Snyder T. The Reconstruction of Nations Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. 384 p

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Chapter 6 Early Modern

Ukraine (1569–1914)

You boast that, once, we brought Poland down.

Yet when Poland fell, you were crushed as well.

Then fathers spilt blood for Moscow and Warsaw,

Bequeathing to sons their chains, their renown!

—Taras Shevchenko, “To the Dead, the Living, and the Yet Unborn . . .”

(Viunyshcha, 1845)

The Lublin Union of  deﬁned early modern Ukraine by transfer-

ring East Slavic lands from Lithuania to Poland. Most of the lands of

Kyivan Rus’ had been acquired by Lithuania in the fourteenth cen-

tury, Kyiv city coming under Lithuanian dominion in . Polish

King Kazimierz (the Great) had seized Galicia and L’viv in . For

about two hundred years, most of the patrimony of Kyivan Rus’, in-

cluding the lands we now call Ukraine, was divided between Lithua-

nia and Poland.

Before , Lithuania had the lion’s share of the old

Kyivan principalities, but Poland’s Galicia (the Rus’ Palatinate) was

the most prosperous and advanced of these lands. The  Lublin

Union was thus a repartition of old Rus’, on terms favorable to

Poland. Lithuania retained its more northerly Slavic territories now

known as Belarus. Lithuania ceded to Poland its most southerly territories, the

Bratslav, Kyiv, and Volyn’ regions, most of what is now Ukraine. Orthodox no-

bles of Rus’, who after two centuries thought of themselves as Lithuanians,

found themselves within the Polish Kingdom. Braclaw, Kijów and Wolyn´

joined Galicia as territories within the Polish Kingdom where the main religion

was Orthodoxy, the vernacular was Ruthenian, the liturgical language was

Church Slavonic, and the script was Cyrillic. Kyiv city, the capital of ancient

Rus’, was suddenly part of Poland.

The Union between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish Kingdom

was organic and negotiated, while the absorption of Ukraine by Poland was

precipitous and decreed. The spread of Roman Catholicism within Lithuania

had begun with baptism of the sovereign in , and continued slowly for

nearly two centuries before the constitutional union with Poland in .

Ukraine, on the other hand, was an Orthodox land suddenly brought into in-

tense contact with Western Christendom at the height of the controversies over

Reform. Reform marked a change in the balance between Western and Eastern

Christianity. In the medieval period, Orthodox Rusian churchmen had pro-

vided Vilnius and Lithuania with East Slavic languages and culture. As Polish

high culture came to dominate Vilnius, as Lithuania granted Ukraine to Poland,

and as Western Christianity was subject to Reform, the tables were turned. A

source of high culture in medieval Lithuania, Ukraine became the target of civ-

ilizers in early modern Poland. Ukraine had provided medieval Lithuania with

Christianity and writing; Ukraine received from early modern Poland Reformed

Christianity and the printed book. In these ways, the  transfer marks the

end of medieval Rus’, as continued within Lithuania; and the beginning of

early modern Ukraine, comprised of East Slavic lands included in Poland. The

Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko called Vilnius “the most glorious of

cities”; the Ukraine of which he wrote begins with a connection to Warsaw.

Just as the history of medieval Rus’ begins with the Orthodox baptism of

Grand Duke Volodymyr in , so the history of early modern Ukraine begins

with conversions of Ukrainian nobles to Western Christianity after . In six-

teenth-century Poland, Protestants ﬁrst, and Catholics in response, brought to

bear the printed word, the vernacular, and techniques of disputation revived by

the Renaissance. After , these intellectual ﬁreworks were released in Ukraine,

the main pyrotechnicians being the Jesuits. The effect was spectacular, espe-

cially against a darkening sky. As Reform raised religious disputation in Poland

to a very high level, Orthodoxy in Ukraine continued its long intellectual de-

cline. Its limitations inhered in the language created to spread eastern-rite

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

106

Christianity among the Slavs. Old Church Slavonic, the remarkable creation of

Cyril/Constantine, had allowed the spread of the Gospel throughout East and

South Slavic lands. Although Old Church Slavonic served the medieval pur-

poses of conversion from paganism to Christianity very well, it was insufﬁcient

for the early modern challenge of Reform. It provided no link to classical mod-

els. As centuries passed, it was ever less able to provide Orthodox churchmen

with a means of communication among themselves—or with their ﬂock, when

this idea arose. As the various Slavic languages emerged (or diverged), Church

Slavonic lost both its original proximity to the vernacular and its universal ap-

peal. By the early modern period it had declined into local recensions which

neither matched local speech nor represented a general means of communica-

tion among Orthodox churchmen.

In the sixteenth century, the humble literature of the Orthodox church was

dwarfed by that of the Protestants and Catholics.

