was born in 1681, received his entire education after the Ukrainian
Church had been forced to acknowledge the Patriarch of Moscow as its
canonical head. After graduating from the Academy, Prokopovich became
a Uniat and thus secured the possibility of a course in the College
of St. Athanasius in Rome. This was an institution aiming to prepare
talented young men for energetic propaganda on behalf of the Catholic
Church among the Greeks and the Orthodox peoples. It gave Prokopovich
a good acquaintance with the classical world and also with the
post-Renaissance developments in Western Europe, and fitted him to take
the lead in breaking from the older scholasticism. On his return to
Ukraine in 1702, Prokopovich left the Union and became an Orthodox monk
and a teacher in the Academy of Kiev. Here he commenced his writing
with a drama on Volodymyr. The work was dedicated with the greatest
compliments to Mazepa and was perhaps one of the first attempts to
introduce the later pseudo-classic style. Yet it was intended also to
be a glorification of Peter the Great. As soon as Mazepa rose in revolt
and the battle of Poltava had been won by Peter, Prokopovich turned to
him with new compliments and with the most unsparing denunciations of
his former patron.
This naturally brought him into favor with Peter, who constantly
relied more and more upon him, and finally made him Archbishop of
Novgorod. It was in this capacity that he faithfully served the Tsar
in drawing up the constitution that was to govern the Orthodox Church
after the abolition of the Patriarchate. Prokopovich, whether from his
experiences in Rome or otherwise, had become a bitter foe of the entire
Catholic position and he turned with considerable ardor toward the
Protestant theologians of northern Europe and especially of Germany. It
was due to him that Peter was able to find ways of suppressing most of
the activities of the Church through his control of the Holy Synod.
It is no exaggeration to say that from the period of the revolt of
Khmelnitsky to the final triumph of the Western pseudo-classicism under
Peter, a period of more than half a century, every sign of intellectual
and progressive life in Moscow and the later Russia was the direct
product of the scholars of Kiev. At the moment when Ukraine was losing
its political rights and independence, it was taking cultural control
of its conqueror. The youth of Moscow were being trained by Ukrainians,
they were being taught for the most part in Ukrainian, they were
learning to read Great Russian from Ukrainian texts and grammars, and
they were learning to think along the lines that had been developed in
Kiev. It was an amazing phenomenon and we can only wonder what would
have happened, had the Kievan Academy early in the seventeenth century
adopted a broader attitude toward worldly knowledge and toward the
national cause.
As it was, the greater men of the Kievan school never came into contact
with the world as it had developed in the West after the fall of
Constantinople. They made no attempt to understand what was going on
in England, France, and Germany, and they rested content to remodel
their culture merely on the lines of the Polish-Jesuit schools. On the
other hand, their ardent defence of Orthodoxy made them blind to the
situation that was developing at home in the political field. It was
undoubtedly not only a desire for personal aggrandizement that rendered
them incapable of understanding the thoughts and the desires of their
own people. It was not only deliberate selfishness that threw them into
the arms of Moscow with the resulting confusion at home and the loss
of those things which the intelligent part of the population valued so
highly. It was rather a curious blindness which was perhaps inseparable
from the circumstances under which the cultural revival had commenced
in the sixteenth century.
Yet for the most part Moscow did not welcome their assistance. The
native spirit of Moscow continued to regard the Kiev scholars not only
as men of doubtful Orthodoxy but as foreigners in the full sense of the
word. Even the extension of Russian rule over Ukraine did not reconcile
the Muscovites to the giving of good positions in Church and state to
the people of Kiev. The gap in the mentality of the two races was too
complete. The gibes of the conservative Muscovites were answered by
equal attacks from these scholars that the Muscovites were barbarians
with no culture and no civilization and it was a long while before the
mutual dislike was even toned down on the surface. It was to crop up
again years later when Kotlyarevsky and his associates began the use
of the Ukrainian language in literature, at the end of the eighteenth
century.
