The Russian elite now
want to restore an empire, based on historical arguments at that. These kinds
of arguments once gave rise to the Russian Empire and they will, once
shattered, spell an end to it
Ancient Romans, people who at one point conquered many
nearby and far-away lands, noted that conquests ended when the conqueror began
to write the history of their victims. The purpose of the Kremlin’s
present-time propaganda, whose waves are spreading across Ukraine and the
world, goes beyond ordinary, albeit important, coverage of a “hot”
Russian-Ukrainian war. In reality, Moscow is using information aggression to
achieve its strategic goal which is to enslave Ukraine intellectually. Without
this conquest, the restoration – and even less so the existence – of the
Russian Empire is impossible.
The conqueror’s myth as an enslavement tool
After Muscovy was penetrated Ukraine back in the late 17th century, it
began to immediately seek “historical justification” for its “natural right” to
own Ukrainian lands and impose what it found on the local elites. For nearly
two centuries, Russia tirelessly worked to have the world perceive Ukraine
exclusively through the Russian interpretation and write Ukrainian history
based on the Russian blueprint.
The consequences of this brainwashing are plain to see
today. The world still hears “the voice of Ukraine” through the Russia prism.
However, the key here is how Ukrainians themselves perceive the world – their
worldview still suffers from imperial stereotypes implanted a long time ago. More dangerously,
some historians do, even though they should be the first to cast off the
shackles of inferiority, self-flagellation and imitation of foreign models.
Where a German or French researcher studying, for
example, the medieval period, clearly sees statehood in the respective
territories, a Ukrainian scholar cannot get the myth about the “cradle of three
brotherly nations” out of his head. A European researcher has no doubts about
the nature of statehood in the early modern period, while a Ukrainian
historian, speaking, for example, about the Hetman State, bashfully says that
the question is debatable, thus facilitating Russia-imposed notions about the
Ukrainian elites being unable to form a state. A
Polish intellectual may
speculate about the essence of Poland’s colonial status in the 19th and
early 20th centuries, while his Ukrainian counterpart will deny
the colonial status of Ukraine, citing examples of illustrious careers that
some Ukrainian noblemen made and a lack of ethnic discrimination against
Ukrainians. The continuity of Ukrainian history is thus denied, and an
“unbiased”concept of breaks is proposed instead.
That Ukraine lacks a tradition of statehood, that its
history has been discontinuous and that the contemporary Ukrainian state is a
historical fluke are some of the spurious notions that are still being pressed.
Especially vigorous are attempts to present Ukrainian history as a string of
failures (in contrast to Russia’s brilliant and grand past) and portray the
Ukrainian elites as historically deficient and unable of adequately fulfilling
their societal functions. To this end, the emotional background is employed
that resulted from the fall of the Hetman State in the early modern period and
the failures of the liberation struggle in 1917-1921.
History as a source of optimism
In fact, the history of the Hetman State is a case when an unhappy ending is the wrong
premise to judge about the phenomenon itself. This period furnishes a much
bigger reason for optimism than for discouragement. It proves the main thing:
the ability of Ukrainians to rally together at a critical moment and generate
new elite.
Crucially, the Hetman State again put a Ukrainian
state headed by a Ukrainian ruler on the political map of the world. Thanks to
the Hetman State, Ukrainian ethnic lands expanded. Economic colonization
established Ukrainian presence in a natural way in previously unpopulated
Sloboda Ukraine, as well an in the Zaporizhian steppe all the way down to the
Black Sea and the Sea of Azov and eastwards to the Mius River. This was when
southern and eastern Ukraine acquired anirreversibly Ukrainian character.
Ukraine’s image was formed by Ukrainians, and European
historians wrote about Ukraine relying on Ukrainian texts. No-one in Europe
doubted the legitimacy of Pylyp Orlyk as a ruler, which is why the quest he and
his son Hryhir undertook to find an international option to separate Ukraine
from Muscovy could continue for so long. No-one in Europe viewed Ukraine as
Muscovy’s province. No-one denied Ukraine’s right to free itself from the
supremacy of the tsar. It was only the change of international alliances in the
1750s and the fall of the Hetman State that led to Ukraine being wiped off the
political map as a distinct political entity. This was the perception of
European politicians, even though intellectuals maintained the concept of
Ukraine’s separateness until the end of the 18th century and
into the 19th century.
