Origins of The Slavic Nations
Origins of The Slavic Nations
Origins of The Slavic Nations
past on behalf of
existing national projects, laying the groundwork for a new understan-
ding of the premodern history of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The
book covers the period from the Christianization of Kyivan Rus
in the
tenth century to the reign of Peter I and his eighteenth-century succes-
sors, by which time the idea of nationalism had begun to inuence the
thinking of East Slavic elites.
scnni i iLoknv is Professor of History and associate director of
the Peter Jacyk Centre at the University of Alberta. His numerous
publications on Russian and Ukrainian history include The Cossacks and
Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (2001), and Unmaking Imperial Russia:
Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History (2005).
The Origins of the
Slavic Nations
Premodern Identities in Russia,
Ukraine, and Belarus
Serhii Plokhy
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, So Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
First published in print format
ISBN-13 978-0-521-86403-9
ISBN-13 978-0-511-24704-0
Cambridge University Press 2006
2006
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521864039
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of
relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
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ISBN-10 0-521-86403-8
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not
guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
hardback
eBook (NetLibrary)
eBook (NetLibrary)
hardback
To Maryna
Contents
Preface page ix
Note on transliteration, dates, and translations xii
Maps xiii
Introduction 1
1 The origins of Rus
10
2 What happened to the Rus
Land? 49
3 The Lithuanian solution 85
4 The rise of Muscovy 122
5 The making of the Ruthenian nation 161
6 Was there a reunication? 203
7 The invention of Russia 250
8 Ruthenia, Little Russia, Ukraine 299
Conclusions 354
Author index 363
General index 367
vii
Preface
I did not intend to write this book. I was working on another project
pertaining to modern history when questions related to the premodern
identities of the Eastern Slavs slowly but surely took over most of my time
and attention. Looking at the major modern narratives of East Slavic his-
tory, I suddenly realized that perceptions of the premodern Russians,
Ukrainians, and Belarusians, both in their homelands and in the West,
are still shaped by the views of national historians and the paradigms
they created. While historians studying individual periods and topics
of East Slavic history have made signicant progress over the past cen-
tury, the main national paradigms have survived both Soviet repression
and the emigration of the bearers of national historiographic traditions
to the West. Since the fall of the USSR, those paradigms have reap-
peared in the East Slavic lands and even blossomed on the ruins of Soviet
historiography.
Has anybody done better since the Depression? asked the wife of an
acquaintance of mine who was preparing a talk on the Ukrainian national
historian, Mykhailo Hrushevsky (18661934). Well, frankly, no, was
the answer he gave. I asked myself the same question, broadening its range
from Hrushevsky to the entire eld of Russian, Ukrainian, and Belaru-
sian historiography. I also had to extend the chronological scope of the
question, starting not with the Depression but with the Russo-Japanese
War of 19045 and the Revolution of 1905 in the Russian Empire. It was
then that Hrushevsky published the rst twentieth-century outline of
Ukrainian history; the patriarch of Russian historiography, Vasilii Kliu-
chevsky, began to issue his Survey of Russian History; and Belarusian
national historiography began to emerge from the shell of Russian impe-
rial history. The answer to my question was equally negative. In the last
hundred years, no one had done it better, nor had any approach to the
nationalization of the past improved signicantly on the achievements
of those two outstanding scholars. In the end, I could not resist the urge
to take a fresh look at the dominant versions of premodern Russian,
Ukrainian, and Belarusian history and try to denationalize and update
ix
x Preface
them according to the standards of contemporary historical scholarship.
In order to do so, it turns out, I had to write this book.
I could not have written it without the support offered me (inten-
tionally or not) by many individuals and institutions at times they,
too, were under the impression that I was working on a different project
altogether. I would like to offer individual thanks to those who helped
me most. My special thanks go to Myroslav Yurkevich for his support,
tactful advice, and thorough editing of my Ukrainglish prose. Advice
from Roman Szporluk, Blair Ruble, Terry Martin, and Timothy Sny-
der was instrumental in shaping the scope of this book and my analytical
approach. So were the comments of Volodymyr Kulyk, who, for good rea-
son, advised me against writing this work. I am also grateful to Frank E.
Sysyn and Zenon E. Kohut for sharing their insights on the history of early
modern Ukrainian texts and identities, as well as books and copies of arti-
cles from their personal libraries. Also very helpful were discussions with
Natalia Yakovenko, Charles J. Halperin, Michael S. Flier, and Edward
L. Keenan on early modern Russian and Ukrainian identities. Paul
Bushkovitch, Simon Franklin, Valerie Kivelson, Don Ostrowski, Oleksii
Tolochko, Olena Rusyna, and Michael Moser read individual chapters
of the book and gave me excellent advice on how to improve them. I
would also like to thank participants in the Workshop on Cultural Iden-
tities at the University of Alberta John-Paul Himka, Jelena Pogosjan,
Natalia Pylypiuk, Oleh Ilnytzkyj, Heather Coleman, and Peter Rolland
for their comments on chapters originally presented at meetings of the
workshop. Parts of chapters 7 and 8 originally appeared in my article
The Two Russias of Teofan Prokopovy c, published in Mazepa e il suo
tempo. Storia, cultura, societ ` a / Mazepa and His Time: History, Culture, Soci-
ety (Alessandria, 2004), pp. 33466. I thank Giovanna Brogi Bercoff for
her advice on the content of the article and the editor of the volume,
Giovanna Siedina, for permission to reprint parts of it in this book.
I am also greatly indebted to participants in the Humanities Program
of the American Council of Learned Societies in Belarus, Russia, and
Ukraine, especially to the members of the Carnegie Selection Commit-
tee with whom I was privileged to work in 20036: Andrzej Tymowski,
William Rosenberg, Joan Neuberger, and administrative assistant Olga
Bukhina. My work in the program gave me a unique opportunity to meet
with leading Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian scholars working on top-
ics closely related to the subject of this book. My research was sponsored
by a grant from the Ukrainian Studies Fund, Inc. (New York), and I
would like to express my deep appreciation to the director of the Fund,
Roman Procyk, for supporting this project. I thank Michael Watson, com-
missioning editor for history at Cambridge University Press, for guiding
Preface xi
the manuscript through the review and acceptance process. At CUP my
thanks also go to Isabelle Dambricourt, Jackie Warren, and Jacqueline
French for their help with the editing of the manuscript. I amalso grateful
to the two anonymous reviewers of the book, whose suggestions I took
into account in preparing the nal version of the manuscript. I would
also like to acknowledge the kind assistance of Viktor Brekhunenko, who
helped me with copyright issues in Ukraine. As always, I thank Peter
Matilainen for his help in solving computer problems. My special thanks
go to my family in Canada and Ukraine.
Note on transliteration, dates,
and translations
In the text of this book, the modied Library of Congress system is used
to transliterate Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian personal names and
toponyms. This system omits the soft sign () and, in masculine per-
sonal names, the nal (thus, for example, Ostrozky, not Ostroz
kyi).
In bibliographic references, the full Library of Congress system (liga-
tures omitted) is used, and the titles of publications issued after 1800 are
given in modernized spelling. Toponyms are usually transliterated from
the language of the country in which the designated places are currently
located. As a rule, personal names are given in forms characteristic of the
cultural traditions to which the given person belonged. If an individual
belonged to (or is claimed by) more than one national tradition, alterna-
tive spellings are given in parentheses. In this case, as in the use of specic
terminology related to the history of the Eastern Slavs and titles of east
European ofcials and institutions, I follow the practice established by
the editors of the English translation of Mykhailo Hrushevskys History
of Ukraine-Rus
.
1
The Julian calendar used by the Eastern Slavs until 1918 lagged behind
the Gregorian calendar used in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
and western Europe (by ten days in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies and by eleven days in the eighteenth century). Dates in this study
are generally given according to the Julian calendar; where both styles
appear concurrently, the Gregorian-calendar date is given in parenthe-
ses, e.g., 13 (23) May.
Translations within the text are my own unless a printed source is cited.
1
Cf. editorial prefaces and glossary in Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus
, ed.
Frank E. Sysyn et al., vol. VII (Edmonton and Toronto, 1999), xixxxvi, liiilvi.
xii
Maps
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(Source: Zenon E. Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy:
Imperial Absorption of the Hetmanate, 1760s1830s [Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1988).]
Introduction
The disintegration of the USSR in 1991 and the emergence of fteen
independent nation-states on its ruins demonstrated to the outside world
that the Soviet Union was not Russia, despite the best efforts of the West-
ern media to convince its readers to the contrary by using the two terms
interchangeably for decades. Political developments in the post-Soviet
space indicated that the denition of the USSR as Russia was wrong not
only in relation to the non-Slavic republics of the former Soviet Union
but also with regard to the Ukrainians and Belarusians, the East Slavic
cousins of the Russians. Each of the three newly independent states man-
ifested its own character and chose its own path in the turbulent transi-
tion from communism. After a lengthy period of political uncertainty
and economic chaos, Russia opted for the construction of a strong state
with clear authoritarian tendencies and assumed the role of a regional
superpower. Belarus, after a brief period of democratic development,
refused to reform its political and economic system and took refuge in
Soviet-style ideology and Stalin-era authoritarianism. Ukraine, on the
other hand, after long hesitation between East and West, underwent a
popular revolution in defense of democratic principles and embarked on
a pro-Western course with the goal of joining the European Union. For
all the salient differences between these three post-Soviet nations, they
have much in common when it comes to their culture and history, which
goes back to Kyivan (Kievan) Rus
and set
them on separate paths of development, which eventually led to the for-
mation of three modern nations. The competing view, advanced by impe-
rial Russian historians and shared by some authors in present-day Russia,
claims Kyivan Rus
as an essentially Ukrainian
state and claims that the differences between Russians and Ukrainians
were apparent and quite profound even then. That viewpoint nds some
support among Belarusian historians, who seek the roots of their nation
in the history of the Polatsk principality of Kyivan times. Who is right
and who is wrong? What are the origins of the three modern East Slavic
nations? These are the questions that informed my research and discus-
sion of the origins of modern Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
1
There is little doubt in my mind that the Kyivan-era project involv-
ing the construction of a single identity had a profound impact on the
subsequent identities of all the ethnic groups that constituted the Kyi-
van state. That project dened the parameters of the Rus
legacy, which
still forms the basis of the cultural commonalities between the three East
Slavic nations. I regard the post-Kyivan Eastern Slavs as a group of dis-
tinct communities that possessed and developed their own identities. The
number of my premodern East Slavic communities that emerged on the
ruins of the Kyivan state is smaller than seventy-two the number of peo-
ples into which God divided humankind by assigning different languages
to the audacious constructors of the Tower of Babel. But it is certainly
greater than the number of nationalities or ethnicities suggested either by
the proponents of one Old Rus
or Rus
. It would certainly
be wrong to treat ethnonational identities in isolation from political, reli-
gious, and other types of loyalties constructed and sustained by early
modern societies. This book focuses mainly on ethnic and national iden-
tities, but other types of identity, such as religious, political, and social,
are discussed as well, usually in connection with the formation of the for-
mer. The study of their interaction suggests that up to the late eighteenth
century ethnonational identities were secondary to other types of iden-
tity and loyalty, such as those based on family, clan, social group, region,
dynasty, and religion. This does not mean, however, that ethnonational
identity did not exist before that period or did not contribute signi-
cantly to the formation of collective and individual self-consciousness in
premodern societies.
Given the focus of this book on builders and producers of identity,
the main analytical category that I employ in my research is the identity-
building project. In my discussion of East Slavic identities, I show how
they were constructed by means of diverse efforts that created reser-
voirs of collective memory, images, and symbols. The rst such under-
taking examined in the book is the Rus
nationality of Kyi-
van times undermined the concept of one Rus
skii, Norman-
skaia teoriia v sovremennoi burzhuaznoi nauke (Moscow and Leningrad, 1965), and A. A.
Khlevov, Normanskaia problema v otechestvennoi istoricheskoi nauke (St. Petersburg, 1997).
10
The origins of Rus
11
dividing scholars who argued that Kyivan Rus
nationality from
those who claimed the Kyivan past on behalf of the Russian or Ukrainian
nation.
2
Was Kyivan Rus
the Rus-
sians or the Ukrainians and Belarusians (separately or together)? The
rst question has lost its political urgency because of the outcome of
post-communist nation-building in eastern Europe, but it has not disap-
peared altogether. Since the dissolution of the USSR and the demise of
the notoriously anti-Normanist Soviet historiography, historians in that
part of the world are no longer obliged to oppose the Normanist thesis on
ideological grounds. Nevertheless, after Russias brief irtation with the
West in the early 1990s, the West resumed its traditional role of other
in Russian national consciousness, thereby reviving the anti-Normanist
trend in Russian historiography and popular literature.
3
The dissolution
of the USSR has well and truly revived the East Slavic contest for the
legacy of Kyivan Rus
past
encouraged Belarusian intellectuals to renew their search for the origins
of their nation in the same historical period and turn their attention to
2
For the origins of the debate, see Jaroslaw Pelenski, The Ukrainian-Russian Debate over
the Legacy of Kievan Rus
(Boulder,
Colo., 1998), pp. 21327; Olga Andriewsky, The Russian-Ukrainian Discourse and the
Failure of the Little Russian Solution, 17821917, in Culture, Nation, and Identity:
The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (16001945), ed. Andreas Kappeler, Zenon E. Kohut,
Frank E. Sysyn, and Mark von Hagen (Edmonton and Toronto, 2003), pp. 182214.
3
For a recent example of the latter, see a volume of almost eight hundred pages by the
extremely prolic Russian writer and amateur historian A. L. Nikitin, Osnovaniia russkoi
istorii (Moscow, 2001).
12 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
the Principality of Polatsk, an autonomous realm in the empire of the
Kyivan princes.
4
Exploring the ethnocultural identities of Kyivan Rus
remains an
important task for anyone who seeks to place the age-old debates on
the national character of Kyivan Rus
?
An answer to this simple question, as to most questions about medieval
East Slavic history, is not readily available, and the one we can provide
is quite complex and incomplete. The term itself comes from impe-
rial Russian historiography and was created to distinguish one historical
period within the imperial Russian narrative fromanother (that is, Kyivan
from Muscovite). It helped underline existing differences between these
two periods of all-Russian history and as such was gladly accepted
in Ukrainian historiography, whose twentieth-century representatives
fought hard to remove the history of Kyivan Rus
13
established in the tenth century by princes of the Rurikid dynasty that
disintegrated into a number of polities after the Mongol invasion of the
mid-thirteenth century. As the rst known Kyivan princes and members
of their retinues had non-Slavic or, more precisely, Scandinavian names
Rorik (Rurik), from whom the Rurikid dynasty took its name, Helgi
(Oleh/Oleg), Ingvar (Ihor/Igor), Helga (Olha/Olga), and so on there
is good reason to believe that the polity known today as Kyivan Rus
realm, and,
judging by the chroniclers account, planned to move his capital to the
Danube. His son Volodymyr, who ruled between 980 and 1015, felt much
more attached to Kyiv. He considerably extended the boundaries of the
realm and cemented it ideologically by introducing Byzantine Christian-
ity as the ofcial religion of the land ca. 988. Volodymyrs son Yaroslav,
who ruled (with interruptions) between 1015 and 1054, reunited the
realm after a period of fratricidal wars. He supported the development
of Christian culture and learning and turned Kyiv into a Constantino-
ple on the Dnipro [Dnieper] but also fought a war with Byzantium and
distanced his realm from it by installing the rst Rus
-born metropolitan
in Kyiv.
After the death of Yaroslav in 1054, the freshly built empire gradu-
ally began to disintegrate into a number of smaller principalities ruled
by members of the Rurikid dynasty. In the second half of the eleventh
century, that process had not yet reached its peak and was somewhat
delayed by Yaroslavs eldest sons. Early in the twelfth century, Yaroslavs
grandson, Prince Volodymyr Monomakh, who ruled Kyiv between 1113
and 1125, managed to restore the unity of the realm and the authority
of its Kyivan prince. But his success proved temporary, and soon after
Monomakhs death the feuds resumed. The power of Kyiv was eroded
by the growing strength of the local princes, who developed into semi-
autonomous or fully independent rulers by the end of the century. The
14 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
disintegration of the formerly centralized Kyivan state was partly respon-
sible for the ease with which the Mongols conquered Rus
in a number
of military campaigns between 1237 and 1240. Most historians regard
the Mongol invasion as the single event that formally closed the period
of East Slavic history known as the era of Kyivan Rus
.
5
What we know about Kyivan Rus
,
ed. Frank E. Sysyn et al., vol. I, From Prehistory to the Eleventh Century (Edmonton and
Toronto, 1997); Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, 7501200
(London and NewYork, 1996); J. L. I. Fennell, The Crisis of Medieval Russia (London and
New York, 1983); Oleksii Tolochko and Petro Tolochko, Kyvs
ka Rus
, vol. IV of Ukrana
kriz
history in English-language
syntheses of Russian and Ukrainian history, see Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A History of
Russia, 6th edn (New York and Oxford, 2000), pp. 2362; Janet Martin, Medieval Russia,
9801584 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1133; Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto,
1988), pp. 1954; Paul R. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Toronto, 1996), pp. 51104.
The origins of Rus
15
during the rule of Volodymyr Monomakh and later in Novgorod, where
Mstyslav, the son of Monomakh, probably oversawthe editorial process.
6
This reconstruction of the earliest history of Rus
chronicle writing
is largely based on hypothesis, and many questions still remain unan-
swered. What does seem clear is that the Primary Chronicle was not the
work of a single author but of a number of editors and compilers.
7
It is
also apparent that the chronicle was as much a work of literary art as it
was a political and cultural statement, for the chroniclers knowledge of
bygone years was limited at best. The authors of the Primary Chroni-
cle had ample opportunity to reconstruct events long gone and vanished
fromthe memory of contemporaries, as well as to report on current devel-
opments, in a manner that tted their own agendas and the needs of their
sponsors. Those agendas and needs often differed from one chronicler
and prince to another. Thus, when a new author took on the compilation
of the chronicle, the process of editing, censoring, and correcting its text
would begin anew. As a result, when it comes to the structure of its nar-
rative, the Primary Chronicle often reads like a postmodern text. It can
easily be compared to a historical archive a repository of earlier texts of
various provenance whose narrative lines often were not reconciled with
one another and could even be atly contradictory. One should not,
however, warns Simon Franklin, imagine the chronicle as an unedited
scrap book, a random assemblage of whatever snippets happened to be
available. The compiler had a coherent approach to Providential history,
a coherent perspective on native history, and a critical concern for accu-
racy. According to Franklin, the chronicler successfully adapted the tra-
ditions of Byzantine historical writing to his own purposes. He accepted
the principles of Byzantine historical chronology and found a place for
Rus
version), see The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, ed. and trans.
Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (Cambridge, Mass., 1953).
For a discussion of the earliest stages of Kyivan chronicle writing, see A. A. Shakhma-
tov, Razyskaniia o drevneishikh russkikh letopisnykh svodakh (St. Petersburg, 1908); M. D.
Priselkov, Istoriia russkogo letopisaniia XIXVvv. (Leningrad, 1940); B. A. Rybakov, Drev-
niaia Rus
vremen-
nykh let (Moscow, 1971); A. G. Kuz
min, Nachal
.
8
Most importantly for our discussion, the Primary Chronicle speaks in
many voices and reveals multiple identities a fact that can only be wel-
comed, given the overall scarcity of sources on the period. The preserva-
tion of the chronicle text in a number of versions in regional, non-Kyivan
compilations enhances its potential as a source for the study of the devel-
opment of Rus
or Russian nationality.
9
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the view of the East
Slavic past as the history of one all-Rus
,
which in most textbooks of east European history, both in Russia and in
the West, continues to be seen not only as the common starting point of
the history of the three East Slavic nations but also as the home of one
all-Rus
before 1200,
Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard draw a clear distinction between
Rus and Russia: The story of the land of the Rus could continue
in one direction towards modern Russia, or in other directions towards,
eventually, Ukraine or Belarus. The land of the Rus is none of these, or
8
See Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 31719. Cf. Simon Franklin, Bor-
rowed Time: Perceptions of the Past in Twelfth-Century Rus
, in idem, Byzantium-
Rus-Russia: Studies in the Translation of Christian Culture (Aldershot, Hampshire and
Burlington, Vermont, 2002), no. XVI, pp. 15771. On the nature of Byzantine histori-
cism, see S. S. Averintsev, Poriadok kosmosa i poriadok istorii v mirovozzrenii rannego
srednevekov
17
else it is a shared predecessor of all three.
10
But that is not the approach
taken by Nicholas V. Riasanovsky in his History of Russia, the most popu-
lar Western textbook on the subject. He begins his chapter on the origins
of the Kyivan state with the following statement: The problem of the
origin of the rst Russian state, that of Kiev, is exceedingly complex and
controversial.
11
The origins of the theory of one Rus
).
13
The term Old Rus
nation-
ality with its all-Russian prototype of the turn of the twentieth century. On Mavrodin
and his role in creating the concept of Old Rus
orus
i predposylki ee differentsiatsii,
Ruthenica 1 (2002): 7073. Cf. idem, Slaviane v rannem srednevekov
e (Moscow, 1995);
idem, Drevnerusskaia narodnost
(Moscow, 1999).
18 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Rus
authors
had any national consciousness at all. He also criticized the use of
the ethnonym Russians by some of his colleagues in referring to the
East Slavic population of Kyivan Rus
.
16
In Ukraine, Oleksii Tolochko
stated that it would be a waste of effort to search Kyivan Rus
history
for any people unied by biological, linguistic, and cultural factors; he
suggested instead that the Old Rus
was the
rst Russian state (Historiography and National Identity, p. 125). On the existence
of one Rus
from the ninth to the twelfth century in Tolochko and Tolochko, Kyvs
ka Rus
, pp. 287
309. In this particular work, the term used to dene the notion of Old Rus
nationality
is Old Rus
nist
ka Rus
:
problema etnokul
i narod Rus
: vozmozhnosti
i puti korrektnogo opisaniia, Ab Imperio (Kazan), 2001, no. 3: 14768.
17
See Aleksei (Oleksii) Tolochko, Voobrazhennaia narodnost
19
political identities in Kyivan Rus
identity
in the writings of the Kyivan era, they indicate a period from the mid-
eleventh century to the beginning of the twelfth as the time when the term
Rus
elites
a process allegedly manifested in the revival of old tribal loyalties and
reected in the chronicle.
18
Once scholars proceed from a discussion of factors that may or may
not have been involved in the formation of the Old Rus
nationality to
an analysis of sources that are supposed to reect the existence of the
all-Russian (East Slavic) identity, they encounter impassable obstacles in
their way. If it is possible to nd numerous examples of loyalty to what
we today would call a Rus
ia
(Moscow, 1982), pp. 96119, here 10910; cf. 117.
19
See N. I. Tolstoi,
Land.
22
Tolstois ideas
were further developed by Viktor Zhivov, who probed the interrelations
between Tolstois ve levels of the chroniclers self-consciousness. In so
doing, he treated the religious and particular tribal levels as basic ones,
on which foundation other levels of identity were constructed.
23
Also
directly related to the discussion of Nestors identity is Simon Franklins
recent summary of the different categories of narrative [and] different
criteria for constructing time fused into one historical identity by the
Rus
ka starovyna, 1996,
nos. 45: 1134.
21
See V. D. Koroliuk, K voprosu o slavianskom samosoznanii v Kievskoi Rusi i u zapad-
nykh slavian, in Istoriia, kul
21
origins, an ethnic story of Slavonic origins, a conversion story of Greek
origins; a chronological framework of biblical origins, and a providential
story justifying their own place in the overall scheme of time.
24
Howmany identities (or levels of one identity) did the author or authors
of the Primary Chronicle possess, and what impact did they have on
his/their interpretation of the past? Did that identity really include the ele-
ments described above and, if so, was it limited to the above-mentioned
ve components, or did it represent a more complex and multilevel
construct? We shall approach the question of the hybrid identity of
the author of the Primary Chronicle by examining several legends that
can be interpreted as vehicles facilitating the chroniclers search for the
origins of his own identity.
Choosing an identity
This is the tale of bygone years regarding the origin of the land of Rus
,
the rst princes of Kyiv, and from what source the land of Rus
had its
beginning, read the rst lines of the Primary Chronicle.
25
Further read-
ing indicates that its author (like some of his predecessors, no doubt) was
struggling to bring together in one text a number of sometimes parallel
and sometimes conicting narratives of the origins of what he consid-
ered to be the Rus
, Our land is
great and rich, but there is no order in it. Come to rule and reign over us. They
thus selected three brothers, with their kinfolk, who took with themall of the Rus
and migrated.
26
Thus, by selecting rulers who agreed to their conditions, the conglomer-
ate of Finno-Ugric and Slavic tribes chose their new name and dynasty
all-important components of their identity.
Also freely chosen was another important component of that identity,
the Eastern Christian religion. The Primary Chronicle includes a num-
ber of competing and contradictory stories about the baptism of Rus
,
but the longest, most prominent and elaborate of them explicitly says
that the whole process was the result of a free choice made by the Rus
,
not by someone who chose them. Volodymyr, a descendant of Varangian
warriors and prince of Kyiv, made the decision on behalf of the Rus
. The
26
Adapted from The Russian Primary Chronicle, p. 59.
The origins of Rus
23
chronicler describes Volodymyrs choice of faith in terms no less colorful
than those in his account of the invitation to the Varangians by the disil-
lusioned tribesmen of the Novgorod region. Among those who allegedly
tried to persuade Volodymyr to accept their religion were the Muslim
Bulgars, the (Western) Christian Germans, the Judaic Khazars, and the
(Eastern) Christian Greeks. Volodymyr, who, according to the chroni-
cler, had six hundred wives and eight hundred concubines before accept-
ing Christianity, was especially pleased to hear the words of the Muslim
envoys about the endorsement of polygamy by their religion but refused
to accept the conditions and limitations imposed by Islam. Volodymyr
listened to them, wrote the chronicler, for he was fond of women and
indulgence, regarding which he listened with pleasure. But circumcision
and abstinence frompork and wine were disagreeable to him. Drinking,
said he, is the joy of Rus
. There is good reason to believe that the source of this tale in the
Primary Chronicle is a text of either West Slavic (Czech) or South Slavic
(Bulgarian) origin and that the initial goal of its author was to establish
the equality of status of the Old Slavic literary language with Greek and
Latin.
29
For the author of the Primary Chronicle, that Czech or Bulgarian
27
Ibid., p. 97.
28
Ibid., p. 62.
29
There is a substantial literature on the subject, beginning with Aleksei Shakhma-
tovs Skazanie o prelozhenii knig na slavianskii iazyk, in Zbornik v slavu Vatroslava
Jagi ca (Berlin, 1908), pp. 17288. For recent contributions on the topic, see B. N.
Floria, Skazanie o prelozhenii knig na slovenskii iazyk. Istochniki, vremia i mesto
napisaniia, Byzantinoslavica 46 (1985): 12130; V. M. Zhivov, Slavia Christiana i
24 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
legend could perform a number of different functions, including the pre-
sentation of the Rus
,
and the apostolic origins of its Christian faith. Second, we know perfectly
well that whatever problems former subjects encounter, they do not go
back to their former overlords voluntarily; belief systems are not chosen
by statesmen on the basis of the quality of church frescos; and alphabets
are created by proselytizers, not at the initiative of those who are prose-
lytized. Apart from that, there are good reasons to question the historical
accuracy of all three tales. It is a well-established fact that the Varangians
penetrated the Finno-Ugric and East Slavic territories by military con-
quest, not by invitation, while the episodes of choosing the faith and
creating the Slavic alphabet nd parallels in other literary traditions.
30
Should we then reject these legends entirely? By no means. Apart from
the possibility that they reect elements of historical reality, they repre-
sent a unique source for the study and understanding of what we may
call the hybrid identity of the Rus
elites.
By retelling these tales, the authors and editors of the Primary Chron-
icle were explaining to their contemporaries how the mighty Rus
who,
judging by the writings of their rst native-born metropolitan, Ilarion,
took pride in being known in all parts of the earth had exchanged their
rulers and gods for a foreign name, dynasty, religion, and letters. Even
more importantly for us, the chroniclers version of events made it appear
that his ancestors chose all these voluntarily. In researching and reinter-
preting the past, the chronicler was in fact providing historical legitimacy
for the complex political and ethnocultural identity shared by his contem-
poraries. By the time of the writing and editing of the Primary Chronicle,
istoriko-kul
tura,
ed. L. Magarotto and D. Rizzi (Trent, 1992), pp. 71125; Horace Lunt, What the Rus
Primary Chronicle Tells Us about the Origin of the Slavs and of Slavic Writing, Harvard
Ukrainian Studies 19 (1995): 33557.
30
On literary parallels of Prince Volodymyrs choice of faith as described in the Primary
Chronicle, see Peter A. Rolland, And Beauty Shall Save a Prince: Orthodox Theology
and Kyjevan Texts, Paleoslavica 10 (Zlatyie vrata. Essays Presented to Ihor
Sev cenko on
His Eightieth Birthday by His Colleagues and Students, vol. 2), no. 2 (2002): 197202.
The origins of Rus
25
elements of Slavic identity coexisted peacefully in the minds of its authors
and editors with the legacy of the Scandinavian conquerors of the Slavs,
as did pride in the glorious deeds of the pre-Christian Rus
(who often
opposed the Byzantine Christians) with loyalty to Byzantine Christianity.
Mixing identities
If indeed Rus
Slavs to be part
of the broader Slavic world. The author of the Primary Chronicle clearly
accepted the division of the Slavs into different tribes, but, on the basis of
his own experience, he also tried to group some of those tribes into larger
31
In medieval Rus
texts, iazyk is used to denote both language and people. In the latter
case, it often implies the linguistic particularity of a given people. For the meaning of
iazyk in Rus
27
Constantinople. He declared St. Paul an apostle to the Rus
, quoted the
words of the pope of Rome in defense of the Slavic alphabet, and sent
St. Andrew on a tour of Europe from Sinope to Rome. At the same
time, in the legend about St. Volodymyrs choice of faith, the chronicler
(or his source) made a clear statement in favor of Eastern Christianity.
There is little doubt that different legends were included in the text of
the Primary Chronicle by various authors and editors at different times.
But the survival of all these legends, both pro-Western and pro-Eastern,
as parts of a single text indicates the presence of a common factor that
appealed to the early twelfth-century editors of the chronicle. That factor
may have been the idea of the apostolic origins of Rus
Christianity, which
found its best expression in the chronicle legend of St. Andrewvisiting the
site of the future capital of Rus
realm
and the rest of eastern Europe, a signicant part of which found itself
under the Byzantine cultural veil. At the same time, the Slavic idea poorly
tted the requirements of the Rus
, were dened by him as peoples separate from the Slavs. Every non-
Slavic tribe was referred to as a people (iazyk), for the chronicler believed
that they all used different languages. That privilege was denied to the
individual Slavic tribes, as their different customs apparently did not suf-
ce to make them separate peoples. Apart from the non-Slavic tribes
of the Rus
: by the apostle
Andrew, who blessed the land; by the Varangian warriors Askold and
Dir, whose army accepted Christianity after its attack on Byzantium;
and, nally, by Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv himself. As his narration of the
pre-Christian history of Rus
.
As far as we know, the existence of such a people was originally pro-
claimed in the mid-eleventh century by the rst native-born metropoli-
tan of Kyiv, Ilarion, who wrote about the Rus
Land
withinthe context of Christiantime andspace, borrowedby the Rus
elites
from Byzantium and deeply rooted in Mediterranean historiography. As
Franklin notes, Ilarion laid the foundations for the myth of collective
34
Adapted from The Russian Primary Chronicle, p. 63. Cf. Povest
29
Christian identity for the Rus.
36
That identity project was further devel-
oped and elaborated in the writings of Nestor, whose name stands for
the Rus
princes. Essential to
the chroniclers effort to blend the Varangians and Slavs into one people,
the Rus
, was the history of one of the East Slavic tribes, the Poliani-
ans. Expounding his argument that the Slavs and the Rus
, Slavs, and Polianians as the same people. Who were the Polianians
of the Primary Chronicle? Judging by its text, there were two kinds of
Polianians. The rst were listed along with the Lutichians, Mazovians,
and Pomorians as part of the Liakh group of Slavic tribes. These Liakh
Polianians were mentioned only once. When they cropped up again in the
chroniclers discussion of Slavic settlement along the Danube, he simply
replaced them with the Polianians, who are now called the Rus
.
38
Throughout the rest of the Primary Chronicle, the Kyivan author
treated the Rus
, orig-
inally used to denote the Varangians, eventually spread to the retinue
recruited from Slavic and non-Slavic tribes that came under Varangian
control. According to the chronicler, once Oleh established his seat in
Kyiv he proclaimed it the mother of Rus
31
Kyiv. Then it was the Polianians turn to accept the name of Rus
. Hav-
ing given this account, the chronicler evidently felt justied in declaring
that the Rus
, the Slavs, and the Polianians were one and the same.
43
As we try to put the chroniclers diverse terminology into some order, it
becomes only too obvious that he was far from consistent in his choice of
terms and names. Although he conates the Slavs, Polianians, and Rus
into one group (as noted above), in a subsequent passage he does not
hesitate to list the Rus
history they are last mentioned by the chronicler under the year 944!
The disappearance of the Polianians and the blending of their tribal
name with the political designation Rus
, Varangians,
and Polianians in the Primary Chronicle, see V. Ia. Petrukhin, Nachalo etnokul
turnoi
istorii Rusi IXXI vekov (Smolensk, 1995), pp. 6982.
45
Petrukhin, Nachalo etnokul
kyi za
ipats
dialects also
points in that direction.
48
If that was indeed the case, then the author
of the Primary Chronicle had every right to claim at the beginning of
the twelfth century that the Rus
ka Rus
Slavs with the Danube Slavs who appear in the South Slavic texts used by the chronicler.
The name of the Slovenians corresponds to that of Slavs in general in sources that also
use the name Polianians to designate one of the West Slavic tribes. But the hypothesis
can more easily be applied to the Polianians than to the Slovenians. After all, if the
Polianians disappear from the Primary Chronicle after the entry for 944 a completely
mythical time for the author of the chronicle and his contemporaries the Slovenians
are present in the account of the rule of Yaroslav the Wise under the year 1034, almost
a century later, much closer to the times of the virtual Nestor and his contemporaries,
when chronicle writing supposedly emerged in Kyiv (see The Russian Primary Chronicle,
p. 136). Moreover, references to the Slovenians appear in the Rus
Law.
48
Aleksei Shakhmatov rst suggested this hypothesis in his Vvedenie v kurs istorii russkogo
iazyka, pt. 1 (Petrograd, 1916), pp. 8183. It was subsequently accepted by Mykhailo
Hrushevsky, who wrote about the all-Ukrainian and even all-Slavic character of the lan-
guage spoken in Kyiv (see his Poraionne istorychne doslidzhennia Ukrany i obslidu-
vannia Kyvs
ko kul
33
half before his own times. A comparison with modern historiography can
help elucidate this point. It may be assumed that the Polianians were the
chroniclers heroes, just as the Antes were the heroes of Mykhailo Hru-
shevsky in his reconstruction of early Ukrainian history. Yet Hrushevsky
had a Ukrainian identity, not an Antean one, even though he considered
the Antes to be the rst known ancestors of the Ukrainian ethnos. The
same probably applied to the author of the Primary Chronicle, for whom
the Polianians represented the ancient past. There were no Polianians in
his own time, nor was there a Polianian identity. That is why he never tired
of repeating that the Rus
replaced the
tribal Polianians as the protagonists of the Primary Chronicle from the
beginning of the tenth century and continued to dominate the narrative
until its very end. Thus, if the chronicler associated himself with a par-
ticular group, that group was not tribal but ethnocultural and territorial,
and its name was Rus
.
The Rus
Land
What is the origin of the Land of Rus
Land in narrow and broad senses. The rst included the core possessions
of the Kyivanprinces the Kyiv, Chernihiv, andPereiaslav territories. The
Rus
Land in the broad sense extended to the farthest regions under Kyivs
control. When and how did these two concepts come into existence?
Historians are divided on which came rst, the narrow or the broad
concept of the Rus
state, and
only in the twelfth century, with the growing decentralization of Kyivan
Rus
towns to this triad (the treaty of 907 lists Polatsk, Rostov, and
Liubech among those other towns).
52
But there is serious doubt that the
dates attached to the texts of these treaties are reliable. Indeed, there is
good reason to believe that the treaties are at least partly the result of
later creative editing of original texts, either by the author of the Primary
Chronicle or by his predecessors. For example, the text of the Rus
treaty
of 911 with Byzantium, which is considered more reliable than the other
two, does not include a list of Rus
ka Rus
,
pp. 25, 6061.
52
See The Russian Primary Chronicle, pp. 64, 74.
53
See Tolochko and Tolochko, Kyvs
ka Rus
, p. 122.
