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over all the troops residing in the Belgorod Array territory, those in the gar-

risons as well as the Belgorod corps. The town governors of the southern

garrison towns were thereby subordinated in military affairs, and gradually

in broader administrative affairs, to the commander at Belgorod, to whom

the Military Chancellery could now devolve resource logistic and monitoring

functions that had previously been centralised at Moscow. By 1653 one can

speak of a large Belgorod Line regional military administration (Belgorodskii

razriad) operating out of the corps commander’s headquarters at Belgorod or

Kursk. During the Thirteen Years War this new principle of regional military

administration wouldtake on evengreaterimportance: similarterritorialrazri-

ady would be formed on the north-western front at Novgorod and Smolensk

and the westernmost districts of the Belgorod razriad spun off into a separate

Sevsk razriad.

After the Smolensk war most but not all of the expensive foreign formation

regiments had been disbanded. A few thousand foreign formation soldaty and

dragoons had manned the Abatis Line in 1638, 1639 and 1642, but it had not been

consideredcost-effective todeploythemevery year.But in1646 thegovernment

decided to make foreign formation units an important permanent element in

the southern frontier defence system. A number of ofﬁcers were hired abroad,

especially in the Netherlands; a kriegsbuch on the exercise of musket and pike

was translated into Russian, to help in training Muscovite infantry; a new

census was conducted to levy troops by household rather than from inhabited

chetvert’; and Tsar Alexis endorsedthe Military Chancellery’s recommendation

that the southern garrisons cease relying on irregularly levied peasant militia

to help defend the Belgorod Line and instead place entire peasant communities

in standing service as ‘settled’ dragoons and infantry, drilled in their villages

year-round under foreign ofﬁcers. In Komaritskaia canton in 1646 5,125 state

peasantsweretaken into three dragoon regiments; the next yearseveral private

votchina villages along the Voronezh River west of Kozlov were likewise put

in dragoon service.

In 1648 a new cossack revolt in Ukraine, led by Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi

and in alliance with the Crimean Tatars, dealt devastating defeats to Polish

armies at Zhevty Vody and Korsun’. The massacre of another Polish army

at Batih in May 1652 placed Khmel’nyts’kyi in control of most of Ukraine

as far west as Kamienets in Podol’ia and made the prospect of Muscovite

alliance with rebel Ukraine more attractive and war with the Commonwealth

12 Brian Davies, ‘Village Into Garrison: The Militarized Peasant Communities of Southern

Muscovy’, RR 51 (1992): 481–501.

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Muscovy at war and peace

in Ukraine and Belarus’ more likely. The Military Chancellery therefore began

organising foreignformationunits for the southern ﬁeld army, not just forlocal

defence. Four regiments (8,000 men) of soldaty were formed at Iablonov, in the

Belgorod razriad, ﬁlled largely from conscripts levied from the non-taxpaying

populationsof eighteen southern districts.Thenextyearsomesoldat regiments

were also formed near Smolensk on the north-western front.

Moscow also took steps to tighten its control over the Don cossack host.

LargerDonshipmentsubsidiesweredispatchedin1644,1646 and1647,butthere

were also attempts in 1646 and 1648 to ‘reinforce’ the host with new Muscovite

manpower in such a way as to bind it to Moscow-directed operations. Larger

expeditions, resupplied by river ﬂotillas built on the Voronezh and upper Don,

were sent down in 1659–62; although they still held back from assaulting Azov,

they did join the Don cossacks in land and sea raids to harass Ottoman forces

building new fortresses on the Mertvyi Donets and Kalancha rivers. From 1662

to 1671 Muscovite forces on the lower Don refrained from operations against

the Turks and devoted their attention to distributing the Don shipments and

keeping the host under surveillance.