Challenges for the new Ukrainian elite
At the time of the Hetman State, Ukraine faced the
hardest of challenges – a change of elites. The traditional elites did not go
anywhere but only received new blood. In Ukraine, the nobility was hostile to
the idea of the Cossacks restoring the Ukrainian
state, which is why a
brand new elite had to emerge and incorporate part of the representatives of
the old elite’s lower strata, primarily the petite nobility. Thus, the Hetman
State had issues on its agenda that were unknown in those parts of Europe
(Portugal, Brandenburg, Holland, Naples and Catalonia) where sovereignty was
fought for and won through struggle, whether armed or not. Moreover, Ukraine
had to legitimize a ruler and the elite as such, a situation which engendered
doubts, ochlocracy, rifts and rapidly changing orientations and prompted risky
foreign policy steps.
The key question was, however, how much the people who
claimed the function of representation were fit, in terms of their worldview,
to fulfill the mission of the elite. Was the Cossack sharshyna together
with representatives of primarily the petite nobility able to rise above purely
class interests to embrace national interests and identify themselves as the
social elite? Were they then able to develop strategies to pursue state
interests that would give the Ukrainian people a prospect in the complicated
geopolitical situation?
The response of the elite
The very first steps taken by the 17th-century Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky and his close circle suggest that the leaders of
the uprising were ready, without having any prior experience and a tradition of
representation, to formulate strategic national goals which were interpreted
unambiguously as restoring the self-sufficiency of the Ukrainian people with a
state-like structure headed by their own ruler.
The ideological tools employed by the Cossack elite
made it possible to achieve recognition of the restored Ukrainian state in the
Christian world as soon as in the 1650s. In the eyes of other rulers, the
Hetman State acquired the status of a separate polity which it kept until the
end of its existence. The Khmelnytsky-period elite was not to blame that the
other side of the coin was the 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav, designed exclusively
to address the current issues of the time. It was turned by Muscovy into a
springboard for its attempts to conquer Ukrainian lands. Geopolitical
considerations dictated that Ukraine was not only the eastern gate to the
European civilization but also Europe’s most advanced outpost which constantly
clashed with a different system of values, experienced the pressures of a
non-European societal formation and government and was permanently under the
threat of war.
Hetman Khmelnytsky thought and acted in the system of
reference traditional for his time. It did not involve the concept of permanent
allies, while solving problems caused by temporary alliances was postponed for
some future time. In 1654, there was no alternative to using Muscovy with its
territorial appetite and fierce competition with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Muscovy tsar was the weakest link in a series of
potential allies-cum-neighbours, but he extended recognition to the Hetman
State only under pressure from Khmelnytsky who presented the unappealing
alternative of the Hetman State becoming a Turkish protectorate.
The Cossack elite managed to put its relations with
Muscovy on contractual basis negotiated between the two rulers, the hetman and
the tsar, thus placing them in a legal framework unknown in the Muscovite
tradition. Thus, the March Articles became the biggest obstacle to Muscovy’s
assimilation efforts as it had to always refer to them in order to give its actions
an air of legitimacy. Moreover, even after the fall of the Hetman State, the
Ukrainian Cossack elite still thought in terms of contracts as the basis for a
Ukraine-Russia union, which required the tsar to keep his commitments and
theoretically permitted rolling back an undesirable situation. A balancing act
between mutually hostile powers resembled a strategy pursued by Moldovan hospodars for a long
time and the recent practices of the Dutch provinces of Brandenburg or Livonia.
The supremacy of the tsar was never considered to be permanent or without
alternative.