The origins of Rus
35
Does this mean that the Rus
Land
at the Liubech congress of Rus
realm
had already passed. The princes quarreled and fought with one another
over the volosti, which were in short supply owing to the slow pace of the
Rus
Land and the idea of its defense against the incursions of the steppe
nomads (of whom the Polovtsians were strongest at that time) became
an extremely important ideological construct. As the power of the Kyi-
van princes continued to decline, this idea became essential for enhancing
the solidarity of the Rurikid clan, mobilizing their forces in support of the
common cause and keeping the dispossessed princes in line by emphasiz-
ing the common good. It seems that there was one prince who beneted
most fromthe concept of the Rus
polity and was fully exploited to that end by the author of the
Primary Chronicle. As Viktor Zhivov has recently noted, two-thirds of the
references to the Rus
37
that references to the Rus
history? Most probably, it does. But does it also mean that the concept
itself was the product of the political thinking of the early twelfth century
and that the chronicler had to implant it into his discussion of events
in the second half of the eleventh century? Probably not. There is reason
to believe that the concept was already present in earlier versions of the
chronicle. Moreover, there is a reference to the Rus
Land
meant the territory around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav, we can only
guess whether the term really had a broader meaning in the eleventh
century or, most particularly, in the tenth. What we can assert is that in
the overwhelming majority of cases the Rus
As early as the second half of the tenth century, the Byzantines were faced
with the problemof distinguishing between the Rus
proper and
outer Rus
.
60
The Rus
Land and a valued prize in the wars waged by the non-Kyivan princes
for dominance in the Rus
Land and maintain its unity. They also continued to locate the
Rus
39
Kliazma, and the lands of the Derevlianians and the Viatichians.
61
Thus
the identity associated with the concept of the Kyiv-Chernihiv-Pereiaslav
Rus
was clearly alive and well in Kyiv throughout the twelfth and early
thirteenth centuries, while the other lands ruled by the Rurikids were
viewed merely as possessions, not as part of the Rus
Land did
not in and of itself prevent the Kyivans, Chernihovians, and Pereiaslavians
from having distinct identities in the Kyivan chronicles. Thus the divi-
sion of the Rurikid realm into semi-independent principalities became
the main parameter identifying its population. These new local identities
represented the newpolitical structure of the Kyivan state, not the former
tribal and cultural divisions a clear gain, at rst glance, for the cause
of Rus
.
40 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
So far we have discussed the identity of the author of the Primary
Chronicle, which to some degree mirrored that of the Kyivan secular and
religious elites. What of the interests and identities of those outside Kyiv,
or, to be more precise, outside the Rus
Land,
Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav, but these are the complexes that have survived.
What do they tell us about local identities in the land that Constantine
Porphyrogenitus called outer Rus
?
63
First of all, there are clear indica-
tions that the chroniclers in those centers were very well aware that their
territories did not belong to the Rus
and which
ones besides Novgorod to outer Rus
41
of the Rus
territory around
Kyiv was exempt, indicating that the Novgorodians belonged to the cate-
gory of tribes dependent on the Rus
Land. The Kyivan chronicler mentions the Slovenians for the last
time in his account of the rule of Yaroslav the Wise and then refers to the
local population as Novgorodians, but the latter fared no better than the
Slovenians when it came to the membership of their territory in the Rus
Land. The Novgorod chroniclers, for their part, referred to their land as
the Novgorod country (oblast
or the Rus
of the
twelfth and early thirteenth centuries knew perfectly well that although
they did not belong to the Rus
, pp. 11217.
42 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
the Rurikid realm. It is quite apparent why Monomakh and other Kyi-
van princes before and after him sought to preserve the unity of Rus
,
but why was the author of the Primary Chronicle so concerned about
it? The answer is not so simple as might appear at rst glance. The
explanation that chronicle writing simply reected the sympathies and
interests of the princely patron, which was quite popular among schol-
ars at the turn of the twentieth century, has not withstood the criticism
advanced by subsequent research. Clearly, while the chronicler took the
interests of the princes into account, he often served not only as a sym-
pathetic recorder of the princes deeds but also as their principled critic.
His main loyalty did not lie with the princes. The Primary Chronicle,
as well as the earlier chronicles on which it was based, was not written
at the princely court but in the Kyivan Cave Monastery, and it was the
interests of that monastery, the metropolitan see, and the church in gen-
eral that counterbalanced the chroniclers loyalty to a particular prince.
He judged the princes deeds by the standard of Christian principles
and the interests of the Rus
realm, as well
as those of the church as a whole, represented by the Metropolitan of
All Rus
,
which was meant to surpass even that of St. Sophia in Kyiv. The worst
was yet to come. In 1162, Prince Andrei Bogoliubsky of Vladimir in
Northeastern Rus
, encouraging princes to
preserve its unity.
The origins of Rus
43
The Kyivan church, among whose spokesmen in the court of posterity
is the author of the Primary Chronicle, was one of many instruments that
helped establish and maintain the unity of the Rurikid realm. Even if we
do not take at face value the chroniclers stories about Volodymyrs pre-
Christian attempts to create a pantheon of pagan gods, or question the
signicance of those initiatives as an important step toward the religious
unication of his realm,
66
we may assume that he faced the real problem
of unifying the vast territories of his newly conquered domain by means
of a common belief system. If so, then Christianity was a much better
tool for dealing with the problem than some ad hoc pan-East Slavic pan-
theon. The unifying function of the Christian church was already appar-
ent in the name of the Kyiv metropolitanate, whose ofcial appellation
was the Metropolitanate of Rus
.
69
The metropolitan see and the Kyivan monasteries beneted from that
devolution, as they acquired the right to own land and thus established
their own economic base, but they also acquired new rivals. Not only
were new bishoprics created in the new princely centers, but additional
metropolitanates (albeit titular and short-lived) arose in Chernihiv and
Pereiaslav, the two other centers of the Rus
ka Rus
,
pp. 1058.
67
See Omeljan Pritsak, Kiev and All of Rus
ko kul
tury, ed.
P. P. Tolochko et al., vol. I (Kyiv, 2001), pp. 76890.
69
On the introduction of the concept of all Rus
, where it became
the language of education and church liturgy. By the twelfth century it
had acquired enough local East Slavic characteristics to allow modern
scholars to dene it as a distinct language, Church Slavonic. Some lin-
guists argue that Church Slavonic coexisted with the so-called Old Rus
secular and ecclesiastical government. They were accepted and used all
over Kyivan Rus
, pp. xiiicix.
71
See Ihor
Sev cenko, Byzantium and the Slavs, in his Ukraine between East and West:
Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century (Edmonton and Toronto, 1996),
pp. 1226, here 21; George Y. Shevelov, Church Slavic, in Encyclopedia of Ukraine,
vol. I (Toronto, 1984), pp. 48889; Nimchuk, Literaturni movy Kyvs
ko Rusi. On
the nativization of Rus
culture from the turn of the twelfth century, see Franklin and
Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 31317.
The origins of Rus
45
What language (or languages) did the Slavic population of Kyivan Rus
the Russians,
Ukrainians or Belarusians. Linguists seem to agree that all three mod-
ern languages form a group separate from the West and South Slavic
languages. They also agree on the general model of development of the
Slavic languages from a common Slavic to particular national languages.
At this point, disagreement begins. The most politically loaded question
is whether the East Slavic languages developed directly from a Slavic
proto-language or whether there was an intermediate stage in the form
of a common East Slavic language. Another bone of contention is the
issue of periodization in linguistic development. Prior to the Revolution
of 1917, the majority of Russian linguists, who, like Aleksei Shakhmatov,
also turned out to be proponents of the imperial idea of all-Russian unity,
argued in favor of the existence of a common all-Russian language. That
approach became the only one acceptable in ofcial Soviet linguistics,
with Soviet authors dating the earliest stages of the disintegration of the
common idiom and the emergence of separate Russian, Ukrainian, and
Belarusian languages to the fourteenth century. A number of Ukrainian
scholars, including George (Yurii) Shevelov, refused to subscribe to that
theory and traced the origins of separate East Slavic languages back to
the seventh and eighth centuries. Discussion of the problem continues,
but for present purposes it is fair to suggest that whatever the languages
spoken by the Slavic population of Kyivan Rus
) as a common
literary medium could not help but retard the development and eventual
formation of distinct East Slavic languages.
72
Thus it would appear that the language in which the author(s) of the
Primary Chronicle wrote, their membership in the church, their location
in a monastery in the capital of the Rurikid realm, and their closeness to
the secular and spiritual powers of Kyivan Rus
unity.
Who has the better claim?
What does all this mean for the modern debate about the ethno-
national character of Kyivan Rus
and repre-
sent Galician-Volhynian Rus
,
see Magocsi, A History of Ukraine, pp. 100102; Vasyl
ko kul
tury, I: 68394.
46 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
right to the proto-Russian Suzdal principality? Or does the evidence favor
Mikhail Pogodin, Aleksei Sobolevsky, and other Russian historians and
linguists, who believed that the entire population of the core area of Kyi-
van Rus
iden-
tity was attached to and based upon the concept of the Rus
Land in
the narrow sense, limited to the territory around Kyiv, Chernihiv, and
Pereiaslav. Only later was the name of the Rus
Land
per se and Galicia-Volhynia) as a single entity in opposition to a non-
Ukrainian other. No such identity existed at the time. The same applies
to the type of identity that existed in the territories of present-day Rus-
sia and Belarus during the Kyivan Rus
47
Kyivan Rus
nationality?
Wrong again. Nikita Tolstoi, whose work on the multiple identities of
the author of the Primary Chronicle has been noted above, was perfectly
right to identify the East Slavic component as the weakest of all the levels
of Nestors ethnopolitical consciousness. Ethnic afnity played a role in
the development of the sense of Rus
.
Even their political loyalty as we knowit fromtwelfth-century sources was
to their lands of Rus
as an imagined
community, the image we get is not one of an Old Rus
nationality (itself
the product of the modern historical imagination) but of a multiethnic
imperial elite whose identity was quite different from that of the rest of
the population. Indeed, it is generally accepted that even at the peak of
their power, the prince and church of Kyivan Rus
,
73
Natalia Iakovenko, Narys istori Ukrany z naidavnishykh chasiv do kintsia XVIII stolittia
(Kyiv, 1997), pp. 5359.
48 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
it undermined the dominance of the dynastic approach to the history of
the Kyivan realmand opened newprospects for historical research. When
Ukrainian and Belarusian scholars challenged the concept of all-Russian
nationality, they rightly questioned the level of ethnic homogeneity in
the Kyivan Rus
identities shows that they were in constant ux, often looking to the past
for justication of the particular structure of that identity at any given
time.
Modern historians in search of the origins of their own changing iden-
tities (and seeking legitimacy for them as well) continue to disagree in
their interpretations of the ethnocultural history of Kyivan Rus
. What
seems beyond doubt, however, is that the Kyivan intellectuals succeeded
in creating an identity-building model one that endowed the Rus
elite
with a sense of common identity extending beyond the boundaries of the
Rus
Land in the narrowsense. The Kyivan state left a strong legacy in the
region in terms of historical memory, law, religion, and ultimately iden-
tity, which was adopted in one form or another by all its former subjects.
Most importantly for our discussion, that state left a tradition of usage
of the name of Rus
Land?
The period from the mid-thirteenth to the late fteenth century is proba-
bly the least researched in the history of the Eastern Slavs.Yet the events of
that time gave rise to extremely important developments in the ethnocul-
tural history of the region that led, according to most scholars, to growing
differentiation among the East Slavic ethnonational communities. Soviet
historians claimed that this was the period in which one all-Rus
nation-
ality ceased to exist and the three East Slavic nationalities were formed.
There are also a number of other questions pertaining to the period that
seem vital to modern-day national narratives. Did the nal disintegra-
tion of Kyivan Rus
unity
developed in Kyivan times? I address this question by examining changes
in the concept of the Rus
Land (in one form or another) adopted in these polities during the
period in question, but it was also passed on to subsequent generations
as an important element of the prevailing system of political and cultural
values.
49
50 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
The heirs of Kyiv
The ofcial end of Kyivan Rus
found itself under Mongol rule, while the rest of the Rus
.
The Mongol invasion hardly affected Danylos ascendancy as a regional
ruler. On the one hand, he lost control over Kyiv, which he ruled through
a voevoda (military governor) on the eve of the Mongol attack of 1240.
On the other hand, in 1245, in the wake of the Mongol campaign, he
managed to restore the unity of Galicia-Volhynia (or Volhynia-Galicia, as
some scholars believe the principality should be called). Danylo subdued
the powerful local boyars, ensuring the political stability of the realm.
What happened to the Rus
Land? 51
He conducted a skillful foreign policy, playing off the Poles and Hun-
garians in the west against the Mongols in the east and becoming the
only Rus
was by
now rmly established in the minds of its domestic elites and neighbors
alike, remained a bone of contention in Polish-Hungarian relations until
the 1420s.
1
While Galicia-Volhynia was nominally dependent on the Mongols only
until the turn of the fourteenth century, Northeastern Rus
experienced
their rule until the mid-fteenth century. Initially, the Mongols treated
the Suzdal-Vladimir Land, along with Kyiv and Chernihiv in the south
1
On the history of the Galician-Volhynian principality and its territories in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, see A. M. Andriiashev, Ocherk istorii Volynskoi zemli do kontsa
XIV stoletiia (Kyiv, 1887); Ivan Lynnychenko, Suspil
ni verstvy Halyts
ko Rusy XIVXV
vv. (Lviv, 1899); Mykhailo Hrushevs
ko-Volyns
ko-
Volyns
ka Rus
(Kyiv, 1998).
52 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
and Novgorod and Pskov in the northwest, as a separate Rus
realm.
They controlled it through grand princes dependent on the khans. The
Rus
Land? 53
about the battle rmly established the notion of the Rus
Land (a name
now applied to the territory of Northeastern Rus
) as an object of loyalty
for local elites and turned it into a rallying cry for those who wanted to
deliver Northeastern Rus
people. Does
this mean that elites of both principalities shared one ethnonational iden-
tity and that the Rus
, see Ihor
Sev cenko, Rival
and Epigone of Kiev: The Vladimir-Suzdal
nationality
split into smaller groups after the disintegration of Kyivan Rus
. Accord-
ing to this version, the Old Rus
neishego razvi-
tiia russkoi (velikorusskoi) narodnosti, in Voprosy formirovaniia russkoi narodnosti i natsii,
ed. N. M. Druzhinin and L. V. Cherepnin (Moscow and Leningrad, 1958), pp. 15591.
Soviet views on the formation of the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages are summa-
rized by Anna Khoroshkevich in Vladimir Pashuto, Boris Floria, and Khoroshkevich,
Drevnerusskoe nasledie i istoricheskie sud
ko
narodnosti, in Istoriia Ukrans
Land? 55
Soviet historiography silently ignored the ofcial scheme in favor of the
Russocentric paradigm. The authors of the collective monograph The
Old Rus
Heritage and the Historical Fate of the Eastern Slavs (1982) revived
the prerevolutionary and World War II-era practice of using the term
Russians to denote all three East Slavic nationalities. Vladimir Pashuto,
for example, referred to the thirteenth-century population of Kyivan Rus
by vos-
tochnogo slavianstva, pp. 56, 20, 196. For the continuation of that practice in post-
Soviet Russian historiography, see A. I. Dvornichenko, Russkie zemli Velikogo kniazhestva
Litovskogo (do nachala XVI veka). Ocherki istorii obshchiny, soslovii, gosudarstvennosti (St.
Petersburg, 1993).
8
In Belarus, A. I. Mikulich applied genetics to the study of Belarusian ethnogenesis.
He concluded that of the twelve genes analyzed in his study, Belarusians differ from
Lithuanians by two genes, from Russians by three, from Ukrainians by four, and from
Poles by six. See G. V. Shtykhov, U istokov belorusskoi narodnosti, Ruthenica (Kyiv) 1
(2002): 8588, here 8788. Cf. his Drevnerusskaia narodnost
lands.
11
Most
Russian scholars, by contrast, continue to believe in the existence of one
Old Rus
Land as they
developed in the territories of the former Kyivan state.
Galicians into Rus
ians
The authors of the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle, who constructed their
narrative in the second half of the thirteenth century, regarded their
princes and their principality as the lawful continuators and heirs of the
Kyivan princes and the Kyivan state. So did the authors of the modern
Ukrainian national narrative. But when did the Galician-Volhynian elites
and their neighbors to the east and west begin to think of their land as
part of Rus
was
fully completed only after the Kyivan state had succumbed to the Mongol
invasion. Impossible? Let us see what the sources have to say about it.
11
See Mykola Kotliar writing in a Soviet-style collective monograph, Istoriia Ukrany
(Kyiv, 1997), pp. 4748, and Natalia Iakovenko, Narys istori Ukrany z naidavnishykh
chasiv do kintsia XVIII stolittia (Kyiv, 1997), pp. 5359.
12
See Boris Floria, O nekotorykh osobennostiakh razvitiia etnicheskogo samosoznaniia
vostochnykh slavian v epokhu srednevekov
Land? 57
Since we have both Kyivan and local Galician-Volhynian chronicles
(which, together with the Primary Chronicle, constitute the Hypatian
Codex), we can trace the Galician-Volhynian elites acquisition of the
Rus
name and identity from two vantage points. The fact that the rst
voice belongs to the twelfth century while the second comes fromthe thir-
teenth (more precisely, its latter part) complicates our task. Nevertheless,
compared with the exclusively Kyivan perspective on Rus
presented by
the authors of the Primary Chronicle and the complete silence of the
fourteenth-century sources with regard to the history of the region, the
stereo sounds that we can extract from the chronicles covering the his-
tory of the Galician-Volhynian principality are a true boon to anyone
interested in the study of its political, military, economic, religious, and
cultural history.
Let us begin investigating the identities of the Galician-Volhynian elites
by listening to the Kyivan voices. According to the author of the Primary
Chronicle, the territory of the future principality was settled by a num-
ber of tribes. Among them were the Dulibians, Buzhanians, and Volhyni-
ans, who resided in Volhynia, and the Ulichians, Tivertsians, and Croats,
who lived in Galicia and neighboring territories. Like some other Rus
ko-Volyns
ka Rus
, pp. 1828.
14
Under the same year, the chronicler reported Volodymyrs victory over the Viatichians.
15
See Kotliar, Halyts
ko-Volyns
ka Rus
, p. 28.
58 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
themselves began ghting over them, with the Kyivan princes squaring off
against their Volhynian and Galician counterparts. The princely congress
of Liubech in 1097 assigned Volodymyr in Volhynia, Peremyshl, and Tere-
bovlia in Galicia to individual representatives of the Rurikid clan. It failed,
however, to put an end to internecine warfare: the Kyivan and Volodymyr-
Volhynian princes plotted against Vasylko of Terebovlia and blinded him.
That act of violence, committed by the Rurikid princes against one of their
own, allegedly made Volodymyr Monomakh exclaim: Such a crime as
this has never been perpetrated in the Rus
Land in connection with the war that broke out in Galicia and
Volhynia, the author of the Primary Chronicle did not consider those
territories to be part of the Rus
, as
he noted in the entry for 981, but that did not make them part of Rus
or
of the Rus
Land
(narrowly conceived), making it an easy target for the Polovtsians, who
might destroy it completely. There are numerous statements to that effect
in the pages of the Primary Chronicle. Its continuators, the authors of
the Kyiv Chronicle, give much more evidence that in the twelfth century
neither Volhynia nor Galicia was considered part of the Rus
to dishonor!
They have won their honor everywhere, and today, brothers, we shall all
see to it. May God grant that we win our honor in these lands and before
foreign peoples.
18
In all likelihood, the foreign peoples mentioned by
16
Adapted from The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, ed. and trans. Samuel
Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 191.
Cf. A. K. Aleshkovskii, Povest
evskaia letopis
,
2nd edn (St. Petersburg, 1908; repr. Moscow, 1962), col. 315.
18
Ibid., cols. 44849.
What happened to the Rus
Land? 59
the chronicler were the Hungarians, not the Galicians, but the reference
to the Rus
Land and its sons clearly showed that the Galicians were not
included in either of those concepts. Moreover, after the conclusion of a
peace treaty between the warring parties, the Hungarian king demanded
that Prince Volodymyr return the captured Rus
Land to
the exclusion of all other parts of the Rurikid realm. One might assume
that their use of the term also reected the reality on the ground, or at
least corresponded to their contemporaries usage. Under the year 1231,
the chronicler reports on Prince Danylo of Halych taking possession
of the town of Torchesk, which is characterized as part of the Rus
Land.
20
The entry for 1234 describes an attack by the Polovtsians, who came
to Kyiv and plundered the Rus
Land.
21
Recording the sack of Kyiv
by the Mongols in 1240, the chronicler states that the Rus
Land was
lled with enemies (ratnykh).
22
Interestingly enough, after the fall of
Kyiv to the Mongols the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle makes no direct
reference to the Rus
Land? Did it vanish entirely, or did it acquire a new meaning under new
circumstances?
The notion of the Rus
ko-
Volyns
kyi litopys. Doslidzhennia. Tekst. Komentar, ed. Mykola Kotliar (Kyiv, 2002).
For an English translation, see The Hypatian Codex, pt. 2, The Galician-Volhynian
Chronicle, trans. George A. Perfecky (Munich, 1973). Cf. Halyts
ko-Volyns
kyi litopys,
p. 95.
21
Ibid., p. 97.
22
Ibid., p. 101.
60 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
in the early thirteenth century as a time of great disorder . . . in the
Rus
Land.
23
The Galician Land is identied with the Rus
Land in
the chronicle account of the conict over Halych between Danylo and
the Hungarian King B ela IV in 1230. On the one hand, the chronicler
reports in his description of the conict that in order to defend the town
of Halych, Danylo mobilized the whole Galician Land. On the other
hand, he writes that one of the Galician boyars (an enemy of Danylos)
called upon the Hungarians: Come out against Halych and take the Rus
Land.
24
In his account of developments after the Mongol sack of Kyiv,
the chronicler frequently uses the term Rus
Land before
he returned there.
25
It is interesting that by the Rus
Land.
26
Danylo, who acquired Kyiv on the eve of the Mongol inva-
sion and installed his voevoda there, was also referred to in the chronicle
entry for 1250 as the former grand prince who, together with his brother,
ruled the Rus
Land, but its two peripheral centers were now located in the west, not in
the east: Chernihiv was replaced in the new scheme by Volodymyr in Vol-
hynia, while Halych, the capital of Galicia, took the place of Pereiaslav.
Danylos deeds were compared with those of such Rurikid princes as
Sviatoslav the Brave and Volodymyr the Great as the chronicler sought
to establish that Danylo had been the rst in the Rus
Land? 61
The application of the term Rus
princes Vasylko and Shvarno in 1266, the chronicler refers to the two
parties involved as the Liakhs and the Rus
.
31
Thus Danylos army, and
probably the general population of Galicia-Volhynia, from which it was
recruited, were increasingly regarded by the chroniclers not just as a pop-
ulace under the control of the Rus
people
itself.
As the ofcial titles of the rulers of Galicia-Volhynia might suggest, the
fourteenth century saw the further penetration of the term Rus
into
local political discourse. The tradition of its use in the ofcial titles of
Galician-Volhynian princes can be traced back to Prince Danylo, who
was called rex Ruthenorum in the papal bulls of 124648. His heirs,
Princes Andrii and Lev, who jointly ruled the newly reunited principality
of Galicia-Volhynia in the rst decades of the fourteenth century, were
referred to in their own documents as leaders of the whole land of Rus
,
Galicia and Lodomeria, by the grace of God. Separate references to
Galicia and Volhynia (usually known in Latin as Lademirie, a name
derived fromthat of its main city, Volodymyr) showed that these two parts
of Danylos principality had recently existed as separate entities. This is
also apparent in the title of one of the brothers, Andrii, who was referred
to in his own edicts as leader of Lodomeria and lord of Rus
, with the
latter termdenoting Galicia. Yurii II, the last independent ruler of Galicia-
Volhynia, usually styled himself leader and lord of Rus
or leader of
all Little Rus
other in the
Galician-Volhynian Chronicle. The manifold relations of the Galician-
Volhynian princes with their Polish neighbors to the west wars as well
as alliances; conicts as well as marriages made the Poles a familiar
presence to the inhabitants of southwestern Rus
Land? 63
playeda role inshaping the chroniclers attitudes towardthe Poles.
34
What
can be said with certainty is that religion was only occasionally a decid-
ing factor in drawing the line between the two communities. According
to the chronicler, Danylo accepted a royal crown from the envoys of the
pope after the Polish princes convinced him that they would support his
actions against the Mongols. Further justifying Danylos act, the chron-
icler wrote that Pope Innocent IV condemned those who denigrated the
Greek faith and planned to convene a council to reunite the divided
churches, clearly regarding the latter as a positive prospect.
35
Mykhailo
Hrushevsky was certainly right in suggesting that political antagonism
resulting from military confrontation in the Polish-Rus
borderlands pre-
ceded religious (Orthodox-Catholic) hostility.
36
The recognition of religious afnity and commonality between the Rus
chroni-
cles,
37
gave way to a strong sense of religious distinctiveness and animosity
when nomadic neighbors to the south and east were involved.
38
In the
Primary Chronicle, the opposition of the Rurikid princes to the steppe
nomads already gured as a powerful device to help construct the Rus
as pagans.
39
That term not only accom-
panied the actual name of a given people but also often replaced it. For
34
The deterioration of relations between Western and Eastern Christianity affected Rus
only in the 1230s. It had no impact on the Galician and Volhynian princes, a fact fully
reected in the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle. There is an extensive literature on the
relations of the Galician-Volhynian princes with Rome and their Catholic neighbors; for
the most recent contribution, see Boris Floria, U istokov religioznogo raskola slavianskogo
mira (XIII vek) (St. Petersburg, 2004). On the attitudes of the authors of the Galician-
Volhynian Chronicle toward Catholicism, see ibid., pp. 198205.
35
See Halyts
ko-Volyns
ko-Volyns
s ethnopolitical ter-
minology occurs in an addition to its text in the sixteenth-century Voskresensk Chronicle.
There, a reference to the Polovtsians as pagans is added to the account of Volodymyr
Monomakh
vremennykh let,
p. 192.
64 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
example, the Kyiv Chronicles rst reference to the Polovtsians identies
themas pagans with no further elaboration of whomthe chronicler had
in mind.
40
The religious component of the new image of the Polovtsians
becomes especially clear in the chroniclers account of the Polovtsian
attack on Rus
, the
chroniclers regarded the Mongol invasion as punishment for the sins of
the Christians. The chronicler reconciled himself to the Rus
princes
submission to the power of the Mongols but was vehemently opposed
to the notion of accepting their religion. That was the main burden of
the chroniclers account of the death of Prince Mykhail of Chernihiv,
who was allegedly killed by the Mongols for refusing to convert to their
faith. He reportedly said to Batu: If God has delivered us and our land
into your hands because of our sins, we make obeisance to you and pay
our respects to you. As for the law of your fathers and your at, which
is repugnant to God, we do not make obeisance.
44
The protagonist of
the chronicle, Prince Danylo, is praised by the chronicler for refusing to
make obeisance to the sacred bush, as Prince Yaroslav Vsevolodovych
of Vladimir-Suzdal had allegedly done at Mongol insistence. Yet Danylo
apparently agreed to drink fermented mares milk (kumys), an act that
made him a Tatar in Batus eyes.
45
Probably it was a lesser evil to accept
a new political identity than a new religious one, thereby abandoning
Christianity.
46
40
PSRL, II: 286.
41
Ibid., col. 612.
42
See Halyts
ko-Volyns
ko-Volyns
Land? 65
If the Galician-Volhynian elites were separated by political, ethnic, and
religious differences from the Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs in the west
and nomadic peoples to the south, how did they view their relations
with the other Rus
princes. The
text of the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle, compiled in the second half
of the thirteenth century, gives ample evidence of that impact. Once the
Mongols took direct control of most of the Rus
, denying
that title to other Rurikids. In the chronicle account of the Lithuanian
campaign of 1275, three Galician-Volhynian princes, Lev, Mstyslav, and
Volodymyr, are called Rus
in Galicia-
Volhynia, argues that the Galician author of the chronicle was much more willing to call
his land Rus
than was his Volhynian continuator. See Pritsak, Kiev and All of Rus
:
The Fate of a Sacral Idea, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10, nos. 34 (December 1986):
279300, here 28788.
48
See Halyts
ko-Volyns
Land proper, is
particularly telling.
49
It serves to indicate the almost total appropriation
of the Rus
. He took
with him the title of metropolitan of all Rus
identity.
The Rus
Land
adopted in Northeastern Rus
kyi, p. 265).
50
Ibid., p. 184.
What happened to the Rus
Land? 67
and ideological signicance of that process? It is difcult if not impossible
to give an exact answer to the rst part of this question. What remains
beyond doubt, however, is that the chroniclers of Northeastern Rus
,
the authors of the so-called Laurentian Codex,
51
were much slower than
their Galician-Volhynian counterparts to apply the term Rus
Land to
their realm, which they usually called the Suzdal Land. Under the year
1249, they recorded that the Mongol khan had awarded Kyiv and all the
Rus
, knownas Pereiaslav-Zalesskii.
52
According to Charles
J. Halperin, the name of the Rus
sometime between 1293 and 1328, with the process fully complete by
1340. It appears that after 1310 the chroniclers all but ceased to use the
term Suzdal Land, replacing it with Rus
Land.
53
Halperin bases his observations on the data of the Trinity Chronicle,
the earliest of the Moscow chronicles known to scholars. The portion
written by native chroniclers covered events in Northeastern Rus
from
1305, the year that ended the narrative of the Laurentian Codex, to 1408
the period in which, according to Halperin, the translatio of the concept of
51
The Laurentian Codex is a compilation (like the Hypatian Codex) that includes the text
of the Primary Chronicle but then shifts to the history of Northeastern Rus
and covers
it up to 1305. The surviving copy of the codex was made by monks of the Nizhegorod
Cave Monastery in Northeastern Rus
in 1377.
52
See the geographical index and references to both Pereiaslavs in Lavrent
evskaia letopis
,
PSRL, vol. I (Moscow, 1962). There was a third Pereiaslav in the Riazan Land,
already known to the compiler of the Laurentian Codex but much more familiar to
his fourteenth-century continuators.
53
See Halperin, The Concept of the Russian Land; idem, The Russian Land and
the Russian Tsar: The Emergence of Muscovite Ideology, 13801408, Forschungen zur
osteurop aischen Geschichte (Berlin) (1976): 7103 (the latter article being a revised and
augmented version of the former); idem, The Concept of Russkaia zemlia and Medieval
National Consciousness from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Centuries, Nationalities Papers
8, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 7586. My discussion of the historical evidence generally follows
Halperins selection of sources. My summary excludes the data provided by the Slovo
o pogibeli Russkoi zemli, as I believe that Halperin offers sufcient evidence to rule
out this text as a product of the writing done in Northeastern Rus
as it appears in a sixteenth-
century codex, see V. P. Adrianova-Peretts, ed., Voinskie povesti drevnei Rusi (Moscowand
Leningrad, 1949). Nor do I comment on the Tale of Ihors Campaign, whose authenticity
has been placed in serious doubt by students of the text. For the most recent discussion
of the issue, see Edward L. Keenan, Josef Dobrovsk y and the Origins of the Igor
Tale
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003).
68 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
the Rus
Land from the Dnipro to the Volga region actually took place.
54
There is nevertheless a serious problem with the Trinity Chronicle
it no longer exists, for the original manuscript perished in the re of
Moscow in 1812, when Napoleon paid an unsolicited visit to the former
Russian capital. No copy of the famous chronicle was made, although
extensive quotations from it appeared in the History of the Russian State,
published after the Napoleonic Wars by the ofcial historian of Rus-
sia, Nikolai Karamzin. On the basis of these citations, M. D. Priselkov
reconstructed the text of the lost chronicle, lling in the text between
quotations with borrowings from other, obviously later, chronicles that
in his highly informed opinion were closest to the lost text of the Trin-
ity Chronicle.
55
It was on this reconstructed text of the chronicle that
Halperin based his conclusions. Although Priselkovs authority remains
unchallenged, it is clear that observations made on the basis of his recon-
struction rather than on the actual text of the chronicle are hypothetical.
In his later studies, Halperin declined to treat Priselkovs reconstruction
of the Trinity Chronicle as an authentic and reliable source and even
criticized other scholars for doing so.
56
Nevertheless, Halperins earlier
conclusions regarding the time when the concept of the Rus
Land was
transferred to Suzdalia were never revised and are clearly in need of reex-
amination, given the hypothetical nature of Priselkovs reconstruction of
the Trinity Chronicle.
This applies, for example, to the chronicle entry for 1293, regarded
as the rst application of the idea of the Rus
Land to Northeastern
Rus
. The entry does not belong to Karamzins citations from the Trinity
Chronicle but is one of Priselkovs borrowings from the Simeon Chron-
icle, written no earlier than the late fteenth century and preserved in a
sixteenth-century copy.
57
In fact, all but three references to the Rus
Land
in the reconstructed text of the Trinity Chronicle come from Priselkovs
borrowings, not from Karamzins citations. Of these three, two were not
directly attributed by Karamzin to the Trinity Chronicle but interpreted
as such by Priselkov himself. There is only one unquestionable reference
54
For a brief discussion of the Trinity Chronicle and its relation to the later chronicles
of Northeastern Rus
, see L. L. Murav
.
Rekonstruktsiia teksta (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950).
56
See Charles J. Halperin, Text and Textology: Salminas Dating of the Chronicle Tales
about Dmitrii Donskoi, Slavonic and East European Review 79, no. 2 (April 2001):
24863.
57
Priselkov used the Chronicle as a basis for his reconstruction of the text of the Trinity
Chronicle between 1177 and 1305 (see Priselkovs introduction to his Troitskaia letopis
,
pp. 4144). On the Simeon Chronicle, see Murav
Land? 69
to the Rus
Land.
58
Although the
entry in question has been sandwiched between two others that discuss
events in and around Moscow, its actual content does not allow one to
conclude that the chronicler had in mind that particular region when
he was writing about the Rus
Land in
Northeastern Rus
, entries for the years 1308 (p. 353), 1328 (p. 359), and
1332 (p. 361).
59
See Halperin, The Concept of the Russian Land, p. 35; cf. idem, The Russian Land
and the Russian Tsar, p. 66.
70 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
predominantly fteenth-century Muscovite point of view on the events
of the fourteenth century in Northeastern Rus
.
60
Where should we go from here? Can we use other written sources to
determine whether the Moscow scribes actually employed the concept of
the Rus
:
the polity of the Muscovite princes had successfully taken over for its
60
On the history of chronicle writing in Northeastern Rus
, see Murav
eva, Letopisanie
Severo-Vostochnoi Rusi. On the rewriting and reconstruction of major ideological myths
in Muscovite Rus
Land? 71
own purposes the concept of the Rus
of the period?
One of the meanings of the concept of the Rus
Land in fteenth-
century Mongol Rus
Land in the Grand Princedom of Tver during the reign of Grand Prince
Dmitrii Mikhailovich, in the time of the Most Reverend Archbishop Petr,
Metropolitan of All Rus
). Thus
the Rus
or Rus
. Such is the
concept of the Rus
. The so-called Short Chronicle Tale about the Kulikovo battle, most
probably composed between 1449 and 1462 and later included in the
Simeon Chronicle, presented Prince Dmitrii Donskoi as the protector of
the Land of All Rus
also occu-
pied an important place. In the list of possessions and institutions that
Dmitrii intended to protect from Tatar invasion, it followed Moscow, to
which the chronicler referred as the princes patrimony, and the church,
which the chronicler probably served. Indeed, the Land of All Rus
is
mentioned in the tale much more frequently than the princes patrimony
of Moscow, which was certainly part of that land. Other centers of the
Land of All Rus
Land
replaced the notion of the Kyiv-based one, we may turn to contemporary
accounts of the lives of two saints, Stefan of Perm and Dmitrii Donskoi,
the hero of Kulikovo. The rst of these lives, traditionally attributed to
Epifanii Premudryi (the Wise), probably dates from the period between
1396, the year of the death of Stefan of Perm, and 1420, the approximate
year of Epifaniis demise, even though it rst appears in a manuscript of
1480. The dating of the second monument is no less tentative. Although
it is believed that the rst version of the Oration Concerning the Life and
Passing of Grand Prince Dmitrii Ivanovich
66
was written soon after the
princes death in 1389, the text that has actually come down to us bears
the marks of later editing. Thus, some scholars tend to date the Oration
to the rst half of the fteenth century
67
and others to the 1470s, when
the work was rst included in the Muscovite chronicles.
68
Generally speaking, it is fair to assume that if the Life of St. Stefan of
Perm gives us an idea of how the Rus
, pp. 41921.
The Expanded Chronicle Tale, which was included, along with other compilations, in
the Novgorod IV Chronicle, also dened Moscow as the patrimony of Prince Dmitrii.
For excerpts from the Novgorod IV Chronicle, see Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitve, ed. M. N.
Tikhomirov, V. F. Rzhiga, and L. A. Dmitriev (Moscow, 1959), pp. 3040.