Both Protestants and Cath-

olics initially tried to use Church Slavonic in their schools and publications in

Ukraine, before deciding that what they had to say could only be conveyed in

Polish. Unlike all of its competitors, Polish was at once a living language and a

language of culture, amenable to propaganda and proselytism. Churchmen’s

use of Polish in Ukraine was not national prejudice, but a choice of weapons in

a battle for souls. Proponents of Church Slavonic did rise to the challenge.

Konstantyn Ostroz’kyi, the greatest of the Volhynian princes, sponsored the

publication of the ﬁrst complete bible in Church Slavonic. Pamvo Berynda

published a lexicon. Petro Mohyla founded an Orthodox collegium, which later

became the Kyiv Academy. It used Church Slavonic, although the textbooks

were generally in Latin and the composition generally in Polish. Because they

were forced to learn other languages and classical rhetoric and disputation, Ukrai-

nian churchmen became the outstanding interpreters of Church Slavonic texts,

which made them much desired in Moscow. All the same, they too found the

Polish language best suited their needs. After , the majority of polemical

tracts written by Orthodox churchmen were in Polish (though the titles, pseu-

donyms, and terms of abuse were often of Byzantine origin); after , Or-

thodox churchmen usually signed their names in Polish; after , most ofﬁ-

cial documents in Ukraine were written in Polish. Mohyla, who died in ,

wrote his will in Polish.

One important response of the local Orthodox hierarchy was a project for

Union with Rome. To end the Eastern Schism was a matter of the greatest im-

portance for Rome after ; in the absence of a total solution the Catholic

Church had enacted several local Unions with churches of other rites. After

Early Modern Ukraine

107

, the political conditions were in place for such a local Union in the new

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The ecclesiastical separation of the metro-

politan sees of Moscow and Kiev had been established in , with the latter

entirely within the boundaries of the Commonwealth. After the new territorial

disposition of , most of these Orthodox lands fell within Poland rather

than Lithuania. Polish Jesuits such as Piotr Skarga (–) supported

Union with the Orthodox; papal emissaries such as Antonio Possevino ex-

plained to Rome the possibility of a regional Union; King Zygmunt III was a

keen advocate on security and religious grounds. Yet Union was by no means a

plot of Rome or Warsaw. The  Brest Union came from the bosom of Or-

thodoxy, as bishops sought to preserve their church. The Orthodox Patriarchy

of Constantinople was discredited by its obvious dependency on Ottoman

power; the new Patriarchy of Moscow was established by dubious methods. Je-

remiah II, Patriarch of Constantinople and highest authority of the Orthodox

Church, enjoyed the unpleasant distinction of having been imprisoned by both

the Ottomans and the Muscovites. Having been forced to elevate the metro-

politan see of Moscow to a patriarchy, Jeremiah tarried in Poland’s Ukrainian

lands in  and . Jeremiah ordered annual synods at Brest, which pre-

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

108

Fig. . The Ostroh Bible, published in . Early modern Ostroh boasted an Orthodox

academy, a yeshiva, a mosque, and a Unitarian Church. Ostroh is today a town in Rivne

oblast, western Ukraine.

pared the Union of Orthodox and Catholic Churches promulgated in the Com-

monwealth in .

Opponents saw the Brest Union as an attempt to eliminate the Orthodox

Church in the Commonwealth, which it was. After all, the Orthodox bishops

who proposed and established Union believed that they were joining the Cath-

olic Church, retaining their eastern rite while gaining equal status within that

larger body. The Vatican treated Union as part of a tradition of ending schisms

by way of regional arrangements. King Zygmunt III therefore had a point when

he claimed that the “Greek faith” he was bound to protect was the Uniate

Church, as the full and legitimate successor of the Orthodox Church in the

Commonwealth. The politics of Union forced cooperation between Protes-

tants (now a smaller minority relative to an enlarged Catholic Church) and Or-

thodox (whose church had legally ceased to exist in the Commonwealth). Dur-

ing the crisis of the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Protestants

found themselves in sympathy with the Orthodox for reasons of doctrine and

practice as well as political survival. The most prominent opponent of the Brest

Union was Konstantyn Ostroz’kyi, the Volhynian prince who published the Sla-

vonic Bible. Armed with arguments drawn from Protestant sources (that the

pope was the Antichrist, for instance), Ostroz’kyi used the institutions of the

Commonwealth to protest against Union.

Early Modern Ukraine

109

Fig. . A sixteenth-century eastern-

rite church. Niz˙ ankowice/

Nizhankovitse straddles the Bug/Buh

river, today the border between

Poland and Ukraine.

Ostroz’kyi was able to mobilize some nobles from the Wolyn´/Volyn’ and

Kijów/Kyiv regions in local diets to protest Brest. Religion, in this peculiar way,

brought some Ukrainian nobles into politics. For Orthodox townsmen, the

Brest Union represented a threat to their social position by Polish immigrants.

