CHAPTER TWO Poles and Cossacks: Kamyanets Podilsky
You boast, because we once
Brought Poland to calamity.
And so it was; Poland fell,
But you were crushed by her fall as well.
– Taras Shevchenko, 1845
May you croak in the faith of the Poles!
– Traditional Ukrainian curse
KAMYANETS PODILSKY HAD one functioning café, a dark, damp cell built into the medieval city walls. It sold ersatz ‘Jacky’ coffee and cardboard biscuits, and its only other customer was a wispy young man in a tweed jacket and fogeyish leather brogues. Hearing foreign voices, he came over and produced a business card, a flimsy photocopied rectangle with a home-drawn logo above the words ‘Valery Chesnevsky, Architect’. Underneath, in careful Latin lettering, he pencilled in the word ‘Unemployed’. The reason he was unemployed, he said, was that he was a Pole – the only one left in Kamyanets.
Kamyanets used to guard Poland’s south-eastern border against the Turks. Encircled by the rocky gorge of the Smotrych river and accessible only by soaring single-span bridges, it was one of Christendom’s mythic outposts, remote yet uniquely impregnable. A Turkish sultan, passing by at the head of his army, is said to have asked who fortified the city. ‘God himself,’ came the answer. ‘In that case,’ replied the sultan, ‘let God himself storm it.’ In 1672 the Turks did capture the city, albeit briefly, and the spell was broken. A minaret went up in the courtyard of the SS Piotra i Pawla Cathedral, and the words ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is the Apostle of God’ were inscribed in Arabic – as reported by a startled Victorian missionary – over the door. The nearby Polish fortress of Khotyn, its curved curtain walls the work of Genoese military engineers, housed the local pasha’s harem: the young Prince Adam Czartoryski, touring with his tutor in the 1780s, when the region had fallen to the Turks for a second time, thought its women ‘very untidily dressed’.1 Today there is nothing to show that Khotyn was built by Italians on behalf of Poles, the guidebook on sale at the ticket-booth baldly informing visitors that it symbolises ‘the struggle of the Ukrainian people against foreign invaders’.
Being an architect in Kamyanets, said Valery, was a depressing business. Run by Ukrainian nationalists, the local government would not give work to a Pole. Outdoors, hunched against a bitter wind, it didn’t look as if there was much work to be had anyway. From a distance the city – all pepper-pot fortress and baroque bell-towers – had looked picturesque, poster-cute. Close up, it was falling to bits. Stained, cracked, swathed in black plastic and wooden scaffolding, its historic buildings stood about like relics of some lost civilisation, as irrelevant to their surroundings as Inca temples to a Peruvian peasant. There were no shoppers, no strollers, no tourists; in the weed-grown central square, the only sign of life was an old woman grazing a scabby pony. Passing a buttressed wall, Valery made me kneel down and peer between a pair of wooden doors, half off their hinges. All I could see was a mess of rubble and puddles, bird-droppings and fallen beams. This, he told me, had been a Benedictine monastery. A clothing factory had set up shop in the medieval cloisters the previous summer, and some bales of cotton had caught fire. ‘The fire station isn’t far away, but they mainly tried to save the factory. Nobody cared about the church, so it burned out.’
Not all Kamyanets’s churches were as forsaken. Walls might sag and ceilings might drip, but bit by bit some at least were coming back to life. Catholic monks from Cracow had put a new copper roof on the cathedral and installed two or three pews – all they needed, since most of the city’s Poles were deported by Stalin after the war. A card pinned up by the door outlined a four-point plan for new communicants: ‘1. GET BAPTISED. 2. GET MARRIED IN CHURCH. 3. HAVE YOUR CHILDREN BAPTISED. 4. SEE OUR PRIEST.’ The other churches were being taken over by the Orthodox and the Uniates. In Trinity Church technicolored icons, draped with embroidered napkins, filled the niches where Polish madonnas once stood; the nave of St George’s, a planetarium under communism, had been cut in two by a new plywood iconostatis. Valery’s star exhibit was in the cathedral vestry, a leftover from its days as a Museum of Atheism. On a window-sill stood a knee-high mechanical model of a monk shouldering a wicker basket. Valery turned a handle and the lid of the basket opened, revealing a naked girl. ‘This is how they taught us that monks were not monks, and monasteries were whorehouses.’
Ukraine’s relationship with Poland is difficult and contradictory. For 500 years they shared a common history, first under the Polish kings, then under the Russian tsars. But like rival siblings they define themselves more by their differences than their similarities – Poland glamorous and self-dramatising; Ukraine inarticulate and put-upon. Ukraine resents Poland for hogging the limelight; Poland resents Ukraine for stealing its lines. Ukrainians, like the Irish, rebelled against their Polish landlords at every opportunity; Poles, like the English, responded with a curious mixture of affection, scorn and fear. The Ukrainians, one interwar Polish memoirist wrote of the tenants on her lost Volhynian estates, were ‘singers of songs as beautiful as any in the whole world; a slothful bovine people whose torpor concealed an element which might break out into a hurricane at any moment . . .’2
That the relationship would end in acrimony was not a foregone conclusion, for the Poland that Ukraine joined with Iogaila’s marriage to Jadwiga was a country ahead of its time. Power was divided between the king and the Sejm, a representative assembly elected by the nobility or szlachta. Uniquely, the szlachta comprised around 10 per cent of the population, giving a level of representation that would not be bettered elsewhere until the nineteenth-century British Reform Acts, and forcing princely magnates to share power on an equal basis, in theory at least, with poor smallholders whose pride was the only thing differentiating them from the surrounding peasantry. Only the Sejm could make legislation, and the king could not raise taxes or troops without its consent. From the late sixteenth century onward the szlachta also appointed the king himself, at a rowdy gathering in a field outside Warsaw. Poland thus became that constitutional oddity, an elective monarchy, and a Republic of Nobles.