66
For the text of the Oration, see Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi. XIV seredina XV veka
(Moscow, 1981), pp. 20829. For a discussion of the monument, see Harvey Goldblatt,
Confessional and National Identity in Early Muscovite Literature: The Discourse on
the Life and Death of Dmitrii Ivanovich Donskoi, in Culture and Identity in Muscovy,
pp. 84115.
67
See Halperin, The Russian Land and the Russian Tsar, pp. 6978.
68
See Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, pp. 161, 178. Since the author of the Oration
often speaks of the Land of All Rus
Land? 73
That era sawa dramatic expansion of the power of the Muscovite princes,
who annexed Tver and Novgorod and began to compete with the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania for Rus
Land.
69
Writing, apparently, in the late fourteenth or early
fteenth century, Epifanii Premudryi stated: the Greek [land praises]
the apostle Andrew; the Rus
Land.
71
The way
in which the concept of the Land of All Rus
martyr princes SS. Borys and Hlib. See JaroslawPelenski, The Origins of the Muscovite
Ecclesiastical Claims to the Kievan Inheritance, in idem, The Contest for the Legacy of
Kievan Rus
princes but also those of Lithuania were prepared to ght for the Rus
Land, the Orthodox faith, and (occasionally) for the wrongs done to
Prince Dmitrii.
72
The rise of the Rus
Land.
74
The works of the Kulikovo cycle reect in signicant detail the trans-
formation of the notion of the Rus
Land in
Northeastern Rus
Land? 75
not eleventh-century Kyiv, but twelfth-century Suzdalia.
76
One might
add that the Suzdal Land also served as the immediate forerunner of the
notion of the Rus
.
Local identities
As the princes of Moscow and their bookmen adopted the concept of the
Rus
Land for their territories as one of the basic elements of their identity,
what was happening to the identity of their subjects, especially those liv-
ing outside the former Suzdal Land? It is difcult to answer this question
satisfactorily, given the revising and editing of the local chronicles that
were eventually merged into the Moscow codices. Nevertheless, there
exist chronicle entries that avoided complete rewriting by the Moscow
editors, as well as hagiographic and other writings of the fteenth cen-
tury composed outside Moscow, and Muscovite texts that take account
of the views of people from the newly acquired territories. They support
the assumption that the acquisition of a common identity was no sim-
ple process and that loyalties to particular lands presented a formidable
obstacle to the Moscow-sponsored identity.
Novgorod was of course among the strongest bastions of local identity,
and it is hardly surprising that its chroniclers, despite subsequent cen-
sorship by Moscow editors, best represent the non-Muscovite regional
identity of the period. According to the Novgorodian chronicles, the local
elites changed their minds about the relation of their territory to the Rus
Land. There
was another shift in the entries on the fourteenth century. The entry for
1327, which discussed the Tatar attack on Northeastern Rus
, clearly dis-
tinguished the Rus
Land.
78
According to the chroniclers, the Novgorod men fought and
died not for the Rus
merchants or Rus
ians.
80
Judging by the
troubled history of MoscowNovgorod relations, the Novgorodians not
only possessed a distinct identity but also often harbored strong anti-
Muscovite feelings. They were not alone, as grievances against Moscow
were also expressed by representatives of local elites in territories that had
never enjoyed autonomy comparable to Novgorods or lost it long before
the fteenth century.
Clear signs of strong local identity and resentment of Moscow are
apparent in the Lives of St. Sergii of Radonezh and St. Stefan of Perm. As
noted earlier, the author of the Life of St. Stefan (whether he was Epifanii
or not) did not regard Moscow, Rostov, and Perm as parts of the Rus
Land, which in his opinion was still based in Kyiv. He also distinguished
himself as an ardent loyalist of the Perm Land and a critic of Moscow
and the Muscovites (moskvichi), who possessed the earthly remains of
78
The positioning of Novgorod outside the Rus
po sinodal
nomu kharateinomu
spisku, vol. II (St. Petersburg, 1888).
80
See N. A. Kazakova, O polozhenii Novgoroda v sostave Russkogo gosudarstva v kontse
XV pervoi polovine XVI v., in Rossiia na putiakh tsentralizatsii, pp. 15659.
What happened to the Rus
Land? 77
St. Stefan and did not want them to be in the Perm Land.
81
The author
or editor of the Life of St. Sergii, unlike the author of the Life of St. Stefan,
assumed that Rostov was indeed part of the Rus
identity
In his study of the interrelation between early modern identity and the
minting of coins by the princes of Moscow, Thomas S. Noonan made an
important observation on the nature of Muscovite identity in the four-
teenth and fteenth centuries. He wrote:
One of the major elements in the formation of a Muscovite state was the success of
the Muscovite grand princes in creating a national Muscovite identity and then
imposing this new identity on the conquered peoples of other Rus
lands. Those
who came under Muscovite control were not just subjects who had obligations
to their Muscovite overlords. They were gradually assimilated into an emergent
imperial, Muscovite society and forced to assume a new identity. Residents of
Novgorod, Tver
s
Formative Years, in Culture and Identity in Muscovy, pp. 2638, here 3638.
88
See Ruslan Skrynnikov, Russkaia tserkov
Land? 79
Metropolitan Makarii between 1547 and 1549 could only further the
cause of national unication.
89
An important idea that symbolized and enhanced the unication
project was the old Kyivan concept of all Rus
princes competing for the grand-princely title but was also accepted by
their Mongol overlords. As far as is known today, the term rst appeared
in the title of the grand princes of Rus
princes under
Mongol suzerainty. The rst to use it was Grand Prince Mikhail of Tver.
Ivan Kalita occasionally included references to all Rus
was
limited at best to the territory controlled by the Golden Horde.
91
Still, it
is fair to assume that the concept of all Rus
. St.
Stefan, for example, was described by his hagiographer as a Rus
ian
by birth (rodom rusin) and a Slav by language, while St. Sergii, it was
89
It appears that this was the case even when Makarii helped reactivate local cults, which
were revived as constituent parts of the Muscovite pantheon. On Moscow
s involvement
in the promotion of local saints in Tver, see Isolde Thyr et, Accounts of the Transfer
of Relics and Cults of Saints in Muscovite Russia: Saints Arsenii and Mikhail of Tver
,
paper submitted to a conference on The Modern History of Eastern Christianity: Tran-
sitions and Problems, Harvard University, 2627 March 2004.
90
See A. A. Gorskii, Russkie zemli v XIIXIV vekakh. Puti politicheskogo razvitiia (Moscow,
1996), p. 102. Cf. Anna Khoroshkevich, Otrazhenie predstavlenii o regionakh vseia
Rusi i Rossiiskogo tsarstva v velikokniazheskoi i tsarskoi titulature XVI v., in Die
Geschichte Rulands im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert aus der Perspektive seiner Regionen, ed.
Andreas Kappeler (Vienna, 2004), pp. 10227, here 1068; Aleksandr Filiushkin,
Vgliadyvaias
ian Novgorodians.
92
The merchant Afanasii
Nikitin, a native of Moscows main competitor, Tver, who traveled to the
Muslim East and India, emerges from his travel notes as a representative
of a people called Rus
,
which comprised various lands. He regarded himself above all as a Rus
Christian.
93
This strong sense of a hybrid Rus
to dis-
tinguish themselves not only from foreigners outside the Rus
lands
but also from non-Slavs and non-Christians within the Muscovite realm.
That distinction becomes particularly apparent when one reads the Life
of St. Stefan, the apostle to the non-Slavic and non-Christian people
of Perm who created the Perm alphabet and written language. Born a
Rus
ian, according to his Life, and thus a native to the Slavic language
and the Christian faith, St. Stefan taught himself the Perm language
and created a new Perm grammar, and devised a previously unknown
alphabet for the needs of the Perm language [people], as required, and
translated Rus
unity.
So was a common political culture, which was shared by local Rus
elites
throughout the appanage period. The political structure that maintained
and reinforced Rus
territories under its control as a unit and usually looked to the grand
prince to represent its interests there. Under these circumstances, the
ofce of grand prince symbolized the principle of the unity of Mongol
Rus
Land? 81
princes, the latter emerged as gatherers of the Rus
cousins, whether
allies or enemies, as Lithuanians, while their territories were called the
Lithuanian Land. The author of the Expanded Chronicle Tale about the
Battle of Kulikovo Field showed great animosity toward the troops led
in support of Mamai by the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila, addressing
them as pagan Lithuanians.
95
The fact that Jogaila probably also led
Orthodox Rus
.
96
Political divisions clearly helped shape
the boundaries of Rus
during
the fteenth century.
The many faces of Rus
What does all this mean for the historiographic debate on the ethnogen-
esis of the Eastern Slavs? Should we speak of one Rus
nationality that
maintained its integrity until the end of the sixteenth century? Does it
make more sense to accept the view that by the fourteenth and fteenth
centuries there were three East Slavic nationalities? Should we hold to
the notion that there were only two (Lithuanian and Northeastern) East
Slavic nationalities at the time? Nor should we overlook the belief that
95
See excerpts from the Novgorod IV Chronicle in Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitve, pp. 30, 38.
96
See Slovo Sofoniia riazantsa, p. 11.
82 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
three separate East Slavic nationalities (or at least their precursors) existed
before and during the times of Kyivan Rus
elites
in a given region and at a given time. Any answer to these questions
should take into account the paramount importance of local identities
in the premodern world of East Slavdom. When speaking of the period
between the thirteenth and fteenth centuries, local identity should be
regarded as central to a number of broader identities, for which it served
as a nucleus. Among these, I would single out polity-based identities.
How strong were these identities, and how did they relate to the local
ones? Naturally, the answers to these questions cannot be constant but
would have to be adjusted for every geographical area and historical
period.
The concept of Rus
princes) invested
it with a new polity-based name and identity. As time passed, political,
religious, and cultural identities intermixed. Were Smolensk merchants
called Rus
Land? 83
of ethnic identity into a much broader cultural and political context in
his study of the consciousness of the author of the Primary Chronicle,
but that approach has never been applied to the study of later periods of
East Slavic history.
With regard to Rus
meant
very different things to different people at different times. Depending on
the period under consideration and the context in which they appear, such
terms as Rus
unity
was partly reected in the interest expressed by local chroniclers in the
affairs of other Rus
. In an entry
for 1216, the author of a Suzdal chronicle included the lands of Halych,
Kyiv, Smolensk, Chernihiv, Novgorod, and Riazan as constituent parts
of Rus
.
It would appear that the Mongol invasion helped preserve the sense
of Rus
Land.
First of all, close contact with the Mongol other must have promoted a
sense of all-Rus
Land
around Kyiv, Chernihiv and Pereiaslav. Second, with the destruction of
Kyiv in 1240, not only the former capital and title of the prince of Kyiv
but the Rus
. If a prince wanted to
claim that title, he had to declare his realm, whether Suzdal, Vladimir,
or Moscow, to be not just part of some outer Rus
Land
itself. Different princes and local elites followed a variety of strategies in
advancing their claims to the Rus
heritage.
84 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Although the Rurikid realm and its various principalities were known
to local and foreign observers alike as Rus
Land to a
given principality (to the exclusion of the rest of Rus
metropolitanate.
97
On the tendency to identify only particular Rus
. A case in
point is the alleged capture of Kyiv by Gediminas, reported in a much
later chronicle account.
2
Unfortunately, we have very few sources from
the fourteenth century to rely on.
Gediminas was probably the rst Lithuanian ruler to call himself Rex
Letvinorum et Ruthenorum and refer to his realm as regnum Letuinorum et
(multorum) Ruthenorum. His son Algirdas added to his title the Rus
des-
ignation grand prince (velykyi kniaz
).
3
Rus
viky (Kyiv,
1998), pp. 4355. According to some projections, the Lithuanians of the Grand Duchy
found themselves outnumbered two to one, or perhaps even four to one, by their East
Slavic neighbors. See Daniel Stone, The Polish-Lithuanian State, 13861795, vol. IV of A
History of East Central Europe (Seattle and London, 2001), p. 12.
2
For conicting interpretations of the chronicle account, see S. C. Rowell, Lithuania
Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 12951345 (Cambridge, 1994),
pp. 94111; Rusyna, Ukrana pid tataramy i Lytvoiu, pp. 4355.
3
See Rowell, Lithuania Ascending, pp. 6366.
85
86 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
an important element in the titles of Lithuanian princes and in the def-
inition of their state. It clearly reected local conditions, as most of the
lands ruled by Gediminas and his successors were former territories of
Kyivan Rus
iu i Litvoi: zapadnorusskie
zemli v sisteme russko-litovskikh otnoshenii kontsa XV pervoi treti XVI v. (Moscow, 1995).
For an English translation of selected chapters from Kroms book, see Russian Studies in
History 40, no. 4 (Spring 2002): 993.
The Lithuanian solution 87
fromthe beginning of the thirteenth century to the Union of Lublin). The
Galician-Volhynian Chronicle covers the thirteenth century, but then we
lose our main source of information. We are thus obliged to zigzag in pur-
suit of sources from western Ukraine to Smolensk and Lithuania, where
chronicle writing began sometime in the mid-fteenth century. The only
area that remains in focus despite these geographical shifts is Volhynia,
but no local chronicle writing went on there in the fourteenth century,
and there appears to have been little in the fteenth. Other sources help
ll the gap, but they are incomplete and, for the earlier period, not very
numerous. The scarcity of sources has left this eld open to rampant spec-
ulation and given rise to quite a few contradictory concepts and theories,
especially when it comes to the history of identities.
Was the Grand Duchy of Lithuania primarily a Lithuanian state, or
was it in fact a Lithuanian-Rus
-Lithuanian one,
given that Eastern Slavs accounted for most of its population? And who
were those Eastern Slavs? Were they Belarusians and Ukrainians, or were
they Russians, as imperial Russian historiography claimed? One of the
dominant trends in Belarusian national historiography claims most of
the historical legacy of the Grand Duchy for the Belarusian nation. This
claim gave rise to major disputes between Lithuanian and Belarusian his-
torians and political elites. After the disintegration of the USSR, the latter
claimed for Belarus not only the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius (in Belaru-
sian, Vilnia) but also the current coat of arms of Lithuania, which shows
a mounted equestrian with a raised sword a symbol deeply rooted in the
history of the Grand Duchy.
6
For Ukrainian historians, their countrys
association with the Grand Duchy is a fairly marginal episode, a sideshow
to their historical narrative, which focuses primarily on the exploits of
Kyivan princes and Zaporozhian Cossacks. Not so for Russian histori-
ography. As Aleksandr Filiushkin has recently observed, Russian interest
in the history of the Duchy was often driven by the need to legitimize
the partitions of Poland, the suppression of the Polish uprisings of the
nineteenth century, and the annexation of Lithuania, western Belarus,
and western Ukraine in the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
of 1939.
7
6
On the twentieth-century Polish-Lithuanian-Belarusian contest for Vilnius/Vilnia, see
Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569
1999 (New Haven and London, 2003), pp. 52102.
7
See Aleksandr Filiushkin, Vgliadyvaias
population
of the Grand Duchy Russian, Slavic studies in the West continue to be
inuenced by the imperial-era view that the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
belongs to Russian history. Textbooks on Russian history repeat this
view: the author of the best known of them, Nicholas Riasanovsky, refers
to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a Lithuanian-Russian state and to
its East Slavic population as Russians.
10
8
See, for example, Vladimir Pashutos critique of the views of Igor Grekov in Pashuto,
Boris Floria, and Anna Khoroshkevich, Drevnerusskoe nasledie i istoricheskie sud
by vos-
tochnogo slavianstva (Moscow, 1982), pp. 2829. Following the Russian prerevolutionary
tradition, Grekov was inclined to see the Grand Duchy as a predominantly East Slavic
state and thus a legitimate competitor of Muscovy. Pashuto, developing the Soviet-era
paradigm that treated the Grand Duchy as a Lithuanian feudal state (the Lithuanian
Soviet Socialist Republic was part of the USSR, and the socialist Lithuanian nation
could not be completely deprived of its history, as had been the case prior to 1917),
denied any legitimacy to Grekovs claim and regarded the Lithuanian gathering of
Rus
v oskolki
razbitogo zerkala.
10
For Riasanovskys interpretation of the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in
the context of Russian history, see his History of Russia (Oxford and New York, 1977),
pp. 14656.
The Lithuanian solution 89
Among the important historiographic problems pertaining to the his-
tory of East Slavic identities is the role of the Lithuanian experience
in enhancing distinctiveness among different groups of the Rus
popula-
tion. The long-held Soviet viewthat distinct East Slavic nationalities were
formed in the course of the fourteenth and fteenth centuries has recently
been challenged by Boris Floria. According to him, the Rus
elites of
the Commonwealth and Muscovy only began to regard each other as
distinct entities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. But
even then, in Florias opinion, there was no irreversible separation. Floria
also questions the grounds for speaking of a distinct Belarusian (and, by
implication, Ukrainian) ethnic identity prior to the seventeenth century,
11
thereby reviving the discussion that began in Ukrainian historiography
in the 1930s about the existence of a common Ukrainian-Belarusian
nationality during the early modern period.
12
In Belarus, Ihar Marza-
liuk, a leading authority on matters pertaining to premodern Belarusian
identities, seems unimpressed by Florias denial of a distinct medieval
and early modern identity to the Belarusians. Marzaliuk often equates
manifestations of Rus
ei A. S. Kotliarchuka), in Rus
-Litva-Belarus
. Problemy nats-
ional
nu svidomist
ukrans
koho
narodu v kintsi XVI na pochatku XVII st., Ukrans
turnyia stereo-
typy (XXVII st.) (Mahilio u, 2003). For a detailed critique of Marzaliuks general
approach to the problemof early modern Belarusian ethnic, social, cultural, and religious
stereotypes, see Henadz
pride of the Kyivan era and the resolve with which western Rus
elites developed over time? Did they play any role in the process? I
shall approach this question by focusing on the image of the Lithuanians
as it emerges from the Galician-Volhynian Chronicle the only Rus
.
16
Thus for the author of the Primary Chronicle the Lithuanians
gured as subjects conquered by the Kyivan princes who lived peace-
fully under Rus
evskaia i Ipat
.
20
It would appear that in the eyes of the chroniclers
the major factor distinguishing the Lithuanians from Galicia-Volhynias
other immediate neighbors, the Poles, was religion. Judging by the chron-
icle account, Prince Danylo even appealed to the principle of Christian
solidarity when calling upon the Poles to join forces with him against
the pagan Lithuanians. Prince Vasylko garnered special praise from the
chronicler for his victories over the pagans, who included the Lithuanians
and Yatvingians. The chronicler also praised such Lithuanian princes as
Vai selga (Vai salgas, Vai svilkas, Voishelk) who accepted Christianity and
were clients of the Galician-Volhynian rulers, while castigating those, such
as Traidenis, who remained pagan and hostile.
21
The case of Mindaugas, the Lithuanian grand prince and autocrat
of the whole Lithuanian Land, as the chronicler calls him, shows that
being Christian was insufcient to obtain a positive characterization in
the chronicle. The kind of Christianity (Eastern or Western) adopted
by a Lithuanian ruler and the nature of his relations with the Galician-
Volhynian princes were no less important factors. Mindaugas was gen-
erally in conict with the Galician-Volhynian princes. Accordingly, the
chronicler casts Mindaugass conversion in a negative light: the Lithua-
nian prince was insincere, for he continued his pagan practices, and the
baptismthat he accepted on the advice of Andreas, the master of the Riga
Knights, led to the defeat of the Christianization project in Lithuania.
22
The chroniclers ideal Lithuanian prince was Mindaugass son Vai selga,
18
Ibid., col. 721.
19
It appears that derogatory remarks in the Rus
ko-Volyns
along
the Nemunas (Nieman) River often preferred pagan Lithuanian princes
to Christian Rurikids fromGalicia-Volhynia. The authors of the Galician-
Volhynian Chronicle would drop such epithets as godless with regard
to the Lithuanians if they allied themselves with Rus
princes or served
in their armies.
26
Thus the acceptance of Christianity by the Lithuanian
princes was probably an important but not a necessary condition for the
submission of local elites.
What seems much more signicant in this context is that the Lithuanian
princes who emerged fromthe ruins of the Kyivan empire shared the same
political culture as their former Rus
folkways. Their
situation was very different fromthat of the Mongols, who at rst were not
only distinguished fromthe Rus
ian
The narratives of the thirteenth century show that the Rus
component
was important to the identity of ruling elites in the lands of present-day
Belarus. There, as in the Rus
and Rusin are intermixed with Smolensk and Smolnianin. In the text
of the treaty, the Latin language/people are the counterparts of Rus
,
latynin or nemchin of Rusin, and Ryzhanin of Smolnianin.
27
If terms based
on the name of Smolensk can be dened in this context as political or
local names, terms based on the name Rus
elites but also their subjects had begun to cast off their old tribal loyalties
and accept some form of Rus
.
29
As in the case of Galicia-Volhynia and Northeastern Rus
, the Belaru-
sian territories may not have been regarded as part of the Rus
Land in the
narrow sense of the term but were certainly considered to belong to it in
the broader sense. That was the case with the Polatsk principality, which
managed to avoid absorption by Rus
among themselves
27
The treaty is known in two versions, one from Gotland and the other from Riga. Both
are published in A. F. Vishne uski and Ia. A. Iukho, Historyia dziarzhavy i prava Belarusi
u dakumentakh i mat eryialakh (Minsk, 2003), pp. 1523. The division of the world in the
treaty text into Rus
Land and
assist him with his campaign against the Polovtsians.
31
In the second
case, the parties to the treaty refer to Smolensk, Polatsk, and Vitsebsk as
parts of the Rus
lands.
Its inhabitants were called Rusins or Polatskians, as opposed to the
Germans (nemtsy) or Ryzhanins of Riga.
33
A different system of political names and ethnonyms was employed by
the authors of the peace treaty of 1338 between Gediminas, the alleged
Lithuanian gatherer of the Rus
ka Rus
viky
(Kyiv, 1998), pp. 178, 184.
31
See PSRL, II: 303.
32
See the text of the circular in Polotskie gramoty XIII nachala XVI veka, comp. A. L.
Khoroshkevich, 4 vols. (Moscow, 197782), I: 3536.
33
Aside from Gerdens circular letter of 1264, see also the letter of 1300 from the Polatsk
Orthodox bishop to the Riga authorities and the treaty of 1330 between Polatsk and Riga
in Belorussiia v epokhu feodalizma. Sbornik
.
dokumentov i materialov v trekh tomakh, vol. I,
nos. 24 and 25 (Minsk, 1959), pp. 8283. For the texts of other Polatsk documents of
that period, see Polotskie gramoty.
96 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
instead by the general term Rus
Land was
employed not only as an ethnocultural but also as a political designation
of part of the Lithuanian state. The disappearance of the names of sepa-
rate principalities from the text of the treaty and the endorsement of the
notion of the Rus
community.
34
The Lithuanian princes acceptance of the concept of the Rus
Land as
a legitimate counterpart of the Lithuanian Land appears to have been a
short-lived phenomenon that did not survive the rst union of the Grand
Duchy with the Kingdom of Poland. While the Rus
ethnocultural iden-
tity was becoming increasingly established in the consciousness of Rus
-derived toponyms
in Belarus), the political component of that identity was manifestly dis-
appearing. It can be argued that with no distinct political entity to sup-
port it, the concept of the Rus
brand of
Christianity or remained pagan, the religious component of their iden-
tity remained largely dormant, or at least did not serve to differentiate the
Rus
and Lithuanian elites. As noted above, the local elites did not regard
the Lithuanian princes as other, and they were often chosen to rule
Rus
it
claimed numerous members of the Lithuanian princely elite.
37
That sit-
uation changed dramatically after the Union of Kreva, which required
the pagan Lithuanians to convert to Roman Catholicism. Jogaila him-
self accepted not only a new name but also a new faith, as did those of
his brothers who were not yet Christian, but those who were Orthodox
refused a second baptism. With that, the problem seemed resolved, but
it reappeared in 1413, when the Union of Horodl o replaced the personal
union between Poland and Lithuania with a dynastic one. The newunion
gave the Lithuanian nobles a broad range of privileges on condition that
they become Catholics. These privileges did not extend to the Orthodox
princely and nobiliary class.
38
A legal barrier had been erected between
the Poles and Lithuanians on the one hand and the Rus
nobility on the
other. It had nothing to do with the local (land) identity of the inhab-
itants of the Polatsk Land or Volhynia; instead, it united them on the
basis of religious identity while distinguishing them from the Lithuani-
ans. Moreover, the religious discrimination introduced by the Union of
Horodl o helped distinguish the Rus
elites themselves.
39
The Rus
nobles
in eastern Podilia prevented the transfer of their lands to Poland. Besides,
only the Lithuanian lands of the Grand Duchy recognized
Zygimantas as
their ruler, while the Rus
Zygimantas, did not enhance the princes popularity among the Ortho-
dox nobles. Nevertheless, he did not lose their support entirely. Some
of them, like Oleksander Chartoryisky, took part in the assassination of
nobles
from
Svitrigaila may be seen as events linked to the mobilization of
Rus
identity during the 1430s. We know that the decade preceding the
crisis of the 1430s also saw the rise of Lithuanian ethnic identity, which
found expression in Vytautass characterization of Lithuania (Auk staitija)
and Samogitia as one language and one people.
41
Polish observers also
interpreted the original conict between Wl adysl awand
Svitrigaila in eth-
nic and religious terms. One of them, Bishop Zbigniew Ole snicki, wrote
in 1430 to the papal representative at the Council of Basel that
Svitrigaila
had gained the support of the Rus
nobles, whose
preponderance over the Lithuanians he attributed to
Svitrigailas sup-
port, did not want peace for fear that their religion would suffer and their
inuence would be diminished.
42
Another indication that the ethnoreligious factor played a major role
in the conict can be found in texts of Rus
conict, see also Henryk L owmia nski, Studia nad dziejami Wielkiego
Ksie stwa Litewskiego (Pozna n, 1983), pp. 41324. On the support offered to
Svitrigaila
by Rus
kyi, Zakhidno-rus
.
45
Secondly, accord-
ing to the chronicler, and contrary to what we know from other sources,
there was not only a Lithuanianbut also a Rus
principality/grand-princely
ofce (kniazhen
by the Rus
and
Lithuania, with Rus
: thus
he reported that
Svitrigaila was installed as grand prince of Rus
once he
came to Polatsk and Smolensk. He also stated that
Zygimantas took over
the two princely ofces (of Lithuania and Rus
are
limited to the Smolensk, Polatsk, and Vitsebsk principalities. Nor does
his Rus
ko literatury, V:
16273.
45
See Igor
. Over the
years there developed more than one image of Rus
, the Rus
Land, and
the Rus
elites of their
former unity and glorious past was the Metropolitanate of Rus
. The
migrations of the higher clergy within the former Kyivan realm and the
maintenance of a common liturgical language and church practices also
helped preserve a sense of common identity long after the disappearance
of the unied political structure. Still, despite extensive contacts between
the various centers of Rus
church
The disintegration of the formerly unied realm and its common reli-
gious identity was reected in the jurisdictional history of the Rus
church
and the ofcial titles of its leaders. As noted in chapter 1, they initially
bore the title of Metropolitan of Rus
in 1299,
and the Metropolitanate of Halych was established in the next few years,
it became ofcially known as the Metropolitanate of Little Rus
. As dis-
cussed above,
47
the term made its way into the title of the last Galician
prince, Yurii II (132540), who occasionally styled himself Dux totius
Russiae Minoris. The grand dukes of Lithuania also established their own
metropolitanate ca. 1317. It is generally regarded as an attempt by Ged-
iminas to gain control over his Orthodox subjects and isolate them from
the foreign inuence of the metropolitans of all Rus
.
48
47
See chapter 2 of this book.
48
See Rowell, Lithuania Ascending, pp. 15161.
102 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Contrary to general belief, the name of the city of Kyiv was not incor-
porated into the title of the Rus
. The name of
Kyiv rst appears in the title of the metropolitan of all Rus
in documents
drawn up in Constantinople in 1354, possibly as a result of promises
made by Grand Duke Algirdas of Lithuania to convert to Orthodoxy
if the metropolitan see were moved from Moscow back to Kyiv. It may
also be related to what some historians consider an attempt on the part of
Kyivan elites to demonstrate their opposition to Algirdas and play an inde-
pendent role in church politics. They did so by welcoming Metropolitan
Feodorit, who had been consecrated in Bulgaria and was never recog-
nized by Constantinople. One of the Kyivan princes, Volodymyr Olher-
dovych (Algirdaitis), later even insisted on his historical right to nominate
metropolitans. It was probably in response to these developments in the
Grand Duchy that the patriarch of Constantinople added the name of
Kyiv to the title of the next metropolitan of all Rus
.
49
Constantinople probably reserved the title Metropolitan of Kyiv and
All Rus
i Vizantiia
v epokhu Kulikovskoi bitvy. Stat
.
51
As he sought to reunite the divided metropolitanate under his authority,
Cyprian emerged as a leading proponent of all-Rus
,
Cyprian insisted that his jurisdiction extended to all the Rus
Land and
that he should have access to his churches not only in the Grand Duchy
but also in Northeastern Rus
.
52
For him, all the Rus
unity. The
veneration of saints such as Metropolitan Petr, who came from Galicia,
probably had the same effect.
53
The unity of the metropolitanate was nevertheless short-lived, as the
fteenth century brought about its nal division. After Cyprians death,
Vytautas and Vasilii resumed their struggle for control of the metropoli-
tanate. The new metropolitan, Photius, lived in Moscow, and in 1415
51
On Metropolitan Cyprian and his activities, see ibid., pp. 26384. On the history of
metropolitans titles and the ideological meaning of changes in them, see Oneljan Prit-
sak, Kiev and All of Rus
i Vizantiia v epokhu
Kulikovskoi bitvy. Povest
church
and Rus
metropolitanate and its nal division in the mid-fteenth century, see John
Fennell, AHistory of the Russian Church to 1448 (London and NewYork, 1995); Pelenski,
The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus
Ul
ianovs
.
Kyiv was in one part of the divided metropolitanate, while Moscow, the
actual seat of the Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Rus
lands
extending between their core possessions in the late fteenth and early
sixteenth centuries.
The boundaries of Rus
.
56
The transformation of loyalty to the princely patrimony into
loyalty to a common fatherland (otechestvo) was potentially a decisive step
toward the formation of a new protonational identity. The term (in its
new meaning) was probably suggested by Tsamblak himself. It was rst
56
See Rusyna, Ukrana pid tataramy i Lytvoiu, pp. 21315.
106 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
used to dene the notion of fatherland in Rus
in the broader world is the textual history of the Eulogy for Vitold
(Vytautas), originally composed in the milieu of a native of Moscow, the
bishop of Smolensk and metropolitan of Lithuania, Gerasim. The ear-
liest text of the Eulogy is to be found in a manuscript commissioned by
Gerasim in 1428. There the author of the Eulogy presented Vytautas not
only as the ruler of the Grand Principality of Lithuania and Rus
(making
no distinction between them, in contrast to the Chronicle of the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania) but also as the suzerain of a group of other grand
principalities that the author called all the Rus
people ren-
dered homage and gifts to him, wrote the anonymous author.
58
Thus,
according to the author of the Eulogy, all the Rus
lands of
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) the Rus
.
By the mid-fteenth century, the Eulogy was incorporated into the
Chronicle of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which was edited several
times in the course of the fteenth and sixteenth centuries.
59
The text
57
On the medieval and early modern usage of the term otechestvo, see V. V. Kolesov, Mir
cheloveka v slove drevnei Rusi (Leningrad, 1986), pp. 24246.
58
See excerpts from the 1428 version of the Eulogy in Hrushevs
ko
literatury, V: 16465. Cf. his Pokhvala v. kn. Vytovtu, in idem, Tvory u 50 tomakh,
vol. V (Lviv, 2003), pp. 5065.
59
For the textual history of the Eulogy, see Sushyts
kyi, Zakhidno-rus
literati
after 1428. One of the most interesting changes directly related to our
discussion is the removal from the text of the Eulogy of a passage about
the Rus
lands within
the boundaries of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The passage about the
grand princes of Moscow, Tver, Riazan, and the republics of Novgorod
and Pskov did not disappear fromthe text of the Eulogy, but it was moved
alongside the reference to the rulers of Moldavia, Bessarabia, and Bul-
garia paying their respects to Vytautas.
60
The other Rus
appears to
have been removed from the list of ethnolinguistic relatives of Lithua-
nian Rus
Mus-
covites.
61
The refusal of the Lithuanian Rus
(as he was
referred to in the panegyric, according to prevailing practice). Accord-
ing to the chronicle, the battle was waged by Lithuanian warriors against
60
The changes to the text of the Eulogy included a mention of the grand princes of Moscow
separately from the other Rus
. Several times the Grand Duchy was called the Grand Principality of
Lithuania and Rus
.
63
After the loss
of Smolensk to Muscovy, Lithuania refused to recognize the addition of
Smolensk to the title of the grand princes of Moscow. It also avoided
the phrase Sovereign of All Rus
gured
not as Rus
,
but the motives behind them should be sought in the political aspirations
of individual princes, not in culturally based agendas.
65
The tragic fate
that awaited the defectors in Moscow, along with growing differences
in the political status of nobles in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and
the Grand Principality of Moscow, eventually deterred Rus
princes from
defecting to tyrannical Muscovy.
66
Between the land and the duke
The Chronicle of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (1430s) demonstrates
the level of vitality and mobilization of the Rus
. In the
broader sense (encompassing the whole territory of the Grand Duchy),
the term Lithuanian Land was employed in chronicle descriptions of
Tatar attacks on what today are Ukrainian territories. For example, in
his account of the battle between Vytautas and the Tatars at the Vorskla
River in 1399, the chronicler wrote that the Tatars raided the Lithuanian
Land all the way to Lutsk.
67
Why the Lithuanian Land? Lithuanian chroniclers borrowed the tale
about the Battle of the Vorskla River from the chronicles of Northeastern
65
On the princely defections, see Oswald P. Backus, Motives of West Russian Nobles in
Deserting Lithuania for Moscow, 13771514 (Lawrence, Kans., 1957).
66
See Olena Rusyna (Elena Rusina), Obshchnost
Land, while its principal subject, the Podolian Land, is given the same
prominence as the Lithuanian Land.
69
A historical compilation dating from the turn of the sixteenth cen-
tury, known as the Short Kyivan Chronicle, introduces another object of
local patriotism, the Volhynian Land, which is treated on a par with the
Liakh Land. Its inhabitants, the Volhynians, gure as prominently in
the chronicle as the Lithuanians (Lytva). The Rus
Land is mentioned
twice, but its relation to the Volhynian Land remains unclear. The rst
mention of the Rus
ko literatury, V: 16970.
The Lithuanian solution 111
the chronicler was using Rus
Land that
served as the protagonist of the Short Kyivan Chronicle.
Our reading of the early modern Lithuanian chronicles leaves the
impression that chroniclers working in Smolensk and present-day Belarus
used the term Rus
with
their realms alone? That seems to have been the tradition established in
the Rus
no-istoricheskogo izucheniia
politicheskogo stroia (Moscow, 1996); M. M. Krom, Rossiia i Velikoe kniazhestvo
Litovskoe. Dva puti v istorii, Angliiskaia naberezhnaia: Ezhegodnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo
nauchnogo obshchestva istorikov i arkhivistov, 4 (2000): 73100; Hieronim Grala, Diacy i
pisarze: wczesnonowo zytny aparat wl adzy wPa nstwie Moskiewskimi WielkimKsiestwie
Litewskim (XVI pocz. XVII w.), in Modernizacja struktur wladzy w warunkach
op o znienia, ed. Marian Dygo et al. (Warsaw, 1999), pp. 7391; Rusyna (Rusina),
Obshchnost
neskhozhego.
112 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
long-term effect the preservation of extensive local rights and privileges
that undermined the unity of the state. Only insignicant parts of the
Rus
lands at least
since the fteenth century). He was, however, the rst to explain why he
was doing so. The ideas expressed by Skaryna in the prefaces to his pub-
lications indicate a major revolution in the self-identication of the Rus
72
On the variety of methods employed by the Lithuanian princes to acquire Rus
lands, see
Rowell, Lithuania Ascending, pp. 8488, 93, 11516. On the strength of regionalismin the
Grand Duchy of Lithuania, see Liubavskii, Ocherk istorii Litovsko-Russkogo gosudarstva,
pp. 7688. For a discussion of social change in the Rus
ian
an indicator of his cultural identity, and Polatskian a term derived from
his birthplace that served to denote his local identity. It was the mobilized
Rus
identity that seems to have been the driving force behind Skarynas
publications, which heralded the advance of new thinking in the hitherto
stagnant world of Orthodox Rus
ko literatury, V: 11929.
75
See Ilarion, Sermon on Law and Grace, in Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus
, trans.
and with an introduction by Simon Franklin (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 329.
114 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Rus
identity.
One of the problems that Skarynas writings pose today is the vagueness
of the geographic boundaries of the Rus
lands
of the Grand Duchy, the entire Grand Duchy of Lithuania, or the Rus
lands within and outside the Grand Duchy? Or did they lie somewhere
else within the boundaries of these political and ethnocultural entities?