Here religion stood for conservatism. In the parishes, the Uniate Church failed

to unify the Orthodox clergy or elevate the eastern rite such that it could satisfy

the majority of the Ukrainian gentry.

From controversy over Union arose a

political lexicon. The traditional sacral designation “Rus’” had been used in a

political sense for centuries; now the vague military term “Ukraina” took on

something like a political meaning as the homeland of the Orthodox in

Poland.

The Lublin Union of  had separated East Slavs in Ukraine from

their northern counterparts in the Grand Duchy; the Brest Union of  pro-

vided the occasion to consider this new territorial settlement in political terms.

Rather than creating a single church within the Commonwealth that could as-

similate eastern traditions, the Brest Union created a confusing situation in

which all Christian churches in Ukraine posed political problems. Most preg-

nant was the gap between reformers and peasants, for whom the motives of Re-

form and Union were totally obscure.

THE DEFINITION OF EARLY MODERN

UKRAINE, 1569 –1648

Earlier, we noted an odd and important feature of the resolution of the Renais-

sance language question in Poland and Lithuania. Whereas nobles of both

realms accepted Polish as the language of learning and politics after , this

had different long-term social consequences in the two realms. In Poland the

educated classes shifted from an imported language of state and literature,

Latin, to a codiﬁed version of the vernacular, Polish. In the Grand Duchy of

Lithuania the educated classes shifted from a language of government similar to

the vernacular of much of the country, Chancery Slavonic, to an imported lan-

guage of state and literature, Polish. This sidelined the Belarusian vernacular,

which joined the Lithuanian vernacular in political and cultural irrelevance.

We then saw that the elite status of Polish weakened its case when national pol-

itics came to mean mass politics in the modern period. In Ukraine, the same

can be said about the answer to the language question after : rather than the

Ukrainian vernacular being elevated or Church Slavonic being revived, Polish

simply won the day. Whereas in Poland the answer to the language question

brought letters closer to common speech, in Lithuania and Ukraine it dis-

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

110

tanced the literate elite, lay and church alike, from the commoners (chart ,

p. ).

A further point can be made about the outcome of religious Reform in

Ukraine. Like Polish nobles, many Ukrainian nobles were swept away by the

Reformation. Much of the Ukrainian gentry converted from Orthodoxy to

several varieties of Protestantism in the sixteenth century. As in Poland, the

children and grandchildren of such nobles in Ukraine were drawn to Counter-

Reformation, and converted to Roman Catholicism. Polish and great Ukrain-

ian nobles thus ended by sharing a religion, Roman Catholicism. Yet whereas

the Counter-Reformation removed a new religious difference between Polish

lords and Polish peasants, it created a new religious difference between Roman

Catholic Ukrainian lords and Orthodox Ukrainian peasants. When in the mod-

ern period popular religion and the common speech became platforms of na-

tional politics, the Polish language and Roman Catholic religion were bound to

be presented as alien to Ukraine. There was, however, one institution which

served both. The Uniate Church survived in Ukraine, as a minority religion

among both gentry and peasants. When Orthodoxy regained legal status in the

Commonwealth in the s, Union ceased to be a universal aspiration and be-

came a minority eastern-rite Church. As we shall see, in the right political con-

ditions the Uniate Church became one platform for modern ideas of Ukraine

nationality.

In the religious and political life of the new Commonwealth, early modern

Ukraine differed more from Poland than did Lithuania. In Lithuania, Roman

Catholicism had taken root long before, and was a faith of peasants as well as

nobles. Lithuania was a full partner in the politics of the new Commonwealth,

Ukraine was not. Whereas the Lithuanian middle gentry could choose between

Lithuanian and Commonwealth law to protect their freedoms, Ukrainian mid-

dle gentry found themselves at the mercy of their richer and more powerful

brethren. In the political economy of the new Commonwealth, Ukrainian

lands played a particular role. As the Commonwealth became the breadbasket

of Western Europe, and as gentry succeeded in binding peasants to the land,

property was ever more the way to wealth and power.

Property was for the

taking in Ukraine.

In Lithuania, gentry were able to use the executive power they retained after

 to protect their landholdings, and in any case the Lithuanian Statutes re-

mained the highest law. The  Statute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was

designed in part to protect native Lithuanian landholders. No such Ukrainian

defenses existed. In the decades after , a few Polish families gained enor-

Early Modern Ukraine

111

mous landholdings in Ukraine, and thousands of petty Polish nobles and Jews

followed to work for the great lords. Fewer lords owned more land. By ,

perhaps  percent of the population of Ukraine was noble, as opposed to about

 percent of the population elsewhere in Poland.