All of these Don expeditions suffered heavy losses to hunger and desertion,

and they did not accomplish much against the Tatars and Turks. But they

did give the Muscovite army valuable experience in land–sea operations and

did begin to restrict the Don cossack host’s freedom of initiative. By the late

1660s the host was in transformation. Muscovite military colonisation of the

Belgorod Line had set off a cascade migration of thousands of deserters and

fugitive peasants southward into the Don host. The resources provided by the

Don agricultural economy and Don shipments were not enough to support

them. Meanwhile Moscow’s diplomacy to get the sultan and the khan to

stop attacks in Ukraine on behalf of Hetman Doroshenko (see below) meant

that Moscow could no longer sanction Don cossack raids on the khanate or

on Ottoman coastal towns. Denied plunder opportunities on the Black Sea,

part of the host rebelled and followed Stepan Razin on a campaign of piracy

on the Caspian and then on a revolt against Ataman Kornilo Iakovlev and

Muscovite garrisons on the lower Volga. Razin’s defeat in 1671 left the host

further servilised to Moscow.

13 Hellie, Enserfment,p.193.

14 On the Don expeditions, see V. P. Zagorovskii, ‘Sudostroenie na Donu i ispol’zovanie

Rossieiu parusnogo-grebnogo ﬂota v bor’be protiv Krymskogo khanstva i Turtsii’, Kan-

didatskaia dissertatsiia, Voronezhskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 1961. On the Razin

Rebellion, see E. V. Chistiakova and V. M. Solov’ev, Stepan Razin i ego soratniki (Moscow:

Mysl’, 1988), and Michael Khodarkovsky, ‘The Stepan Razin Uprising: Was it a “Peasant

War”?’, JGO 42 (1994): 1–19.

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The Thirteen Years War, 1654–67

As early as 1649 Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi had tried to convince Moscow to assist

his revolt against the Commonwealth and put Ukraine under the tsar’s pro-

tection. At that time Moscow had not been interested; taking responsibility

for Ukraine as a client or vassal polity had been a major objective of Muscovite

grand strategy, and joining the Ukrainians in war upon the Commonwealth

also meant going to waragainst the Crimean Tatars, who had left their alliance

with Khmel’nyts’kyi. By late 1652, however, the tsar’s government was ready

to ally with Khmel’nyts’kyi. Khmel’nyts’kyi’s great victory at Batih meant

that Muscovite intervention in Ukraine was likely to meet a greatly reduced

Polish military threat, and there was still hope that Ukrainian and Muscovite

diplomacy could convince the Crimean khan to rejoin the alliance against the

Poles. But the primary reason Tsar Alexis accepted Khmel’nyts’kyi’s alliance

proposal in June 1653 and formalised it in the Pereiaslav (Pereiaslavl’) Treaty in

January 1654 had much less to do with Ukraine than with Muscovite designs

uponLithuanian Belarus’. The Commonwealth’swaragainst Khmel’nyts’kyi’s

cossacks had left very few troops defending Lithuania and the west Rus’ ter-

ritories – Smolensk, Seversk, Chernigov – wrested from Muscovy during the

Troubles. Reconquering these territories promised to be considerably eas-

ier than in 1632–4, particularly now that Khmel’nyts’kyi promised to send

thousands of cossack troops north to assist such a campaign. Furthermore,

Moscow felt that the window of opportunity to accomplish this was closing,

for Lithuanian Grand Hetman Janusz Radziwil

l, aware of Lithuania’s vulner-

ability to Muscovite invasion, was trying to get the hospodar of Moldavia

to mediate a peace treaty between the Commonwealth and Khmel’nyts’kyi’s

hetmanate.

There was therefore an impulsive element in Moscow’s decision to inter-

vene in Ukraine. Muscovite military preparations for the war were thorough:

the invasion of Lithuania was soundly planned, and it was decided that for-

eign formation units would comprise a larger part of the ﬁeld armies on the

Lithuanian and Ukrainian fronts, towards which end 40,000 muskets were

bought from the Dutch and Swedes and more enlistees and conscripts were

taken into the soldat regiments of the Belgorod razriad.