The most obvious markers of Skarynas identity, his self-identication as
a native of Polatsk and Lithuania, indicate the Rus
people.
The divisive union
The nal act in the history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania took
place at the Lublin Diet of 1569, which transformed the dynastically
linked Kingdom of Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania into a new
united polity, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Modern historians
The Lithuanian solution 115
of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus have seen the Union of Lublin as an act
that opened the door to Polish cultural and religious expansion in the
east and drastically diminished the inuence of the Rus
element in the
new state. What seems to have been overlooked is the positive long-term
impact of the union on the Ukrainian and Belarusian identity-building
projects. By bringing the Ukrainian lands of the Grand Duchy into the
Kingdom of Poland, the architects of the union reunited them in one
political structure with other Ukrainian territories, Galicia and western
Podilia, which had been part of the kingdomsince the fourteenth century.
In that sense the Union of Lublin revived the glory days of the Galician-
Volhynian principality, when for a short period most of the Ukrainian
ethnic territories were united in a single state. The union also established
the border which still survives, with minor modications between
Ukrainian and Belarusian Polisia. Does this mean that the union resulted
from the desire of sixteenth-century Ukrainian elites to reunite with their
brethren to the west and separate themfromthe culturally related but still
distinct proto-Belarusians to the north? Or was it the other way around:
did the border established between the kingdom and the duchy in 1569
inuence the nation-building process of the two East Slavic peoples? Or
does the answer lie somewhere between these alternatives?
A reading of the sources pertaining to the Union of Lublin shows that
the East Slavic factor did indeed play a crucial role in the outcome of
the Diet of 1569. The decisive inuence, however, came not from the
Rus
, whose military
advances during the Livonian War (155883) forced the Lithuanian elites
to seek closer cooperation with Poland. In trying to prevent the possible
loss of Ukrainian and Belarusian territories to Muscovy, the Lithuanian
elites unexpectedly lost a portion of them to their new partner in the
Commonwealth, the consolation being that they remained within the
same state. Another drawback to this arrangement was that the Lithuani-
ans all but lost their independence to the Poles. But the Lithuanian elites
were in no position to oppose the explicit will of the king and could not
control the desire of the Rus
delegates from
Volhynia (until then part of the Grand Duchy) were less than decisive in
their opposition to the union. The same was true of the Kyivan nobility
when the Polish authorities claimed the Kyivan Land as well, stressing
the need to protect their new Volhynian possessions from invasion by
the Crimean Tatars. The embattled Lithuanian deputies who had origi-
nally left the Diet in protest against the Polish takeover found themselves
obliged to return and consent to the union for fear that even more of the
116 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Rus
lands would be lost if they did not do so. As a result, the Lithuanians
retained the territories of what would later become Belarus.
76
Did the Union of Lublin come down to the result of Muscovite aggres-
sion, Lithuanian weakness, Polish greed, and the Rus
nobilitys desire
to get a better deal from the Poles? Was there nothing in it that could
be regarded as a manifestation of protonational identity? There are some
traces of that as well. The Lithuanians, for example, showed dogged loy-
alty to their state, whose integrity they tried to preserve by all possible
means. The Rus
,
pp. 15188.
77
See a quotation from the Diet speech of Prince Kostiantyn Vyshnevetsky of Volhynia in
Natalia Iakovenko, Narys istori Ukrany z naidavnishykh chasiv do kintsia XVIII stolittia
(Kyiv, 1997), pp. 12122. On the attitude of the Ukrainian princes and the Volhyn-
ian nobility toward the Lublin takeover, see Karol Mazur, Nieznana petycja szlachty
wol y nskiej do kr ola w dobie sejmu lubelskiego 1569 r., Sotsium. Al
manakh sotsial
no
istori (Kyiv) 2 (2003): 4156.
The Lithuanian solution 117
the historical boundaries of a given land and its ancient rights were
not violated. Nor did the Podlachians, Volhynians, and Kyivans show any
interest in banding together with their fellowRuthenians in Galicia. After
the Union of Lublin, when Volhynians and Kyivans began to encounter
Galicians on a more or less continuous basis, they viewed them as for-
eigners (panove zahranychnyky). It was the Poles, not the Rus
delegates to
the Diet, who indicated the former status of Kyiv as capital of the country
in making their case for its incorporation into the Commonwealth. The
Kyivans and Volhynians themselves left little evidence of their feelings
about the whole undertaking.
78
What is known today from the chronicles and ofcial documents of
the Grand Duchy nevertheless permits the assumption that the lands
transferred to the Kingdom of Poland as a result of the Union of Lublin
were somewhat different from the rest of the Lithuanian Rus
lands. First
of all, they were among the least integrated into the Lithuanian state. As
early as 1392, for example, the Volhynian nobles acquired the same rights
as those of their counterparts in the Lviv Land on the other side of the
Polish-Lithuanian border. The Kyivan Land, ruled by the Ruthenized
descendants of Algirdas, was by far the most independent of all the ter-
ritorial units of the Grand Duchy. The Kyivan princes and boyars often
found themselves in opposition to the central authorities. During the
wars of the 1430s they were staunch supporters of
Svitrigaila. According
to the later chronicles, some of them were involved in the assassination of
Grand Prince
Zygimantas in 1440. In 1481 they plotted to kill another
grand duke so as to replace himwith one of their own. In 1508 the Kyivan
nobles supported the revolt of Mykhailo Hlynsky in the hope of restor-
ing the Kyiv principality. Even if some of these accounts were actually
fabrications of a later period, their presence in sixteenth-century chron-
icles suggests that there was indeed a tradition of Kyivan alienation
from the main centers of power in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
79
The Kyivans fell into line only as they became more dependent on their
78
Pelenskis argument that religious and national considerations were of secondary impor-
tance to participants in the Lublin Diet, including those fromthe Rus
elites but
because of the dominance of local (land) and regional (trans-land) iden-
tities in the Rus
iden-
tity. It also created conditions for the rst manifestation of Rus
solidarity
based not on the principle of the dynastic state but of ethnocultural unity.
That type of solidarity underlay Rus
elite involvement in
Svitrigailas wars
of the 1430s. It also manifested itself in the perception of Muscovites as
others, which was readily adopted in Lithuanian Rus
. Boris Florias
observation that this occurred only in the late sixteenth and early sev-
enteenth centuries relies on the recording of that attitude in numerous
sources of the period. Signs of the othering of the Muscovites are indeed
readily apparent in the avalanche of polemical works that partly preceded
but mostly followed the Union of Brest (1596). Still, the dearth of such
sources before the end of the sixteenth century should not lead one to
conclude that the Lithuanian Rus
elites often
80
On the Volhynian and Kyivan lands, apart from the relevant sections of Yakovenkos
Narys istori Ukrany, see also Dvornichenko, Russkie zemli Velikogo kniazhestva Litovskogo,
pp. 94106.
81
Like some other lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the Volhynian and Kyivan
lands enjoyed autonomous status, protected by special decrees and privileges. On this
special status, the political attitudes of local elites, and their relation to the decisions of
the Lublin Diet, see Dvornichenko, Russkie zemli Velikogo kniazhestva Litovskogo, pp. 91
101, 12124.
The Lithuanian solution 119
regarded Northeastern Rus
.
Although the idea of all-Rus
under the
leadership of Moscow helped solidify the political and cultural border
between Lithuanian and post-Mongol Rus
princes from
leaving for Muscovy in the early sixteenth century or joining the King-
dom of Poland in the second half of that century. At the Lublin Diet of
1569, the Lithuanian delegates justied their concessions to the Poles
with references to their duty to their fatherland, the Grand Duchy,
82
but
the concept itself was neither well developed nor in any way central to
the political discourse of the time. Whatever the positive feelings of the
Rus
.
As we have seen, the concept of loyalty to the grand prince and the state
that he embodied was secondary to the prevailing local identities of the
day. But what about broader elite identities that transcended individual
lands? It is in the existence of such identities that present-day historians
see precursors of the modern Ukrainian and Belarusian nations. There is
certainly a sizable body of evidence attesting to the existence of regional
identities, encompassing more than one land, in the late medieval and
early modern periods. The tendency of the Smolensk-based chronicler
of the mid-fteenth century to refer to Smolensk, Polatsk, and Vitsebsk
as the Rus
the
rise of Moscow. Here I apply this clich e in a broader sense, covering not
only the rise to prominence of the Principality of Moscow and its rulers
but also the creation under their leadership of a unied state known in
Western ethnography of the fteenth and sixteenth centuries and present-
day Western scholarship as Muscovy.
What was the ethnonational identity of early modern Muscovite Rus
?
Was it as fragmentedandlocal innature as the identity of LithuanianRus
?
Edward L. Keenans interpretation of Muscovite history suggests that
ethnic identity as it existed among the secular Muscovite elites was much
less important than clan loyalty, and that those elites had much more
in common with Turkic and Lithuanian elites than with the Muscovite
peasantry.
1
Nancy Shields Kollmann has reached similar conclusions in
her study of social identities in early modern Russia: The boundaries
of identity in pre-modern times were not xed but uid, the content of
identity was not national but local and personal. And this was the case
regardless of how strong a learned discourse a given social body might
have possessed about community and society.
2
It is hard to disagree
with this statement, which, apart from being based on a thorough study
of the sources, is particularly convincing because it places Muscovy in
the same category as most early modern European countries. Recently,
however, Valerie Kivelson has made a strong case for the existence of
1
Edward L. Keenan, Royal Russian Behavior, Style and Self-Image, in Ethnic Russia in
the USSR: The Dilemma of Dominance, ed. Edward Allworth (New York, 1980), pp. 316.
2
Nancy Shields Kollmann, Concepts of Society and Social Identity in Early Modern
Russia, in Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine, ed. Samuel H. Baron
and Nancy Shields Kollmann (DeKalb, Ill., 1997), pp. 3451, here 44. On the connection
between the concept of honor and social identity in Muscovy, see Kollmanns monograph
By Honor Bound: State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Ithaca and London, 1999),
pp. 5863.
122
The rise of Muscovy 123
powerful horizontal and vertical bonds in Muscovite society that qual-
ify it, in her opinion, for the status of a political community or even a
nation.
3
Acknowledging that learned discourses do not tell the whole
story, we shall take Kivelsons argument into consideration and subject
the discourses of the period to closer scrutiny, for it is there that identity-
and nation-building projects took shape and the roots of later national
identities are to be found.
In this chapter I seek the origins of modern Russian identity in the
discourses created by Muscovite elites of the late fteenth and sixteenth
centuries. I begin with the declaration of political independence by Ivan
III and end with the rule of his grandson, Ivan the Terrible ofcially
the rst tsar on the Muscovite throne and often also regarded as the cre-
ator of a truly multiethnic Muscovite state the immediate precursor of
the Russian Empire. Ivan IV used his diplomatic skills and later often
employed brute force to unite his country, relentlessly persecuting local
elites and suppressing anything that smacked of opposition to central
control. In many ways, the events of the Time of Troubles the period
of social upheaval and foreign intervention in the rst two decades of the
seventeenth century can be regarded as consequences of the changes
introduced by Ivan the Terrible. That period, which lies outside the scope
of the present chapter, inaugurated a new era in Muscovite history one
that was free (insofar as the past ever relaxes its grip) from the impact,
consequences, blessings, and curses of Mongol rule. The Time of Trou-
bles found its reection in numerous texts expressing the new concepts
and structures of Great Russian (Muscovite) identity. Muscovite views of
themselves and their neighbors in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries will therefore be addressed in the following chapters.
4
Muscovy and its rulers
In the course of the fourteenth century, the princes of Moscow all but
monopolized the ofce of grand prince of Vladimir, but the nal victory
of Moscow in the contest for supremacy in Mongol Rus
can be dated
only to the mid-fteenth century. It coincided with the disintegration of
the Golden Horde and the creation of smaller khanates in its place, which
3
See Valerie Kivelson, Muscovite Citizenship: Rights without Freedom, Journal of
Modern History 74 (September 2002): 46589.
4
For a survey of the period, apart from the general works on Russian history cited earlier,
see Robert O. Crummey, The Formation of Muscovy, 13041613 (London and New York,
1987). For a recent interpretation of the era and new literature on the subject, see Nancy
Shields Kollmann, Russia, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. VII, c. 1415
c. 1500 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 74870.
124 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
left the princes of Moscow stronger and better positioned than anyone
else to take advantage of the decline of Mongol (Qipchaq) power. After
a prolonged dynastic crisis that resulted in wars of succession (1420s
50s), Moscow again emerged as the primary gatherer of the Rus
lands
under Mongol tutelage. In the process, the principality turned itself into
a new power in the region and constructed a new type of identity for its
secular and religious elites. These developments are closely associated
with Grand Prince Ivan III, who ruled from 1462 to 1505.
The rst ruler of Moscow to be installed without the formal approval
of the Horde, he gained a place of honor in Muscovite and, later, Rus-
sian historical tradition next to Dmitrii Donskoi for overthrowing Mon-
gol supremacy. This signal development was allegedly the result of a
confrontation (which failed to develop into a full-blown battle) between
Ivans troops and the army of Khan Ahmed of the Great Horde at the
Ugra River in 1480. But that confrontation, which took place a century
after the Battle of Kulikovo Field, had even less effect on actual rela-
tions between the Horde and the Rus
e)
created and, last but not least, the army, which had relied on the support
of the appanage princes, was reformed to reduce the rulers dependence
on the princely and boyar elite. It was also during the tenure of Ivan and
Vasilii that a new type of ideology was developed and employed in the
interests of the dynasty and the autocratic state it had created. The major
The rise of Muscovy 125
goal of the new ideology, presented in numerous historical and literary
works of the period, was to legitimize the power of the Muscovite rulers
both internally and externally. The marriage of Ivan III to Sophia Pale-
ologina, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, which was orchestrated
by the papacy, and the recognition of Vasilii III as tsar by Emperor Maxi-
milian in 1514 were important elements of the new ideological program.
The search for a new legitimacy was fullled in 1547, when Ivan IV was
ofcially installed on the Muscovite throne with the title of tsar.
Ivan IV the Terrible (153384) inherited a rising state that was nev-
ertheless beset with numerous problems resulting from the rapid expan-
sion of the late fteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as well as from
strife between boyar groupings that he had witnessed in childhood. Ivan
entered the Muscovite political scene as a great negotiator and peace-
maker, convoking assemblies of the land (zemskie sobory) and seeking
to establish ties with local elites. He initiated an ambitious program of
reforms, ranging from central and local administration to the system of
landholding, from the law code to the military and the church. He was
also a successful empire-builder, adding to his Russian (Rossiiskoe) tsar-
dom two other tsardoms, those of Kazan (1552) and Astrakhan (1556).
Ivans problems began when he turned his army westward. The Livo-
nian War that he began in 1558 promised easy prey, and indeed in a few
years the Livonian Order was defeated and disbanded, while the tsars
troops took Polatsk away from its Lithuanian masters. The success of
Muscovite arms in Livonia alarmed the tsars western neighbors. First
Lithuania entered the war, then Poland (after the Union of Lublin in
1569). Sweden and Denmark also joined the camp of Muscovys ene-
mies. Polatsk was recaptured and Narva lost, leaving Ivan the Terrible
with little choice but to turn to the papacy for intervention and media-
tion, exploiting Romes undying hope of involving Muscovy in the war
with the Ottomans and converting it to Catholicism. The papacy com-
plied, sending the Jesuit Antonio Possevino as its legate to negotiate peace
with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1582. Ivan found himself
obliged to accept the harsh treaty conditions, losing not only what he had
gained at the beginning of the war but also the foothold on the Baltic
littoral that his grandfather had acquired after subjecting Novgorod and
its possessions to Muscovite rule.
By that time Ivan was gravely ill, while his country was devastated not
only by the prolonged and disastrous war but also by the policy of oprich-
nina. In pursuing it, Ivan set aside part of the Muscovite realmfor himself,
introducing a separate administration and army (oprichniki) in an appar-
ent attempt to establish his unlimited rule and build a utopian authori-
tarian state. The experiment, which lasted from 1564 to 1571, exhausted
126 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
the countrys material and human resources as hundreds if not thousands
of members of the nobiliary elite and inhabitants of cities such as Nov-
gorod fell victim to the terror introduced by the tsar and implemented
by his troops. Explanations of the terror range from those that blame
the tsars apparently erratic and illogical behavior on his illness to those
that see a certain logic in all the zigzags of his policy and attribute them
to a carefully crafted plan. An interpretation advanced recently by the
St. Petersburg scholar Ruslan Skrynnikov explains the oprichnina by the
tsars inability to honor his social contract with the elites and reward them
for their service with new land grants. Under those circumstances, Ivan
allegedly had to resort to brute force in order to ensure the loyalty of the
elites and force them to fulll their obligations to the state.
5
The jury
is still out on Ivan himself, his puzzling behavior and contradictory poli-
cies. It might be argued, however, that Ivan the Terrible left his state more
centralized than he found it, with a political and ethnocultural identity
stronger and more distinct than those of its imagined others. While
Ivans policies can be blamed for creating preconditions for the social
upheavals of the Time of Troubles, they also helped Muscovy survive as
a state united and indivisible.
The search for origins
Ivan the Terrible strongly believed in the Kyivan roots of his dynasty
and the state. So did dozens of historians who applied his belief to the
process of nation formation, turning to Kyiv in search of the origins of
the Great Russian nation as a whole. The rst historian to challenge the
traditional scheme of Russian history, which closely linked not to say
lumped together the history of Kyivan and Mongol (later Muscovite)
Rus
, was not the Ukrainian Mykhailo Hrushevsky but the Russian Pavel
Miliukov. Having studied the monuments of Muscovite historical thought
and culture, Miliukov rejected the prevailing view of the Principality of
Moscow as a continuator of Kyivan Rus
, who saw more continuity between the political and legal develop-
ment of Kyivan and Lithuanian Rus
.
8
Still,
Miliukovs interpretation remained marginal in twentieth-century Rus-
sian historiography, overshadowed by the much more traditional view
of Russian and East Slavic history formulated by his famous professor,
Vasilii Kliuchevsky.
In his lectures on Russian history, originally written in the 1880s and
published in the rst two decades of the twentieth century, Kliuchevsky
dened his subject as the history of the Russian state and nationality,
which was divided into Great Russian and Little Russian branches. He
believed in the existence of one Rus
nationality during
the Kyivan period but rejected the views of scholars like Boris Rybakov,
who claimed that it existed until the fourteenth and fteenth centuries.
Also mistaken, in Cherepnins opinion, were those scholars who claimed
that only the Mongol invasion prevented the consolidation of the Rus
nationality as a
major national tragedy. Cherepnin was also critical of Dmitrii Likhachevs
efforts to revive and legitimize the traditional interpretation within the
parameters of Soviet class-baseddiscourse. The renownedliterary scholar
held the feudal elites (ruling classes of feudal society) responsible for
the disintegration of Rus
fromNortheastern Rus
. While rejecting
certain elements of the Tatar yoke myth in favor of the social formation
paradigm, Cherepnin remained a hostage of the negative assessment of
Mongol rule in traditional Russian historiography.
15
While Soviet historians searched for the origins of the Rus
nationality
by invoking objective laws of historical development, literary scholars
promoted a more traditional interpretation of Russian nation-building.
Some of them, like Likhachev, sought to push the creation of the Russian
nationality (if not nation) as far back in history as possible. If for most
historians the reign of Ivan III witnessed the creation of the centralized
Russian state, for Likhachev it was the time when the Russian national
state took shape. He dated the cultural revival of the Russian people
and the rise of their national identity (pod
em narodnogo samosoznaniia)
to the times of Dmitrii Donskoi the period immediately after the Bat-
tle of Kulikovo Field (1380).
16
Writing in the 1960s, another literary
scholar, G. M. Prokhorov, saw the Kulikovo battle as giving rise not only
to Russian national consciousness but also to the actual formation of the
Russian people per se. He claimed that the fourteenth century witnessed
the rise of two peoples that managed to form their respective states, the
Ottoman Turks and the Great Russians.
17
From the 1960s, the Kulikovo battle turned into the starting point of
Great Russian history and a symbol of Russian nationalism not only in
the writings of literary scholars but also in the novels of Russian writers
and the historical imagination of numerous proponents of the Russian
national and religious revival. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in one of his
short stories about a pilgrimage to Kulikovo Field. In the years 198082,
faced with the need to promote Russian patriotism after the invasion of
Afghanistan and respond to the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland,
the Soviet authorities jumped on the bandwagon and allowed a prolonged
commemoration of the six-hundredth anniversary of the Kulikovo battle.
Ironically, given the conditions of the Cold War, public discussion of the
event that presumably put a stop to aggression from the East took on a
pronounced anti-Western character. The celebrations were regarded as a
Great Russian (not all-Soviet or East Slavic) commemoration, while the
Ukrainians were allowed (not without some reluctance on the part of the
15
Ibid., pp. 7679.
16
See D. S. Likhachev, Natsional
lands as part of
their patrimony had little to do with their sense of belonging to a common
East Slavic ethnos.
21
Some ideas of the Russian Eurasianists have been
further developed by Donald Ostrowski. He has successfully challenged
the myth of the Tatar yoke and persuasively identied numerous bor-
rowings of the Muscovite political elite and society from their Qipchaq
overlords.
22
The history of Muscovite secular and religious claims to
the Kyivan heritage has been thoroughly reconstructed by Jaroslaw
Pelenski.
23
These and numerous other works by Western authors continue the revi-
sionist trend initiated by Pavel Miliukov in the late nineteenth century and
offer a good basis for our present attempt to challenge the traditional
scheme of the formation of the Russian nation. I shall begin with a close
look at the origins of one of the founding myths of modern Russia, that
of the Tatar yoke.
The Tatar yoke
The rule of the Qipchaq khans over the vast territories of Northeastern
Rus
always dis-
tinguished itself from the Horde and that Muscovite centralization was
undertaken not with the encouragement of the khans but against their
will. Nevertheless, long habituation to Mongol rule led Muscovy to adopt
a number of important elements of its political culture and thinking, as
well as its social and economic practices. Such borrowings included the
concept that all the land belonged to the ruler; the structure of the boyar
council; the system of dual administration, in which regional military
and civil power was concentrated in the hands of representatives of the
center; the institution of mestnichestvo, which made the servitors status
dependent on that of his family; and the granting of land on condition
of military service (pomest
at the
turn of the fourteenth century, he was not only moving to a more secure
and economically prosperous location but also establishing himself in
the heartland of the Rus
, pp. 22843.
26
See Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, p. 138; Prokhorov,
Etnicheskaia integratsiia
v Vostochnoi Evrope, pp. 543, here 2229.
The rise of Muscovy 135
church, once freed from the tutelage of Constantinople, began to engage
in anti-Tatar propaganda as its own interests dictated. Thus, when Grand
Prince Vasilii II of Moscow agreed to the installation of a new auto-
cephalous metropolitan in 1448 without the blessing of Constantinople,
the church reciprocated by supporting the prince against his rival, Dmitrii
Shemiaka, accusing the latter of pro-Tatar and anti-Rus
princes
and church hierarchs was later complemented by the myth of the Tatar
yoke, which vilied the Golden Horde and its practices. The term itself
came into existence quite late. It cannot be traced back further than the
last quarter of the sixteenth century, when it appears in one of the West-
ern descriptions of Muscovy. It gained popularity only in the seventeenth
century and apparently entered Muscovite literature through the inter-
mediacy of Kyivan literati in the second half of that century.
28
The two
motifs in combination effectively served as a founding myth of Muscovy
and the Great Russian nation. The latter, according to that myth, came
into existence as a result of centuries of heroic struggle to preserve its
Kyivan heritage from obliteration by the oppressive Mongol regime. In
the nineteenth century, Aleksandr Pushkin would claim that Russia had
shielded and saved the West from the horrors of a Mongol invasion. The
West, by that logic, was greatly indebted to Russia.
Rediscovering Kyiv
Another founding myth of the Muscovite state was that of its Kyivan ori-
gins. In the mid-fteenth century, as Muscovite metropolitans dropped
the name of Kyiv from their ofcial title, while Moscow-based literati
denied the ancient capital of Rus
Land, replac-
ing it in that capacity with Moscow, nothing seemed to indicate a possible
27
See Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, pp. 13963.
28
For a critique of the myth of the Tatar yoke, see ibid., pp. 24448; Keenan, On
Certain Mythical Beliefs, pp. 2526.
136 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
revival of interest in the heritage of ancient Kyiv among the Moscowelites.
Nevertheless, the second half of the fteenth century witnessed just such
a revival, inuenced by factors of a religious and political nature. The
rst of these was interest in the roots of Rus
Christianity, generated by
polemics over the Union of Florence, the division of the Rus
metropoli-
tanate, and the de facto autocephaly of its Muscovite portion. The second
factor was the emergence of Muscovy as a fully independent polity that
had thrown off the power of the Qipchaq khanate and was looking for
historical justication of its new status. In both cases, the search for a
usable past led to Kyiv or through Kyiv to Byzantium, making the history
of Kyivan Rus
ian of all
metropolitans in terms of his actual pastoral experience, and by his suc-
cessor, Metropolitan Fotii. The rst half of the fteenth century saw the
introduction into the Muscovite church calendar of a number of feasts
directly related to Kyiv and the Kyivan origins of Rus
Orthodoxy. These
included the feasts of St. Olha, St. Antonii of the Kyivan Cave Monastery,
and the Varangian martyrs. The fteenth-century Muscovite church cal-
endar also included feasts of St. Volodymyr and the dedication of the
Church of St. George in Kyiv, as well as two feasts devoted to SS. Borys
and Hlib.
29
When it comes to Muscovite texts, the rst indications of the
new interest in Kyivan times on the part of the Muscovite literati appear
in the late 1450s and 1460s. They are to be found in polemical works con-
cerning the Union of Florence that discuss St. Volodymyr and his role in
the baptism of Rus
.
30
Among the works of the Kulikovo cycle, the earli-
est to evince strong interest in the Kyivan past is the Oration on the life of
Dmitrii Ivanovich (1470s). Dmitrii Donskoi is presented there not only
as the grandson of Grand Prince Ivan Kalita, the gatherer of the Rus
Land, but also as the fruitful branch and ne ower of Tsar Volodymyr
(Vladimir), the new Constantine, who baptized the Rus
Land; a relative
of the new miracle workers Borys and Hlib.
31
References to the Kyivan
29
See Richard D. Bosley, The Changing Prole of the Liturgical Calendar in Muscovys
Formative Years, in Culture and Identity in Muscovy, 13591584, ed. A. M. Kleimola
and G. D. Lenhoff (Moscow, 1997), pp. 3537.
30
See Jaroslaw Pelenski, The Origins of the Ofcial Muscovite Claims to the Kievan
Inheritance, in idem, The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus
, pp. 8788.
31
Slovo o zhitii i prestavlenii Velikogo kniazia Dmitriia Ivanovicha, in Khrestomatiia po
drevnei russkoi literature, comp. N. K. Gudzii (Moscow, 1973), pp. 18088, here 180. The
The rise of Muscovy 137
past in the Oration also nd parallels in the chronicles of the period,
which helps to explain the timing and signicance of the new interest in
the Kyivan heritage.
According to Pelenski, the compilers of the Muscovite Codex of 1472
not only included the Oration in their compilation but also extended the
Kyivan princely line fromRurik and St. Volodymyr all the way to Ivan III.
This was done in the entry for 1471 and spelled out in statements made
during negotiations between the Novgorodians and Muscovite envoys.
The latter allegedly stated on behalf of the tsar:
From antiquity you, the people of Novgorod, have been my [Tsar Ivan IIIs] pat-
rimony, fromour grandfathers and our ancestors, fromGrand Prince Volodymyr,
the great grandson of Rurik, the rst grand prince in our land, who baptized the
Rus
land. And fromthat Rurik until this day, you have recognized only one ruling
clan (rod) of those grand princes, rst those of Kyiv, then Grand Prince Vsevolod
[III] Yurievich, [and Grand Prince] Dmitrii [Ivanovich Donskoi] of Vladimir.
And from that grand prince until my time, we, their kin, have ruled over you, and
we bestow [our mercy] upon you, and we protect you against [all adversaries],
and we are free to punish you if you do not recognize us according to the old
tradition.
32
This statement may be regarded as one of the rst expressions of the
translatio theory that postulated the transfer of power in the Rus
lands
fromKyiv to Vladimir on the Kliazma and then to Moscow. The Moscow
politicians and scribes needed such a theory to legitimize their claims to
Novgorod, but apparently it also had an actual political connection with
Kyiv. In their efforts to play off the Grand Duchy of Lithuania against
Muscovy, the Novgorodians invited Prince Mykhailo Olelkovych of Kyiv
to rule them, and it is possible that Muscovite literati produced the trans-
latio argument in order to offset the historical arguments advanced by
supporters of the Kyivan prince.
33
If that was indeed the case, then from
its very inception the translatio theory not only established a link between
Moscow and Kyiv but also did so at Kyivs expense, excluding the Kyivan
Kyivan theme, in the form of numerous references to Kyivan princes and personages,
was also developed in other works of the Kulikovo cycle written contemporaneously
with the Oration and later. Zadonshchina, for example, contains references not only to
St. Volodymyr but also to Ruriks son Ihor, Yaroslav the Wise, and the legendary Boian,
the Kyivan minstrel who also appears in the Tale of Igors Campaign. See Slovo Sofoniia
riazantsa o velikom kniazi Dmitrii Ivanoviche, in Povesti o Kulikovskoi bitve, ed. M. N.
Tikhomirov, V. F. Rzhiga, and L. A. Dmitriev (Moscow, 1959), p. 9.
32
Adapted from Pelenski, The Origins of the Ofcial Muscovite Claims, p. 90.
33
Ibid., p. 90. On the Novgorod and Pskov communities practice of inviting princes
from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, see Anna Khoroshkevich, Istoricheskie sud
by
belorusskikh i ukrainskikh zemel
by vostochnogo
slavianstva (Moscow, 1982), pp. 14041.
138 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
(and, by extension, Lithuanian) princes from the ofcial genealogy of the
ruling house of Rus
.
The appearance in the chronicles of Moscows claimto the Kyivan her-
itage prepared the way for Ivan IIIs assumption of the title of autocrat
of all Rus
. The
resumption of hostilities in the years 15001503 led to the Muscovite
conquest of a number of new Rus
ba
vostochnoslavianskikh narodov za vossoedinenie, in Pashuto, Floria, and Khoroshke-
vich, Drevnerusskoe nasledie, pp. 17172.
The rise of Muscovy 139
the Muscovite ruler until the coronation of Ivan the Terrible in 1547, it
was occasionally used by his grandfather, Ivan III, and recognized by the
Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I as the legitimate title of Ivan IIIs
father, Vasilii III. It was apparently during Vasiliis reign that a political
and historical treatise known as the Tale of the Princes of Vladimir was
written a work that presented the Muscovite rulers as heirs of Emperor
Constantine Monomachos of Byzantium and Augustus Caesar of Rome.
The authors of the Tale in fact followed the argument rst developed in
the early sixteenth century (and rejected by the Lithuanian authorities) by
Metropolitan Spiridon-Savva of Kyiv, a native of Tver. Apparently under
the inuence of theories about the Roman origins of the Lithuanians,
Spiridon-Savva rooted the genealogy of the Rurikid princes in the impe-
rial Roman past and advanced a hypothesis about the Byzantine origins
of the Muscovite princes claim to tsardom.
36
The authors of the Tale of the Princes of Vladimir found Kyivan history
useful in establishing both connections, for it linked the rulers of Moscow
with Augustus not only through Constantine Monomachos (an uncle of
Prince Volodymyr Monomakh of Kyiv) but also through an alleged rela-
tive of Rurik named Prus. It also introduced Lithuanian genealogical leg-
ends into the Muscovite grand narrative, facilitating the incorporation of
Lithuanian Rus
princes as well. The Life of St. Stefan of Perm gives a good idea of
the problems faced by fourteenth-century missionaries working among
non-Slavic and non-Christian inhabitants of Mongol Rus
. That category
of the population increased dramatically after the annexation of the Nov-
gorodian Land. Thus it appears that the viewof the mid-sixteenth century
as a period of Muscovys imperialization is not free of pitfalls. Geoffrey
41
See Pelenski, State and Society in Muscovite Russia, p. 237; L. N. Pushkarev,
Otrazhenie istorii Russkogo tsentralizovannogo gosudarstva v ustnom narodnom
tvorchestve XVIXVII vv., in Rossiia na putiakh tsentralizatsii. Sbornik statei, ed.
D. S. Likhachev et al. (Moscow, 1982), pp. 25055.
42
Pelenski subscribes to this view when he states: Until 1552 it [Muscovy] had primarily
existed as a Great Russian state . . . Subsequently Russia ceased to be regarded as a single
homogeneous country and began to be viewed as an empire (state of states) composed
of a diversity of tsardoms, lands and cities (State and Society in Muscovite Russia,
p. 237).
43
See Anna Khoroshkevich, Otrazhenie predstavlenii o regionakh vseia Rusi i Rossiiskogo
tsarstva v velikokniazheskoi i tsarskoi titulature XVI v., in Die Geschichte Rulands im.
16 und 17. Jahrhundert aus der Perspektive seiner Regionen, ed. Andreas Kappeler (Vienna,
2004), pp. 10227, here 11926.
142 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Hosking, for example, acknowledges that by 1552 Muscovite Rus
was
already a multinational state and regards the conquest of Kazan as the
moment when Muscovy set out on its career of empire by conquering
and annexing for the rst time a non-Russian sovereign state.
44
One can
certainly accept this interpretation of the conquest of Kazan (if Russian
is understood to mean East Slavic), but is that howthe Muscovite elites
of the period saw it?
Of course, contemporaries did not have our advantage of hindsight
and were unaware that Kazan would be followed by Astrakhan, western
Siberia, and eventually Central Asia. Besides, the Muscovite elites of the
age of Ivan the Terrible thought (or, better, articulated their thoughts)
not exclusively but primarily in terms of polities and dynasties. Thus the
annexation of the Volga khanates was considered an addition of two new
tsardoms to the tsardom of Rus
princes, from the Oka River all the way to the Kama River
and the Caspian Sea. They claimed Astrakhan by the simple expedient
of identifying it as the Kyivan-era Principality of Tmutarakan.
49
Some
Muscovite authors established the patrimonial rights of Ivan the Terrible
to Kazan by tracing his lineage through Dmitrii Donskoi to Volodymyr
Monomakh and St. Volodymyr himself. Others, like the author of Kazan-
skaia istoriia (The History of Kazan), claimed that Kazan was founded in
the Rus
Land, or even stated that the territory was settled by the Rus
,
47
See Rusyna, Kyiv iak Sancta Civitas, pp. 18990.
48
Adapted from Jaroslaw Pelenski, Muscovite Imperial Claims to the Kazan Khanate
(Based on the Muscovite Theory of Succession to the Lands of Kievan Rus
), in idem,
The Contest for the Legacy of Kievan Rus
ians not
only politically and religiously but also culturally.
51
The age of Ivan IV brought large population shifts as Novgorodian
boyars, craftsmen, and merchants, Kazan elites, and senior Muscovite
servitors were forced to move around the country and in and out of the
oprichnina lands. This large-scale resettlement caused major shifts of iden-
tity. The Muscovite state was quite successful in promoting service-based
identities, recruiting elites from different parts of the country. Although
50
See the reproduction of the Kazan Cat lubok in Robin Milner-Gulland, The Russians
(Oxford, 1997), p. 174. On the meaning of the lubok composition, see Said Faizov,
Probuzhdenie imperii v tsarstvovanie Alekseia Mikhailovicha (otsialnaia ideologiia
Moskvy i folklor), in Ukraina i sosednie gosudarstva v XVII veke, pp. 14559.
51
On the role of ethnic and religious factors in the incorporation of Tatar elites into Mus-
covite society, see Michael Khodarkovsky, Four Degrees of Separation: Constructing
Non-Christian Identities in Muscovy, in Culture and Identity in Muscovy, pp. 24866,
here 24849; Janet Martin, Multiethnicity in Muscovy: A Consideration of Christian
and MuslimTatars in the 1550s1580s, Journal of Early Modern History 5, no. 1 (2001):
123.
The rise of Muscovy 145
relocated princes and boyars used every opportunity to go home, in the
long run they tended to lose their regional identities and acquire new
ones. In ofcial documents, military units were now identied not by
the names of the appanage principalities or provinces from which they
were recruited but by the names of their commanders. Local identi-
ties became less important than provincial ones, but ethnocultural ones
showed no decline. The culturally distinct Muslim elites of the Kasimov
khanate, Kazan, and Astrakhan became the only exceptions to that rule.
Unlike the elites of other regions, their troops and individual representa-
tives fully maintained their distinct identity in ofcial documentation.
52
Marginalized or ignored in the tsars pronouncements and religious and
historical works of the time, ethnicity and culture certainly mattered in
the daily administration of the state and the everyday life of the tsars
subjects.