It was in the field of theological education that Ukrainian and Kievan
influence continued longest, for it was in this that the Academy of
Kiev had found its chief interest. Elsewhere there was a speedier end,
for the reforms of Peter called for the introduction of large numbers
of Germans, Dutch and French into the service of Russia. They brought
with them a new attitude toward life, new styles of dress and living,
new manners of thinking which were alien to both Kiev and Moscow.
St. Petersburg was from the beginning a place apart, where the old
Muscovite traditions were securely hidden by the Western European
facade.
Nevertheless, all through the eighteenth century, one is surprised by
the number of talented Ukrainian gentlemen who appeared in the newly
developed Russian literature. Those men, who had been able to move by
reasons of their wealth and influence in the higher circles of life
in the old Ukraine, found themselves attracted to the new learning
at St. Petersburg. They joined in the steady outflowing of the new
literature and even though they no longer had the monopoly of learning,
they formed a by no means negligible group in the life of the northern
capital.
Yet it is to be noted that at the same time, the Holy Synod, like the
preceding patriarchs, was constantly on the lookout lest the Kievan
school show too much independence of thought and action. The leaders
of Moscow and later of St. Petersburg still cherished too much of the
old xenophobia that had characterized the Muscovite past. They made
every attempt to limit the publications of the Kiev Academy and of
other schools in Ukraine. They even held up for decades the printing of
the works of St. Dimitry of Rostov (the Ukrainian Dmytro Tuptalenko).
He might be declared a saint but that was no reason why his writings
should not be regarded for style and language as something alien to the
new regime. The situation was worse with lesser men and once Moscow had
taken over the scholarship of Kiev, it was only eager that that source
should not be available to create a new generation of independent
thinkers that might re-Ukrainianize their own land and spread a new
influence abroad.
The cultural successes of the Kievan scholars form a striking parallel
and contrast to the failure of the Kozak Host to maintain and
strengthen the political position and independence of Ukraine. The lack
of political interest on the part of the scholars was as dangerous to
the normal intellectual development of Ukrainian culture as were the
unbridled dissensions of the men of action. Had the two groups worked
together along the same lines and toward the same goals as they had
done at the end of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries,
it is quite likely that the history of Ukraine would have contained
more bright and fewer gloomy chapters, for the intelligence and the
ideas which might have made the state modern and progressive were
all torn away. The Ukrainization of Muscovite thought was a startling
phenomenon. It could only be of passing importance in the great drama
of history, but it remains as one of the great achievements of the
work of the Ukrainian lords and the Brotherhoods, and it certainly
strengthened those factors which enabled Ukraine to pass through the
dark night of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
CHAPTER NINE
_THE LAST ACTS IN POLAND_
At the beginning of the seventeenth century nearly all of Ukraine was
within the borders of Poland and the Polish King and the magnates were
able to feel that Ukraine offered a purely Polish internal question.
They were to be disillusioned. The formation of the Church Union and
the Ukrainian cultural revival, together with the actions of the Kozak
Host, proved that the Polish state as then constituted could not master
the problem. The revolt of Khmelnitsky and his placing of the Host
under the supremacy of the Tsar definitely established Ukraine as an
international problem, perhaps the greatest in Eastern Europe.
Poland had a last chance at the time of the Union of Hadiach in 1658,
when it seemed for a moment as if Ukraine would enter along with Poland
and Lithuania into a new tripartite form of government. It was not to
be. The Kozaks were not willing to back Vyhovsky in his undertaking,
the Polish King and magnates had learned nothing, and the scheme fell
through. Instead there was made between the King and the Tsar the
Treaty of Andrusivo in 1667 whereby Ukraine was definitely divided
along the Dnyeper and Kiev passed into Muscovite hands.
As we have seen, the struggle continued and Ukraine was cruelly
devastated. More and more the Kozak Host was driven to the eastward and
a large part of the Ukrainian lands in Poland lost contact with it. The
last endeavor of the Kozaks came during the hetmanship of Mazepa, when
Paly had endeavored to unite what was left of it in Poland with the
main forces of the Kozaks.