Ukrainian nobles of local

origin proﬁted most from the new order. The richest ones recruited Polish and

Jewish soldiers and assistants. Polish hirelings brought economic practices such

as leasing, which allowed great tracts of land to become proper latifundia; Jew-

ish administrators were drawn from the Polish crownlands by magnates keen to

proﬁt from their skills. As gentry took on Polish ways and Jews took up their

leases, the Orthodox peasantry was reduced from poverty to penury. Nathan of

Hanover, graduate of the Ostroh Yeshiva and famous chronicler if the blood-

shed that followed, compared the suffering of the peasants to that of the Jews

under Egyptian bondage. The Ukrainians, he wrote, “were looked upon as

lowly and inferior beings, and became the slaves and handmaids of the Polish

people and the Jews...”

This intense stratiﬁcation allowed impressive cultural attainments at the

peak of society. Polish women brought court life to Ukraine, creating milieux

that allowed cultural trends to be observed and to spread. Just as the Italian Re-

naissance had been rendered attractive in Poland by the person and entourage

of the Italian princess Bona Sforza, wife of Zygmunt I and mother of Zygmunt

II, so a generation later the Polish Renaissance was communicated to Ukraine

in magnate courts organized by Polish women. Less than a century after 

we ﬁnd enormously wealthy estates in Ukraine whose guardians were as Polish

as the Poles, if not more so.

Ukraine provided new summits for Polish high

culture; but in their shadow lurked rebels.

1648 AND ALL THAT

In the three crucial generations between the Lublin Union of  and Bohdan

Khmel’nyts’kyi’s uprising of , Polish nobles entered Ukraine and Ukrai-

nian magnates became more Polish. Increasing social differences combined with

new religious and cultural differences to create deep political divisions. These

were compounded by the constitutional order of the new Commonwealth. It

was a republic of Two Nations, not Three; and it was before all a republic of the

nobility. The Commonwealth was thus ill designed to incorporate the free so-

ciety of the Cossacks, armed men generally of peasant rather than noble origin.

In , the Polish Kingdom had inherited the Cossacks along with Ukraine

from Lithuania. Lithuania had relied upon the Cossacks to defend its southern

The Embattled Ukrainian Borderland

112

borderlands from the Crimean Khanate. Poland found that the Cossacks were

a tremendous military asset, not only in defense but in attack. The Polish cav-

alry was the best in Europe at the time, but it was most effectively used to end

battles, and the state had difﬁculty paying for the standing infantry needed to

begin them.

For a time, the Cossacks ﬁlled this gap. Their value was demon-

strated in the wars with Sweden in –, Muscovy in –, and the Ot-

toman empire in . The Commonwealth attained its greatest glory when its

Polish and Lithuanian knights and its Ukrainian Cossacks fought side by side.

The compromise found for such militarily useful commoners was the legal

category of “registered” Cossacks. Registered Cossacks had personal liberty, but

were disenfranchised if they were not noblemen. Since Cossacks as an estate

were not represented in the parliament, that body took an ungenerous view of

the number of Cossacks who should be registered. The nobility, by contrast,

was enfranchised. Since great nobles had an interest in keeping peasants bound

to the land, and a peasant who became a registered Cossack gained rights, they

had an economic interest in keeping the number of registered Cossacks low.

The policy after  was to maintain the Cossacks as a small border guard, in-

creasing their numbers only when necessary for war. The Commonwealth ne-

glected to pay the registered Cossacks after , which was much resented.

They faced mobilization without representation.

The Cossacks impotently petitioned parliament for the restoration of their

traditional status. Like the Lithuanian middle gentry before , some Ukrai-

nian Cossacks after  also wished to win the rights that nobles had secured

for themselves within the Polish Kingdom. Unlike Lithuanian nobles, Ukrai-

nian Cossacks had not begun the association with Poland from a position of

formal equality, and lacked the institutional platform from which to negotiate.

The Lithuanian gentry had observed Polish norms over the course of centuries,

and had negotiated what became the Lublin Union with Poland over decades.

Ukrainian Cossacks were thrust into direct contact with Polish practices, while

a very few very rich magnates and their administrators represented Poland and

Polishness in Ukraine. Catholicism had been introduced by degrees into Lithu-

ania, beginning in ; and was familiar when not acceptable to nobles through-

out the Commonwealth. Orthodoxy was the only religion the non-noble ma-

jority of the Cossacks had ever known. Although the  Brest Union was a

matter of disputation among Ukrainian gentry, it appears to have been simply

shocking to most of the Cossacks.

Although after the s Orthodoxy was

once again recognized in the Commonwealth, Cossacks generally wished to re-

move the Uniate Church (and Roman Catholics, and Protestants, and Jews)

Early Modern Ukraine

113