The paradoxes of the new Jerusalem
In their search for manifestations of Muscovite identity, historians are
often fascinated by broad religious concepts that may or may not have
had currency in the top echelons of early modern Muscovite society and
may or may not have reected and inuenced the identity of broader
circles of Muscovites. In this regard, the concept that has attracted most
attention in the scholarly literature is that of Moscow as the Third Rome.
Most modern-day scholars who accept the existence of the theory trace
its origins to a letter from the Pskov monk Filofei to Grand Prince Vasilii
III exhorting him to defend true Orthodoxy against heresy. Since the rst
two Romes (the Eternal City itself and Constantinople) had succumbed
to heresy, argued Filofei, Moscow (the Third Rome) had to protect itself
and safeguard the true faith, for there would be no fourth Rome. Filofeis
theory lent religious legitimacy to the view of the Muscovite princes as
heirs of the Byzantine emperors a viewenhanced not only by the Mono-
makh legend but also by the marriage of Ivan III to the niece of the last
Byzantine emperor, Sophia Paleologina. It also portrayed Muscovy as the
last bastion of true Christianity and placed special responsibility for pro-
tecting it on the shoulders of the Muscovite rulers.
53
Although students
52
See Janet Martin, Mobility, Forced Resettlement and Regional Identity in Moscow,
in Culture and Identity in Muscovy, pp. 43149.
53
On the theory of Moscow as the Third Rome, see David M. Goldfrank, Moscow, the
Third Rome, in The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, ed. Joseph
L. Wieczynski, vol. XXIII (Gulf Breeze, Fla., 1981), pp. 11821; N. V. Sinitsyna,
Tretii Rim. Istoriki i evoliutsiia russkoi srednevekovoi kontseptsii (XVXVII vv.) (Moscow,
1998); Paul Bushkovitch, The Formation of a National Consciousness in Early Modern
146 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
of the era have spilled gallons of ink in their discussions of the theory of
Moscow as the Third Rome, the fact remains that until the end of the
sixteenth century we encounter no evidence that this theory was popular
or well known in Muscovy a fact that allowed Keenan to dismiss it as
little more than a scholarly misunderstanding.
54
Why, then, has so much attention been paid to this concept in the
literature? Partly because there are clear indications in sixteenth-century
sources that the Muscovite rulers in general and Ivan the Terrible in
particular regarded their own faith and church as the only true ones
in the world. That view was of course reinforced by the actual separa-
tion of Muscovite Orthodoxy from the rest of the Christian world (both
Catholic and Orthodox) after the Union of Florence.
55
However, if there
was ever a theory that systematized and legitimized that view, then it
was the concept of Moscow as a new Jerusalem (alternatively, Israel),
not as a Third Rome. The rst reference to Moscow as a new Jerusalem
appears in a letter to Ivan III from Archbishop Vassian Rylo, written after
Ivans confrontation with the Tatars at the Ugra River in 1480. Refer-
ences to Muscovy as a new Israel are also to be found in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century texts, including the Book of Degrees and the writ-
ings of Ivan Timofeev on the Time of Troubles.
56
Secular and spiritual
leaders of Muscovy were inuenced by the image of Moscow as a new
Jerusalem. Boris Godunov planned the reconstruction of Moscow along
the architectural lines of Jerusalem, while Patriarch Nikon had his own
vision of Moscows destiny as a new Jerusalem.
57
Over time, that concept
Russia, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10, nos. 34 (December 1986): 35576, here 358
63; Ostrowski, Muscovy and the Mongols, 21943. For the impact of Byzantine tradition
on Muscovite political practices, see ibid., pp. 164218. On the inuence of the Byzan-
tine heritage on Muscovy after the fall of Constantinople, see Ihor
Sev cenko, Byzantium
and the East Slavs after 1453, in idem, Ukraine between East and West: Essays on Cultural
History to the Early Eighteenth Century (Edmonton and Toronto, 1996), pp. 92111.
54
Keenan, On Certain Mythical Beliefs and Russian Behaviors, p. 26.
55
For a survey of sixteenth-century Muscovite Orthodoxy, see Crummey, The Formation
of Muscovy, pp. 11642; Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries (New York and Oxford, 1992), pp. 1050; Ostrowski, Muscovy
and the Mongols, pp. 14463.
56
See Paul Bushkovitch, Pravoslavnaia tserkov
i russkoe natsional
noe samosoznanie
XVIXVII vv., Ab Imperio, 2003, no. 3: 101718.
57
On the concept of Moscow as a new Jerusalem and its reection in Muscovite political
thought, architecture, art, and ritual, see Andrei Batalov and Aleksei Lidov, Ierusalim v
russkoi kul
ture (Moscow, 1994); Daniel B. Rowland, Moscow the Third Rome or the
NewIsrael, Russian Review55 (1996): 591614; Joel Raba, Moscow the Third Rome
or the New Jerusalem, Forschungen zur osteurop aischen Geschichte 50 (1995): 297308;
and Michael S. Flier, Court Ceremony in an Age of Reform: Patriarch Nikon and the
Palm Sunday Ritual, in Religion and Culture in Early Modern Russia and Ukraine, ed.
Samuel H. Baron and Nancy Shields Kollman (DeKalb, Ill., 1997), pp. 7395.
The rise of Muscovy 147
was used both to stress the exclusivity of Muscovite Christianity and to
promote ties with foreign Orthodox communities. The former tendency
appears to have predominated in the sixteenth century.
Belief in the uniqueness and ultimate truth of Muscovite Orthodoxy
fostered the growth of a distinct Muscovite identity. In the realm of inter-
national relations, it served not only to establish a clearly dened border
between Muscovy and its immediate neighbors (including the Rus
lands
of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and, later, the Polish-Lithuanian Com-
monwealth) but also to legitimize aggression against them. The Mus-
covite literati used the religious factor to justify the conquest of Novgorod
as well as Kazan. For example, an entry about Ivan IIIs conquest of Nov-
gorod in 1471 that was added to a Novgorodian chronicle during the rule
of his grandson, Ivan the Terrible, read as follows: Grand Prince Ioan
Vasilievich [Ivan III] marched with a force against Novgorod the Great
because of its wrongdoing and lapsing into Latinism.
58
But nothing can
compare to the Orthodox zeal with which the clergy and the lay servitors
of Ivan the Terrible attacked the Muslim faith of the defenders of Kazan.
The religious rage unleashed against the indel Tatars showed that
since its liberation from Byzantine control and dependency on the khans,
the Muscovite church had managed not only to recover the plenitude
of the anti-pagan and anti-Mongol vocabulary of its medieval polemi-
cists but also signicantly to enrich it. The theme of the eternal struggle
between Christianity and Islam informed Metropolitan Makariis epis-
tles on the eve of the campaign, as well as the subsequent coverage of the
Kazan War in the Muscovite chronicles. One of them, composed at the
court of the tsar himself, asserted:
And with Gods grace and because of the great faith of the Orthodox tsar Ivan
Vasilievich, and on account of his hearts desire, God turned over to him the
godless Kazan Tatars, and our pious Sovereign destroyed their Muslim faith, and
he demolished and devastated their mosques, and he enlightened with his piety
their dark places, and he erected Gods churches there and introduced Orthodoxy,
and he established there an archbishopric and many clergymen in the churches
desiring Gods love on account of his faith.
59
The chronicler was not exaggerating. An archbishopric was indeed
established in Kazan, and in a dramatic departure from the religious tol-
erance of the khans of the Golden Horde, their former Christian subjects
initiated a brutal campaign to convert the heirs of their former rulers
58
Adapted from The Chronicle of Novgorod, 10161471 (London, 1914; repr. Hattiesburg,
Miss., 1970), p. 205.
59
Quoted in Pelenski, Muscovite Imperial Claims to the Kazan Khanate, p. 196.
148 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
to Orthodoxy. This was certainly a case in which the Mongol Empire
did not serve the tsars of Muscovy as an example for building their own
polity: for a while they were clearly tempted by the model of a monocon-
fessional state rather than that of a multiethnic empire. In 1556, writing
to Archbishop Gurii of the newly founded archbishopric of Kazan, Ivan
treated the conversion of non-Christians as a divinely ordained duty of
the church.
60
The theme of pan-Christian struggle against Islam also
appeared in the correspondence between Ivan the Terrible and his main
adversary in the Livonian War, King Stefan Batory of Poland. In a let-
ter sent to the king in 1581, Ivan repeatedly invoked the Muslim theme,
either attacking Batory for the alleged violation of his oath which was
not permitted even in Muslim states, according to the tsar or pointing
out that the spilling of Christian blood was the desire of the Muslims,
or suggesting that by continuing the war and weakening both Rus
and
the Lithuanian lands, the king was betraying Christianity to the Muslims
(besermenom).
61
Ivans sense of religious superiority was not limited to his treatment of
the Muslim indels. At times it is difcult to avoid the impression that
he did not consider even Stefan Batory to be fully Christian. In a letter of
1579 to Batory, the tsar wrote as follows: But you have lived in a Muslim
state, and the Latin faith is [only] half-Christian, and your lords believe in
the iconoclastic Lutheran heresy. And now we hear that the Arian faith is
beginning to be practiced openly in your land.
62
Here we see references
to the Muslim faith of the Ottomans, to whom Stefans homeland of
Transylvania was a vassal; an assault on Catholicism as quasi-heretical;
and an attack on Reformation communities of faith that associates them
with earlier Christian heresies. To be sure, Ivan IV was not the only
Muscovite who regarded other Christian denominations as not entirely
Christian or blatantly heretical. The author of the Tale of the Expedition
of Stefan Batory to the City of Pskov called Stefan a godless Lithuanian
king and counterposed him to the Orthodox tsar and sovereign Ivan
the Terrible.
63
Wartime conditions naturally made it easier to vilify the
enemy, but if the fortunes of war turned against Muscovy, as was the case
in 1581, ofcial rhetoric became considerably more tolerant. Once Ivan
IV decided to play the anti-Ottoman and anti-Muslim card in an attempt
60
On non-Christians in early modern Russia, see Khodarkovsky, Four Degrees of Sepa-
ration, p. 258.
61
See Poslanie pol
versus Lithuania
In theory, the Livonian War (155883), which enlisted numerous Rus
for
attacking their own or try to enlist their support and turn them into a
fth column in the war against Catholic Poland-Lithuania. Paradoxi-
cally (from the present-day viewpoint, of course) we see no attempt on
the part of Muscovite strategists or literati to seize that opportunity. The
discourse employed by the Muscovite side in negotiations with the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania remained focused on the patrimonial and dynastic
rights of the Muscovite ruler.
70
The lack of attention to Lithuanian (from 1569 Polish-Lithuanian)
Rus
theme in the
anti-Tatar resistance, or the History of Kazan, where the Kyivan descent
of Ivan the Terrible is used to justify his conquest of the khanate,
71
all
these texts are evidence of the unquestionable importance of the Kyivan
heritage for the self-identication of the Muscovite elite. It appears that
the rediscovery of Kyiv by the Muscovite literati in the late fteenth
century and the incorporation of the Kyivan past into the ofcial geneal-
ogy of the Muscovite rulers in the early decades of the sixteenth century
had made it an integral part of Muscovite mythology and historical iden-
tity by the second half of the century. Ivan the Terrible believed in this
virtual past, as did his subjects at least those who bothered to take up
70
See Filiushkin, Vgliadyvaias
ikh Makariia, in Pamiatniki literatury drevnei Rusi. Vtoraia polovina XVI veka,
pp. 478549, here 48488, 496, 524; Istoriia o Kazanskom tsarstve, in Khrestomatiia
po drevnei russkoi literature, pp. 27685, here 278.
152 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
a pen and set down their views for posterity. By the latter half of the
sixteenth century, such writers were no longer limited to the literati at
the tsars or the metropolitans court but included exiles such as Andrei
Kurbsky, or Rus
, where he settled
after his ight fromMuscovy. Even if one disregards the History of Ivan IV,
a work attributed to Kurbsky in which the author calls himself a stranger
74
See Auerbach, Identity in Exile: Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbskii and National Con-
sciousness in the Sixteenth Century in Culture and Identity in Muscovy, pp. 1125, here
1417.
75
Prince Dmytro Vyshnevetsky, the legendary sixteenth-century founder of Zaporozhian
Cossackdom, could freely return to the court of Sigismund Augustus after having offered
his voluntary services to Ivan IV. On Vyshnevetsky, known in Ukrainian folklore as
Baida, see Mykhailo Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus
was clearly
expressed by the author of the Tale of the Expedition of Stefan Batory to
the City of Pskov, which described the Muscovite defense of the city in
1581.
78
The events of the siege, as well as the text of the Tale, indicate a
new-found sense of loyalty toward the rulers of Moscow on the part of a
city that they had taken over as recently as the early sixteenth century. At
that time, the anonymous Pskovian author of the Skazanie o Pskovskom
vziatii (Narrative of the Annexation of Pskov) stressed that since the very
beginnings of the Rus
Land and the tsars patrimony, and its defenders were prepared to die
at the hands of the Lithuanians. But we shall not, wrote the author,
betray our sovereigns city of Pskov to the Polish king Stefan.
83
Quite
strangely for a Pskovian author, whose land had a long tradition of inde-
pendent relations with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the author of the
Tale not only failed to distinguish between Lithuania and the Kingdom
of Poland, referring to the Commonwealth and its ruler as the Lithua-
nian Land and the Lithuanian king, but also never distinguished between
the Lithuanians and Rus
ian who
came fromthe Lithuanian army.
84
The musketeer had probably served
in Polatsk when it was under the tsars rule, but according to the logic of
the narrative, ceased to be Rus
but
also their next of kin, the Polish-Lithuanian Rus
-Rus
border.
The origins of Great Rus
.
Muscovite Rus
, where
local loyalties were dominant among the Rus
identity-building project.
One should begin by stressing the importance of Mongol rule for the
process of identity formation in Northeastern Rus
. In that regard, it
seems appropriate to extend the Eurasianist argument about the impor-
tance of the Mongol impact on the Muscovite political structure and
economy to the sphere of ethnonational identity. The Mongol invasion
did not obstruct or complicate (as Cherepnin assumed) the formation of
the Great Russian nationality. On the contrary, it created all-important
preconditions for shaping the nature and boundaries of that nationality.
It dened the extent of future Great Russian territory in the southwest
and in the east; it also lumped the Novgorodians, with their West Slavic
dialects, together with a largely East Slavic population in one political
entity. Furthermore, Mongol dominance gave the elites of those territo-
ries a sense of unity by dening their political homeland as an autonomous
realm of the Golden Horde ruled by the grand prince of Rus
. All this
can be seen as a head start in the identity-building project that Rus
lands
beyond Mongol control clearly lacked. Even when they were reunited
within one Lithuanian state, the Rus
and
tried to undermine it by granting the title of grand prince to several Rus
and
non-Rus
chroniclers originally applied to Kyiv and the surrounding area, was later
appropriated by Northeastern Rus
.
The evidence discussed in this chapter appears to conrm the con-
clusion reached at the end of the nineteenth century by Pavel Miliukov:
Great Russian history per se, at least when it comes to self-identication
and ethnopolitical identity, begins with the reign of Ivan III. It was in his
time that the Muscovite literati created the underpinnings of Muscovite
Rus
was the rst powerful unifying project since the demise of Kyi-
van Rus
Land
stood for the common patrimony of the Rurikid princes and claimed
the loyalty of the whole clan, in Moscow it referred to the patrimony of
the grand prince (a term and an ofce unknown to the Kyivans) and was
used to promote the loyalty of dependent princes and servitor elites to the
grand prince. If the Rus
. Bound
by politics and state boundaries, the two Rus
, Rossiia, or the Russkaia zemlia, and his people were the Rus
. The
Eastern Slavs of Poland-Lithuania were generally called Litva or (if Cossacks)
Cherkassy.
89
As Muscovy developed into a multiethnic and multireligious empire,
forging closer ties between Slavs and non-Slavs, Christians and Muslims
within its borders than with fellow Orthodox Slavs across the Muscovite-
Lithuanian border, the two Ruses grew even further apart.
89
Ibid., pp. 35556.
5 The making of the Ruthenian nation
The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries or, more precisely, the
eight decades between the Union of Lublin (1569) and the beginning of
the Khmelnytsky Uprising (1648) are often treated as a distinct period
in the history of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus. If the start-
ing point requires little introduction, since it was marked by the creation
of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the terminus certainly needs
some explanation. The Cossack uprising of 1648, led by Hetman Bohdan
Khmelnytsky, spread to most of the Ukrainian territories and took in
a signicant part of the Belarusian lands. More than previous Cossack
revolts, it shook the Commonwealth, resulting in the loss of much of
its territory and inaugurating a long series of wars that eventually led to
the decline of the Polish-Lithuanian state. The uprising also marked the
end of Polish-Lithuanian eastward expansion and set off a long Muscovite
drive to the West that saw Russian troops enter Paris in 1813 and the Red
Army occupy Berlin in 1945. More immediately important for our dis-
cussion is that the uprising brought about the rst prolonged encounter
between Muscovite and Polish-Lithuanian Rus
Sahanovich,
Narys historyi Belarusi (Minsk, 2001), pp. 20565; Natalia Iakovenko, Narys istori
Ukrany z naidavnishykh chasiv do kintsia XVIII stolittia (Kyiv, 1997), pp. 11976. For indi-
vidual topics in the history of the region, see David Frick, Meletij Smotryc
kyj (Cambridge,
Mass., 1995); Linda Gordon, Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century
Ukraine (Albany, NY, 1983); Borys A. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropoli-
tanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge,
Mass., 1998); Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford,
2001); Ihor
Sev cenko, Ukraine between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early
Eighteenth Century (Edmonton and Toronto, 1996); Frank E. Sysyn, Between Poland and
the Ukraine: The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 16001653 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).
166 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Was there a Polish noble nation?
The importance of the Union of Lublin (1569) for the historical fate of
the Eastern Slavs has long been underestimated in Russocentric narra-
tives of east European history. Under Soviet tutelage, the Ukrainian and
Belarusian historical narratives, which paid considerable attention to the
union of 1569, were demoted to the status of appendixes to the Great
Russian historical narrative, disguised as the history of (the peoples of)
the USSR. The emergence of independent East Slavic states after the
breakup of the USSR inspired efforts to reconceptualize the history of
the region, which entailed a new focus on the Union of Lublin. A similar
process has taken place in the West, where there is nowgreater willingness
to go beyond the Russocentric paradigm in conceptualizing the history
of the region. Recently, in his long-range reexamination of the develop-
ment of east European nations and national movements, Timothy Sny-
der even took the Union of Lublin as his starting point. He wrote in that
regard:
1569 is an untraditional starting point. National histories of Poland, Lithuania,
Belarus, Ukraine, or Russia usually begin with the medieval period, and trace the
purportedly continuous development of the nation to the present. To recognize
change, it is best to accept the unmistakable appearance of a single early modern
nation in the vast territories of the early modern Commonwealth, then consider
its legacies to modern politics.
2
Did the Union of Lublin indeed inaugurate not only a new era in east
European history but also the emergence of a new early modern nation?
And if so, what nation was it? Snyder states that 1569 marks the creation
of the early modern Polish nation. He explains that term as follows:
The nation of this Commonwealth was its nobility, Catholic, Orthodox, and
Protestant. United by common political and civil rights, nobles of Polish, Lithua-
nian, and East Slavic origin alike described themselves, in Latin or Polish, as of
the Polish nation. They took for granted that, in the natural order of things, the
language of state, speech, literature, and liturgy would vary. After the Common-
wealths partition by rival empires in the eighteenth century, some patriots recast
the nation as the people, and nationality as the language they spoke.
3
The idea that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had a noble
nation crossing ethnic and religious bounds is not a Western invention.
It was popularized in Poland after World War II by a host of scholars,
including Stanisl aw Kot and Janusz Tazbir, two prominent authorities on
2
See Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus,
15691999 (New Haven and London, 2003), p. 3.
3
Ibid., p. 1.
The making of the Ruthenian nation 167
early modern Polish history. It was disseminated in the West in numer-
ous works by Andrzej Walicki, a leading specialist in Polish and Russian
intellectual history.
4
In twentieth-century historiography it became the
basis for treating the Polish historical experience as unique in European
history, since it had seen the formation of a civic nation in Europe long
before the modern age. According to this school of thought, the Com-
monwealth was a cradle of democracy (albeit limited to the noble estate),
civic patriotism, and exceptional tolerance. Not all these claims can be
reconciled with historical fact.
In the history of the Commonwealth, one can certainly nd numer-
ous manifestations of broad solidarity, extending across ethnic and reli-
gious boundaries, among the nobiliary elites. The Union of Lublin is one
of the best-known instances of such solidarity. Nevertheless, these hori-
zontal links were often broken, and vertical links between social estates
developed in particular ethnocultural communities. In Ruthenian soci-
ety, this process began on the eve of the Union of Brest and continued for
decades afterward. To be sure, the concept of the Polish noble nation
is a useful analytical model that puts special emphasis on the character
of the Commonwealths political system, takes account of the nobiliary
monopoly on political participation, and stresses the equality of members
of the Commonwealth nobility, irrespective of ethnocultural background.
But this model also tends to overlook and thus distort the development of
ethnocultural identities in the multiethnic state, which was largely respon-
sible for the decline of the Commonwealths historical fortunes after the
Khmelnytsky Uprising of the mid-seventeenth century. More fundamen-
tally, one may ask whether a Polish noble nation actually existed in the
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Commonwealth or whether it was a
useful invention of later times.
As David Althoen has recently argued, the image of the Polish noble
nation is indeed a creation of the modern era. His research shows that
sixteenth-century Poles imagined their nation (and nations in general) as
linguistic and cultural entities, not political ones. Nor did they believe that
only nobles were entitled to participate in the nation, or at least no such
idea was formulated until modern times. The nobles reference to them-
selves as a noble nation was an awkward translation fromthe Latin that
actually meant of noble origin and had nothing to do with the concept
of nation. When it comes to the nobles alleged loyalty to their noble
4
See Janusz Tazbirs most recent statement on this question in his Kultura szlachecka
w Polsce. Rozkwit upadek relikty (Pozna n, 2002), pp. 87105 (
Swiadomo s c naro-
dowa szlachty). See also Andrzej Walicki, The Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern
Nationhood: Polish Political Thought from Noble Republicanism to Tadeusz Kosciuszko, trans.
Emma Harris (Notre Dame, Ind., 1989).
168 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
nation in preference to the ethnolinguistic one, Althoen maintains that
this was also a product of nineteenth-century Polish thought, which by
no means reected the hierarchy of identities shared by early modern
elites of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Althoens research not
only deconstructs a number of historiographic myths but also shows how
they were created to promote the formation of a big Polish nation in
the nineteenth century.
5
In light of the latest ndings, the work of J ozef
Andrzej Gierowski deserves special attention. He was the rst to concep-
tualize the Commonwealth not as a state of one (Polish) or two (Polish
and Lithuanian) nations but as a polity of many nations.
6
The work done
in the last few decades by Frank E. Sysyn and David Frick in North
America and Teresa Chynczewska-Hennel and Mirosl awCzech in Poland
also undermines the established interpretation of early modern national
identity in the Polish-Lithuanian state.
7
The development of a strong
Ruthenian identity among the nobiliary stratum, which is demonstrated
by these studies, challenges the view that a multiethnic and multicultural
Polish nation existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Judging
by the recent research of Natalia Yakovenko, only Ruthenian princes and
magnates could easily cross national and religious boundaries in the Com-
monwealth, intermarrying with the Catholic and Protestant aristocracy
of Poland and Lithuania, while the Ruthenian nobility was conned to
a closed and very traditional space dened by local culture and East-
ern Christian tradition.
8
The known examples of nobiliary, Cossack, and
5
See David Althoen, Natione Polonus and the Nar od Szlachecki: Two Myths of National
Identity and Noble Solidarity, Zeitschrift f ur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 52, no. 4 (2003):
475508. Cf. idem, That Noble Quest: From True Nobility to Enlightened Society in
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 15501830, Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Michigan, 2001.
6
See the tribute to him in Rzeczpospolita wielu narod ow i jej tradycje, ed. Andrzej K. Link-
Lenczowski and Mariusz Markiewicz (Cracow, 1999).
7
See Frank E. Sysyn, Ukrainian-Polish Relations in the Seventeenth Century: The Role of
National Consciousness and National Conict in the Khmelnytsky Movement, in Poland
and Ukraine: Past and Present, ed. Peter J. Potichnyj (Edmonton and Toronto, 1980),
pp. 5582; idem, Concepts of Nationhood in Ukrainian History Writing, 16201690,
Harvard Ukrainian Studies 10, nos. 34 (1986): 393423; idem, The Cossack Chroni-
cles and the Development of Modern Ukrainian Culture and National Identity, Harvard
Ukrainian Studies 14, nos. 34 (1990): 593607; Frick, Meletij Smotryc
palatinate. Judging by
the letter, Orzechowskis fatherland was settled by people who were more
warriors than scholars. They had accepted the Christian faith from Con-
stantinople during the rule of Prince Volodymyr. Orzechowski divides
his people into the nobility, most of which accepted Catholicism, and the
common folk, who maintained the Greek rite. His reference to Volodymyr
can be seen as an indication that his peoples homeland was not limited
to Galicia, but the author himself does not make this observation. On the
13
Cited in Althoen, That Noble Quest, p. 123. Cf. idem, Natione Polonus, p. 493.
14
Althoen, Natione Polonus, pp. 499504.
172 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
contrary, adopting a regional (as opposed to an ethnocultural) Ruthenian
identity, Orzechowski claims that his people fell under strong Latin inu-
ence when they were taken over by Poland. Orzechowski never denes
his people in linguistic terms, but his comment that its limited education
was either in Latin or Slavic, which was used for church services and
legislation, points in the direction of Church or Chancery Slavonic as
the medium of the indigenous culture. Orzechowskis narrative indicates
that he associated himself rst and foremost with the people of Rus
, not
with the Polish presence in the area. On the other hand, the population of
his Rus
.
15
Does this autobiographical account bring us closer to an understanding
of Orzechowskis Ruthenianidentity? I wouldargue that it does. It appears
that a particular local and cultural identity strongly stamped Orzechowski
as a Ruthenian, and the designation Roxolanus, which he often added
to his last name, served as an important marker of both types of iden-
tity on the territory of the Polish state. But that designation apparently
had little meaning outside Poland. Thus, when traveling abroad, Orze-
chowski dened himself as a Pole (that is, an inhabitant of the Kingdom
of Poland), as he did when being introduced to Cardinal Contarini in
Rome. He explained this in a letter of 1549 to Paolo Ramusio of Venice,
pointing out that his relatives Stanisl aw Wapowski and Stanisl aw Dro-
hojowski were considered Poles in Rome, since Rus
was a province of
Poland.
16
Recent research on the Polish system of government and the
political culture of the Polish nobility notes the paramount importance of
local political structures and loyalties in the sixteenth-century Common-
wealth.
17
The palatinate of Rus
ka literatura XIVXVI
st., pp. 15255, here 153.
17
See Andrzej Zajaczkowski, Szlachta polska. Kultura i struktura, 2nd edn (Warsaw, 1993);
Antoni Maczak, Klientela. Nieformalne systemy wladzy w Polsce i Europie XVIXVIII w.
(Warsaw, 1994).
The making of the Ruthenian nation 173
a different history, ethnic composition, and religious tradition a legacy
embraced and cherished by Orzechowski. Judging by his writings, he was
particularly devoted to the Rus
identity was
strong enough to cross ethnic, linguistic, and cultural bounds. But that
identity stopped at the borders of the Kingdom of Poland: Orzechowskis
writings show that the Ruthenized Poles were unwilling or unable to
make a connection with Rus
lands of the
Grand Duchy, which, for all its autonomy, drew much closer to Poland
in political terms than ever before. Should that palatinate-based identity
be extended to include the Rus
territories,
including Volhynia and the Kyiv region. In the vanguard of change were
those who had to deal with features of Rus
that he wanted to unite with Rome. His suggestion was made three years
before the Union of Lublin: soon afterwards, the idea of religious union
was reformulated to include all the Rus
of
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, addressing his argument to the
Ruthenian peoples, although he never claried what he meant by the
term. Since Skarga divided Rus
, Volhynia, Bratslav,
and Kyiv as separate Ruthenian peoples. It seems quite clear, however,
20
Quoted in Tazbir, Kultura szlachecka w Polsce, p. 101.
21
Benedykt Herbest, Wypisanie drogi, in Michal Wiszniewski, Historia literatury polskiej,
vol. VII (Cracow, 1845), pp. 56981, here 579. On Herbest, see Oleksander Sushko,
Predtecha tserkovno uni 1596 r. Benedykt Herbest, Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva
im. Shevchenka 53 (1903): 171; 55 (1903): 72125; 61 (1904): 12677.
The making of the Ruthenian nation 175
that Skargas Ruthenian peoples inhabited a territory far larger than the
Rus
a conglomerate of Ruthe-
nian peoples. The same approach was taken by Maciej Stryjkowski, the
author of the Polish-language Chronicle of Poland, Lithuania, Samogi-
tia and All Rus
.
23
Still, he focused mainly on Polish-Lithuanian
Rus
history,
24
slowing down
the separation of the Lithuanian and Ruthenian historical narratives that
began in the early sixteenth century. Polish writers used its ideas and
data to incorporate Rus
nist
palatinate but also the newly acquired lands of Volhynia and Kyiv. With
the exception of Podlachia, it included all the ethnic Ruthenian territories
that ended up within the boundaries of the Kingdom of Poland after
the Union of Lublin.
27
Lviv remained the center of that Ruthenia, but
Kyiv is a close second as regards the length of Klonowics description.
25
For the Latin text, accompanied by a Polish translation, see Sebastian Fabian Klonowic,
Roxolania/Roksolania czyli ziemie Czerwonej Rusi, ed. and trans. Mieczyslaw Mejor
(Wroclaw, 1996). On Klonowic, see Halina Wi sniewska, Renesansowe zycie i dzielo Sebas-
tiana Fabiana Klonowicza (Lublin, 1985).
26
On Renaissance ethnography and the interest of European ethnographers in eastern
Europe and Muscovy, see Marshall T. Poe, A People Born to Slavery. Russia in
Early Modern European Ethnography, 14761748 (Ithaca and London, 2000), pp. 11
38. Klonowic was among the founders of the Polish literary tradition of treating Rus
as
a land of ancient practices, mysteries, and wonders. On the development of that tradition,
see Joanna Partyka, Glebokie ruskie kraje w oczach staropolskiego encyklopedysty,
in Mazepa and His Time: History, Culture, Society, ed. Giovanna Siedina (Alessandria,
2004), pp. 291300.
27
Cf. the political and ethnic maps of the sixteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Com-
monwealth in The Historical Atlas of Poland, ed. Wladyslaw Czapli nski and Tadeusz
L adog orski (Warsaw and Wroclaw, 1986), pp. 2021, 23. In one case Klonowic denes
Ruthenia (Russia) as a country extending from the Black Sea in the south to the Arctic
Ocean in the north but otherwise regards the Muscovite Rus
. Kyiv is depicted in
Roxolania as the capital of the old Rus
ka lit-
eratura XIVXVI st., p. 461.
The making of the Ruthenian nation 179
translated fromthe Greek in the days of St. Volodymyr. It was also claimed
to have been acquired from another Rurikid, Ivan the Terrible, the Com-
monwealths adversary in the Livonian War, whom Smotrytsky/Ostrozky
called a sovereign and grand prince pious and most resplendent in
Orthodoxy.
35
The editors of the Ostrih Bible were consciously estab-
lishing parallels and connections between Ostrozky and the Rurikids but
were not yet prepared to declare the prince a Rurikid and a direct descen-
dant of St. Volodymyr. Smotrytsky did so in 1587 in the dedication to
his book The Key to the Kingdom of Heaven, which called Oleksander, the
son of Kostiantyn Ostrozky, an heir and descendant of St. Volodymyr.
36
The uncrowned king of Rus
was accom-
plished by writers who generally came from the pre-1569 Kingdom of
Poland, as did Smotrytsky and Demian Nalyvaiko, the brother of the
famous Cossack leader Severyn Nalyvaiko. As Natalia Yakovenko has
recently shown, the vast majority of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
panegyrists were non-Orthodox and not even ethnic Ruthenians (the lat-
ter accounted for only six of the forty-seven identied by Yakovenko).
They were predominantly Polish Catholics (thus it would appear to be
no accident that the rst references to the Kyivan origins of the Ostrozky
princely family appeared in the 1570s in Polish rather than Ruthenian
sources).
37
The new aspirations of the Ostrozkys were articulated, legitimized,
and disseminated not only by Polish writers but also with the aid of
Polish ideas. There were two different agendas advocated by two groups
35
See Smotryts
ka
literatura XIVXVI st., p. 202.
36
See Smotryts
kym i Zaslavs
ko identychnosti), in eadem,
Paralel
in Rus
.
47
The interests of Rus
kyi narod), which they clearly distinguished from the Polish nation
44
On the spread of radical Reformation ideas in Ukraine, see George H. Williams, Protes-
tants in the Ukraine during the Period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Har-
vard Ukrainian Studies 2, no. 1 (March 1978): 4172; no. 2 (June 1978): 184210.
45
For a brief survey of the struggle over church union and an interpretation of the ensuing
reforms in terms of the confessionalization paradigm, see my Cossacks and Religion,
pp. 7799.
46
See the reference to a court case of 1585 in Iakovenko, Relihiini konversi, p. 35.
47
See Jan Szczesny Herburt, Zdanie o narodzie Ruskim, repr. in Z dziej ow Ukrainy, ed.
Waclaw Lipi nski (Cracow, 1912), pp. 9296. The same formula was used in a speech
delivered in defense of the Orthodox Church by the Roman Catholic prince Krzysztof
Zbaraski at the diet of 1623 (Iakovenko, Relihiini konversi, p. 46).
184 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
(nar od polski) on the basis of its religion, culture, and language. Debates
over the Union also helped reinforce the existing boundary between the
Commonwealth Rus
.
48
This old Greek term, originally used to
denote the Halych metropolitanate, now helped give a name and iden-
tity to the Orthodox population of Poland-Lithuania in the larger world
of Slavia Orthodoxa. The notion of Little Rus
name and
fought hard to limit the number of Orthodox participants in the debate.
49
They directed their re mainly against the Rus
converts
to Roman Catholicism had also banished themselves from the Ruthe-
nian nation: by going directly to the Catholic Church and bypassing the
Union, they had embarked on the road of cultural Polonization.
51
The
Orthodox, by contrast, recognized the legitimacy of the Catholic Rus
, Smotrytsky eventually
accepted the Union himself. In the process he changed his polemical
arguments but remained devoted to the ultimate good of the Ruthe-
nian nation.
52
His own experience turned him into a strong opponent
of internecine religious conict, which he called the struggle of Rus
with Rus
religion.
Whoever changes his faith does not immediately also degenerate fromhis
blood, wrote Smotrytsky, whoever fromthe Ruthenian nation becomes
of the Roman faith does not become immediately a Spaniard or an Italian
by birth; rather he remains a noble Ruthenian as before. For it is not the
faith that makes a Ruthenian a Ruthenian, a Pole a Pole, or a Lithuanian
a Lithuanian, but Ruthenian, Polish, and Lithuanian blood and birth.
53
50
See Petro Kraliuk, Osoblyvosti vyiavu natsional
no svidomosti v ukrans
kii suspil
nii dumtsi
16 persho polovyny 17 st. (Lutsk, 1996), pp. 7173.
51
On Uniate arguments to that effect, see Ihar I. Marzaliuk, Liudzi da uniai Belarusi: etna-
kanfesiinyia i satsyia-kul
kyj.
53
Smotrytsky, Vericatia niewinnosci (Vilnius, 1621), p. 60 (quoted in Frick, Meletij
Smotryc
The concept of the Ruthenian nation that became central to public dis-
course in the aftermath of the Union of Brest was contested not only
by a variety of religious groups but also by different social strata. They
included princes, nobles, clergymen, and burghers, all of whom spoke in
the name of Rus
.
The Polish panegyrists do not appear to have been taken aback by the
princes abandonment of Orthodoxy, which was so closely identied with
Rus
.
54
Indeed, this made it easier for representatives of Polish Catholic
learning to appropriate Rus
regional identity.
They exalted their princely patrons by establishing their descent from
ancient Kyivan princes. Thus the last of the Ostrozkys, a Roman Catholic
named Janusz, was linked by his panegyrist Sebastian Sleszkowski to Rus,
the brother of Lech and Czech, and Kyi, the legendary founder of Kyiv
(1612).
55
Jan Dabrowski, the author of the poem Camoenae Borysthenides
54
Among the princes, the percentage of marriages outside their confession appears to have
diminished from approximately 50 percent in the period 15401615 to 29 percent in the
years 161650. By 1616 most princely families had already abandoned Orthodoxy and
married within their new confession (predominantly Roman Catholicism). By that time
the confessionalization of religious life in the Commonwealth was well advanced, making
interconfessional marriages and families an exception to the general rule. These devel-
opments reduced the number of interconfessional marriages not only among the princes
but also among the Ruthenian nobility in general. According to Yakovenkos calcula-
tions, they declined from 16 percent (15811615) to 12 percent (161650) (Iakovenko,
Relihiini konversi, p. 36).