Compared to szlachta status, religion and race were unimportant. The nobility included Ruthenians (the Polish name for what were to become Ukrainians and Belarussians), Lithuanians, Jews, Germans, Moldovans, Armenians, Italians, Magyars, Bohemians and even Muslim Tatars. ‘One is born noble, not Catholic’ was the motto. Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox all served in the upper house of the Sejm, and the legal system used six different languages – Ruthenian (precursor to Ukrainian and Belarussian), Polish, Hebrew, Armenian, German and Latin. The Reformation saw an influx of recherché nonconformist refugees, who were allowed to build churches and proselytise. Lviv, in present-day western Ukraine, became the only city in the world besides Rome to host three Christian archbishoprics – Catholic, Orthodox and Armenian. Zygmunt August, last of Iogaila’s descendants, called himself ‘King of the people, not of their consciences’, and his father Zygmunt the Elder put down a bumptious cleric with the words ‘Permit me, Sir, to be King of both the sheep and the goats’.3
But the virtues of the Polish system were also its weaknesses. Unfettered by a strong monarchy, the wealthiest magnates – Ruthenians and Lithuanians as well as Poles – operated like independent rulers. In the wide, underpopulated eastern borderlands they accumulated vast estates as big as many a Western kingdom. Guillaume Le Vasseur, Sieur de Beauplan, a French military engineer who worked for the Polish crown in Ukraine through the 1630s and ‘40s, wrote that these ‘kinglets’ had ‘the right to place crowns on their coats of arms, in the manner of minor sovereigns, to cast as much cannon as they please, and to build fortresses as strong as their means may permit. Neither the king nor the Commonwealth may prevent them. Indeed, they lack only the right to coin money to be sovereign.’4 Quarrels between ‘kinglets’ were frequent, and settled in full-scale battles involving thousands of armed retainers. Judicial rulings from Cracow were routinely flouted: one magnate paraded at court in a suit fashioned from all the writs he had received and ignored. Poles still use the expression ‘Write to me in Berdychiv’ – a small town west of Kiev – to mean ‘Catch me if you can’.
With the rise of the great landowners, Polish society, once so tolerant and inclusive, began to atrophy and fossilise. In the early sixteenth century, just as the rest of Europe was abandoning serfdom, Poland introduced it, the better to exploit an export boom in grain. Rather than extract money rents from peasant farmers, landowners preferred to take the land in hand and turn it over to wheat, using the peasantry as free labour. ‘Ukraine was treated,’ in the words of the historian Adam Zamoyski, ‘by its own élite as well as by the Poles, as a sort of colony.’5 Laws were passed making it difficult for peasants to leave the land, and they lost their rights of appeal, leaving them at the mercy of local manorial courts. De Beauplan described the results:
The local peasants are in a very miserable state, being obliged to work, with their horses, three days a week in the service of their lord, and having to pay him, in proportion to the land they hold, many bushels of grain, and plenty of capons, hens, goslings and chickens, at Easter, Pentecost and Christmas. What is more, they must cart wood for their lord, and fulfil a thousand other manorial obligations, to which they ought not to be subject . . . the lords have absolute power not only over their possessions, but also their lives, so great is the liberty of Polish nobles (who live as if they were in paradise, and the peasants in purgatory). Thus if it happens that these wretched peasants fall into the bondage of evil lords, they are in a more deplorable state than convicts sentenced to the galleys . . .6
The weirdest manifestation of the new exclusivity was the cult of ‘Sarmatism’, based on the lunatic notion that the Polish nobility were descended from a mythic eastern warrior-tribe called the Sarmatians, justifying an imaginary racial divide with the rest of the population. In line with their newly-invented Sarmatian credentials, the szlachta developed a bizarre taste for the bejewelled and exotic. Turkish carpets and enamelled coffee pots started appearing in wood-girt Polish manor houses; Polish knights shaved their heads, wore Arab-style chain-mail armour, and dyed their horses’ hides cochineal pink or patriotic red-and-white on special occasions. Poles ended up looking so oriental, in fact, that at the battle of Vienna in 1683 Jan Sobieski had to order his troops to wear straw cockades so as to distinguish them from the enemy Turks.