But the full strate-

gic consequences of placing Ukraine under Muscovite protection were not

yet apparent. Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi had created a de facto independent het-

manate across most of Ukraine in six years of war; it was Khmel’nyts’kyi’s mil-

itary leadership and diplomatic cunning which held this hetmanate together;

15 A. N. Mal’tsev, Rossiia i Belorussiia v seredine XVII veka (Moscow: MGU, 1974), p. 23.

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Muscovy at war and peace

and it was Khmel’nyts’kyi’s vision of an autonomous Ukraine in loose con-

federation and military alliance with Muscovy that his colonels understood

to be the objective of the Pereiaslav Treaty. But once Khmel’nyts’kyi passed

from the scene the hetmanate would be riven by conﬂicts between the cos-

sack elite and rank-and-ﬁle, between cossacks and townsmen and peasants and

between the cossack colonels and the Muscovite commanders garrisoning the

larger Ukrainian towns. The task of protecting Ukraine would inevitably give

Moscow reason to increase the number of its garrisons, make greater demands

upon Ukrainian revenue sources to provision them and thereby encroachupon

Ukrainian liberties. Furthermore, because Khmel’nyts’kyi had been pursu-

ing an imaginative but complicated diplomacy since 1648 before turning to

Moscow for protection, the Crimean Tatars, Moldavians, Wallachians, Tran-

sylvanians, Ottomans and Swedes had come to have stakes in what happened

to Ukraine. Muscovite protectorate over Ukraine therefore had serious reper-

cussions for Muscovy’s relations with these nations, and Ukrainian cossacks

growing disillusioned with Muscovite protectorate would have alternative

alliance models (Ottoman–Tatar protectorate, reincorporation in the Polish-

Lithuanian Commonwealth, and later, Swedish protectorate) to which to

turn.

On 15 May 1654 Muscovite armies invaded Lithuanian Belarus’ and entered

eastern Ukraine. The primary objective in this opening campaign was clearly

the recapture of Smolensk and the west Rus’ territories annexed to the grand

duchy of Lithuania. Three large army groups entered Lithuanian territory: a

mainarmy of 40,000 men under the commandof the tsar himself, moving from

Viaz’ma towards Smolensk; a second army of 15,000 under V. P. Sheremetev,

advancing from Velikie Luki against Polotsk and Vitebsk; and another army of

15,000 under A. N. Trubetskoi, moving from Briansk towards Minsk. A smaller

force under L. Saltykov also advanced from Pskov, and Khmel’nyts’kyi sent

some 20,000 Ukrainian cossacks under Colonel Zolotarenkoto invade Belarus’

from the south. Muscovite troop deployments in Ukraine were considerably

smaller: 4,000 troops under A. V. Buturlin were sent to reinforce Zolotarenko,

and 2,500 troops went to garrison Kiev. Another 7,000 Muscovite troops held

the Belgorod Line against Tatar attack.

The invasion of Belarus’ and Lithuania was strikingly successful. The Mus-

covites had overwhelming numerical superiority (Lithuanian Grand Hetman

Janusz Radziwil

l, charged with the task of throwing them back, had no more

than6,000−7,000 effectives);theiroperationhad been planned long in advance;

16 Ibid., pp. 26–37.

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and the tsar’s presence with the army provided better command-and-control

than if supreme command had remained back at Moscow. In June the Mus-

covitestookBelaia,Dorogobuzhand Roslavl’;bylate Augusttheyhadcaptured

Mstislavl’, Orsha, Mogilev and the capital at Vilnius; Smolensk fell to them in

September, and Vitebsk in November.