55
See Natalia Iakovenko, Latyna na sluzhbi kyievo-rus
princes contin-
ued to be lauded by their panegyrists as representatives and protectors of
Rus
ka poeziia
XVII stolittia (persha polovyna). Antolohiia, comp. V. V. Iaremenko, ed. O. V. Lupii (Kyiv,
1988), pp. 93119. For an analysis of the poem, see Ihor
Sev cenko, Poland in Ukrainian
History, in idem, Ukraine between East and West, pp. 11230, here 12426; Iakovenko,
Latyna na sluzhbi kyievo-rus
ko istori.
57
On the treatment of Janusz Ostrogski (Ostrozky) and the Zaslavsky princes heirs of the
Ostrozkys and protectors of the Uniate Church in panegyrical literature, see Iakovenko,
Topos z
tura ukrans
koho suspil
stva (kinets
, was promoted by
Ruthenian nobles on both sides of the religious divide. The other was pro-
moted by the church hierarchy, which insisted on a broad interpretation
of the Ruthenian nation encompassing both noble and non-noble strata.
That inclusive model was promoted by the Orthodox hierarchs not
merely because the nobiliary status of the new metropolitan and many of
his bishops was questionable after all, their milieu also included people
of unquestionable princely origin, such as Bishop Iosyf (Iezekyil) Kur-
tsevych but mainly because it was the dominant model of the time. As
Althoen has shown, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth the term
nation (narod) was associated rst and foremost with the concept of
ethnolinguistic community. As in Kyivan times, the Rus
literati con-
tinued to use the term language (iazyk) to designate what we would
now call people or nation.
63
Moreover, as the Orthodox Church
had traditionally been associated with Rus
religious and ethnonational communities were all but identical until the
mid-seventeenth century. Because the ecclesiastical community accom-
modated people of all walks of life, the concept of the national commu-
nity became equally inclusive. The close correlation between these two
models of identity, religious and national, is clearly apparent in the writ-
ings of the Orthodox literati. In 1582, for example, Herasym Smotrytsky
addressed the Ostrih Bible to the Orthodox reader of every degree.
Forty years later, Metropolitan Iov Boretsky addressed a circular to the
whole community of the faithful of the Eastern Church of the illustrious
Ruthenian nation of every clerical and secular order of every degree.
Church documents of the period attest that hierarchs normally divided
the secular order into princes, nobles, knights, and burghers.
64
Peasants
were excluded from the list of Orthodox degrees, but the townsfolk
were certainly there. Indeed, the burghers were not slow to defend their
rights in the name of the Ruthenian nation, regardless of the hierarchys
attitude toward them.
65
63
Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion, 14748.
64
Ibid., pp. 16364.
65
In 1609 the Lviv brotherhood complained in a petition to the king that we, the Ruthe-
niannation, are oppressedby the Polish nationwith a yoke worse thanEgyptianbondage
(quoted in Kraliuk, Osoblyvosti vyiavu, p. 50). On the history of the brotherhood move-
ment in Ukraine, see Iaroslav Isaievych, Between Eastern Tradition and Inuences from
the West: Confraternities in Early Modern Ukraine and Byelorussia, Ricerche slavistiche
37 (1990): 26993.
The making of the Ruthenian nation 191
Thus it appears that in the early seventeenth century the nobility tried
hard, but without ultimate success, to claim the exclusive right to rep-
resent the Ruthenian nation to the outside world. This failure was due
in large part to the opposition of the clergy and the burghers, who had
their own views of the Ruthenian nation and its rights. The religious
debate gave them an excellent opportunity to present their opinions, as
the church was an institution that transcended social boundaries and the
administrative borders of palatinates. Even as the Uniate nobility chal-
lenged the right of the Orthodox hierarchs to represent the whole Ruthe-
nian nation, the same hierarchs were bringing their new protectors, the
ZaporozhianCossacks, into the ranks of the Rutheniannation. Very fewof
the Cossacks, including their hetmans, could claim noble origin, but the
old tradition of including knights in the ranks of the noble nation/estate
opened the door to anyone prepared to make a case in favor of Cossack
membership in the Ruthenian nation. Indeed, their formal qualications
were better than those of the burghers. Their chances of acceptance were
further improved by the readiness of the Orthodox clergy to list them as
members of the nation of Ruthenian worship.
For the new Orthodox hierarchy that was consecrated under Cossack
auspices in 1620, ensuring Cossack involvement in the religious conict
was almost as important as legitimizing its own existence. That is why the
Cossack theme received special attention in the petitions, protestations,
and literary works issued by Orthodox clerics in the years following the
consecration. In the Protestation a petition of the Orthodox hierarchy
issued in late April 1621 to condemn the persecution of their church in
the Commonwealth the Cossacks were presented as an integral part of
the Ruthenian nation:
As for the Cossacks, we know that these military men are our kin, our brothers,
and Christians of the true faith. . . . For this is the tribe of the glorious Ruthenian
nation, born of Japheths seed, that campaigned against the Greek Empire across
the Black Sea and overland. It is the host of the generation that under Oleh,
the monarch of Rus
,
campaigned against Greece, Macedonia, and Illyria. It was their ancestors who
were baptized together with Volodymyr and accepted the Christian faith from the
church of Constantinople and are born and baptized and live their lives in that
faith to this day.
66
The authors of the Protestation were concerned to establish rst and fore-
most that the Cossacks were Orthodox Christians devoted to their church
66
See P. N. Zhukovich, Protestatsiia mitropolita Iova Boretskogo i drugikh zapadno-
russkikh ierarkhov, sostavlennaia 28 aprelia 1621 goda, in Stat
i po slavianovedeniiu, ed.
V. I. Lamanskii, vyp. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1910), pp. 13553. This extract is quoted from
Hrushevsky, History of Ukraine-Rus
, VII: 3056.
192 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
and thus needed no clerical instigation (the accusation made against the
hierarchy by the authorities) to rise in its defense. Given the dominant
Ruthenian discourse of the time, proving the Cossacks Orthodox was
equivalent to proving them Ruthenian, and vice versa. To achieve both
goals, it was necessary to incorporate the Cossacks into the historical
grand narrative of the Ruthenian nation the narrative that began with
Oleh, the conqueror of Byzantium, and Volodymyr, the baptizer of Rus
.
The new element here was that the old Rus
of Volodymyrs successors
was represented not by the princes but by the low-born Cossacks. In this
new atmosphere, Orthodox intellectuals portrayed the Cossack uprising
of 1630 not as a conict between princely Rus
, ed. O. V.
Myshanych (Kyiv, 1987), pp. 22038, here 221. Cf. Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion,
p. 168.
The making of the Ruthenian nation 193
They have fear of the Lord and great constancy in faith, and in military discipline
and prudence they will not yield even to the most pious, and in courage they
excel Roman Scipios and Carthaginian Hannibals! For the Zaporozhian Cossack
[as a ghter] for the renowned Kingdom of Poland against border enemies is like
a knight of Malta for the Italian land: he stands in good order and gives brave
cavaliers to our fatherland.
69
The Cossacks themselves sought to acquire economic, judicial, and
political privileges that would put them on a par with the nobility, and
recognition of those claims by the Orthodox clergy was certainly in their
interest. The Cossack leaders also regarded themselves as part of the reli-
giously dened nation of Rus
.
71
Opponents of the Orthodox hierarchs, such as the nobles who
wrote the Letter to the Monks of the Monastery of Vilnius, did not question
the knightly status of the Cossacks, nor did they directly contest their
right to serve as protectors of the Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, their
denial of the right of the non-noble hierarchy to speak in the name of
Rus
, VIII: 11617.
194 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
the Union and a major triumph for the Ruthenian nation of the Greek
faith. The Orthodox, who had been very quick to shape debate on the
legitimacy of church union in terms of national discourse, claiming that
the ancient rights of the Ruthenian nation had been violated, had every
reason to celebrate the success of their strategy. Yet the Ruthenian nation
that was accommodated in 1632 was quite different from the one pro-
moted by the Orthodox literati of the 1620s. Very telling in that regard was
the above-mentioned refusal to allow a Cossack delegation to take part in
electing the king, as was the fact that the Measures were addressed to
citizens of the Kingdomof Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania
a category that included noble landowners alone, excluding all other
strata of Ruthenian society. This new deal with the government marked
the climax of decades of struggle by the Orthodox nobility at local and
Commonwealth diets. Their victory would have been impossible without
the efforts of the outlawed Orthodox hierarchy of the 1620s, as well as
the support of the religious brotherhoods and the Cossacks, but in the
end the nobles alone secured an understanding with the state.
73
By appeasing the nobles, the government was trying to obtain the loy-
alty of the whole Ruthenian Orthodox community (not least the Cos-
sacks) in its imminent confrontation with Orthodox Muscovy the
Smolensk War of 163334. Additional benets were the termination
of decades of ofcial conict with much of the nobility in the east-
ern provinces of the Commonwealth and the disruption of the alliance
between the Orthodox and the Protestants, with whose help the compro-
mise of 1632 had been achieved in the rst place. While making conces-
sions to the Ruthenian nation of the Greek faith, the authorities wanted
to ensure that the new rights did not fall into the wrong hands. Very
important in that regard was the election at the Diet of a new metropoli-
tan of Kyiv and all Rus
, VIII: 11755.
74
The most informative work on Mohylas activities is still Stepan Golubev, Kievskii
mitropolit Petr Mogila i ego spodvizhniki (Opyt tserkovno-istoricheskogo issledovaniia), 2 vols.
(Kyiv, 188398).
The making of the Ruthenian nation 195
the eyes of the government than a non-Ruthenian aristocrat as head of
its principal institution?
Mohyla and his Ruthenian supporters in the ranks of the Orthodox
nobility were eager to take back control of their church from the rebel-
lious Cossacks. In so doing, they were trying not so much to appease the
government as to take revenge for years of humiliation at the hands of the
Cossacks. Cossack interference in church affairs throughout the 1620s
had not only shifted the nobles the traditional patrons of the church
to the periphery but also brought extreme discomfort to those who
beneted most from Cossack involvement in religious affairs the hier-
archs and clergy of the Orthodox Church. The authors of the Protestation
of 1621 had already noted the Orthodox zeal of the Cossacks and their
readiness to ensure that the clergy was adhering to the established rules.
Subsequent events showed that the hierarchs had not simply made up this
claim to avoid responsibility for Cossack actions. The Cossacks indeed
proved themselves a highly intrusive element, prepared to resort to vio-
lence not only against external enemies of the church but also against
perceived enemies within it. In the late 1620s, Cossack pressure forced
the hierarchs to condemn one of their own, Meletii Smotrytsky, for what
the Cossacks regarded as a pro-Uniate and anti-Orthodox attitude. As if
in realization of a self-fullling prophecy, the condemned hierarch soon
joined the Uniate Church. Cossack hostility also precluded the convo-
cation of an Orthodox-Uniate council intended to reconcile Rus
with
Rus
and a suc-
cessor to the medieval Kyivan princes, especially Yaroslav the Wise, the
builder of St. Sophias Cathedral, which had been taken away from the
Uniates on the eve of Mohylas arrival. The Ruthenian-language pane-
gyric, presented to the new metropolitan on behalf of the printers of the
Kyivan Cave Monastery Mohylas stronghold probably best captured
the new characteristics of the national discourse. It began with verses
about Mohylas coat of arms, indicating not only his noble origins but
also his descent from a family of rulers. This opening stood in clear con-
tradiction to Sakovychs verses on the demise of Hetman Sahaidachny,
which began by describing the coat of arms of the Zaporozhian Host. In
the Mohyla panegyric, it was not the Cossacks but the new metropoli-
tan who gured as the successor of the Kyivan princes. The connection
between the Moldavian prince and his Kyivan predecessors is articulated
by St. Sophias Cathedral, which speaks to Mohyla as follows:
Now I entrust my walls to you,
Which I have from Yaroslav,
It is praiseworthy: be their Atlas,
Be their Adamant.
77
76
Concerning the impact of confessionalization on cultural developments, see Heinz
Schilling, Confessionalisation and the Rise of Religious and Cultural Frontiers in Early
Modern Europe, in Frontiers of Faith: Religious Exchange and the Constitution of Religious
Identities, 14001750, ed. E. Andor and I. G. Toth (Budapest, 2001), pp. 2136. On
Mohylas religious reforms, see Georges Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, pt. 1 (Bel-
mont, Mass., 1979), pp. 6485; Ivan Wlasowsky, Outline History of the Ukrainian Ortho-
dox Church, vol. II, XVII Century (NewYork, 1979), pp. 74103; Paul Meyendorff, The
Liturgical Reforms of Peter Mogila: A New Look, St. Vladimirs Theological Quarterly
29, no. 2 (1985): 10114; Francis J. Thomson, Peter Mogilas Ecclesiastical Reforms
and the Ukrainian Contribution to Russian Culture: A Critique of Georges Florovskys
Theory of the Pseudomorphosis of Orthodoxy, Slavica Gandensia 20 (1993):
67119.
77
See Ukrans
In a miserable age.
Do you recall how famous Rus
was before,
How many patrons it had?
Now there are few of them; Rus
,
Which, unfortunate one, had become very sooty
When it grew poor in educated men.
79
Lack of education and the resulting inferiority complex had dogged the
Orthodox since the earliest debates on the Union of Brest. The Uni-
ates promised to raise the educational level of their clergy and did so by
sending students to papal academies in the West, while the Orthodox
remained on the defensive. Some of them, like Vyshensky, took pride in
the Ruthenian lack of sophistication. Others, like Sakovych, abandoned
Orthodoxy for Uniatism and then Uniatism for Roman Catholicism in
their efforts to shed the image of foolish Rus
.
80
The author of the
Warning, an early seventeenth-century Orthodox tract, went so far as to
78
Ibid.
79
See Anonim, Mnemosyne slawy, prac i trud ow, in Roksola nski Parnas. Polskoje zyczna
poezja ukrai nska od ko nca XVI do poczatku XVIII wieku, pt. 2, Antologia, ed. Rostyslaw
Radyszew skyj [Rostyslav Radyshevs
had
introduced the pagan Lithuanian princes to Christianity.
82
Mohyla was very serious about improving the educational level of his
church: his reform of the brotherhood school turned it into a college and
made it the outstanding educational institution in the whole Orthodox
world. He also sponsored the publishing of religious literature and helped
produce the very rst Confession of the Orthodox Faith. Mohyla assembled
a staff of rst-rate Orthodox scholars and not only stopped the defection
of Orthodox literati to the Uniates but also made Ruthenian Orthodoxy
an intellectually attractive confession. The text of Mohylas will shows
that his dedication to raising the educational level of Rus
was rooted in
a conscious choice made very early in his ecclesiastical career. He wrote:
on seeing the decline of pious religiosity in the Rus
ia k modernu,
Ab Imperio, 2004, no. 4: 53960.
83
See Zapovit mytropolyta Petra Mohyly, in Arkadii Zhukovs
settlement in the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the canonical jurisdiction of the
Kyiv metropolitanate. In short, the elites of signicant parts of Ukraine
and Belarus came under a new structure an umbrella of early modern
national identity that superseded previously dominant local loyalties
circumscribed by the boundaries of towns, palatinates, and the inter-
nal border between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania.
85
On Mohylas cultural preferences and policies, see Ihor
Sev cenko, The Many Worlds
of Peter Mohyla, in idem, Ukraine between East and West, pp. 16486.
200 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
The geographical boundaries in which the public discourse of the
period imagined the Ruthenian nation were not set in stone: various types
of discourse proposed different boundaries and formulas for the amalga-
mation of local identities. One such discourse, advanced by the Ruthenian
nobility in the 1640s, presented the palatinates of Volhynia, Kyiv, Brat-
slav, and Chernihiv (to the exclusion of Galicia, Podilia, and the Ruthe-
nian territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) as a unit that should
enjoy the same rights and privileges.
86
Another discourse employed by
the panegyrists of the Ruthenian princes dened their homeland as a
combination of the above-mentioned palatinates with Galicia, thereby
restoring the memory of the Galician-Volhynian principality and laying a
foundation for the future Ukrainian identity.
87
It appears, however, that
the solidarity of the Ruthenian elite in the Commonwealth promoted by
the religious polemics of the day was much stronger than solidarity based
on historical or legal grounds.
The political upheaval created by the church union consolidated elites
irrespective of territorial location, political loyalty, and cultural pref-
erences, forcing them to play on one Ruthenian eld. It also linked
Lviv, Ostrih, Vilnius, and Kyiv as major centers of a common cultural
space. The same process encompassed a variety of social strata active in
ecclesiastical politics and polemics throughout the Rus
territories of the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The princes of Volhynia and Belarus,
church hierarchs, clergy and monks of the whole Kyiv metropolitanate,
the Ruthenian nobility of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania, the burghers of Lviv and Vilnius and, nally, the Cossacks
of the Dnipro region all participated in one great debate that ultimately
gave thema sense of common belonging and identity. That socially inclu-
sive character of the religious discourse helped promote a model of early
modern identity based on the nation as a linguistic and cultural entity.
The nobilitys efforts to monopolize the right to speak in the name of the
Ruthenian nation were only partly successful. The close association of
religious and ethnonational identity made it impossible for the nobility
to monopolize the national idea in the Rus
with Rus
linguistic
nomenclature to dene themselves. In one way or another, both drew on
the intellectual, political, and cultural heritage of Kyivan times. Both were
closely linked to the Orthodox religious tradition and church structure.
Finally, both identities were often weaker than the loyalty of the secular
202 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
elites to their local homelands and family clans.
88
At the same time, these
two identities were very different in origin and structure. For example,
state boundaries often performed different functions in shaping the Mus-
covite and Polish-Lithuanian Rus
imagined
itself rst and foremost within the borders of the Muscovite state, tend-
ing to ignore cultural differences within the tsars realm, the identity of
Polish-Lithuanian Rus
, the Polish-
Lithuanian and the Muscovite, to meet each other en masse certainly
not under the best of circumstances, but for the rst time in many
decades, if not centuries. Ukrainian Cossacks, often accompanied by
their families, crossed the Muscovite border in the ranks of the pre-
tenders armies, while noblemen made their way there under the leader-
ship of Sigismund III of Poland. There were as many as twenty thousand
Ukrainian Cossacks in the army of the First False Dmitrii, and up to
thirteen thousand in the forces of the second. They entered the heart-
land of Muscovy, going as far north as Beloozero. The encounter of the
two Ruses entailed not only killing and robbery but also the establish-
ment of new families. Some Cossacks stayed in the Muscovite service
after the end of the campaigns, creating problems for the authorities with
regard to their social and religious assimilation. Such encounters contin-
ued during the Commonwealth campaign of 1618 and the Smolensk War
of 163234. The incorporation into the Commonwealth of the Smolensk
and Chernihiv lands, which had been part of the Muscovite state for most
of the sixteenth century, gave rise to newsituations and allowed both sides
to draw comparisons.
5
4
For the most recent survey of the Time of Troubles, see Chester Dunning, A Short
History of Russias First Civil War: The Time of Troubles and the Founding of the Romanov
Dynasty (University Park, Pa., 2004). On Grigorii Otrepev and other pretenders to the
Russian throne during the Time of Troubles, see Maureen Perrie, Pretenders and Popular
Monarchism in Early Modern Russia: The False Tsars of the Time of Troubles (Cambridge,
1995). For a treatment of pretenders to kingship as a cultural phenomenon, see Boris
Uspenskii, Tsar
turno-istoricheskii
fenomen, in idem, Izbrannye trudy, vol. I, Semiotika istorii. Semiotika kul
tury (Moscow,
1994), pp. 75109.
5
On Ukrainian Cossack involvement in the Time of Troubles, see Tatiana Oparina,
Ukrainskie kazaki v Rossii: edinovertsy ili inovertsy? (Mikita Markushevskii protiv Leon-
tiia Pleshcheeva), Sotsium (Kyiv) 3 (2003): 2144.
Was there a reunication? 207
The mid-century uprising in Ukraine led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky
resulted in a major new encounter between Muscovites and Rutheni-
ans. Like many other Cossack uprisings of the period, the one of 1648
began with a rebellion at the Zaporozhian Sich. Its distinguishing feature
was that from the very beginning Khmelnytsky was able to obtain sup-
port from the Cossacks traditional enemies, the Crimean Tatars. The
combined Cossack-Tatar army proved invincible in ghting the Com-
monwealth troops. In May 1648, the Polish army suffered two crushing
defeats, leaving the entire Dnipro region in the hands of the Cossacks,
rebel peasants, and burghers. The jacquerie that began in the summer
counted among its victims thousands of Poles, Jews, and Ruthenian
nobles, all of whom were associated in the eyes of the rebels with the
Commonwealths oppressive rule in the region. The Kingdom of Poland
was left without a standing army, and a levy en masse raised in the autumn
of 1648 was soon defeated. The Cossacks, accompanied by the Tatars
(who did not distinguish between Ruthenians and non-Ruthenians when
it came to robbery and ransom), reached Lviv and Zamo s c, creating
panic as far west as Warsaw. The Diet convened to elect a new king after
the unexpected death of Wl adysl aw IV in May 1648 chose a candidate
favored by Khmelnytsky the brother of the deceased, John Casimir. The
Cossacks retreated, at least temporarily.
Hostilities resumed in the summer of 1649. The Cossack Host, rein-
forced by tens of thousands of rebellious peasants, besieged the Common-
wealth corps in the town of Zbarazh in Volhynia. Troops under Khmel-
nytskys command also attacked the main Commonwealth army, led by
the newking himself, at the nearby town of Zboriv, forcing the kings army
onto the defensive. Anewvictory of Cossack arms seemed imminent, but
the Crimean khan, who beneted fromcontinuing military conict in the
Commonwealth and wanted neither side to gain a decisive advantage,
opted for a truce with the king. The subsequent negotiations resulted in
compromise. The Zboriv Agreement recognized the existence of the new
Cossack state (known in historiography as the Hetmanate) but limited
the territory under Cossack control and reduced the size of its army to
forty thousand (at Zboriv, contemporary reports gave estimates as high
as three hundred thousand). The Commonwealth, for its part, was also
unhappy with the deal forced on the king by unfavorable circumstances.
The resumption of open warfare was thus only a matter of time. The
next major battle took place in the summer of 1651 at the village of
Berestechko in Volhynia. Again the Cossacks and their Tatar allies had a
good chance of victory, and again the khan decided the issue, this time by
eeing the battleeld. Abandoned to the mercy of the Commonwealth
army, the Cossacks suffered a major defeat. Khmelnytsky managed to
208 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
recover by autumn, mustering a new army that confronted Crown and
Lithuanian troops near the town of Bila Tserkva in Dnipro Ukraine.
The agreement signed there signicantly reduced the territory of the
Hetmanate and the Cossack register, but the Cossack polity survived. In
1652 Khmelnytsky struck again, defeating Commonwealth forces at the
village of Batih in Podilia. The next year witnessed an indecisive battle
between the Cossack Host, again allied with the Crimean Tatars, and the
Commonwealth army at the village of Zhvanets.
6
By the autumn of 1653, Khmelnytsky and his ofcers realized that
they needed another strong ally. While the Tatars had been essential to
the Cossacks initial victories, they had also proved themselves unreli-
able. Moreover, the price paid by the Hetmanate for that alliance was
counted in tens of thousands of Ukrainian captives taken to the Crimea
as slaves. Khmelnytsky had to take the anti-Tatar sentiments of his peo-
ple into account once they began to ee Ukraine, cross the border with
Muscovy and settle there in the territories that became known as Slo-
boda Ukraine. Khmelnytskys formal acceptance of Ottoman suzerainty,
on which he resolved in the difcult year of 1651, brought no military
aid from Istanbul. Under the circumstances, Khmelnytsky intensied his
negotiations with the tsar, pressing the Muscovite authorities to enter the
war with the Commonwealth. Negotiations between Muscovy and the
Cossack hetman led to the conclusion of the Pereiaslav Agreement in
January 1654 and the establishment of a Muscovite protectorate over the
Hetmanate developments that became known in imperial Russian and
Soviet historiography as reunication.
7
The reunication paradigm
The origins of the reunication paradigm, which dominated the Soviet
historiography of Russo-Ukrainian relations for decades, can be traced
back at least to the end of the eighteenth century. After the second par-
tition of Poland in 1793, Empress Catherine II struck a medal welcom-
ing Polish and Lithuanian Rus
, ed. Frank E. Sysyn et al., vols. VIII and IX, bk. 1 (Edmonton and Toronto,
20025).
7
On the Pereiaslav negotiations, see the comprehensive body of research assembled in
Pereiaslavs
et al. (Kyiv,
2003).
8
See Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History (Toronto, Buffalo, and London, 1988), p. 203.
Was there a reunication? 209
to the problem of reunication was reected in the writings of the
nineteenth-century Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin, a leader of the
pan-Slav movement. He claimed that the leitmotif of Russian history was
the reclamation of those parts of the Russian land that had been lost to
western neighbors since the times of Yaroslav the Wise. The rst scholar
to fully merge the statist and nation-based elements of the reunication
paradigm in his historical survey of Russia was Nikolai Ustrialov, who
maintained that all Eastern Slavs constituted one Russian nation and
that the various parts of Rus
,
bought into the idea. The same is true of nineteenth-century Russophile
historiography in Galicia, but most Ukrainian historians, led by Mykhailo
Hrushevsky, rejected the reunication paradigm. They regarded Ukraine
as a separate nation whose origins reached back to Kyivan Rus
: it had
not been torn away from any other nation and thus had no need to be
reunited with its other parts.
10
Early Soviet historians concurred with Hrushevsky in regarding Russia,
Ukraine, and Belarus as separate nations and kept their historical narra-
tives apart in every period except that of Kyivan Rus
?
Soviet historians were discouraged from asking questions of that kind.
Nevertheless, the liberal thaw of the 1960s created an atmosphere in
which a semi-ofcial challenge to the reunication paradigmbecame pos-
sible. It came in the formof an essay, Annexation or Reunication, writ-
ten in 1966 by the Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Braichevsky. Intending
to publish his essay in a Soviet scholarly journal, Braichevsky proceeded
to delegitimize the reunication paradigm by invoking the class-based
Marxist discourse of the 1920s. He also pointed out the contradiction
between the Russocentric paradigm and Communist Party declarations
on the equality of Soviet nations. Colleagues in the Ukrainian Academy
of Sciences initially were very supportive of Braichevskys argument, and
one of them even advised him to look at work done by the Belarusian his-
torian L. S. Abetsedarski, who also questioned the legitimacy of the reuni-
cation concept, though in a much more subdued manner. Braichevskys
essay was never published in the USSR, where it circulated only in samiz-
dat. It appeared in the West in 1972. The author was dismissed from the
Institute of History of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1968. He
worked at the Institute of Archaeology for two years (197072) but was
also hounded from that position and prevented from taking another for
the next six years. Meanwhile, in the summer of 1974 the Institute of
History of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences organized a discussion of
the essay behind closed doors. Needless to say, Braichevskys colleagues,
including those who had supported him at the beginning, now solemnly
condemned his work.
12
Scholarly discussion of the meaning and historical importance of the
Pereiaslav Agreement resumed only in the late 1980s, following
the advent of glasnost. Ukrainian historians overwhelmingly rejected
the reunication paradigm, replacing the imperial- and Soviet-era reuni-
cation with the terms Ukrainian revolution and national-liberation
11
On the interpretation of Russo-Ukrainian relations in Soviet historiography of the 1940s
and 1950s, see Serhy Yekelchyk, Stalins Empire of Memory: Russian-Ukrainian Relations
in the Soviet Historical Imagination (Toronto, 2004).
12
See the text of Braichevskys essay, the minutes of the closed discussion of 1974, and
Braichevskys response to his critics in Pereiaslavs
evicha Skopina-Shuiskogo, in
Khrestomatiia po drevnei russkoi literature, pp. 31421, here 315.
23
See Iz Karamzinskogo khronografa, in Vosstanie I. Bolotnikova. Dokumenty i materialy
(Moscow, 1959), pp. 10919, here 109.
24
And by now they have handed over to him, the thief, almost all the Rus
tsardom,
wrote a contemporary author about the intentions of the Muscovite traitors. See
Novaia povest
mennost
, p. 307.
28
Kollmann denes the term as follows: Generally the Land was envisioned as being
separate from the tsar, the privileged military ranks, and the apparatus of government.
The usage of the term Land fairly explicitly distinguishes between the tsars realm
and perhaps a vestigial public sphere; this distinction is evident since the mid-sixteenth
century (Concepts of Society and Social Identity, p. 41).
29
See Iz Vremennika Ivana Timofeeva, in Vosstanie I. Bolotnikova, p. 125.
30
See an excerpt from Patriarch Hermogens letter of June 1607 in Vosstanie I. Bolotnikova,
pp. 21516.
31
See Novaia povest
, p. 311.
32
Kollmann suggests that assemblies of the land should probably best be regarded as a
consultative process rather than as formal institutions, particularly of a protoparliamen-
tary type (Concepts of Society and Social Identity, p. 39).
Was there a reunication? 215
his legitimacy in the eyes of some of his subjects.
33
Assemblies of the land
represented the whole society, including the boyars, clergy, service nobil-
ity, burghers, and, in times of unrest, the Cossacks as well. The notion
of the land was as close as early seventeenth-century Muscovy came to
the concepts of nation and fatherland. It also acquired supernatural
characteristics: as Valerie Kivelson has recently noted, The voice of the
land was understood as an embodiment of divine choice.
34
If applied
broadly, the concept could inspire local communities to pursue an all-
Rus
political agenda, as was the case with the movement that led to
the enthronement of Mikhail Romanov. Understood locally, the same
concept could encourage regionalism or even secession. If the views of a
particular region were ignored, local elites could claim the right of revolt.
According to the narrative of a Dutch merchant, Isaac Massa, the people
of the Siverian region (that is, Chernihiv and vicinity) justied their rebel-
lion against Vasilii Shuisky by claiming that the Muscovites (inhabitants
of Moscow) had killed the legitimately consecrated tsar (the First False
Dmitrii) for no reason and without having consulted them.
35
As a rule, the term land was applied either to a region or to the
whole territory of the Muscovite tsardom, but given the prevailing polit-
ical fragmentation, it could also exceed the boundaries of Muscovy. This
applies to the proclamation of a separate Novgorodian state (gosudarstvo)
under Swedish protection in 1611. The treaty signed between Novgorod
and Sweden envisioned the possible annexation of the Muscovite and
Suzdalian states to the state of Novgorod.
36
Some documents of the
period also included references to a Kazan state, and there were mentions
of a Vladimir state as well.
37
Under these circumstances, references to
the whole land and the Russian land took on the supra-state mean-
ing they had had in the fteenth and early sixteenth centuries, stressing
the cultural unity of the politically fragmented realm. Quite telling in that
regard are references in Muscovite tales to Kuzma Minins miraculous
33
Avraamii Palitsyn wrote in that regard: After the unfrocked monk was killed on the
fourth day by certain petty servants from the tsars palaces, Vasilii Ivanovich Shuisky
was given preference and installed in the tsars residence, but he was not persuaded [to
take ofce] by any of the magnates or entreated by the rest of the people, and Russia
(Rosia) was of two minds: those who loved himand those who hated him (Iz Skazaniia
Avraamiia Palitsina, in Vosstanie I. Bolotnikova, pp. 12627, here 126). For the complete
text of the monument, see Skazanie Avraamiia Palitsyna, ed. O. Derzhavina and E.
Kolosova (Moscow and Leningrad, 1955).
34
See Valerie Kivelson, Muscovite Citizenship: Rights without Freedom, Journal of
Modern History 74 (September 2002): 46589, here 474.
35
See excerpts from Isaac Massas notes in Vosstanie I. Bolotnikova, pp. 13449, here 134.
36
See G. M. Kabalenko, Dogovor mezhdu Novgorodom i Shvetsiei 1611 goda, Voprosy
istorii, 1988, no. 11: 13134.
37
See Kollmann, Concepts of Society and Social Identity, pp. 4041.
216 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
vision of St. Sergii, the fourteenth-century protector of the Muscovite
realm and the whole Russian land.
38
The old, supra-state meaning of
the terms the whole land and all Russia is revived in Avraamii Pali-
tsyns narrative. Palitsyn wrote about the revolts in the borderlands, which
included the Riazan Land, the Siverian and Smolensk regions, Novgorod
and Pskov. Discussing the revolt in the Chernihiv (Siverian) region, he
draws a parallel with Novgorod, as both were relatively late additions
to the Muscovite realm: The Siverian region, being well aware of Tsar
Ivan Vasilievichs latest destruction of Novgorod, and not waiting for
such suffering to be inicted upon it, soon separated from the Muscovite
state, thereby doing great harm to all Russia (Rosia) when it elevated
the Unfrocked Monk to the Russian tsardom and completely forsook
the Christian fraternity, consigning itself to servitude to the Kingdom of
Poland.
39
Thus, in Palitsyns opinion, regional grievances and insecuri-
ties vis-` a-vis the policy of the Moscow center were among the causes of
the Time of Troubles and could prompt certain regions to seek foreign
protection. Palitsyn treated the Siverian case as an example of regional-
ism, not of incipient statehood. In his view, the Siverian Land was part
of all Russia.
The boundaries of Muscovite identity
If the inhabitants of Chernihiv (or Novgorod, for that matter) were
not regarded as foreigners or indels in Muscovy, where did the early
seventeenth-century Muscovites draw the line between themselves and
the other? In seeking an answer to this question, we should begin with
the self-image of the Muscovites as it emerges from writings of the rst
decades of the seventeenth century. The picture presented by contem-
porary texts is quite confusing. On the one hand, both ecclesiastical and
secular authors of the period saw themselves as part of the Muscovite
or Russian populace. On the other hand, the ethnonational terms that
our authors used to describe themselves and their people (Moskovskie or
Russkie liudi) consisted mostly of adjectives, while nouns were used to
denote their neighbors (liakh, nemets, etc.). The noun Rusin/Rusyn, used
in earlier Muscovite texts and employed in Ukraine and Belarus to refer
to the local population, does not appear in Muscovite texts of the early
seventeenth century. The term narod, which is occasionally encountered
in Muscovite texts of the period, is not used in the sense of nation or
ethnocultural community, as in Ukraine and Belarus of the period, but
38
See Kivelson, Muscovite Citizenship, pp. 47172.
39
See Iz Skazaniia Avraamiia Palitsina, p. 126.
Was there a reunication? 217
simply means a number of people. The nouns that Muscovites used to
refer to themselves were not usually ethnonational (the ethnonym Rus
koho kozatstva
16131620 rr., comp. Leontii Voitovych et al. (Lviv, 1998), p. 77.
41
See Skazanie Avraamiia Palitsina, in Khrestomatiia po drevnei russkoi literature, pp. 321
28, here 324.
42
Inozemets Litvin Ivan Storovskii (Iz Karamzinskogo khronografa, in Vosstanie I. Bolot-
nikova), pp. 11314.
43
See Dokumenty rosiis
ev-Romanov
a.k.a. The Grand Sovereign The Most Holy Filaret Nikitich, Patriarch of Moscow and
All Rus
(ca. 15501633), Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1998. The text of the thesis,
which remains unpublished, is as informative and extensive as its baroque title suggests.
58
In 1629 there were 554 inhabited homesteads in Tver as opposed to 1,450 abandoned
ones. There were also eleven deserted churches and monasteries within the city limits.
See N. N. Ovsiannikov, Tver
.
The Ruthenians appear to have become no less alienated from the Mus-
covites, whether they served in Cossack detachments or in the armies
of Sigismund III or Royal Prince Wl adysl aw. Loyalty to a common king
and fatherland, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, emerged as the
force that bound together Poles, Lithuanians, and Ruthenians Roman
Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians and divided them
from the Muscovite subjects of the tsar. Polish-Lithuanian Rus
clearly
regarded Muscovite Rus
. The
religious turmoil of the Union of Brest era and the advancing confession-
alization of religious and secular life in the Commonwealth alerted the
Orthodox side to the existence of the Orthodox Rus
Etnogeneticheskie legendy, dogadki, protogipotezy XVI nachala XVII veka (St. Petersburg,
2000), pp. 2145, 95140 passim.
Was there a reunication? 227
Union and the pro-Uniate policy of the Polish court were inclining the
Ruthenian Orthodox toward Muscovy more than ever before. The Com-
monwealth authorities tried to put an end to that tendency, accusing the
Orthodox of treason, taking their leaders to court, and ordering the arrest
of delegations to Moscow. Orthodox complaints about the persecution
of their church in the Commonwealth lessened the kings chances of suc-
cess with his Muscovy project. The Ruthenian Orthodox bishops Hedeon
Balaban and Mykhail Kopystensky, who signed an appeal to the Mus-
covites pointing out the First False Dmitriis contacts with the Jesuits,
were accused of treason. Meletii Smotrytsky faced the same accusation
after publishing his anti-Uniate Threnos in 1610.