With serfdom and Sarmatism came the end of religious toleration. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, with the Counter-Reformation and Poland’s wars against the Swedes and Turks, Polishness became increasingly identified with Catholicism. Nonconformists were banished, entry to the szlachta was barred to non-Catholics, and a new chain of Jesuit colleges set about converting the sons of the Orthodox nobility. The high point of the Catholic push came when Piotr Skarga, an influential Jesuit divine, persuaded a group of Orthodox bishops, hopeful of being admitted to the upper house of the Sejm, to acknowledge papal supremacy while retaining their own Slavonic liturgy and their priests’ right to marry. In 1596 an Act of Union was signed at Brest creating the ‘Greek-Catholic’ or Uniate Church, which dominates western Ukraine to this day. The rest of the Orthodox were furious, denouncing the Union and calling for an anti-Catholic alliance with the Protestants. Alarmed by the uproar, two of the four new Uniate bishops turned tail and reverted to Orthodoxy. ‘Your dear Union,’ the chancellor of Lithuania wrote to one of the remainder, ‘has brought so much bitterness that we wish it had never been thought of, for we have only trouble and tears from it.’7
Though Catholic proselytising soured relations between the Commonwealth and Ruthenians in general, it did stunningly well within an important group – the Ruthenian nobility. A mournful work of 1612, entitled ‘Trenos or Lament of the Holy Eastern Church’, asked what had happened to the old families of ancient Rus:
Where are the priceless jewels of [Orthodoxy’s] crown, such famous families of Ruthenian princes as Slutsky, Zaslavsky, Zbarazky, Vyshnevetsky, Sangushsky, Chartorysky, Pronsky, Ruzhynsky, Solomyretsky, Holovchynsky, Koropynsky, Masalsky, Horsky, Sokolynsky, Lukomsky, Ruznya, and others without number? Where are those who surrounded them . . . the well-born, glorious, brave, strong, and ancient houses of the Ruthenian nation who were renowned throughout the world for their high repute, power and bravery?8
It was a rhetorical question. Vyshnevetsky had turned into Wisniowiecki, Sangushsky into Sanguszko, Chartorysky into Czartoryski – the Ruthenian nobility, in other words, had adopted the faith, language and manners of the ruling Poles. By the mid seventeenth century, according to de Beauplan, Ukraine’s nobles seemed ‘ashamed of any religion but the Roman, to which more of them are converting every day, even though the great men of wealth and all those who bear the title of prince issue from the Greek religion.’9
Though as individual families the Ruthenian nobility flourished, providing many of the greatest names in Polish history, as a distinct group it disappeared. For the rest of the Ruthenians – later to re-identify themselves as Ukrainians and Belarussians – this was a long-term disaster. Shorn of their native élite – the class that founded and filled schools and universities, patronised the arts, built churches and palaces, invested in trade and manufacturing – they turned into a leaderless people, a ‘non-historic nation’. Ruthenian became the language of serfs and servants, bam and byre. Right up to the First World War the words ‘Ruthenian’ and ‘peasant’ were virtually synonymous, used interchangeably in Polish letters and memoirs. Ukrainians and Belarussians did not get their own national leaders again until the mid nineteenth century, when a great wave of ethnic consciousness, borne along by the Romantic fascination with all things folkloric and obscure, swept the whole of Eastern Europe. The new enthusiasts were not the descendants of the old Rus princes, but writers, teachers and antiquarians, offspring of a fledgling educated middle class.
Polish rule robbed Ukraine of its nobility. But it also saw the emergence of a new power in the region – the Cossacks. Outlaws and frontiersmen, fighters and pioneers, the Cossacks are to the Ukrainian national consciousness what cowboys are to the American. Unlike the remote and sanctified Rus princes, the Cossacks make heroes Ukrainians can relate to. They ranged the steppe in covered wagons, drawing them up in squares in case of Tatar attack. They raided Turkish ports in sixty-foot-long double-ruddered galleys, built of willow-wood and buoyed up with bundles of hollow reeds. They wore splendid moustaches, red boots and baggy trousers ‘as wide as the Black Sea’. They danced, sang and drank horilka in heroic quantities. ‘No sooner are they out of one state of inebriation,’ wrote de Beauplan, ‘than they set about drinking again as before.’10 Though the historical Cossacks ceased to exist in the eighteenth century, they lived on powerfully in the Ukrainian imagination. The anarchic peasant armies of the Russian Civil War called themselves ‘Cossacks’, as do a few fringe nationalists today, turning out in astrakhan hats and home-made uniforms at anti-communist rallies. Khokhol – the name of the long pony-tail, worn with a shaven head, which was the Cossack hallmark – is still derogatory Russian slang for a Ukrainian.