Poland was steadily falling into ruin. The Kings were no longer able to
govern, except on paper, and during the eighteenth century, Russian and
Swedish armies were constantly marching across her territory. The King
and the magnates were only too ready to be peaceful, provided they were
not asked to fight for themselves or for any else. It might have seemed
an ideal time for a Kozak movement, but the main body of the Host had
been so punished after the defeat of Mazepa, that it could give no
support to the Kozaks in Poland. Step by step the Host vanished from
the Polish lands. It was consistently deprived of its possible supports
and from the early part of the eighteenth century, it ceased to play
any role in Polish affairs.
Lviv had been one of the centres of the Ukrainian cultural revival,
but this too languished under the new conditions. By now there were
practically no noble families that continued to support the Orthodox
Church. The Poland of the late seventeenth century was no longer
interested in the welfare of its own cities. Trade and commerce were
hampered in every way by the senseless quarrels of the magnates and
the szlachta and by the impotence of the Diet to take any action for
the good of the state and the improvement of economic conditions. As
a result the Brotherhoods which had played such an important part in
Ukrainian life a few years earlier, no longer had the income that would
permit them to continue their old scale of activities. The schools
which they had supported languished and were finally closed, while the
Polish government worked to accelerate the process of their dissolution.
The formal division of the country in 1667 and the addition of Kiev
to the Muscovite lands, foreshadowed the diminution of the power of
the Orthodox in Poland. When the Tsar was putting pressure upon the
Sultan of Turkey to have the Patriarch of Constantinople formally
transfer the Metropolitan of Kiev and his subordinate dioceses to
the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Moscow, the Poles considered it
time to act. In 1676 they forbade the Orthodox in case of dispute to
appeal to the Patriarch and they demanded that all Orthodox cases be
tried in Polish courts. They placed the Brotherhoods under the control
of their bishops and the Polish courts and forbade the Orthodox to
leave or re-enter the country. Such measures, far more drastic than
those of a century earlier, aroused hostility but no revolt, for the
Orthodox Church, except in a few areas, was now too weak to do more
than present ineffectual protests. It was now unable to stage those
mass demonstrations that fifty years before had revived a threatened
hierarchy and under Kozak protection raised it to new heights of power.
The next act was the elimination of Orthodoxy almost entirely from
the bulk of the Polish lands, especially in Western Ukraine where
the process of Polonization had gone furthest. The work of inducing
the people of this area to accept the Union was accomplished largely
through the efforts of Josef Shumlyansky, (1643–1707), the Archbishop
of Lviv. Shumlyansky had very early in his career accepted the Union.
He was doubtless an able, if hardly spiritual, man. He had taken part
in various military campaigns and he was later, after his acceptance
of the bishopric, wounded at the siege of Vienna, the last great
exploit of Polish arms. He was also a skilful diplomat and served on
many missions for the King. He profited by the Treaty of Andrusivo
to have himself nominated by the King as the administrator of those
lands of the Kiev metropolitan that still remained in Poland. All in
all, he gathered under his own control all those Orthodox threads
that still served to hold together a dying movement. Yet he felt that
time was playing on his side and when the King, in 1680, attempted to
expedite the Union by calling a council similar to the one in Brest a
century earlier, Shumlyansky refused to attend. However, he secretly
notified the King and the Roman Catholic authorities that his return to
Orthodoxy from the Union was not a sign of altered interests. He won
the confidence of the authorities and for twenty years he undermined
the Orthodox Church by appointing only secret partisans of the Union
to the more responsible posts. When he felt himself strong enough to
come out into the open, he was ably seconded by the other bishops
and the elimination of the Orthodox Church in Western Ukraine was
an accomplished fact. Neither the Brotherhoods nor the nobles were
able to resist the movement and that undertaking which had been so
disastrous to the Polish state a century earlier was carried through as
a well-prepared scheme by a Polish government that was already losing
its control of events.
Even the Brotherhood of Lviv, though it continued the struggle, was
no longer able to protest effectively. Shumlyansky established his
own printing press and this deprived the Brotherhood of its source
of income, for it had formerly had a monopoly of printing in Church
Slavonic and exported many books to the rest of Ukraine, a trade that
had been cut off by the actions of Moscow. Finally, when the Swedes
besieged the city in 1704, the Brotherhood was compelled to contribute
an enormous sum to the ransom demanded. By these and many other acts of
annoyance, it was finally ruined and in 1708 it too accepted the Union.