The new Ukrainian elite declared the Hetman State a
successor to Kyivan Rus’ and delineated the borders of the restored state based
on the territories populated by ethnic Ukrainians. The concept of turning the
Hetman State into the Grand Principality of Rus’, which was cherished by the
leaders since the time of Hetman Ivan Vyhovsky, was, above all, a reflection of
the course on reconciling people with the nobility as the traditional elite, a
saving step for Ukraine. The “momentous blend” had to take place not only
between Ukraine and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth reformed for this
purpose, but also, and even more so, within Ukrainian society itself,
previously weakened by a rift between the old and new elites at a decisive
moment.
The failure of the 1658 Hadiach project triggered the
gradual erosion of Ukrainian statehood, which later provided grounds for a
pessimistic retrospective evaluation of the ability of the then Ukrainian elite
to adequately represent society. Indeed, the Cossack sharshyna were for
numerous reasons unable to find and implement optimal practical steps, and this
failure resulted in a division along the Dnieper River, the loss of Right-Bank
Ukraine and Muscovy’s curtailment of the sovereignty of the Hetman State in
Left-Bank Ukraine that continued for over a century. However, the elite never
abandoned its statehood positionsat the intellectual level. The Ukrainian
hetmans were in no doubt that a Ukrainian polity, a Ukrainian ruler and
gathering all ethnic Ukrainian lands in one state were a top priority. However,
while hetmans like Petro Doroshenko and Ivan Mazepa approached the problem at
the level of strategic state policy, others, less talented ones were often
mired in tactical retreats. Triggered by various causes, these retreats
unremittingly narrowed the window of opportunity, reducing the chances of the
Ukrainian statehood project in the early modern period.
Despite resistance to unification, the Cossack starshyna was
invariably committed to ideas which proved they belonged to social elites.
Thus, the establishment of the Hetmanate’s sovereignty was a goal in Mazepa’s
time, in the mid-18th century and after the fall of the Hetman
State. The concept of the Hetman State/Little Russia/Ukraine as a polity with
roots that go deeper than the time of Kyivan Rus’, a polity that is distinct
from Muscovy and linked to it only though the tsar, was at the heart of the
convictions held by this elite. Thus, under Kyrylo Rozumovsky, the
Cossack starshyna read
the Hadiach Pacts and elaborated a programme of reform designed to restore not
only the internal self-sufficiency of the Hetman State but also its independent
standing in the international arena.
The Ukrainian historical myth developed in the 18th century
was well-tuned to the challenges of the early modern period. It legitimized the
emergence of the Hetman State in line with the requirements of the times, while
at the same time rejecting Muscovy’s claims to Ukrainian lands. Over time,
Ukrainians were able to enlist the help of Orthodox intellectuals, and they
started emphasizing the links between the Hetman State and the earlier
Ukrainian tradition. Under Mazepa, they constructed ideological conceptions to
highlight the new historical mission of the Hetman State as a successor of
Kyivan Rus’.
The Ukrainian elite of the Hetman State did not vanish
from the historical radar – several decades later, starting from the 19th century,
part of its descendants were building a new Ukraine. Most important, its
historical and historical-legal works became the foundation of the intellectual
birth of modern Ukrainianness. It was a replication of what happened in the
previous cycle of historical evolution when part of the nobility joined the
Cossacks enriching their intellectual space with their perceptions of the world
and when the fullness of structure, self-sufficiency and distinctness of the
Ukrainian state were restored. In this way, the necessary minimum of continuity
was preserved at the level of the elites, preventing gaps at the top of the
social pyramid and the loss of elites.
Responding to the challenges of the time, the creators
of the early modern-time Ukrainian statehood were able to lay their own
ideological foundation and erect the edifice of their state. This foundation
proved to be strong enough to outlive the Hetman State and fuel the Ukrainian
idea in the 19th century as it became the basis of a modern
Ukrainian nation. The Ukrainian nobility again cameonto the historical stage in
the 20th century when the Ukrainian conservative forces briefly
rose to power in the Ukrainian state headed by Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky in
1918. However, a wave of socialist transformations swept over Ukrainian society
at the time, bringing with itself Russian Bolshevism. From that time on and
until recently, the question of the traditional Ukrainian elite was excluded
from the Ukrainian narrative.
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