Cossackdom had its beginnings in the early fifteenth century, when the Grand Dukes of Lithuania built a line of forts on the edge of the empty ‘wild field’ between the Duchy and Tatar-ruled Crimea. Initially garrisoned with Tatar mercenaries called ‘kazaks’ or ‘free adventurers’, they soon attracted runaways of every class and nationality – escaped serfs, indebted nobles, defrocked priests. By the end of the century these makeshift frontier communities had turned into a semi-independent society with its own elected leaders – called ‘hetmans’ and ‘otamans’ – army, laws and vocabulary. Epitome of Cossackdom was the Zaporozhian Sich, a stockaded wooden barracks-town on a remote island south of the Dnieper rapids. Symbol of freedom for generations of Ukrainians, it was where the wildest outlaws gathered, the most daring raids were plotted, and the most horilka drunk. No women were allowed to enter the Sich, and important decisions were taken by the Rada, a rough-and-ready open-air assembly where, in theory at least, everybody had an equal voice. ‘This Republic could be compared to the Spartan,’ wrote a seventeenth-century Venetian envoy, Alberto Vimina, ‘if the Kozaks respected sobriety as highly as did the Spartans.’11
Despite Ukrainian wishful thinking, Cossackdom never formed anything approaching a state in the modern sense of the word. It had no borders, no written laws, no division between army and administration, and no permanent capital (the Sich moved several times in its career). Nor, since not all Ukrainians were Cossacks and not all Cossacks Ukrainians, did Cossackdom form an embryo Ukrainian nation. As Zamoyski says, the Cossacks were not a people, but a way of life.
What they also certainly were was a military power. Most of the time they worked on the land as ordinary farmers and craftsmen. ‘Among these people,’ wrote de Beauplan, ‘are found individuals expert in all the trades necessary for human life: house and ship carpenters, cartwrights, blacksmiths, armourers, tanners, harnessmakers, shoemakers, coopers, tailors, and so forth.’12 But when inclination and the hetman dictated, they took up horse-tail banners and spiked maces, and launched fearsome raids deep into Poland. In 1498 they reached Jaroslaw, west of Lviv; four years later they got all the way to the Vistula.
Poland’s response, never more than partially succesful, was to try to redirect Cossack aggression eastwards, towards the Muscovites and Turks. In 1578 King Stefan Batory granted the wealthier, town-dwelling Cossacks stipends in exchange for military service against Muscovy and the wild outlaws of the Sich. The move split Cossackdom into three – the 3,000 ‘registered’ Cossacks loyal to the Poles, the 5,000 or 6,000 independent Cossacks of the Sich, and the remaining 40,000 or so who pitched in on either side as whim and circumstance dictated.
As far as attacking Turkey was concerned, Batory’s arrangement worked brilliantly. Between 1600 and 1620 the Cossacks mounted sea-raids against Akkerman, Trabizond, Kaffa, Perekop, Varna, Kilia and Ismail, and burned Constantinople twice. The price of captured slaves fell so low, according to Paul of Aleppo, that ‘Every gentleman of fortune owns seventy or eighty Tatar males, and every rich matron fifty or sixty women or girls’.13 Europe rang with the Cossacks’ praises: from scrubby renegades they had turned into latter-day Crusaders, new paladins in a holy war against the godless Mohammedan. ‘The horrible Turk opened his mouth,’ wrote a Polish polemicist approvingly, ‘but the brave Rus thrust his arm within. When Turkey rushed upon Poland with a mighty army, it was stopped by the Ruthenian force.’14 But what the Polish stipends signally failed to do was to stop the Cossacks attacking Poland herself. A series of uprisings – in 1591, 1595, 1625, 1635 and 1637 – was met with equally vicious pacification campaigns, culminating in 1648 with the biggest and bloodiest Cossack rebellion of them all, under Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky.
Of all the endlessly mythologised figures of Ukrainian history, Khmelnytsky is both the most influential and the most mysterious. For Ukrainians he is the leader of the first Ukrainian war of independence; for Poles he is the misguided peasant rebel who split the Commonwealth, pushing Poland into her long pre-Partition decline. For Jews he is the prototype pogromshchik, author of the infamous Khmelnytsky massacres; for Russians he is the founder of the Great Slav Brotherhood, the Moses who led Ukraine out of Polish bondage into the welcoming arms of Muscovy. In Kiev, the tsars erected a statue of him astride a rearing charger, pointing his mace towards the north-east and Moscow. According to its original design, the hetman was to have been represented trampling the cowering figures of a Polish nobleman, a Catholic priest and a Jew. Wiser councils prevailed, and today a solitary Khmelnytsky slices the uncomplaining air on a traffic island outside Santa Sofia Cathedral.
It is hard to make out what kind of man Khmelnytsky was in real life. Polish tradition paints a lurid picture of a half-mad drunkard surrounded by necromancers, terrified by his own runaway success. But contemporary accounts from outsiders describe a quite different figure: plain, judicious and oddly at variance with the chaotic rebellion to which he gave his name. The Venetian envoy Vimina, in Ukraine in 1650, reported Khmelnytsky to be ‘of more than middle height, with wide bones and of a powerful build. His utterances and his system of governing indicated that he possesses judicial thinking and a penetrating mind. In his manner he is gentle and unaffected, thereby winning the love of the Kozaks.’ Though the hetman conversed happily in Latin, his surroundings were austerely military: ‘There is no luxury of any kind in his room; the walls are bare. The furniture consists of rough wooden benches covered with leather cushions . . . A damask rug lies before the hetman’s small bed, at the head of which hang a bow and a sabre.’15 A couple of years later, Paul of Aleppo was surprised to find this ‘old man, possessing every quality of a leader’ having dinner in ‘a small and mean shelter . . . with the table spread before him and no other dish laid on it but a mess of boiled fennel’.16
For the first fifty years of his life, Khmelnytsky pursued a perfectly conventional szlachta career. Born around 1595 of noble Orthodox parents, he was educated by Jesuits at Jaroslaw, before joining the Polish army. Serving in Moldova, he fell prisoner to the Turks and spent two years in captivity. In 1622 he came home to the family estate in central Ukraine, where he spent the next twenty-five years farming and bringing up his family, avoiding involvement in the uprisings of the 1620s and ‘30s and climbing steadily up the ranks of loyal registered Cossacks. What induced this respectable middle-aged figure to start a rebellion that would last eight years, lay waste Ukraine, kill hundreds of thousands of people and almost destroy the Commonwealth of which he had hitherto been a loyal and successful member?
