height of his power in France and the
controversy between Charles I of England and Parliament was beginning
to assume a serious form. All Europe was in turmoil and with diplomatic
agents rushing back and forth and armies marching over the entire
continent, it would seem to have been no time to have forced the Kozaks
into new extremes of anger and of discontent.
Yet at this period, when an explosion seemed so near on every side, no
one gave a thought as to whether Ukraine should be pacified or goaded
further. Every one in the country was dissatisfied. Kozaks registered
and unregistered, townsmen and peasants, Orthodox and members of the
Union, gentry and landowners, all had some special grievance. There was
needed only a leader who would be able to galvanize the entire mass
into active measures to create an outburst that would jeopardize the
very existence of the Polish state; but no one gave any attention to
the problem in the proud confidence that no leader could be found. Yet
one appeared and that man was Bohdan Khmelnitsky.
This man who was to open a new period in Ukrainian history was the son
of an Orthodox squire and had served on the staff of the Polish hetman
Zolkiewski, who had defeated the Kozaks in several of their uprisings
and had later been killed by the Turks. Born around 1595, Bohdan had
had the best of opportunities for an education at the Jesuit college in
Yaroslav. He had filled several posts in the Kozak Host and had been
one of the men removed after the changes of 1638. He had then retired
to his estate at Subotiv, where he was living quietly with his wife and
family.
It might seem that Khmelnitsky was finished with politics and war. He
was about fifty years of age but he was still active and vigorous.
His wife died and then he took into his house a beautiful woman named
Helen, but for some reason he did not marry her. The whole episode with
Helen savors of the theatrical and is even more inexplicable than are
the usual events of life. Suddenly a Polish nobleman, one Czaplinski,
appeared at the home of Khmelnitsky, beat Khmelnitsky’s youngest son so
badly that he died, burned the mill and barns, and carried Helen off
and married her under the Roman Catholic rite.
Bohdan was furious and sought justice. It was not forthcoming. The
Polish authorities laughed at his case and even ordered his arrest.
This was too much for the Kozak officer and he made his way to the
Zaporozhians and sought refuge among them.
He very soon became a recognized leader, was elected hetman and thus
became able to plan for revenge on his enemies. His position among the
Kozaks was the stronger because he possessed definite knowledge that
King Wladyslaw was planning to restore the Kozak liberties on condition
that they aid him against the Turks. It was the same old device that
had occurred again and again. Kozak aid was desired in war and spurned
in peace. The King was more kindly disposed to the Kozaks than were
the magnates and was himself taking the initiative in stirring up the
Kozaks to attack the Turks.
Khmelnitsky’s scheme was simple. He played for time with the Polish
authorities and meanwhile made an alliance with the Khan of the Crimea
to send him some military aid in his new venture. Then when all was
ready, he took the field.
The Poles were by now well aware of what was going on. They sent an
army under the Crown Hetman Potocki and the Field Hetman Kalinowski
to Fort Kodak to keep the Zaporozhians from moving northward. This
time they were too late. The King, who had himself incited the Kozak
leaders, urged his officers not to fight. They decided to do so and
sent the son of Potocki with a force of 1500 Poles and 2500 registered
Kozaks overland to Fort Kodak, as a preliminary reinforcement for the
troops stationed there.
Bohdan learned of this movement and with some 8,000 Kozaks, by forced
marches, he surrounded the young and unsuspecting Potocki at Zhorty
Vody (the Yellow Waters) on April 29, 1648. Seeing himself outnumbered,
Potocki fortified a camp, where he was besieged and waited for the
aid of the Kozaks who were coming down the Dnyeper on barges. Bohdan
reached these Kozaks, easily won them to his cause, and added them
to his own forces. When the news of this reached the Poles, Potocki
realized that his only chance was to cut his way out and reach
his father and the main body of the troops at Korsun. He failed
disastrously in this and was compelled to ask for terms. Khmelnitsky
allowed them to retire without their artillery. They had barely started
on their march when the forces of the Tatars under Tugai Khan attacked
the disordered and heavily laden Polish force and destroyed them almost
to a man. Stephen Potocki was taken prisoner but died of his wounds the
next day.