In the summer of 1655 Sweden’s King Karl X Gustav (r. 1654–60) began his

own invasion of the Commonwealth in order to exploit the Muscovites’ suc-

cesses in Lithuania while pre-empting their advance towards his own intended

sphere of inﬂuence in the region. As most Polish and Lithuanian troops were

already engaged against the Muscovites the invading Swedes were able to

make remarkable progress in just a few months – and their sudden gains

threatened to usurp everything the Muscovites had won to that point. On

13 June Swedish troops landed in Riga and seized Dunaburg, then under siege

by the Muscovites; on 17 August, a week after Muscovite troops had taken

Vilnius, Lithuanian Grand Hetman Janusz Radziwil

l signed the Treaty of Niej-

dany, recognising Karl Gustav as grand duke over all of Lithuania; and on

8 September the Swedes entered Warsaw, forcing Jan Kazimierz to ﬂee into

exile in Silesia.

Karl Gustav had no desire to see the Muscovites seize Riga or any other part

of the Baltic coast, but he had been prepared to accept Muscovite control over

thesouthern Lithuanianhinterlandifthiskept his peacewithMuscovywhilehe

ﬁnished off the Poles.

But Moscow was not interested in such a compromise,

for it had revised its original war aims: A. L. Ordin-Nashchokin, the rising star

of Muscovite diplomacy, now considered it paramount that Muscovy secure

its dominion over occupied Lithuania and win access to the Baltic, and he

therefore urged the tsar to negotiate a peace with JanKazimierz and an alliance

with him against the Swedes. This was against the advice of Khmel’nyts’kyi,

who was seeking to form a Swedish–Ukrainian alliance which would ﬁnish

off the Commonwealth and guarantee the liberation of right-bank Ukraine. In

fact Ordin-Nashchokin so felt the need for haste that Muscovy declared war

upon Sweden in May 1656 while peace talks with the Poles at Vilnius were

still in their preliminary stage. A treaty with the Commonwealth was ﬁnally

signed in November, but it was only for an armistice, not a permanent peace

and true alliance, for the Muscovite envoys at Vilnius had not been satisﬁed

with Jan Kazimierz’s offer to cede Smolensk and Seversk and had held out

for even larger concessions: the cession of Lithuania, or the ‘election’ of Tsar

Alexis as Poland’s king upon the death of Jan Kazimierz.

17 L. V. Zaborovskii, Rossiia, Rech’ Pospolitaia, i Shvetsiia v seredine XVII v. (Moscow: Nauka,

1981), pp. 118, 121.

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Muscovy at war and peace

Muscovy’s war with Sweden mostly took the form of operations against

small Swedish garrisons in Karelia, Izhorsk and Livonia. In the summer and

autumn of 1656 Muscovite forces were able to capture Dunaburg, Koknes and

Iur’ev (Dorpat), but they failed to take Riga even after three months’ siege

because they had no ﬂeet to blockade its reinforcement by sea. The Swedes

launched a counter-offensive the next year, defeating the Muscovites at Walk

but failing to capture Gdov.

In December 1658 the breakdown of peace talks with the Commonwealth

and Vyhovs’kyi’s betrayal in Ukraine forced Tsar Alexis to sign a three-year

armistice with the Swedes. Sweden was ready for truce; the Polish and Lithua-

nian hetmans had joined in confederatio against the Swedes and had brought

back Jan Kazimierz, who had regained the military initiative; and Karl X

Gustav’s operations against Prussia and Denmark had provoked the Danes,

Prussians, Austrians and Dutch to join the Commonwealth in coalition against

him. His sudden death in February 1660 gave his successor, Karl XI, the oppor-

tunity to sue for peace while terms were still favourable. The Treaty of Oliva

(May 1660) recognised Hohenzollern sovereignty over Prussia in exchange for

recognitionof Swedish control overLivonia and JanKazimierz’sabandonment

of his claim to the Swedish throne. The Treaty of Kardis (June 1661) established

a permanent peace between Sweden and Muscovy and compelled Tsar Alexis

to return to Swedish control the Baltic towns and territories he had captured

since 1656.