The answer, apparently, was a personal grudge. In 1646, while Khmelnytsky, now a widower, was away on business, a Polish neighbour with whom he had quarrelled raided his estate, beating to death his young son and kidnapping the woman he had been planning to marry. Having failed to win redress from the local courts or the Senate in Warsaw, in January 1648 the infuriated Khmelnytsky fled to the Sich, where he succeeded in persuading the Zaporozhians to rise once more under his leadership. At the same time he concluded an alliance with the Tatar khan, giving him a force of 4,000 cavalry, vital against the Poles’ fearsome Husaria, who galloped into battle with twenty-foot lances and feather-covered wooden wings hissing above their heads. Forewarned, the Poles marched south, and in April the two sides came face to face at a village north-west of the Sich called Yellow Waters, where a 3,000-strong Polish advance guard was surrounded and cut to pieces.
That spring and summer Khmelnytsky seemed invincible. Marching north-west towards Warsaw, his raggle-taggle army scored victory after victory, leaving the Commonwealth in tatters. Registered Cossack troops came over to the rebels in droves, and all over the country peasants took the opportunity to loot and massacre. ‘Wherever they found the szlachta, royal officials or Jews,’ says the nearly contemporary Eye-Witness Chronicle, ‘they killed them all, sparing neither women nor children. They pillaged the estates of the Jews and nobles, burned churches and killed their priests, leaving nothing whole. It was a rare individual in those days who had not soaked his hands in blood . . .’17 Jarema Wisniowiecki, leader of an earlier pacification campaign and the most powerful magnate in Ukraine, raised his own army and instituted savage reprisals, ordering captives to be tortured ‘so that they feel they are dying’. Imitating the Tatars, both sides took to using prisoners for target practice, or impaled them alive upon wooden stakes.
For three years Khmelnytsky held all of present-day western and central Ukraine, from Lviv in the west to Poltava in the east. His luck ran out in 1651, when the Cossacks were deserted by their Tatar allies and suffered a crushing defeat at Berestechko, north-east of Lviv. Beaten and betrayed, Khmelnytsky needed an ally. Fatefully – some would say fatally – for the whole of Eastern Europe, he found it in Russia.
By now Muscovy was already a vast empire. Ivan IV (‘The Formidable’ to Russians, ‘The Terrible’ to everyone else) had conquered the Muslim khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan, taking the border south to the shores of the Caspian. Trappers and traders had crossed the whole length of Siberia, followed by officials staking out taiga and pine-forest for Moscow. But compared to their neighbours the Russians were still backward and thinly spread. With about 8 million inhabitants, Russia’s population was about the same size as Poland’s and only half as large as that of France. To turn into a true European power Russia needed to push towards the rich, populous West. Though nobody saw it that way at the time, its alliance with Khmelnytsky was the first step in a process which came to an end only with the collapse of the Soviet Union – and perhaps not even then.
The transfer of Ukraine’s loyalties from Cracow to Moscow took place in January 1654 at Pereyaslav, a small town on the eastern bank of the Dnieper, not far south of Kiev. From the beginning, the partnership was an unhappy one. The two delegations, headed by Khmelnytsky and the Russian envoy Vasiliy Buturlin, met in a church. Khmelnytsky had expected that in exchange for an oath of loyalty on the Cossacks’ side, Buturlin would, on behalf of Tsar Alexey, swear ‘that he would not betray the Cossacks to the Poles, that he would not violate their liberties, and that he would confirm the rights to their landed estates of the Ukrainian szlachta’. Buturlin refused. Polish kings might make oaths to their subjects, he said, but they also often broke them, whereas ‘the tsar’s word is unchangeable’. Furious, Khmelnytsky stalked out of the church, only to stalk back in again a few hours later, and sign a unilateral oath of obedience. The tsar’s title changed from ‘the autocrat of all Russia’ to ‘the autocrat of all Great and Little Russia’, and the Cossack hetman took a new seal substituting the tsar’s name for that of the Polish king.
Symbolism aside, Pereyaslav’s significance became apparent only with hindsight. Over the next thirty years Russian, Polish, Cossack and Tatar armies swept repeatedly through Ukraine in a series of formless wars dubbed ‘The Deluge’ by Poles and ‘The Ruin’ by Ukrainians. The situation did not stabilise until 1686, when Poland and Russia – this time without even consulting the Cossacks – signed a so-called ‘eternal peace’, handing Kiev and all lands east of the Dnieper over to Muscovy. For the next three and a quarter centuries Kiev would be ruled from Moscow.