68
What was really going on in the minds of the Ruthenian Orthodox
during the Time of Troubles? How did they reconcile their conicting
loyalties toward their Polish-Lithuanian fatherland on one hand and the
Orthodox faith on the other, given that the latter included Muscovite
Rus
churches. He wrote:
And that happened to thembecause of the great Lithuanian abuses and the Polish
mockery, for in Moscow Tsar Dmitrii had built a Polish Roman Catholic church
for his wifes sake, and monks served the divine liturgy, but they [the Poles and
Lithuanians] made great mock of the Rus
mennastsi (Minsk,
1975), pp. 11155, here 151.
228 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
of the Commonwealths confrontation with Muscovy explains at least in
part why the authors of the Lviv and Ostrih chronicles presented the
whole history of Commonwealth intervention in Muscovite affairs as a
solely Polish undertaking that had nothing to do with Polish-Lithuanian
Rus
.
70
Since there is no evidence of Ruthenian Orthodox protest against the
war, nor were there any major religiously motivated desertions of Ortho-
dox Ruthenians to Muscovy, it is fair to say that most Ruthenians found
ways of handling their conicting identities in a manner that did not
compromise their loyalty to the Commonwealth. Of particular interest in
this connection is the Trynografe (1625), a Polish-language poem on the
death of Prince Bahdan Ahinski written by a professor of the Orthodox
College in Vilnius. Ahinski was a Ruthenian aristocrat who traced his
origins back to St. Volodymyr, was active in the Vilnius Orthodox Broth-
erhood, and signed a protestation in defense of the rights of the Orthodox
Church in 1608. He also held high ofces in the Commonwealth admin-
istration, being subchamberlain of Trakai and starosta of Dorsun. From
the verses we learn that he was elected a captain (rotmistrz) during the
campaign against Muscovy, in which he fully demonstrated his devotion
to the Commonwealth as his fatherland:
Velikie Luki, Kropivna and the Dnipro,
Full of boyar blood and corpses of musketeers, must attest
That no one could appease him by being of the same faith;
They could not ward off the gifts of Mars rendered by his hand.
He considered foes of the Fatherland enemies of God;
He venerated the cross, revered the faith and the threshold of the
Lords Church;
Not for the faith but for space, for the sake of the Fatherlands borders,
He would gladly have turned the Muscovite lands inside out.
71
Was the reconciliation of the two loyalties more a problem for the
Orthodox cleric who wrote these verses than for Ahinski himself? That is a
denite possibility. But there is also good reason to believe that the verses
accurately reected the thinking of the prince, who, as we learn from this
source, was known to his contemporaries as a Ruthenian (Rusnak) and
70
See O. A. Bevzo, L
vivs
kyi litopysets
. Dzhereloznavche doslidzhennia,
2nd edn (Kyiv, 1971), pp. 1023, 13031. Both chronicles were written far from the
theater of events, which may also have inuenced their coverage of those developments.
71
See Trynografe, in Roksola nski Parnas. Polskoje zyczna poezja ukrai nska od ko nca XVI
do poczatku XVIII wieku, pt. 2, Antologia, ed. Rostysl aw Radyszew skyj [Rostyslav
Radyshevs
kyi] (Cracow, 1998), pp. 97104, here 100. The author of the verses, Iosyf
Bobrykevych, wrote and recited them in Ruthenian but published them in Polish. See
Ihar A. Marzaliuk, Liudzi da uniai Belarusi: etnakanfesiinyia i satsyia-kul
turnyia stereotypy
(XXVII st.) (Mahilio u, 2003), p. 76.
Was there a reunication? 229
regarded himself as one of the leaders of the Orthodox Rus
. In order to
deal with their conicting loyalties, Ahinski and his coreligionists sepa-
rated religious and political identity.
In the eyes of the Orthodox clergy, the way to balance the two loyal-
ties was, at a minimum, to refrain from attacking Orthodox churches
(as distinct from the Orthodox population) on occupied territory.
Kasiian Sakovych, for example, praised Hetman Petro Konashevych-
Sahaidachny, who led one of the most devastating Cossack attacks on
Muscovy in 1618, for having forbidden his Cossacks to attack Ortho-
dox churches during the Moldavian campaign.
72
Sakovych was silent
on whether Sahaidachny had done the same in Muscovy, but Meletii
Smotrytsky later wrote that the Cossack hetman had repented his partic-
ipation in the campaign against Muscovy before Patriarch Theophanes.
73
Muscovite sources leave little doubt that there was good reason to repent,
for the Orthodox Ruthenian nobles and Cossacks participated equally
with their non-Orthodox comrades in atrocities against the Muscovite
population. The actions of one of them, the Cossack ofcer Andrii Naly-
vaiko, who impaled Muscovite nobles and took women and children cap-
tive, prompted the Second False Dmitrii to issue an order sentencing him
to death.
74
There is also no reason to disregard Muscovite documents
stating that the Cossacks robbed Orthodox churches of their valuables,
which were considered legitimate booty at the time, whatever the denom-
ination of the churches and the religion of the soldiers involved in those
acts of blasphemy.
75
It was probably easier for the Cossacks and the rank
and le of the Commonwealth army, not yet religiously mobilized, to dis-
regard the denominational afliation of the churches, while the leaders of
the Orthodox nobility, deeply involved in the struggle over church union,
found it more difcult to do so.
At a time when the Ruthenian Orthodox elite sought to balance loy-
alty to the Commonwealth and to the Orthodox Church, which included
enemies of its Polish-Lithuanian fatherland, while the rank and le sim-
ply exercised the right of conquest in the course of expeditions against
72
See Kasiian Sakovych, Virshi, in Ukrans
,
ed. O. V. Myshanych (Kyiv, 1987), p. 230.
73
Boris Floria, Narodno-osvoboditel
by vostochnogo slavianstva
(Moscow, 1982), pp. 195226, here 2023.
74
See Oparina, Ukrainskie kazaki v Rossii, p. 22. Nalyvaiko was ultimately executed by
his own men.
75
Ibid, p. 31. For a discussion of the military ethos of the time, see Natalia Iakovenko,
Skil
nyi
svit, pp. 189230.
230 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Muscovy, a number of Orthodox intellectuals began to develop a view
that prepared the way for what nineteenth-century historiography would
call the reunication of Rus
unity.
Its argument capitalized on the idea of religious unity between Muscovy
and Polish-Lithuanian Rus
-
Moskva.
78
The most compelling case for the ethnic afnity of the two Rus
i po slavianovedeniiu, ed.
V. I. Lamanskii, vyp. 3 (St. Petersburg, 1910), pp. 13553, here 143. Cf. Plokhy, The
Cossacks and Religion, p. 291.
78
See Hustyns
in
his title had nothing to do with the Polish-Lithuanian Little Rus
.
80
There was more understanding between the two parties on the issue
of the Kyivan origins of the Muscovite ruling dynasty. Muscovite diplo-
macy fought hard with the Polish-Lithuanian authorities to gain recogni-
tion of the Romanovs as heirs of the Rurikids. The Ruthenian Orthodox
hierarchs, by contrast, whether out of ignorance or for political reasons,
preferred to take no notice of the change of dynasty. Their treatment of
Mikhail Romanov as an heir of St. Volodymyr followed the pattern estab-
lished by the Orthodox alms-seekers of the early 1590s. Despite the pro-
found dynastic crisis of the Time of Troubles, St. Volodymyr remained a
popular gure in Muscovite political and religious discourse. References
to him as a second Constantine appeared in Patriarch Hermogens letter
of 1610 to Royal Prince Wl adysl aw, in which the patriarch attempted to
convince his addressee to convert to Orthodoxy. Later, in 1625, Semen
79
For the text of the letter, see Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei. Dokumenty i materialy, 3 vols.
(Moscow, 1954), I: 4648. Cf. Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion, pp. 28990.
80
See letters from Kopynsky to Filaret (December 1622) and Filarets letter to Boretsky
(April 1630) in Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, 1: 2728, 81. On the negotiations of 1632,
see Sergei Solov
ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, bk. 5 (Moscow, 1961), pp. 176.
232 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Shakhovskoi included the same references in a draft of the tsars let-
ter to Shah Abbas of Persia, whom the Muscovite authorities also tried
to convert.
81
By all accounts, Ruthenian references to the legacy of St.
Volodymyr were appreciated in Moscow. In the 1640s, when Metropoli-
tan Mohyla (not very well disposed toward Muscovy) asked the tsar to
help build a sepulcher for the remains of our forefather [St. Volodymyr]
at St. Sophias Cathedral, the response was not negative. The tsars exact
answer is not known, but there is evidence that a Muscovite goldsmith
worked for Mohyla in Kyiv in 164445 on the tsars orders.
82
It would
appear that both sides agreed on the Kyivan origins of the Muscovite
dynasty and statehood.
Nevertheless, that agreement did very little to alleviate Muscovite sus-
picions about the religion of their Ruthenian neighbors. Responding to
the challenges of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Ruthe-
nian Orthodox sought to confessionalize their religious and public life; in
so doing, they looked to Constantinople and Moscow for support. The
Ruthenians were disappointed with the model of reform offered by Con-
stantinople, whose patriarch, Cyril Lukaris, seemed to them excessively
inuenced by Protestant ideas. Nor did they get any help in Moscow,
where they were considered dangerous heretics. A typical indication of
that attitude was the reception offered by the Muscovite authorities to
the Ruthenian writer Lavrentii Zyzanii, who came to Moscow in 1626
for theological advice and approval of the Orthodox catechism he had
drafted. Zyzanii was actually imprisoned in the capital. Accused of har-
boring heretical and non-Orthodox views, he chose to make concessions
on issues that aroused suspicion about the purity of his Orthodoxy. As
the Orthodox faith of the Ruthenians was not considered truly Ortho-
dox or even Christian, the Muscovite authorities forbade the import of
Orthodox theological literature from Ruthenia, and some books were
even burned.
83
The attitude of the Muscovites toward Orthodox Ruthenians in their
midst is fully apparent in their insistence on the rebaptism of the Com-
monwealth Orthodox. The same Orthodox council of 1620 that con-
demned Metropolitan Iona (at the initiative of Patriarch Filaret) for the
conrmation of two non-Orthodox Christians also issued a pastoral letter
81
See Keenan, Semen Shakhovskoi and the Condition of Orthodoxy.
82
See Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, 1: 400401. Cf. Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion,
pp. 24243.
83
On Zyzaniis mission to Muscovy and Smotrytskys trip to Constantinople, see David
A. Frick, Zyzanij and Smotryc
nyts
. Polish
letters were full of rumors to that effect.
92
But were Khmelnytsky and the
Cossack leaders of the uprising actually contemplating a restoration of
Rus
nyts
ka
derzhavna ideia. Problemy formuvannia, evoliutsi, realizatsi (Kyiv, 1997), pp. 2534.
93
See Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, II: 10414, here 1089. On the consistent Cossack
demand for territory up to the Vistula in the course of the military campaigns of
165457, see Smolii and Stepankov, Ukrans
(at least in
the way he presented themto the Polish envoys). It would appear that like
the princes and nobles, the Cossacks thought of the northern boundary
of their polity as extending along the border between the Polish Crown
and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Although they considered the East
Slavic population of the Grand Duchy to be part of the Ruthenian
nation,
94
the political realities of the time dictated caution: Khmelnytsky
was trying to avoid a war on two fronts and counted on the neutral-
ity of Prince Janusz Radziwil l , the commander of the Lithuanian army.
Khmelnytsky sought to represent the uprising as an internal matter of
the Kingdom of Poland. If the Cossacks crossed the Lithuanian border,
they did so in order to stir up revolt and keep the Lithuanian troops
busy putting down popular uprisings on their own territory instead of
encroaching on the Ruthenian lands of the Crown. From very early on,
Cossack diplomacy tried to persuade the Muscovite tsar to send his troops
to Smolensk in order to open a Lithuanian front, suggesting that at least
for the moment they were not interested in Belarus.
95
94
Both the Cossacks and their opponents in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania considered the
Ruthenian population on both sides of the border to belong to the same ethnocultural
group. Albert Wijuk Kojal owicz, the author of Rerum in Magno Ducatu Lithvaniae per
tempus rebellionis Russicae gestarum Commentarius (Regiomonti [K onigsberg], 1653), who
was close to Radziwil l , saw the reason for the spread of the uprising to the Grand Duchy
in the national unity of Ruthenians on both sides of the Polish-Lithuanian boundary. See
my Osvoboditel
tsev, Rossiia
i Belorussiia v seredine XVII veka (Moscow, 1974), pp. 19134, 21854; Sahanovich,
Neviadomaia vaina, pp. 1482; Smolii and Stepankov, Ukrans
ka derzhavna ideia,
pp. 1057.
Was there a reunication? 239
Developments in the second year of the uprising led to the recognition
of autonomous Cossack statehood in the provisions of the Zboriv Agree-
ment (1649).
96
In many ways the agreement was a major triumph for
the rebels, although it fell short of Khmelnytskys aspirations as reported
in a Polish diary for the rst months of 1649. The territory that ended
up under Cossack control was even smaller than that envisaged as a his-
torical and legal unit by the Ruthenian nobles of the 1640s: it included
the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Bratslav palatinates, but not Volhynia. Still,
within the boundaries of the new Cossack state the Ruthenian Ortho-
dox nobility was able to achieve some of the major goals of its original
program, which could never have been realized without Cossack inter-
vention. These included special rights for the Orthodox Church (in fact,
Jews, Uniates, and members of Catholic religious orders were ofcially
banned from the territory of the Hetmanate). Ofces in the royal admin-
istration of the Cossack palatinates were reserved for nobles of Ruthenian
Orthodox extraction. Thus the key post of palatine of Kyiv went to Adam
Kysil, a leader of the Ruthenian nobility and author of an appeal that rep-
resented the palatinates of Volhynia, Kyiv, Bratslav, and Chernihiv as part
of the same administrative entity. To be sure, the Ruthenian Orthodox
nobles did not run the newstate, but many of themfound their place in it,
and some made spectacular careers: one such was the Orthodox noble-
man Ivan Vyhovsky, who became general chancellor under Khmelnytsky
and succeeded him as hetman in 1657.
97
On the occasion of the Zboriv Agreement, Vyhovsky or, much more
probably, some of his secretaries recruited from the ranks of the Ruthe-
nian nobility composed verses that eulogized the Cossack hetman and
thus picked up where Kasiian Sakovych had left off in the early 1620s.
Khmelnytsky and his family were presented in the verses as successors to
St. Volodymyr. Under Volodymyrs sons Rus
society
as those earlier attributed to Mohyla. For example, the author credited
Khmelnytsky with solicitude for the common good of the Rus
stock
and with freeing their mother church from captivity in order to return
it to the Rus
and
Poland and its peaceful resolution are a leitmotif of the verses, which
present the uprising in clear-cut national terms.
The war was presented as a conict between Rus
and Poland
(that is, the Union of Lublin of 1569). He also insisted that the palatine
of Kyiv be appointed from among the people of the Rus
or to
Polish misfortune.
101
To be sure, the fact that the ethnonational interpretation of the conict
found its way into the letters of leaders of the uprising and the writ-
ings of Ruthenian literati does not mean that in the eyes of the elites the
national view prevailed over the legal, social, and especially the religious
99
Ukrans
nyts
by your
people. The Cossacks, on the other hand, had concluded an armistice
with the Poles on condition that the newly elected king, John Casimir,
be a Rus
as an equal part-
ner in the Commonwealth and by Khmelnytskys interpretation of the
uprising as a national war.
The continuation of the uprising and the varying fortunes of war sig-
nicantly altered the Cossack view of the Hetmanate, its geographical
extent, and legal status, but the vision of Rus
ky oblych u viiny.
103
Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, II: 12731, here 128, 130.
242 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Hetmanate an exchange that eventually led to the Pereiaslav Agree-
ment of 1654. Not unlike the Khmelnytsky Uprising itself, this event had
a profound impact on the political situation in the region and the process
of nation-building among the Eastern Slavs. Here, however, our task is
not so much to look into the long-termconsequences of the agreement as
to understand whether the ethnonational factor was part of the equation
from the outset and, if so, how it inuenced the course of events.
Contacts between the rebels and the Muscovite authorities began in
the summer of 1648 at the initiative of the Cossack hetman. From the
very beginning he asked Muscovy to join forces with the Cossacks in
the war against the Commonwealth. The situation of 1632 was repeat-
ing itself, with the difference that it was now the Cossacks, not the tsar,
who were eager to obtain support. After the defeat of 1634, Muscovy was
more than cautious. Besides, the specter of a new Cossack-led uprising
that might spread to Muscovy and provoke a new Time of Troubles dis-
couraged the Muscovites from becoming openly involved in the conict.
They adopted a compromise tactic: those of the Cossacks and rebels
who wanted to cross the border were welcomed in Muscovy (on one
occasion, Cossack troops were even allowed to launch a surprise attack
on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from Muscovite territory), but the tsar
would not start a new war with the Commonwealth. Not until 1651 was
Muscovy nally prepared to change its policy of noninterference in Com-
monwealth affairs. Preparations were even made to convene an Assembly
of the Land to sanction the war, but the Commonwealth armys defeat
of the Cossacks at Berestechko put an end to the plan. By 1653, unable
to obtain military assistance from the Ottomans and losing the coopera-
tion of the khan, Khmelnytsky insisted that the Muscovite rulers nally
make up their mind. That autumn, a special convocation of the Assembly
of the Land decided to take Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks with their
towns (meaning the territory of the Hetmanate) under the tsars high
hand. An embassy led by the boyar Vasilii Buturlin was sent to Ukraine
to administer an oath to the Cossack leadership and the rank-and-le
Cossacks. In January 1654, the embassy met with Khmelnytsky in the
town of Pereiaslav. After brief negotiations that were not very satisfactory
to the Cossack side, a council was convened to formally approve Cossack
submission to the tsar.
Historians still differ on what the Pereiaslav Agreement amounted
to in legal terms. Was it indeed an agreement? After all, no document
was signed in Pereiaslav, and the tsars approval of the conditions of
submission was given much later in Moscow. If it was an agreement,
was it a personal union, real union, alliance, federation, confedera-
tion, vassalage, protectorate, or outright incorporation? How did that
Was there a reunication? 243
arrangement compare with previous ones, such as the Zboriv Treaty of
1649 with the king, or agreements concluded by Muscovy with previously
incorporated territories and peoples?
104
Of greatest interest to us is not the legal status of the Pereiaslav Agree-
ment but the discourse that accompanied its preparation and legitimized
its conclusion. If Muscovys involvement in the war with the Common-
wealth was the main goal of Cossack diplomacy, what ideological argu-
ments did Khmelnytsky and his associates use to convince the tsar to
send his troops against Poland-Lithuania? Khmelnytskys letters to the
tsar and to his courtiers and voevodas provide sufcient information to
answer this question. They indicate that from the very beginning of that
correspondence in the summer of 1648, the religious motif had a promi-
nent place. The tsar emerges from the hetmans letters as rst and fore-
most an Orthodox Christian ruler duty-bound to assist fellow Ortho-
dox Christians rebelling against Catholic persecution of their church.
Khmelnytsky also sought to lure the tsar into the conict by invoking the
mirage of a vast Orthodox empire including not only Cossack Ukraine and
Polish-Lithuanian Rus
kyi, Istoriia
Ukrany-Rusy, IX, pt. 2: pp. 61941.
111
See the decisions of the Assembly of the Land in Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, III:
414.
246 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Khmelnytsky scarcely missed an opportunity to visit a Ruthenian Ortho-
dox church or take part in a religious procession along its way. It was met
not only by Cossacks but also by burghers solemnly led by priests, who
welcomed the embassy with long baroque-style speeches, and sermons.
The conclusion of the Pereiaslav Agreement itself was accompanied by a
solemn church service. In his speech at Pereiaslav, the tsars envoy Vasilii
Buturlin mentioned not only the Muscovite saints to whose support he
attributed the success of the whole enterprise but also SS. Antonii and
Teodosii of the Kyivan Cave Monastery and St. Barbara, highly vener-
ated in the Kyiv metropolitanate, whose relics were preserved in one of
the Kyivan monasteries.
112
If there was a reunion in Pereiaslav, it was an Orthodox one, declared
in numerous religious services, speeches, and pronouncements but not
yet implemented. In fact, it was not even a reunion (that did not happen
in institutional, liturgical, and other terms until the last decade of the sev-
enteenth century and the rst decades of the eighteenth) but an avowal
of reconciliation. After the tumultuous struggle against the Union in the
Kyiv metropolitanate and the shock of the Time of Troubles in Muscovy,
the two sides had agreed to reestablish relations. The churchmen thereby
provided the political elites with the common language required to begin
a dialogue between the two nations, which by now were very different. In
Europe, even after the end of the Thirty Years War, religion continued to
provide legitimization for political alliances, breaches of peace, and dec-
larations of war. Muscovy and the Cossack Hetmanate were no exception
to that rule.
The Pereiaslav disagreement
What about ethnic motives for the reunication? Were they entirely
absent from Cossack negotiations with the tsar? Although Khmelnytsky
dened certain elements of the uprising in ethnonational terms in his
letters to Muscovy, it appears that the hetman and his secretaries never
made the seemingly natural link between the two Rus
nations. In a letter
to the voevoda Semen Bolkhovsky in the summer of 1648, Khmelnytsky
complained about the persecution of our Rus
Orthodox Christians,
but in his attempt to involve the tsar in the Cossack-Polish conict he
made no use of the theme of ethnic afnity between the two parts of
Rus
; instead, he invited the tsar to seek the Polish throne, which was
112
For the texts of the speeches, see the report of Buturlins embassy in Vossoedinenie
Ukrainy s Rossiei, III: 42389. Cf. Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion, pp. 31825.
Was there a reunication? 247
vacant at the time.
113
That did not change in Khmelnytskys subsequent
letters to Moscow.
114
What changed was the way in which he referred to
his homeland. If at rst he called it Rus
but as Sovereign of
Great and Little Rus
.
115
The tsar accepted this change of his title.
116
The beginning of the new war with the Commonwealth clearly freed him
from the Muscovite envoys claim of 1634 that the Polish Little Rus
had
nothing to do with the tsars all Rus
as well, and his title was changed accordingly to avoid the ambiguity of
1634.
In accepting the formula of Great and Little Rus
nyts
koho, p. 65.
114
There was also no attempt to play on the theme of ethnic afnity in Khmelnytskys letter
of 29 September (9 October) 1649 to the voevoda Fedor Arseniev, in which the hetman
complained about attacks on the Orthodox Rus
nyts
in
his letters to the tsar seems to have been fairly insignicant, given that in his letters to
Muscovite correspondents (including the missive to Arseniev) the hetman also used the
full title of John Casimir, which included a reference to the king as Prince of Rus
.
115
See Khmelnytskys letters in Dokumenty Bohdana Khmel
nyts
, Ukrana,
1917, nos. 12: 719; A. V. Solov
, Voprosy istorii,
1947, no. 7: 2438.
117
See Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion, p. 326.
248 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
referred to his homeland as Rus
nyts
koho, p. 323.
119
See Khmelnytskys letter to the tsar of 19 (29) July 1654 in Dokumenty Bohdana
Khmel
nyts
koho, p. 373.
120
See the description of the disagreement over the oath in Buturlins ambassadorial report
(Vossoedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, III: 46466).
Was there a reunication? 249
Buturlin did not lie: tsars indeed never swore oaths to their subjects. At
Pereiaslav the tsars representative applied to his sovereigns new subjects
the rules of steppe diplomacy a set of principles inherited by Mus-
covy from the Golden Horde and practiced with regard to its eastern
neighbors and vassals. As Andreas Kappeler has argued, these princi-
ples entailed a loose protectorate, which was concluded by means of
an oath, by installing a loyal ruler. From the Russian point of view that
established a client status to which it could always refer in the future,
whereas the other side saw it at the most as a personal and temporary act
of submission.
121
Indeed, if the Cossack elite viewed the oath and ser-
vice to the tsar as conditional (voluntary [povol
(Kazan, 1914). On the activities of the Kyivan literati (Slavynetsky and Polatsky)
in Moscow, see Paul Bushkovitch, Religion and Society in Russia: The Sixteenth and Sev-
enteenth Centuries (New York and Oxford, 1992), pp. 15075. For a revisionist view that
questions the extent of Kyivan inuence on Muscovite society, see Okenfuss, The Rise
and Fall of Latin Humanism, pp. 4563.
11
Such was Valuevs reference to the Ukrainian language in his circular of 1863 prohibiting
Ukrainian publications in the Russian Empire. On the origins of the circular and its
inuence, see Alexei Miller, The Ukrainian Question: The Russian Empire and Nationalism
in the Nineteenth Century (Budapest and New York, 2003), pp. 97126.
The invention of Russia 255
traditional approach to the topic is well summarized in the opening para-
graph of Hans Roggers groundbreaking study, National Consciousness in
Eighteenth-Century Russia (1960), where we read the following:
Nationalism, most of its students are agreed, is a recent phenomenon, and any use
of the termapplied to events or attitudes before the eighteenth century unjustied.
Even then, only some favored few the English, the French, perhaps the Dutch
could claim it as their own. The Russians, backward in this as in so many other
things, did not, in the eighteenth century, have a nationalismworthy of that name,
and real Russian nationalism did not make its appearance until the nineteenth
century.
12
Roggers study proved beyond reasonable doubt the existence of
national consciousness in post-Petrine eighteenth-century Russia, but
the reign of Peter himself, and especially the decades leading up to it, long
remained a gray area to most students of Russian history. Only recently
has the situation begun to change. Geoffrey Hosking, for example, intro-
duced the schismatic Old Belief into his discussion of Russian national
mythology, presenting it as a factor in some ways even more damag-
ing to Russians condence about their own national identity than the
rift between Russia and the West.
13
In her comparative study of Euro-
pean nationalisms, Liah Greenfeld included the Petrine era in a general
discussion of Russian national consciousness, as did Vera Tolz in her
pioneering work on the invention of the Russian nation. Tolz was never-
theless careful to observe: It should be said from the very outset that in
the eighteenth century, Russia was not a nation. Nevertheless, concepts
about what Russia was, and especially how it compared to the West, rst
began to be elaborated in the eighteenth century.
14
What are the ndings, suppositions, and hypotheses of the most recent
historiography concerning the Petrine beginnings of Russian national
identity? Greenfelds observations deserve particular attention in this
regard. For her, the eighteenth century is the period of the rise of national
consciousness in Russia, as it provided safe haven and gave a new iden-
tity to the masses of the nobility and educated non-nobles who were
experiencing a crisis of their old identities and searching for new ones.
Greenfeld credits Peter I, along with Catherine II, with installing the
idea of the nation in the Russian elite and awakening it to the potent
and stimulating sense of national pride. According to her, the idea of
12
Hans Rogger, National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge, Mass.,
1960), p. 1.
13
See Geoffrey Hosking, The Russian National Myth Repudiated, in Myths and Nation-
hood, ed. Geoffrey Hosking and George Sch opin (London, 1997), pp. 198210, here
19899.
14
Vera Tolz, Russia (London and New York, 2001), pp. 2324.
256 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
nation implied the fundamental redenition of the Russian polity (from
the property of the tsar into a commonwealth, an impersonal patrie or
fatherland in which every member had an equal stake and to which every-
one was naturally attached). Greenfeld studied ofcial documents of the
Petrine era, looking for the occurrence and usage of such terms as gosu-
darstvo/state, common good, and fatherland. Her conclusion was
that the use of such (often Western) terms signaled the arrival in Russia
of new, nation-related concepts and ideas. At the same time, Greenfeld
noted the contradictory nature of the process, observing that Peter con-
tinued to regard the state as an extension of himself and failed to provide
his subjects with a sense of individual dignity, but gave them instead a
sense of pride in being subjects of a mighty emperor. She also took her
lead fromHans Rogger in stressing the importance of the West as a factor
in opposition to which Russian identity of the period was formed.
15
Vera Tolz developed some of Greenfelds ideas (and was apparently
inuenced by her selection of source quotations) but refrained frommak-
ing any reference to Greenfelds book in her discussion of the Petrine era.
Tolzs main argument was that Peters reforms both laid the foundation
for, and at the same time put constraints on, Russias subsequent nation-
building and the construction of its national identity. When it comes to
the foundations of both, Tolz indicates the secularization of the state and
educational system, as well as the creation of an ideology of state patrio-
tismthat nurtured the loyalty of imperial subjects to the state. Constraints
on nation-building included Peters consolidation of autocratic rule, the
strengthening of the institution of serfdom, and the further extension of
the empire. Tolz notes that by the time Peter came to power, traditional
Russian identity based on the pillar of Orthodoxy was already crumbling.
Taking her lead from Hosking, she includes the Old Belief schism in her
discussion and emphasizes the dissenters opposition to the secularization
of the state and their profound anti-Westernism. Unlike Greenfeld, Tolz
draws attention not so much to the discourse of the epoch as to those
reforms of Peter I that altered the character and structure of Russian
society, thereby contributing (mostly in the long run) to the construction
of Russian national identity.
16
Both Greenfeld and Tolz pay substantial attention to the role played in
Peters reformof Russianpolitics, highculture, andlearning by Ruthenian
alumni of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy. In both studies they are presented
as bearers of newWestern ideas and cadres that helped undermine the old
Muscovite culture. Who were those Kyivans in the imperial service, what
15
See Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1992),
pp. 189274.
16
See Tolz, Russia, pp. 2344.
The invention of Russia 257
kind of identities did they possess, and how did they bear transplanta-
tion from the intellectual soil of Kyiv to that of St. Petersburg? These
questions were rst placed on the scholarly agenda by George (Yurii)
Shevelov with reference to Peters leading ideologue, an alumnus and
one-time rector of the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Teofan Prokopovych. In
1954, under the pseudonym Jurij
Serech, he published an article On
Teofan Prokopovi c as Writer and Preacher in His Kyiv Period
17
in
which he questioned the practice, dominant in Russian studies, of treating
Prokopovych exclusively as an ideologist of the Russian Empire. Shevelov
argued that Prokopovych could be properly understood only if one took
account of his Kyivan writings. Shevelov believed that during his Kyiv
period Prokopovych showed himself to be a local patriot, not a promoter
of the idea of the Russian Empire, and that his works of that period belong
to the sphere of Ukrainian literature and culture. Prokopovychs tragi-
comedy Vladymyr (1705) provided most of the ammunition for Shevelovs
argument. He rejected the views of the nineteenth-century Russian spe-
cialists on Prokopovych, Petr Morozov and N. S. Tikhonravov, as well
as the Soviet scholar G. A. Gukovsky, who claimed that the character of
Volodymyr embodied the image of Peter. Shevelov found support for his
skepticism in the writings of Aleksei Sobolevsky and especially Yaroslav
Hordynsky, who sawVolodymyr as embodying the image of Ivan Mazepa,
not of the Russian tsar.
18
Shevelovs views were reexamined almost a quarter century after the
publication of his article by the foremost Western specialist on the Petrine
era, James Cracraft. In his article Prokopovy cs Kiev Period Reconsid-
ered, Cracraft set out to prove that during his Kyiv period Prokopovych
was not only a proponent of a kind of Ukrainian nationalism, but some-
thing of an incipient ideologist of the Petrine empire too.
19
In fact, he
made a strong argument in favor of the latter thesis, while completely
rejecting the former. Noting the all-Russian elements in Prokopovychs
writings before 1709, Cracraft traced them back to the Synopsis of 1674,
effectively placing Prokopovychs Kyiv period into the context of Russian
imperial thought. He claimed that Prokopovychs all-Russian views were
already present in his Kyivan works. A different approach to the Kyivan
17
First published in Harvard Slavic Studies, 2: 21123. Reprinted in George Y. Shevelov,
Two Orthodox Ukrainian Churchmen of the Early Eighteenth Century: Teofan Prokopovych
and Stefan Iavors
ko suspil
pervykh pechat-
nykh knig po istorii Rossii (konets XVIIXVIII v.) (Moscow, 1988), pp. 2076.
23
For a discussion of the political conditions that inuenced the publication of the Syn-
opsis and its content, see Zenon E. Kohut, The Political Program of the Kyivan Cave
Monastery (166080), unpublished paper prepared for the AAASS Convention in Salt
Lake City (2005).
260 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
for the Muscovite market.
24
The author of the Synopsis toed the same
pro-Muscovite line. The title of the book promised the reader not only
the life story of Prince Volodymyr but also of the successors of his pious
Ruthenian state (rossiskiia derzhava), even unto our most illustrious and
pious sovereign Tsar and Grand Prince Aleksei Mikhailovich [in the sec-
ond and third editions, Fedor Alekseevich], autocrat of all Great, Little
and White Russia.
25
Why were the Kyivan monks so strongly in favor of the Muscovite
tsar? The most obvious answer to this question was given in the pro-
gram of the student play, where the printer set the words Orthodox
monarch in capitals. Gizel and his subordinates, who clearly wanted
to stay in the Orthodox realm, despised the notion of becoming sub-
jects of a Catholic king or, even worse, of a Muslim sultan. At the same
time, Gizel was as ardent a defender of the independence of the Kyiv
metropolitanate from Moscow (and its continuing subordination to the
patriarchate of Constantinople) as he was a supporter of the tsars rule
over Kyiv. It was the tsar, not the patriarch of Moscow, whom the monks
of the Cave Monastery wanted as their protector. The Cave Monastery
(and, to a degree, the Kyiv metropolitanate as a whole) can be imagined
as a seventeenth-century multinational corporation with its headquarters
in Moscow-controlled Kyiv, but with possessions, subjects, and inter-
ests extending beyond the Muscovite borders into the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire. For those behind the publi-
cation of the Synopsis, close Muscovite-Cossack cooperation under the
aegis of the Orthodox tsar and a prospective alliance with the Common-
wealth against the Ottomans constituted the optimal political program.
But for the moment, with the Poles demanding the return of Kyiv and
the Ottomans in close proximity to the city, the monks had to persuade
the tsar not to yield Kyiv to the Commonwealth and defend it against
Turkish attack. They intended to achieve their goal by portraying the
Cave Monastery as the most precious jewel in the Kyivan crown, which
deserved the tsars particular attention and protection. Acknowledgment
of the special role of Kyiv and the Cave Monastery in Rus
religious his-
tory also presupposed the recognition of their special status and rights
24
For a list and brief description of Kyivan Cave Monastery publications of 1674, see Iakym
Zapasko and Iaroslav Isaievych, Pamiatky knyzhkovoho mystetstva. Kataloh starodrukiv
vydanykh na Ukrani, bk. 1, 15741700 (Lviv, 1981), pp. 8990. On the publication
of Baranovychs book and the ideological meaning of its engravings, see my Tsars and
Cossacks: A Study in Iconography (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), pp. 3943.
25
See I. V. Zhylenko, Slovo do chytacha, in idem, Synopsys Kyvs
kyi al
or Rossian (rus
kyi, rossi-
iskyi), it included the Muscovites. The latter were sometimes included
in the family of Rus
were
declared parts of one Slavo-Rossian nation, the historical and spiritual
center of which, according to the Synopsis, was not in the ruling city of
Moscow but in the rst capital of the Slavo-Rossian nation and state the
city of Kyiv. Behind the concept of the Slavo-Rossian nation stood the
idea of a much closer unity of Ruthenians and Muscovites than anything
envisioned earlier. The historical tradition rooted in Kyiv, the common
26
Synopsis, p. 180.
27
Ibid., p. 167.
262 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Orthodox religion and the existence of a common state, the Orthodox
tsardom, were factors that supported and strengthened that intellectual
construct. It was also reinforced by the ethnogenealogical legend that
traced the origins of the Slavs in general and the Slavo-Rossians in par-
ticular back to the biblical Meshech (East Slavic Mosokh), a son of
Japheth the forefather of the Muscovite nation (Moskva-narod) and
all Slavo-Rossians.
28
As he introduced the Slavo-Rossian nation to his readers, the author
of the Synopsis still had to deal with the political and cultural realities
of his day, as well as with the existing historiographic tradition. Thus,
on occasion, he listed Moskva and Rus
(Rus
, he listed the
Volhynians an early sixteenth-century narod that gured in early mod-
ern lists of Slavic nations and was copied from one chronicle to another.
Supported by the authority of the Synopsis, the Volhynians even made
their way into eighteenth-century Russian histories, including the one
written by Aleksei Mankiev.
29
At the same time, the anonymous author
made an effort to reconcile or update some of the older historiographic
legends and concepts. Thus, developing the Kyivan-era legend that the
Slavs took their names from their places of settlement, he claimed that
although the Muscovite nation derived its name from Mosokh, the rul-
ing city of Moscow was named after the Moskva River. As examples of
the topographic origin of the names of Slavo-Rossian peoples, he also
gave the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who took their name from Zaporizhia
(the region beyond the Dnipro rapids), where they settled, and the Don
Cossacks (Dontsy), named after the Don River.
30
The authors vision of
the Slavo-Rossian nation also corresponded to the new historiographic
concepts that inuenced the Kyivan literati in the second half of the sev-
enteenth century. Those concepts bore the clear imprint of early modern
pan-Slavism, which originated among the Southern Slavs, as well as the
28
Ibid., p. 170. For interpretations of the Mosokh legend of Slavic ethogenesis, see Alek-
sandr Myl
,
31
Ibid., pp. 16771.