The 1656–8 armistice between Muscovy and the Commonwealth had not

bound Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi from continuing his operations against the

Poles, or the Crimean Tatars from continuing their raids into Ukraine and

southernMuscovy. Khmel’nyts’kyi’sattempts to bringMoldavia andWallachia

intoalliancewithhimandGeorgeII Rakoczi,along with Zaporozhianand Don

cossack raids on Azov, had the effect of provoking a rapprochement between

the Poles and the Turks and Tatars. The sultan and khan launched a punitive

invasion of Moldavia and Wallachia and offered Jan Kazimierz detachments

to strike against the Ukrainians and the Don cossacks.

Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi died in July 1657. His secretary Ivan Vyhovs’kyi

was proclaimed the new hetman. From the start three problems confronted

Vyhovs’kyi: it was now clear that any chance for resumed alliance with the

khanate required reconciliation with the Poles as well; his own authority

was being challenged by Pushkar, the colonel of the Poltava regiment, and

by Barabash, the Zaporozhian ataman, who enjoyed the protection of the

Muscovite general Romodanovskii; and there was growing dissatisfaction in

Ukraine with the Muscovite protectorate. Moscow diplomats had been ready

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at the Vilnius talks (from which Ukrainian envoys had been excluded) to trade

Ukraine for Polishrecognitionof Tsar Alexis’s future right to the Polishthrone;

and in preparation for resumed hostilities with the Commonwealth Moscow

wasestablishing more garrisons in Ukraine and requisitioning army provisions

and transport at ruinous rates.

When Muscovy’s war with the Commonwealth resumed in Lithuania

in September 1658 it was therefore without a secured Ukrainian rear. On

6 September Vyhovs’kyi signed a treaty with the Poles at Hadiach, by terms of

which Jan Kazimierz agreed to reincorporate Ukraine in the Commonwealth

as a grand duchy of Ruthenia, recognise Vyhovs’kyi as grand duke subject to

the king alone, and dismantle the Uniate Church (although the Sejm ratiﬁed

but never honoured this treaty, Hadiach henceforth served as an alternative

model of Ukrainian autonomy for those cossacks unable to trust in Muscovite

protectorate).

Military alliance with Vyhovs’kyi’s cossacksallowedJanKazimierz toredou-

ble his efforts against the Muscovites on the Lithuanian front. The war here

took an increasingly brutal turn involving long sieges and ambushes provok-

ing the Muscovites to cruel reprisals against the local population – thereby

intensifying resistance to Muscovite occupation. Fighting Vyhovs’kyi and his

Tatar and Polish allies in Ukraine also required much larger Muscovite forces

than the Ukrainian theatre had previously seen. G. G. Romodanovskii’s corps

had some success against them at Lokhvitsa, but S. I. Pozharskii’s corps was

ambushed and crushed at Konotop in July 1659. Muscovite forces then began

to withdraw from Ukraine to regroup at Sevsk. Fortunately for Moscow, its

protectorate over Ukraine – at least over its left bank – was saved at this

moment by a cossack revolt against Vyhovs’kyi. Muscovite armies exploited

this revolt and re-entered Ukraine. In September 1659 Vyhovs’kyi was deposed

and Muscovite troops awarded the hetmanate to Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi’s son

Iurii.

Iurii Khmel’nyts’kyi was inexperienced and easily led, and Moscow was

determined to do the leading; the chance that the new hetman might also

turn renegade had to be prevented. Moscow therefore took his accession as

the opportunity to redeﬁne its protectorate responsibilities so as to limit the

hetman’s authority. The kind of Ukrainian autonomy Moscow had intended

to recognise in the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty can still be debated; but it is very

clear that the revised Pereiaslav Articles promulgated in 1659 aimed at greatly

18 N. I. Kostomarov, ‘Getmanstvo Vygovskogo’, in his Kazaki (Moscow: Charli, 1995),

pp. 49–50, 59, 74, 101.