Khmelnytsky left lots of unanswered questions behind him. Historians disagree about why he started his rebellion, the extent to which he controlled its course, and why he ended it the way he did. Easier than saying what his rebellion was is saying what it was not. One aim he certainly did not have was to free Ruthenian peasants from serfdom. Their interests were consistently ignored during the various treaty negotiations, and one of the prices Khmelnytsky paid for his alliance with the Tatars was allowing them to march whole villages away to the Crimean slave-markets for auction. Nor is it clear that the rebellion – initially at least – was even anti-Polish. Marching westward at the outset of the 1648 campaign, Khmelnytsky wrote letters to the Polish king in the style of a loyal subject protesting his grievances, signing himself ‘Hetman of His Gracious Majesty’s Zaporozhian Host’. For much of the time, the rebellion looked more like a war between different Ruthenian interest groups than an ethnic conflict. Wisniowiecki and Adam Kysil, the chief general and chief negotiator on the Commonwealth side, were both Polonised Ruthenian magnates. Kysil was Orthodox; Wisniowiecki was a great-nephew of the founder of the Zaporozhian Sich and had converted to Catholicism only sixteen years previously.
The Ukrainian version of events, of course, is that Khmelnytsky led an early, failed, war of independence. Probably he never aimed that high. But that the Cossacks did want political and religious autonomy is clear, as proved by the demands they laid down in their various treaty negotiations with the Poles. The abortive treaty of Hadziacz, for example, would have allowed the Cossacks to choose, subject to crown approval, their own treasurer, marshal and hetman. It would have given them their own courts, mint and army, and it would have banished Polish soldiers, Jews and Jesuits from Cossack lands. From whose hands the Cossacks took autonomy, though, seems to have been immaterial. At one point, Khmelnytsky was even in talks with the Ottoman Porte about establishing the same sort of loose protectorate enjoyed by Moldova and Crimea. Pereyaslav itself may only have been intended as a temporary alliance, one more move in the Cossacks’ long juggling act between powerful, threatening neighbours.
Like the historians, today’s Ukrainians are not quite sure what to make of Khmelnytsky. On the one hand he beat the Poles; on the other he delivered up Ukraine to the even tenderer mercies of the Russians. But they are reluctant to jettison him altogether. Ukrainians have not hit the history books often, and under Khmelnytsky, for a while at least, they were genuinely a power to be reckoned with. For a country short on heroes, he is simply too prominent to pass up. Instead, he and his Cossacks have once again been recast to suit the mood of the times – Khmelnytsky as the leader of Ukraine’s first failed stab at independence; the Sich with its Rada as a prototype democracy.
On Khortytsya island in Zaporizhya, now a smoggy industrial city and once the site of the Sich, the local museum has installed a new Cossack exhibition, financed by the Ukrainian diaspora. My friend Roma Ihnatowycz – a Ukrainian-Canadian journalist – and I arrived on a bleak Sunday in February, when the museum was half-closed and the surrounding park thigh-high in grimy snow. The curator was surprised to see anyone in such weather, and pleased that a foreigner was writing about Ukraine. She showed us hetmans’ batons and model Viking ships, Scythian arrowheads and a panorama of the Rada in full raucous swing. Did we know, she asked, that Marx had called the Sich the ‘first democratic Christian republic’? Did we know that the Cossacks had helped France defend Dunkirk during the Thirty Years’ War? Did we know that Orly airport, in Paris, was named after Pylyp Orlyk, author of the first Ukrainian constitution? Some might pretend, she said, that the Cossacks were nothing but bandits, but all cultured, scientific people knew they were early social democrats. The Cossack experience might even help the Ukrainian government work out its new constitution. Ukrainians didn’t need to copy America or Germany, for ‘we have our own history, our own system’.
The drive home to Kiev took us through the old Cossack heartlands – the gently folded plains which skirt the northern edge of the Ukrainian steppe. Covered in snow, the countryside looked one-dimensional, like an overexposed black-and-white photograph. Crows, fluffed into balls against the cold, crouched motionless in the bare trees either side of the empty road. Concrete signposts, topped with hammer-and-sickle or block-jawed proletarian, marked the entrances to ‘Labour-loving’ village or ‘Peace’ collective farm. As the monochrome landscape lurched past, I suggested to Roma that as national figureheads the Cossacks weren’t up to much. Weren’t they violent? Weren’t they drunk? Above all, weren’t they failures? Didn’t even Gogol make fun of his Cossack hero Taras Bulba? Roma got cross. ‘Cossacks,’ she said, ‘are all we’ve got. Other people’s heroes might be a bit more polished, but for Ukrainians the rawness of it all, the down-to-earthness of it all is just what we like.’ Persuading her to forgive me took the rest of the trip.