Thus the two pillars of support of the Ukrainian revival, the cultural
work of the Brotherhoods and the power of the Kozaks, were both
liquidated in Poland, and Western Ukraine was put entirely at the mercy
of the Polish government. The nobles had long since become Polonized
and the eighteenth century is a sad period when there seemed even less
hope of a revival than there had been in the sixteenth.
All that seemed to be left of the old movement was the fanatic faith
of the peasant serfs, who clung to their Orthodox religion and their
native traditions. Yet what could they effect under the conditions of
the time?
They could merely grumble and at times break out into desperate
revolts. Particularly in the eastern parts of the country and along the
Hungarian and Moldavian borders there was a constant state of unrest
headed by the Haydamaks. The name apparently comes from a Turkish
word for brigand, but the Haydamaks were no ordinary bandits. They
were a manifestation of that tendency that had earlier produced the
original Kozaks, and had developed in the Ottoman Empire the various
Chetniks and other groups which fought stubbornly and often without
definite plan for the welfare of the enslaved populations. They could
always rely upon the sympathy and protection of the peasants in their
raids upon the manor houses and the Jewish merchants who worked for
the nobles, for throughout the entire area the collapse of the Kozak
movement had brought back the great estates that had existed before
the time of Khmelnitsky and the landlords were even more tyrannical
and overbearing than they had been before. Their demands for money to
supply their western tastes were greater and life was almost impossible
for their unfortunate underlings.
It was small wonder then that the peasants welcomed the incursions
of armed bands to burn and to plunder their oppressors. The result
was a wild and turbulent period which made life dangerous but which
could not offer, as had the Kozak Host, any prospect of improvement.
The Haydamak bands rarely united except for some major operation. The
leaders were even more torn by mutual feuds than had been the old Kozak
organization, which had been on the way to achieving a stabilized
organization.
The Zaporozhian Sich, which had returned to Russian territory after
a short stay in Turkey, was also only a shadow of its former self.
Nevertheless now and again some particularly bold Haydamak leader would
get in touch with the Sich and detachments of Kozaks would swarm across
the unprotected border to aid them, and in case of defeat the Haydamaks
would go back with the Zaporozhians. Yet this no longer had the same
force as when the Kozaks would dare to defy even the Sultan of Turkey.
The world was becoming settled and the social order had no real place
for these doughty champions of liberty and independence.
The Orthodox Ukrainians had still enough power and energy to rise up
in short but furious revolts. Yet these usually lacked any directive
purpose and spent themselves in savagery, without the formulation of
any definite plan or purpose. They were usually called forth not only
by the deplorable conditions of the people but they were abetted for
the purposes of Russia in order to punish Poland and interfere with her
affairs.
This was the case with the revolt of the Haydamaks in 1734. Poland
was in turmoil after the death of August II. The Russian Empress
Anna was backing August III for his father’s post, while many of the
anti-Russian nobles were trying again to place Stanislas Leszczynski
on the throne. Under such conditions Russian armies, together with
detachments of Kozaks, were invading the country. Rumors, perhaps
spread by the Russian commanders, had it that the Russians and Kozaks
were coming to expel the Polish landlords and to free Ukraine as in
the days of Khmelnitsky. It was only a rumor but the peasants took it
seriously and rose in revolt throughout the eastern provinces. This
was especially marked in the province of Braslav, where the Russian
commander had actually asked the nobles supporting August to send their
Kozak retainers to help the Russians. On the strength of this, Verlan,
who commanded the Kozaks of Prince Lubomirski, embroidered his fancies
and declared that Anna had ordered a rising, so that the peasants could
become Kozaks and join the Hetman state. Armed with this, he raised a
considerable army and set out to plunder the nobles’ estates.
In the middle of the spreading fire, the city of Danzig, the chief
base of Leszczynski, fell to the Russians and August III ascended the
throne. There was no longer any need of rousing the peasants against
the Poles. As a result the Russian troops were at once put at the
service of the Polish King and the nobles to suppress the uprising.