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Muscovy at war and peace

reducing Ukraine’s autonomy. Chernigov, Starodub and Novgorod Severskii

were declared part of Muscovy, not of Ukraine, and were put under full Mus-

covite administration; the hetman could no longer receive foreign envoys or

undertake his own campaigns without the tsar’s permission; and a successor

hetman could not be chosen without ‘report’ to Moscow.

Not surprisingly the 1659 Pereiaslav Articles had the opposite effect to what

Moscow intended: they heightened cossack discontent with the Muscovite

protectorate and increased the pressure on Iurii Khmel’nyts’kyi to follow the

example of Vyhovs’kyi and turn renegade. In the autumn of 1660 a large

Muscovite army under V. B. Sheremetev drove into Volynia with the objec-

tive of crushing the Polish-Lithuanian ﬁeld army and capturing L’viv. Iurii

Khmel’nyts’kyi’s army was supposed to reinforce Sheremetev at Chudnov, but

Iuriiinstead signed a peace treatywiththe Polesand pledged to restoreUkraine

to the Commonwealth. Sheremetev’s army of 40,000 men, surrounded by

Polish and Crimean forces, was forced to surrender.

Operations in Ukraine in 1660–2 generally took the form of raids and

counter-raids across the Dnieper. Polish and Tatar attacks on the left bank

did the greatest damage; Khmel’nyts’kyi’s cossacks were less effective because

their ranks were increasingly divided by doubts over the ultimate intentions

of their Polish and Tatar allies. Khmel’nyts’kyi’s army suffered a serious defeat

in July 1662 when the Crimean Tatars failed to come to his rescue from

Romodanovskii. In January 1663 a cossack assembly at Chyhyryn deposed Iurii

Khmel’nyts’kyi and elected Pavel Teteria hetman. Teteria, a supporter of the

Hadiach Articles and alliance with the Poles, was rejected by the Zaporozhian

host and the cossacks of the left bank, who in June 1663 proclaimed Ivan

Briukhovets’kyi, a client of Moscow, as their hetman.

November 1663 to January 1664 saw the last great campaign of the war.

Three large corps under King Jan Kazimierz, Stefan Czarniecki and Hetman

Teteria crossed the Dnieper, sacked a number of small towns on the left bank,

and pushed as far east as Hlukhiv and Novgorod Severskii before being thrown

back by Romodanovskii’s and Briukhovets’kyi’s forces.

Both sides were now too exhausted to continue major operations. There

were no major battles in Belarus’ or Lithuania in 1665, and, except for some

raids near Korsun’ and Bila Tsirkva, no Muscovite attempt to push deep into

right-bank Ukraine.

In 1666 Petro Doroshenko, Teteria’s successor as hetman on the right

bank, provided further reason for the Commonwealth and Muscovy to begin

19 N. I. Kostomarov, ‘Getmanstvo Iuriia Khmel’nitskogo’, in his Kazaki,pp.176–80.

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brian davies

peace talks: he suddenly broke with the Poles and allied with the Crimean

khan in a campaign to liberate and unite both banks of Ukraine. In January

1667 the Commonwealth and Muscovy signed a thirteen-year armistice at

Andrusovo. With the signing of the Andrusovo Armistice the Poles ﬁnally con-

ceded Smolensk, Seversk and Chernigov to Muscovy (a concession they had

been ready to make in 1656 at Vilnius) and conﬁrmed Muscovite sovereignty

over left-bank Ukraine. They also left Muscovy in temporary control of

Kiev, having agreed to postpone ﬁnal resolution of the Kiev question to

expedite signing of the armistice and free their forces for campaign against

Doroshenko.