The end of Polish rule over Ukraine turned, a century and a half later, into the end of Poland. Weakened by war, peasant uprisings, foreign machinations and the fecklessness of its own nobility, by the mid eighteenth century Poland was, in the words of Frederick of Prussia, ‘like an artichoke, ready to be eaten leaf by leaf’. Shorn of two-thirds of its territory in the Partitions of 1773 and 1793, the Commonwealth finally collapsed for good in 1795. The eastern half of the old Commonwealth lands fell to Russia, the remainder to Prussia and Austria. Like Kievan Rus, Poland had fallen off the map. Like the Ukrainians, the Poles were now a nation without a state.
Shared misfortune did not turn them into friends. During the Polish rising of 1863, Ukrainian peasants rounded up insurgents and turned them over to the Russian authorities. At the end of the First World War Polish and Ukrainian partisans fought over Galicia, left vacant by the collapsed Austro-Hungarian empire. Between the wars Ukrainian nationalists in Polish-ruled western Ukraine mounted an assassination campaign against Polish government officials, and the two partisan armies fought again at the end of the Second World War, as the Germans retreated west before the Red Army. The bickering continued right up to 1945, when a wholesale population exchange brought about a crude but effective divorce.
The reason for conflict was simple. Ukrainians regarded Ukraine as Ukrainian. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Poles regarded it – along with the rest of the old eastern borderlands – as immutably Polish. The borderlands, in fact, were even more Polish than Poland proper, because the provincial nobility, unlike the sophisticates of Warsaw, had stuck to old-fashioned szlachta ways. The fact that the actual population of those borderlands was mostly of a different nationality was immaterial. Hence Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet and a man who never visited Warsaw in his life, was able to open his patriotic epic Pan Tadeusz with the words ‘Oh Lithuania’.
The other great example of the borderland mentality is Joseph Conrad. Born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he grew up in Terehovye, a small village eighty miles south-west of Kiev. His family were crazily, pathologically, patriotic. Jozef’s father Apollo celebrated his birth in 1857 with a poem entitled ‘To My Son, born in the 85 th Year of Muscovite Oppression’. With baptism came another poem: ‘Tell yourself that you are without land, without love, without Fatherland, without humanity – as long as Poland, our Mother, is enslaved.’ Conrad’s own earliest surviving work is a note to his grandmother, thanking her for sending cakes to Apollo, by then in gaol for anti-Russian agitation in a Warsaw coffee-shop. The six-year-old solemnly signs himself ‘grandson, Pole, Catholic, nobleman’. Later, his most vivid childhood memories were of his mother wearing black in mourning for Poland’s demise, and of a great-uncle’s tales of eating roast dog on the retreat from Moscow with Napoleon. When Conrad set off, aged sixteen, to join the French merchant navy, a family friend saw him on to the train with the words ‘Remember, wherever you sail you are sailing towards Poland!’. Surfeited with Polishness, Conrad only ever went back home once, ending his days in the undemanding county of Kent. His Canterbury tombstone muddles up his English and Polish names, rechristening him ‘Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski’.
The Korzeniowskis’ house is still there in Terehovye, used now as the village school. Though not very big, one can see that it once belonged to gentry. The doors are thick and panelled, the walls have cornicing round them, and plaster rosettes show where chandeliers once hung. The drawing room has been turned into the school gymnasium – lines painted on to the parquet, basketball hoops screwed to the walls, and a portrait of Lenin propped up behind a pile of hockey-sticks in a boarded-up bay window. Outside a line of lime trees marks the edge of what was once a terraced garden.
The village is a tiny place, silent save for a chained dog, and smelling of melting snow and horse manure. But it has not forgotten its famous writer. A very deaf old man with gold teeth and a fur hat let me into the collective farm headquarters, where alongside the obligatory pictures of astronauts and folk dancers sepia photographs hung of Conrad on a pony, Conrad at his desk, Conrad in naval uniform. Down at the bottom of the hill, by a frozen lake, he drew a dipper from a square, brick-lined well. ‘Conrad drank this water. It’s a very good well – it never freezes.’ But since Conrad was a Pole who lived abroad most of his life and wrote in English, why should the villagers care? ‘They don’t,’ he said; ‘they think – what did Konrad give us? Nothing!’
Despite their antagonism, matched circumstances pushed Poland and Ukraine into matching survival strategies. For Poles in the nineteenth century and for Ukrainians right up until 1991, the idea of nationhood took on a religious, almost metaphysical significance. Just as diaspora Ukrainians still tend to regard themselves as part of Ukraine despite having been born and brought up in Canada or Australia, exiled nineteenth-century Poles felt they were no less part of Poland for having spent their lives in Paris or Moscow. Their countries existed in a sort of mental hyperspace, independent of such banalities as governments and borders. ‘Poland is not yet lost’ was the title of a Napoleonic Polish marching song; ‘Ukraine is not dead yet’ is the less-then-inspiring opening line of the present-day Ukrainian national anthem.
With this state of mind went a peculiar approach to the writing of history. In the imagination of both countries, as the historian Norman Davies puts it, ‘the “Word” has precedence over the “Fact” . . . more attention is paid to what people would have liked to happen than to what actually occurred.’18 National leaders and national uprisings – no matter that they failed – are given more space and weight than the foreign governments who actually dictated events. Poles revere their ‘Constitution of May 3rd’, Ukrainians, their so-called ‘Bender Constitution’. Never mind that neither even came close to being put into practice, for intentions are more important than results.