Once the peasants had realized that the Russian army was backing their
enemies and not themselves, the movement quickly subsided and the
peasants had nothing to do but to return to their former serfdom. Those
who were unwilling to do this or were too deeply involved to feel safe
made their way to the Sich or into Wallachia and joined the more or
less permanent Haydamak bands.
Disorders continued during the following years but not on a
sufficiently large scale to influence the general course of events. It
was not until the revolt of the Kolii in 1768 that the fires of unrest
flared up violently and again the revolt followed the same course
as that of 1734. It is only remarkable because the grandfather of
Shevchenko served in it and his tales induced the great poet to compose
his longest narrative epic, the _Haydamaki_.
The eternal controversies between the Orthodox and the Uniats were
the spark that set off this turmoil. In 1760 there broke out renewed
fighting in the Polish parts of the province of Kiev as the Uniats
tried to force the Orthodox to join them and the Orthodox, under the
backing of the abbot of the Motronin Monastery, refused. Violence
followed violence on both sides and the Orthodox sexton of Mliiv was
murdered. At the request of the people of the area he had hidden the
chalice of the local church. He was accused by the Uniats of using it
for purposes of orgies, and was publicly tortured by them and put to
death.
Even then these disturbances would have followed the normal course, had
it not been for the Confederation of Bar, when the Pulaskis, including
Casimir who was to die as a general in the American Army, raised the
standard of revolt against Russian interference in Polish affairs.
Russian troops were moved into the Ukrainian area in the southeast
and the peasants again jumped to the conclusion that Catherine the
Great was encouraging them to revolt against their landlords. Maksym
Zalyznyak, a Zaporozhian Kozak, led the revolt and when he and his
bands marched toward Uman, they were joined by Ivan Gonta, captain
of the Kozak retainers of the Potocki estate at Uman. There was a
considerable massacre at Uman when the Kozaks and the Haydamaks took
the town and other bands operated in the southern part of the province.
The outcome was the same. In June, the Confederates of Bar were forced
to cross the Polish border into Turkey after being defeated by the
Russian troops. The Russian commanders then willingly listened to the
plea of Stanislas August Poniatowski for assistance. They invited the
leaders of the revolt to meet them as if they were ready to give them
more support, and then arrested them and turned them over to the Poles,
where they received severe punishment. Some, including Gonta, were
tortured to death.
Again the situation returned to normal. The Haydamaks continued their
raiding on a small scale. There were the usual burnings of manor
houses, and the killing of nobles, but none of the attacks called
forth a wide movement on the part of the population. The mood of the
people continued uneasy but there was no open struggle and in 1792
the division of Poland brought the Ukrainians directly under Russian
control.
Yet during this century, which saw the definite triumph of the Union
in Galicia and the downfall of the Orthodox Ukrainian organizations,
there began to be signs of an astonishing metamorphosis in the thought
of the Union. It had been initiated in the sixteenth century to break
the power of the Ukrainian cultural revival among the Orthodox and
to safeguard the Polish state against the Kozaks and their unbridled
devotion to Orthodoxy. For nearly two centuries it had been generally
understood that the members of the Union, in submitting themselves to
the Papacy, were cutting themselves off from the Ukrainian cause. It
had been confidently believed that the Union would swing ultimately
into the Roman Catholic Church and that it would lose its identity in
the mass of Catholic Poland, exactly as the nobles had done, when they
became Polonized and Catholic. This had been the great argument of all
the Orthodox and had been the cause of the bitterness that had existed
between the two groups.
As Russia extended its control over Kiev and then abolished the
autonomous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, things began to change. The
Russian censors arbitrarily banned many of the books which had been
circulating among both Orthodox and Uniats and insisted on replacing
them with books of the pure Russian type. The Uniats adopted a contrary
policy. They continued to use the old traditional books, written or
printed in the old traditional way. It gave them a strong hold on many
sections of the Ukrainian population who could no longer look to Kiev
for the writings to which they were accustomed. In many sections,
especially in Galicia, the bulk of the population, once they had
accepted the Union and their children had been brought up in the new
environment, commenced to feel at home in it.