The strain the war had placed on Muscovite ﬁnances and manpower mobil-

isation had been considerable but not as permanently damaging as the strain

upon the Commonwealth’s resources. The Tsar’s government was not under

the same political restraints as the Polish crown; its ability to mobilise troops

and provisions did not depend upon the vote of a Sejm fearful of feeding a

royal military absolutism. The decision to increase the relative weight in the

army of the foreign formation troops (7 per cent of the Muscovite military

establishment in 1651, 79 per cent in 1663) had been sound. With the excep-

tion of the better-trained elite guards regiments based in Moscow the soldat

infantry were still of limited tactical effectiveness on the battleﬁeld. More

importantly, though, the soldat regiments were conscripted from politically

subaltern commoners, so it was easier to rebuild them than damaged units

of traditional middle service class cavalry. Over the course of the war about

100,000 men were conscripted into the soldat regiments; the original rate of

one conscript from every twenty-ﬁve households (1658) was soon increased to

one from every twenty (1660) and in many districts on the Belgorod Line this

rate was ignored and men taken from nearly every household. Furthermore,

although the government was still unable to collect cash taxes on a scale sufﬁ-

cient to pay its growing foreign formations (and the inﬂation of the early 1660s

made this all the harder), it was free to compensate by switching to payment

in grain and imposing new grain taxes, even on social categories previously

considered exempt.

For these reasons it did not take long after Andrusovo

for Muscovite military resource mobilisation to recover and demonstrate

its ability to meet the even greater demands of the continuing war in

Ukraine.

20 Hellie, Enserfment,pp.175, 194–6, 200–10, 269; Carol Belkin Stevens, Soldiers on the Steppe:

Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia (De Kalb: Northern Illinois Uni-

versity Press, 1995), pp. 33, 56.

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Muscovy at war and peace

Conﬂict with the Ottomans and Crimean Tatars,

1667–89

After the Andrusovo Armistice the Muscovite government pursued a very

cautious policy towards Sweden. It did press for right of free trade at Riga

and Revel’ in 1673 and signiﬁcantly reinforced its border near Narva in 1677,

but throughout the Scanian war (1674–9) it rebuffed Denmark’s efforts to drag

it into conﬂict with Sweden, even though this might have provided Moscow

an opportunity to regain Livonian territory. Sweden eventually prevailed in

the Scanian war, but at the cost of some temporary weakening of its military

power, so the Swedish threat to Muscovy through the 1680s was considerably

reduced.

Muscovite attention in this period was instead focused largely upon the

situation in Ukraine, where it faced four major threats to its control of the

left bank: the emergence of a rival right-bank hetmanate bent on rolling back

the Muscovites and reunifying Ukraine; the Commonwealth’s resistance to

Ordin-Nashchokin’s project of a permanent peace and alliance and, worse,

the possibility the Commonwealth might break the Andrusovo Armistice and

resume war with Muscovy;the continuing problems of Crimean Tatar raiding;

and the growing danger of Ottoman invasion.

By 1663 the military and political stalemate had already resulted in the de

facto divisionof Ukraine along the Dnieper. Thisdivisionwas formalised at the

peacetalks at Andrusovoin1667,fromwhichUkrainian cossack representatives

had been excluded. Cossacks on both banks of the Dnieper were therefore

deeply dissatisﬁed with the outcome of the Andrusovo talks. By 1666 many

cossacks on the left bank had come to resent the tsar’s protectorate: there were

now over 11,000 Muscovite troops garrisoning Kiev and the left-bank towns,

Muscovite voevoda administration was spreading, mill and tavern revenues

now went to the tsar’s treasury and Hetman Briukhovets’kyi was unsuitably

obsequious towards Moscow. Meanwhile cossack colonels on the right bank

had abandoned any hope of relying on Polish assistance to reunify Ukraine

under their own hetman, Petro Doroshenko,and had instead chosen to pursue

alliance with Crimean khan Aadil Girey and Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV.

Hetman Doroshenko’s acceptance of Ottoman political and military sup-

port threatened the Polish–Muscovite armistice as well as Muscovite control

over the left bank. This gave Doroshenko the freedom to campaign against

eitherMuscovy ortheCommonwealthwhileholdingouttoeach thepossibility

21 Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (London, New York: Longman, 2000),

pp. 216–17.

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