This heroic imaginative effort did not make the political re-emergence of either country any easier. Both have had enormous difficulty persuading the rest of the world to take them seriously. The British historian E.H. Carr, a delegate at the Paris peace talks of 1919, called reborn Poland ‘a farce’. For Keynes it was ‘an economic impossibility whose only industry is Jew-baiting’; for Lloyd George, ‘a historic failure’ – he would no more hand over Upper Silesia to Poland, he swore, than he would give a clock to a monkey. George Bush, had he been around at the time, would undoubtedly have joined this chorus in favour of the status quo, his only contribution to Ukrainian independence being the infamous ‘Chicken Kiev’ speech of August 1991, in which he urged Ukrainians to stay loyal to the Soviet Union. But at least Bush knew Ukraine existed. Six years after independence, many otherwise well-informed Westerners have either completely failed to register that they have a country called Ukraine as a neighbour, or have vaguely heard of it but have no idea where it is, throwing out guesses – Somewhere on the Baltic? Next door to Kazakhstan? – with the gay abandon of a child playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
For both Poland and Ukraine, the best way to get the West’s attention has been to stress their impact on Russia. Nineteenth-century liberals argued that unless Russia freed Poland, it would never be able to undertake its own constitutional reform. The effort of holding down its most intransigent colony trapped Russia in the role of tyrannical autocracy, hurting ordinary Russians as much as the Poles themselves – hence the slogan of the 1831 Polish rebellion: ‘For our freedom and yours.’ The argument Poland used in pleading for military aid last century, Ukraine employs in making the case for IMF funds and diplomatic support today. The (Polish-bom) American Sovietologist Zbigniew Brzezinski writes that ‘without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.’ The bottom line is that ‘Russia can either be an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both.’19 If Ukraine does not stay independent, in other words, Russia will not remain a democracy, so Ukrainian independence is as much for Russia’s good as Ukraine’s.
Russians, of course, have some difficulty taking this concept on board. Just as the Polish risings turned even diehard anti-establishmentarians like Pushkin into raging Slavophiles, today’s independent Ukraine brings out the empire-builder in the best of Russian liberals. ‘When you look at nineteenth-century Russian treatments of the Polish problem,’ says Roman Szporluk, head of Ukrainian studies at Harvard, ‘you really think you’re reading all those Moscow think-tankers today on Ukraine.’20
Today, Polish-Ukrainian relations are rather muted – surprisingly so given their long and scratchy common history. Polish and Ukrainian presidents exchange visits, and Polish economists turn up at Kiev conferences on free-market reform. Numberless Ukrainians do private trade across the border, heaving suitcases full of smoked sausage and tacky clothing on to trains going west, and returning with car parts and kitchen-ware. In Lviv, near the Polish border and a Polish city before the war, Ukrainian yuppies like to assert their Western credentials with a Warsaw-style kiss to the hand. But aside from Ukrainian resentment at the missionary activities of the Polish Catholic Church, the relationship, on the Ukrainian side at least, is a curiously bloodless one. Despite centuries under Polish rule, Ukrainians have none of the fierce love-hate for Poland that they have for Russia – probably simply because Poland no longer affects them much. The number of ethnic Poles left in Ukraine is tiny, and Poland has no leverage over Ukrainian affairs. Whereas Khmelnytsky tried to play off Muscovy against the Poles, today’s Ukraine balances Russia against America.
Ukraine may have ceased to care about Poland, but Poles have not stopped caring about Ukraine. Ukraine might be an economic joke, a place to make cracks about, but it is also a vital buffer-state. With Ukraine independent, the Russian border stays 600 miles to the east and Poland can convincingly call itself part of Central, not Eastern, Europe. Were Ukraine – or more likely Belarus – to lose its independence, Russia would be back glowering over the frontier wire, and Europe’s centre of gravity would shift away westwards. Solidarity sent representatives to the founding conference of Rukh, the opposition coalition that took Ukraine to independence, and Poland was the first country to give Ukraine diplomatic recognition, the day after the independence referendum of 1 December 1991.
In 1883 the young Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz published his best-selling epic By Fire And Sword. A Hollywoodian drama set during the Khmelnytsky rebellion, the book is not historically accurate. Never having visited Ukraine, Sienkiewicz based his descriptions of the Dnieper on his travels up the Mississippi, decorating its banks with mangrove swamps and ‘vast reptiles’. Nevertheless, it perfectly sums up the mixture of nostalgia, condescension and self-interest with which Poles view their erstwhile borderlands. The novel has two parallel story-lines: Khmelnytsky’s war with Wisniowiecki for Ukraine, and the battle between a savage Cossack otaman and a relentlessly virtuous Polish knight for the hand in marriage of a Ruthenian princess. The Pole ends up getting the girl, but the Polish army does not end up getting Ukraine. Instead the country descends into chaos: the book’s notorious final sentence reads, ‘And hatred swelled in people’s hearts and poisoned the blood of brothers.’ The moral of the story, not lost on the palpitating contemporary readership, was that history should not be allowed to repeat itself. To get rid of Russia, Poles and Ukrainians had to stop fighting, and stick together.