32
On the sources of the Synopsis, see Iurii Mytsyk, Ukrainskie letopisi XVII veka
(Dnipropetrovsk, 1978), pp. 2224; Zhylenko, Slovo do chytacha, p. 40.
33
The linguistic analysis of the Synopsis recently undertaken by Ilona Tarnopolska indicates
that a number of authors worked on the book, as one would expect of a work deeply
rooted in the tradition of chronicle writing. See Ilona Tarnopol
ka, Kyvs
kyi Synopsys
v istoriohrachnomu ta dzhereloznavchomu aspektakh, Candidate thesis, Dnipropet-
rovsk National University, 1998.
264 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
articulated on a new intellectual level, and introduced into public dis-
course under new political and religious circumstances, the concept of
the national unity of the Rus
Land (1669),
was hopelessly mired in the prenational age, conceptualizing Rus
and
Muscovite history primarily in dynastic terms.
36
Originally the Synop-
sis was regarded in Muscovy as not entirely a domestic product, to say
the least. In referring to the Synopsis, the compilers of the Novgorod
Zabelin Chronicle occasionally called it the Polish printed chronicle.
37
34
See Synopsis, p. 177. With reference to princely times, Kyiv was called the principal
city of the all-Russian nation (vseho naroda rosyiskoho holovnoi hrad). Ibid., p. 172.
35
Ibid., pp. 18283.
36
According to Zenon Kohut, who compared Griboedovs views with those of the author of
the Synopsis, in Russian historical writing the dominance of the dynastic-state vision of
Russia was not challenged until the 1830s. See Zenon E. Kohut, ADynastic or Ethno-
Dynastic Tsardom? Two Early Modern Concepts of Russia, in Extending the Borders
of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber, ed. Marsha Siefert (Budapest and
New York, 2003), pp. 1730, here 26. Quite logically from that point of view, it was in
the 1830s that reprints of the Synopsis nally ceased to appear.
37
See A. P. Bogdanov, Rabota A. I. Lyzlova nad russkimi i inostrannymi istochnikami,
in Andrei Lyzlov, Skifskaia istoriia, ed. E. V. Chistiakova (Moscow, 1990), pp. 390
447, here 396. Lyzlov used the Synopsis as one of his sources. Under the inuence of
the Polish chronicles, Lyzlov identied Moskva and rossiiane as distinct peoples, along
The invention of Russia 265
The most prominent of the eighteenth-century Russian historians, Vasilii
Tatishchev, criticized the Synopsis, inter alia, for its inclusion of Pol-
ish tales (basnei).
38
Nor was the Church Slavonic language of the work
entirely clear to the Muscovite reader. Consequently, the early eighteenth-
century Russian publishers of the Synopsis not only replaced its Church
Slavonic typeface with the moderngrazhdanskii script introducedby Peter
I but also replaced its original title, Synopsis, or Brief Compendium
of Various Chroniclers, with the more understandable Synopsis, or
Brief History Compiled from Various Authors.
39
The St. Petersburg
editors also planned to remove Ukrainianisms from the text, replacing
the Ukrainian vezha (tower), for example, with the Russian bashnia, but
the project remained unrealized for nancial reasons.
40
The book regarded by a Kyivan as the history of a nation was received
by educated readers in St. Petersburg as the history of a state. In the
catalogue of the library of Stefan Yavorsky, a former Kyivan and later
metropolitan of Riazan and de facto head of the imperial church, the
1718 edition of the book was listed as Sinopsis ili istoriia o rossiistem narode
(Synopsis, or A History of the Russian Nation), while the St. Peters-
burg publishers of that edition entered it in their records as Sinopsis, ili
korotkaia istoriia o Rosiiskom gosudarstve (Synopsis, or a Brief History of
the Rus
State).
41
Not surprisingly, the director of the St. Petersburg pub-
lishing house, M. P. Avramov, was known for collecting documents on
the history of the Russian state, not of the Russian nation. It was also
the history of the Russian state that Peter I ordered Fedor Polikarpov
to write in 1708.
42
The topics that interested Ruthenian and Muscovite
readers were also quite different. The latter were drawn to subjects taken
fromRussian history: thus, Iakov Golovin wrote in the margin of the Syn-
opsis in September 1805, Some historical facts are very well presented:
for example, about the invasion and subjection of Mamai and others.
43
The Synopsis was not, of course, the complete account of the history of
Russia and the Russian state needed by the educated elites of the period,
with the Lithuanians, Wallachians, and Tatars (Lyzlov, Skifskaia istoriia, p. 8). He also
readily used the term narod in reference to Tatar and other nomadic tribes the main
protagonists of his book.
38
See Samarin, Rasprostranenie, p. 63.
39
See Ukrans
ki pys
ka literatura
(XIXVIII st.), comp. Leonid Makhnovets
.
47
As a rule, however,
in Ruthenian and Polish writings of the period, the term Rossiia (Polish
Rossyja) was used exclusively to denote Polish-Lithuanian Rus
. It was in
this sense that the terms narod Rosijski and Rosiejska Ziemla were used by
Meletii Smotrytsky in his Threnos of 1610.
48
That usage became espe-
cially popular in the times of Petro Mohyla. The verses printed in 1633 on
the occasion of his entrance into his capital include numerous references
to Russia.
49
The anonymous author of Mnemosyne of Glory, Works and
Deeds, a Polish-language panegyric to Mohyla, styled him the Russian
Phoebus and praised his defense of dear Russia (mila Rossyja), which
is reminiscent of Polish authors references to mila Polska.
50
Mohylas
Russia certainly included the lands of the Kyiv metropolitanate but
not the Muscovite territories that ofcially acquired that name under
Peter I. Polish-Lithuanian Rus
and M. M.
Sulyma, ed. O. V. Myshanych (Kyiv, 1992), p. 63.
50
See Mnemosyne sl awy, prac i trud ow, in Roksola nski Parnas, 2: 12334, here 128.
For references to Poland as mila Polska, see Rozprawa. Przygody starego zolnierza, in
Roksola nski Parnas, 2: 4758, here 47.
51
See Ukrans
Bozhiia in Vestnik
Obshchestva drevne-russkogo iskusstva pri Moskovskom publichnom muzee, 187476, nos.
112, ed. G. D. Filimonov (Moscow, 1876), no. 1. For a reference to Yasynsky as Kyivan-
Russian metropolitan, see the text of the epitaph for the archimandrite of Novhorod-
Siverskyi written by Yasynsky in Samiilo Velychko, Litopys, trans. Valerii Shevchuk,
vol. II (Kyiv, 1991), p. 593.
57
See the Latin original of the Pacta et Constitutiones in Konstytutsiia ukrans
ko het
mans
ko
derzhavy (Kyiv, 1997), pp. iv, vi, viii, x, xi, xii, xiii ff. Further page references to the text
of the Pacta are given in parentheses in the text.
The invention of Russia 269
based on the ethnonymRoxolani: Roxolana patria nostra (xxvi), incolis Rox-
olanis (xxix), Roxolane patriae, Matris Nostrae (xxxii), etc. The term Parva
Rossia (Little Russia) was used in the Pacta only twice, once with regard to
church jurisdictionandonce inreference to the Cossack fatherland: Parva
Rossia, patria nostra. With regard to their northern neighbor, the authors
of the Pacta used the terms Moscovitico Imperio and iugo Moscorum.
58
While in the chancellery Ukrainian of the day the Cossack elites referred
to their fatherland as Little Russia (Malorosiia), not Rossiia, in elevated
languages such as Latin they preferred Rossiia-based ethnonyms to those
based on the terms Ukraine (Ucraina) or Little Russia (Parva Rossia).
Thus, by the turn of the eighteenth century, Russia was rmly estab-
lished in Kyivan writings as a term for the Ruthenian lands in general.
Although its use in Kyivan clerical circles was clearly inuenced by the
Mohylan tradition, the Russia of the Mohylan authors of the 1630s
40s and the Kyivan writers of the last decades of that century differed
dramatically in geographic extent. As noted above, by the end of the
seventeenth century the territory under the jurisdiction of the Kyivan
metropolitan had shrunk to the borders of the Kyiv eparchy. Similarly,
the Russia of Kyivan authors became limited to the lands of the Het-
manate a phenomenon that allowed the Kyivans to present Hetman
Mazepa as a luminary of Russia. A case in point is the tragicomedy
Vladymyr (1705) by Teofan Prokopovych, the rector of the Kyiv Mohyla
Academy and one of the leading ideologues of the Petrine era.
59
In the
prologue to the tragicomedy, it was Hetman Mazepa and not Tsar Peter
who gured as heir to the all-Russian heritage of Volodymyr the Great.
It was to Mazepa, claimed Prokopovych, that the care of this patrimony
of Volodymyrs has been entrusted by God through the tsar. Proceed-
ing with victories equal to Volodymyrs, with husbandry equal to his in
Russia, you show forth his face on your person as a son shows forth
his fathers face.
60
According to Prokopovych, Volodymyrs patrimony
58
The Ukrainian version of the Pacta, which has not been dated precisely, avoids using the
term Russia with regard to Ukraine, preferring Little Russia (Malorossiia). Still, it
does not apply that term to Russia or the Russian state, which it calls Muscovy.
59
For biographies of Prokopovych, see I. Chistovich, Feofan Prokopovich i ego vremia (St.
Petersburg, 1868); H.-J. H artel, Byzantinisches Erbe und Orthodoxie bei Feofan Prokopovi c
(W urzburg, 1970); Valeriia Nichik (Nichyk), Feofan Prokopovich (Moscow, 1977);
Valeriia Nichyk and M. D. Rohovych, Pro netochnosti v zhyttiepysakh F. Prokopovy-
cha, Filosofs
kyi), Hetman
Mazepa wpolskoje zycznych panegirykach Jana Ornowskiego i Filipa Orlyka, in Mazepa
and his Time, pp. 489502; Serhij Jakowenko, Panegiryk Krzy z. Poczatek madrosci . . . i
mecenacka dzialalno s c Mazepy w Czernihowie, in Mazepa and his Time, pp. 51727.
62
See Cracraft, Prokopovy cs Kiev Period Reconsidered, pp. 14950.
63
For the text of the Slovo, see Feofan Prokopovich, Sochineniia, pp. 2338.
The invention of Russia 271
ideas to broader strata of society, allowing us to make some cautious pro-
jections regarding their dissemination among the population at large.
64
How did Prokopovychs Russia of the pre-Poltava era differ from the
post-1709 Russia? The questionmay be answeredby comparing the use
of that term in Prokopovychs tragicomedy Vladymyr, dedicated to Het-
man Mazepa, and in his sermon on the Poltava victory, delivered in the
presence of Peter I in July 1709. Let us rst examine the geographic limits
of Prokopovychs Russia of 1705. Kyiv and the Dnipro River, the Cave
Monastery, and the Mohyla Academy clearly emerge fromthe epilogue of
the tragicomedy as the most important centers of his Russia, but it was not
limited to the capital city. Prokopovych was also excited about the restora-
tion of the Pereiaslav bishopric, to which he refers in the epilogue, thereby
extending the limits of his Russia to that town and eparchial center, which
was subject to the metropolitan of Kyiv. Prokopovychs indirect reference
to Metropolitan Varlaam Yasynsky supports the assumption that in writ-
ing about Russia, he was in fact referring to the territory of the Kyiv
metropolitanate. As noted above, another Russian luminary (rossiiskoe
svetilo) to whom Prokopovych referred indirectly in the prophecy of St.
Andrew was Hetman Ivan Mazepa, whose virtues he discussed in much
greater detail than those of the metropolitan. For over all these temples,
wrote Prokopovych, referring to the churches and buildings of Kyiv and
Pereiaslav, one sees the image of the eminent builder Ioann [Mazepa].
65
Thus it is safe to assume that Prokopovychs Russia included not only the
territory of the Kyiv metropolitanate, which had shrunk signicantly by
the turn of the eighteenth century, but also the rest of the Hetmanate; for
example, the eparchy of Chernihiv, which constituted an integral part of
the Hetmanate. These were the territories Prokopovych had in mind rst
and foremost when referring to Russia. According to him, they were the
home of the Russian churches. In the tragicomedy, the students of the
Kyivan Academy were termed noble Russian sons, while the audience
that came to the performance of Vladymyr was referred to as people of
the Russian race (rossiiskii rod).
Was Prokopovych unique in limiting the concept of Russia to the ter-
ritory of the Kyiv metropolitanate or the Hetmanate? The very fact that
he did so in a tragicomedy publicly produced in Kyiv indicates that he
64
On the role of sermons in promoting political ideas in England, see T. Claydon, Ser-
mons, the Public Sphere, and the Political Culture of Late-Seventeenth Century Eng-
land in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature, and History 16001750, ed. Lori
Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester, 2000), pp. 20834. See also James
Cracraft, Feofan Prokopovich: A Bibliography of His Works, Oxford Slavonic Papers 8
(1975): 136.
65
Prokopovich, Sochineniia, p. 206.
272 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
used the term and construed its meaning in accordance with the usage
prevalent at the time among the educated circles of the Hetmanate.
Prokopovych was not proposing anything particularly new here, as is
shown by the text of Yan Ornovskys panegyric to Mazepa, which was
written in 1705, the same year as Prokopovychs Vladymyr. Ornovsky
referred to Mazepa as the Camillus of Russia.
66
A very different image of Russia emerges from Prokopovychs post-
Poltava writings. As in the tragicomedy Vladymyr, so in his Poltava ser-
mon of 1709 Prokopovych often referred to Russia as his interlocutor.
Referring to the tsars military victories, Prokopovych exclaimed: O thy
powers and glory, Russia! and called upon her to celebrate the Poltava
victory: Exult, O Russia.
67
The Russia of the Poltava sermon turns out
to have different geographical boundaries from the Russia of the tragi-
comedy. Referring in the sermon to the victories of the Russian armies,
Prokopovych stated: All that was taken from many towns and peoples
was granted to Russia.
68
The territories given to Russia in recogni-
tion of her military victories are enumerated elsewhere in the sermon.
Prokopovych describes the geographical limits of the Russian monarchs
power as follows:
starting fromour Dnipro River to the shores of the Euxine in the south, fromthere
eastward to the Caspian or Khvalinian Sea, even to the borders of the Persian
kingdom, and from there to the farthest reaches of the Sino-Chinese kingdom,
of which only the barest rumors reach us, and from there to the far north to
Novaia Zemlia and to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and from there to the west,
to the Baltic Sea, until one returns again by a long land and water route to the
above-mentioned Dnipro. For these are the boundaries of our monarch.
69
The sermon goes on to indicate that the limits of the monarch were
also the limits of the Russian monarchy, the Russian state, and con-
sequently Russia. Thus, in his Poltava sermon, Prokopovych abandoned
his earlier application of the term to the Kyivan ecclesiastical realm or the
Cossack polity and reserved it for the territory of the entire Muscovite
state, including the Hetmanate.
If the term Russia was reserved in the sermon of 1709 to denote the
tsars whole realm, the land that Prokopovych called Russia in the tragi-
comedy was now referred to as Little Russia a term absent from the
play.
70
According to the sermon, it was Little Russia to which Mazepa had
66
See Jan Ornowski, Muza Roksola nska, in Roksola nski Parnas, 2: 37794, here 380.
67
Prokopovich, Sochineniia, pp. 31, 34.
68
Ibid., p. 33.
69
Ibid., pp. 2425.
70
In the sermon, the patrimony of St. Volodymyr, which, according to the tragicomedy,
was given to Mazepa by God through the tsar, becomes a region given to Mazepa by
the tsar, as Prokopovych accuses Mazepa of daring to advance on the kingdom of one
from whom he had accepted a territory equal to some kingdoms (ibid., p. 28).
The invention of Russia 273
invited Charles XII: by insidious persuasion and secret direction he was
led into the depths of Little Russia itself.
71
It was from Little Russia that
the servants of the devil intended to expel the Orthodox faith and intro-
duce the church union a standard accusation leveled against Mazepa
in Russian propaganda of 17089 and duly repeated by Prokopovych in
his sermon.
72
Thus the Russia of the tragicomedy was transformed into
the Little Russia of the sermon, while the terms Russia and Russian
were used to denote East Slavic entities. In the sermon, Peters army at
Poltava, which included Cossack regiments, was termed the Russian army
(rossiiskoe voinstvo), with no differentiation between Cossacks and regu-
lar Muscovite regiments. The outcome of the battle was deemed to be
the source of common all-Russian joy (obshchei vserossiiskoi radosti)
73
noi kul
ture 17081725 gg., in Mazepa and His Time, pp. 31532, here 31618.
79
For the text of the Slovo, see Propovedi Blazhennyia pamiati Stefana Iavorskogo, 3: 299
302. Russia also emerges as a major point of reference in the text of the church service
celebrating the Poltava victory attributed to Teolakt Lopatynsky (1711). On the origin
and fate of the service, whose composition was ordered by Peter I, see Pogosian, Petr I,
p. 177; idem, I. S. Mazepa, pp. 32728.
The invention of Russia 275
as though there were no other Russia beyond the borders of the Kyiv
metropolitanate. In changing the meaning of the term, Prokopovych was
opening the door to a shift of loyalty (and thus identity) from the Het-
manate and its ecclesiastical and civic institutions to the Russian tsar and
his state.
Throughout most of his St. Petersburg career, Prokopovych was a
strong promoter of the idea of one united Russian nation, which he called
rossiiskii narod, rossiistii rod, rossiane, and rosiistii synove. Like many of his
contemporaries, Prokopovych used narod in two senses. The rst referred
to the population of the tsars realm in general. As a rule, Prokopovych
spoke and wrote about the narod as a community that was supposed to
be grateful to its ruler, but also as one whose happiness and prosperity
were among the rulers main concerns. Most of the time, when speaking
about the narod in this rst sense, Prokopovych apparently had in mind
social elites, but at times he also referred to the simple people, which
included the lower strata of society.
80
The second meaning of narod per-
tained to the ethnocultural and political organization of the world, which
consisted of nations, states, countries, and realms Prokopovych used all
these terms interchangeably. (Thus, for Prokopovych, the Kazan khanate
was a narod.)
81
Narod as a subject of international relations was also occa-
sionally rendered by Prokopovych as natsiia.
82
His sermons contain refer-
ences to foreign peoples (inostrannye those residing in other countries)
and Russian peoples (rossiistii narody), but the latter term, which was
common in Muscovite political discourse of the time, was not favored by
Prokopovych.
83
Clearly, he saw the world in terms of political communi-
ties (nations) and apparently believed that in Russia there was supposed
to be one Russian nation. The Slavo-Rossian nation of the author of
the Synopsis, ambiguously rooted in the broader Slavic world, was giv-
ing way to a nation largely dened by the borders of the Muscovite state.
That viewwas quite concordant with the worldviewof Samuel Pufendorf,
80
For examples of the use of narod as a social category in Prokopovychs sermons of 1709
25, see his Sochineniia, pp. 25, 36, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 83, 98, 102, 138.
81
Ibid., p. 36.
82
Ibid., p. 133. Here, Prokopovych used natsiia to denote a foreign polity, as opposed to
what he called our fatherland.
83
For a rare example of Prokopovychs use of the term rossiistii narody, see ibid., p. 57.
Among other authors, Patriarch Adrian of Moscowused narod in the plural to denote the
tsars subjects. See, for example, his letter of 19 May 1696 to Peter in Pis
ma imperatora
Petra Velikogo k bratu svoemu Tsariu Ioannu Alekseevichu i patriarkhu Adrianu (St. Peters-
burg, 1788), pp. 1823, here 19. Achurch service following the Poltava victory, allegedly
conducted by another Kyivan, Teolakt Lopatynsky, also differentiated between okrestnye
and the Russian narody.
276 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
whose works, translated into a heavily Slavonicized Russian by the Kyivan
Samuil Buzhynsky, were well known to Prokopovych.
84
In his sermon of 1709 on the Poltava victory, Prokopovych used the
term people (narody, iazytse) only in relation to foreign countries or
those conquered by Muscovite monarchs. He did not mention either the
Great Russian or the Little Russian nation, or, for that matter, the Rus-
sian nation, preferring to speak of the Russian military (voinstvo) or forces
(sily).
85
If he used narod with regard to the inhabitants of the tsars realm,
the word denoted the population in general, which was either the object
of Mazepas intrigues by raising his hand against his master, Mazepa
had shaken the people with such confusion or was behind the nectar
of popular rejoicing in connection with the Poltava victory.
86
That pop-
ulation acquired much clearer ethnonational characteristics in the rst
sermon that Prokopovych delivered after his transfer to St. Petersburg in
October 1716. In Slovo pokhval
ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, bk. 8 (Moscow, 1962), pp. 24052. For a
discussion of the war of manifestos, see Bohdan Kentrschynskyj, Propagandakriket i
Ukraina, 17081709 in Karolinska F orbundets rsbok (Stockholm, 1958), pp. 181224.
92
See the discussion of that terminological innovation in Peters propaganda in Greenfeld,
Nationalism, pp. 19596.
278 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
to the Swedes,
93
the tsar presented the hetmans actions as a betrayal of
his oath of personal loyalty. Apart from accusing the hetman of treason,
Peter employed two other political arguments. The rst was related to the
conditions of the Muscovite protectorate over the Hetmanate established
in the days of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. According to those conditions, the
tsar took it upon himself to protect Little Russia from the Polish threat
to the Orthodox religion. Nowthat King StanislawLeszczy nski of Poland
was assisting Charles XII in his war with Muscovy, Peter exploited that
motif to the fullest. He accused Mazepa of attempting to subjugate the
Little Russian land (krai) to the Poles and turn the Orthodox churches
over to the Union. As the protector of the Little Russian land, the tsar
declared his determination to prevent the enslavement and destruction
of Little Russia and the desecration of Gods churches. The other motif
that Peter employed to discredit his opponent was related to the image
of the Muscovite tsar as protector of the Little Russian nation against
abuses of power by the Cossack administration. Alleged betrayal of the
tsars interests and ill-treatment of the Zaporozhian Host and the Lit-
tle Russian nation were among the reasons cited by Moscow for the
removal in 1687 of Mazepas predecessor in the ofce of hetman, Ivan
Samoilovych.
94
Now it was Mazepas turn to be accused of imposing
unfair and heavy taxes on the Little Russian nation for his own enrich-
ment. All three motifs were present in one form or another and further
developed in the numerous manifestos and circulars that Peter issued in
late October and early November 1708.
95
Peters rst use of the termfatherland probably occurred in his man-
ifesto of 6 November 1708, by far the longest document presenting the
tsars case against the hetman. It was issued in response to letters to the
Little Russian nation from Charles XII and Mazepa that were inter-
cepted by the tsars troops. Peters manifesto sought to discredit Charles
XII and Mazepa as enemies of the Little Russian nation who wanted
to exploit Ukraine economically and then either deliver it to Poland
93
See the text of Peters circular of 28 October 1708 in Rigel
,
pp. 53132.
94
See the text of the tsars letter of 3 December 1690 to Colonel Yakiv Lyzohub of Cherni-
hiv, ibid., pp. 5012.
95
See the texts of Peters letters of that period, ibid., pp. 53135. The idea of using mani-
festos to enumerate Mazepas abuses of his own people so as to secure the support of the
simple folk and prove that Mazepa was acting in his own interests rather than for the
good of Ukraine was suggested to Peter by Menshikov on 26 October in the same letter
in which he informed the tsar about Mazepas treason. See Solov
) of the Sich by
1,500 rubles but also expressed his hope that the Cossacks would stand
up for their fatherland and for the Orthodox faith and for us, and not give
ear to the blandishments of the apostate traitor Mazepa.
98
In his mani-
festo of 21 January 1709, Peter set out to undermine Mazepas claim that
he wanted to establish Ukraine as an independent polity, claiming that
the hetman had gone over to the Swedes not for the benet of the Little
Russian land and for the preservation of liberties and so that they might
be neither under Our nor under Polish rule but remain free and indepen-
dent but in order to deliver Ukraine into the hands of the Poles. The tsar
96
Apart from developing the themes introduced in the rst manifesto, the tsar and his
assistants felt that they had to respond to the accusations leveled against them by their
opponents. The manifestos issued by Charles and Mazepa asserted in particular that
Peter was corresponding with the pope in order to establish Roman Catholicism in place
of Orthodoxy in his tsardom. Other charges were related to the nature of Peters war
with Sweden, his violation of the ancient privileges and freedoms of the Little Russian
nation, and the pillaging and destruction of Ukrainian possessions by Great Russian
troops. In response, Peter listed his reasons for the war, indicating the need to reclaim
former Muscovite territories, liberate the churches forcibly taken over by the Lutherans,
and defend the tsars honor, allegedly violated by the Swedish king and his envoys. For
a discussion of some of the accusations against Peter and his responses to them, see
Solov
ma i bumagi imperatora Petra Velikogo, IX, pt. 1: 98083. Quoted in James Cracraft,
Empire versus Nation: Russian Political Theory under Peter I, Harvard Ukrainian
Studies 10, nos. 34 (December 1986): 52441, here 529.
104
For a discussion of the textual history of the order, see Pis
. The adoption
of this title marked a return to the tsars pre-1654 tradition of calling
themselves sovereigns of all Rus
was merely
replaced with its Hellenized form, Rossiia, which reected the new usage
of the day. The foreign-sounding Rossiia was in keeping with the foreign-
sounding imperiia (empire), which now replaced tsarstvo (tsardom) as the
ofcial name of the state. Thus, along with the Holy Roman Emperor
there emerged an all-Russian one whose title was something of a nov-
elty, since it dened the empire in ethnonational terms, but apparently
not without historical parallel in Peters mind. In his acceptance speech
114
On Peters interpretation of Russian history, see Pogosian, Petr I, pp. 183206.
286 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
at the ceremony, Peter warned his subjects that while hoping for peace
they had best prepare for war, so that what had happened to the Greek
monarchy would not happen to us a reference to the Byzantine Empire
dened as a Greek polity. The tsar was an avid reader of popular Mus-
covite translations of historical works about Alexander of Macedonia and
the fall of Constantinople. Both works, which originally circulated in
manuscript, were published on his orders. The latter work was issued
twice, and images derived from it even appeared in the tsars dreams.
115
As for the appellation father of the fatherland, there is little doubt
what fatherland Peter and his entourage had in mind. As noted above,
tsarist ideologues such as Prokopovych readily applied the new term to
the whole Muscovite state: gone were the days when the tsar had written
to the Cossacks about their fatherland. Gone, but not entirely forgotten.
In the draft of the speech prepared by Sharov and delivered by Yanovsky
at the ceremony of the granting of the new title, the Kyiv-trained cleric
took care to change our fatherland, a form that probably reminded
him of the city of Kyiv, to the whole fatherland.
116
In the Holy Synods
proposal, the rationale given for bestowing that particular appellation on
the tsar was the desire to recognize Peters work for the good of Russia,
which through his efforts had been brought out of the darkness of igno-
rance into the theater of worldwide glory and born into existence out
of nonexistence and introduced into the society of political nations. In
the speech delivered at the ceremony, it was claimed that the appellation
was being offered to the tsar according to the example of the Greek and
Roman senates.
117
While it was indeed rooted in the ancient concept of
patria, it had even more to do with ideas current among the European
political nations that Russia aspired to join. The concept of fatherland
was among the rst signs of the advance of modern nationalism, with its
discourse of nation and the common good,
118
and the tsar showed
his aptitude for the new rhetoric when in his acceptance speech he called
upon those in attendance to work for the common good and prot that
God sets before your eyes, both at home and abroad, which will ease the
nations burden.
119
The tsar was uent in the language of the European political nations,
but did he mean what he said? Imitating foreign examples, he routinely
ordered his subjects to build triumphal arches to mark his victories, cre-
ating the impression of popular enthusiasm for him. As for the title, Peter
ordered the Senate to bestowit on him. A foreign diplomat wrote in 1721
115
Ibid., pp. 22643.
116
Ibid., p. 222.
117
Ibid., pp. 221, 22425. Cf. Greenfeld, Nationalism, p. 196.
118
See Greenfeld, Nationalism, pp. 19394.
119
Quoted in Pogosian, Petr I, p. 226.
The invention of Russia 287
that the tsar gave the Senate rights equal to those of the Roman Senate so
that it could grant him the title of emperor, but took them away after the
ceremony. Wanting the fatherland to glorify himas its father and benefac-
tor, he deliberately planned the spontaneous outpouring of his subjects
love and admiration. He certainly achieved a measure of success in that
regard, at least whenit came to ofcial propaganda. Prokopovych gloried
himnot only in life but also after his death. On 8 March 1725, he delivered
a eulogy for the deceased emperor in the Church of SS. Peter and Paul,
addressing his former patron as Responsible for countless successes and
joys of ours, having resurrected Russia from the dead and raised it to
such power and glory or, even more, having borne and raised Russia
this directly descended son of the fatherland and its father.
120
But how
lasting and widely accepted was that praise? Opportunist that he was,
Prokopovych readily discontinued his praise for the deceased emperor in
the 1730s, while the elite in general had mixed feelings about the emperor
from the very beginning, to say the least. Vasilii Kliuchevsky revealed the
core of Peters contradictions when he wrote that the emperor hoped
through strong power to provoke independent activities in the enslaved
society, wanted a slave, remaining a slave, to act as a responsible free
man.
121
The appellation great, bestowed on Peter for his personal accom-
plishments,
122
according to Yanovskys speech, further stressed the
unquestionable centrality of the person of the ruler for the Russian politi-
cal systemand identity. The newtitle and appellations heralded the arrival
in Russia of the age of secular absolutism. After all, even though the ini-
tiative to award the new title came from the Holy Synod, Peter entrusted
the Senate with the task. It was ratied not by the church, which had con-
ferred the tsars titles and consecrated every new ruler until the end of
the seventeenth century, but by a secular government body. Peter did a
great deal to secularize the Russian state, from abolishing the ofce of
patriarch to rmly subordinating the church to the state along the lines
of Prokopovychs Ecclesiastical Regulations (1721). He also did much to
secularize his court and society at large, introducing a new, mostly secular
and dynastically oriented ofcial calendar to replace the predominantly
religious one of his predecessors. Personally, however, Peter remained a
religious man. References to God and Gods will and grace appear as
120
Feofan Prokopovich, Slovo na pogrebenie Vsepresvetleishago Derzhavneishago Petra
Velikago, in idem, Sochineniia, p. 126.
121
Quoted in Tolz, Russia, p. 36.
122
The Synod papers contain a parallel with Julius Caesar and a reference to foreigners
who used that appellation in addressing Peter, but these were not incorporated into the
text of the Sharov-Yanovsky speech.
288 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
frequently in his private correspondence as in his ofcial papers and pro-
nouncements, while his edicts required the populace to attend church
services on Sundays and major holidays and to make regular confession.
On the other hand, during his reign religion in general and Orthodoxy in
particular disappeared from the list of principal markers of Russian iden-
tity as dened vis-` a-vis foreigners.
123
In fact, Peter had to hold back his
Kyiv-trained ideologues, who tried to present not only the Mazepa affair
but also the whole war with Sweden in religious terms. He suggested
corrections to the text of the Service on the Poltava Victory, composed by
the Kyiv alumnus Teolakt Lopatynsky, who compared Peter to Con-
stantine the Great. The emperor noted that the war with Sweden was
not for the faith but for space (ne o vere, a o mere) and that the Swedes
revered the same cross as the Russians.
124
Peter regarded Protestant Swe-
den as belonging to the same Christian tradition as his own Orthodox
subjects and refused to justify the major undertaking of his reign in reli-
gious terms. This was a dramatic departure from Muscovite tradition,
which had framed not only the conicts of the Time of Troubles but also
the Pereiaslav Agreement in religious terms.
All of a sudden wars ceased to be confessional, and religion no longer
constituted the core of Russian identity vis-` a-vis the Christian West.
What, then, took the place of seventeenth-century religious discourse
when it came to constructing Russias main other? In his Rassuzhde-
nie (Consideration, 1717) on the reasons for the war with Sweden, Pavel
Sharov listed the tsars desire to recover lost territories, the personal
insult to the tsar on the part of the Swedish governor of Riga, and the
plot of the Western powers to prevent Russia fromgaining military might.
The tsar, who certainly approved this interpretation of the causes of the
war, later wrote that all other nations follow a policy of maintaining a
balance of power among their neighbors, and particularly of keeping us
from the light of reason in all matters, especially military ones.
125
If
the rst two of Sharovs reasons for war nd parallels in seventeenth-
century Muscovite claims to the tsars patrimony and the need to avenge
insults to his honor (both gured in one way or another with regard to the
Pereiaslav Agreement), the third argument is based on entirely different
123
On Peters personal religious beliefs and his policies toward the church, see Cracraft,
The Church Reform of Peter the Great.
124
See Pogosian, Petr I, p. 242. The author of the eulogy to Prince Bahdan Ahinski (1625)
used the same words, though under different circumstances and with a different mean-
ing, with reference to the war between the Commonwealth and Muscovy. See chapter
6 of the present work.
125
Pogosian, Petr I, p. 278; cf. p. 272.
The invention of Russia 289
grounds, as it presupposes the right of every nation to acquire knowledge
and rise up against those who conspire to prevent it from doing so. The
tsar was opening a window on Europe so as to bring Continental exper-
tise and thinking to Russia not because he wished to subordinate Russia
to the West but, on the contrary, because he wanted to make it the equal
of the other nations of Europe. As Ivan Nepliuev, Peters one-time envoy
to Istanbul, wrote in his memoirs, This monarch made our fatherland
comparable with others; taught us to recognize that we too are people
(liudi).
126
The Russian Empire as imagined and built by Peter was not intended
to be a multiethnic commonwealth. It was supposed to be devoted to the
pride and honor of its ruler, his military victories, and territorial acquisi-
tions, high status for Russia in the hierarchy of European nations, and the
common good of its people, who remained subjects of the tsar. That vision
of the empire was no obstacle to the nationalization of the emperors
realm; indeed, it promoted that goal. Along with military expertise, the
West was exporting to Russia the concepts of nation, fatherland, and the
common good. Muscovy was turning itself into a nation-state, a process
reected in its ofcial discourse. That discourse originated in the expe-
rience and thinking of the Kyivan literati, was adapted to the political
traditions of Muscovy (with its focus on the dynasty and the state), and
was sharpened by direct and sustained military confrontation with the
West. It offered a new identity to the subjects of the newly proclaimed
empire.
The Schism
The territories of the Russian Empire were vast, its society was far from
homogeneous, and the ofcial imperial discourse was not dominant in
every part of the tsars realm. Kyivan learning and the elements of West-
ernization associated with it came into conict with powerful forces within
the Muscovite church and society as soon as they began to be promoted
by the Muscovite court in the times of Aleksei Mikhailovich and Patri-
arch Nikon. In institutional terms, the resistance of traditional Muscovite
society to the religious and cultural change promoted by the Kyivans
was embodied in the Old Belief, which divided the Russian church and
society into two warring camps. The ofcial secularization of the state
and the thoroughgoing Westernization of Muscovite society, most vividly
126
Tolz, Russia, p. 23.
290 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
expressed in Peters prohibition against the wearing of beards and his
introduction of Western costume, only added insult to injury.
127
Peter was of course at the center of the controversy. There were even
rumors to the effect that the real Peter had been replaced at birth by
a German child and that Russia was being ruled by a German, not by
the legitimate Russian tsar. The Old Believers regarded the tsar as the
Antichrist who betrayed his true nature by using the Latin name Peter
(which the tsar liked to do) instead of the Russian Petr. According to an
Old Believer text of 1710, Just as in transforming the name of Jesus
the devil presents a different Jesus, so the newly applied Latin name of
Peter points to a hellish devil presiding over and through him.
128
Peter,
for his part, treated the Old Believers with unprecedented tolerance and
pragmatism, halting the campaign to do away with them that had been
undertaken by the government of the regent Soa. The tsar needed Old
Believer cooperation for his war effort, and instead of persecuting them
he imposed double taxation on Old Believer communities, isolated their
settlements, and allowed them to wear their beards and old-fashioned
clothes, making them a visible embodiment of the old Muscovite Rus
.
Peters Westernization stopped at the gates of the Old Believer commu-
nities.
129
Who were the Old Believers, and why did they become the symbol of
societys resistance to Peters Westernization? The origins of the move-
ment went back to the protest provoked by the reforms of Patriarch Nikon
in the mid-seventeenth century. Nikons goal was to introduce a degree
of uniformity into Russian religious practices and bring them closer to
those of the rest of the Orthodox world Kyivan Christianity and the
Greek church. The most prominent signs of change were corrections in
the texts of liturgical books and the new practice of making the sign of
the cross not with two ngers, as was customary in Muscovy, but with
three. The church council of 166667 removed Nikon from the ofce
127
Some scholars have argued that in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
the Kyivans replaced Muscovite high culture with their own, deepening the chasm
between the educated elites and the people. See Nikolai Trubetzkoy, The Ukrainian
Problem, in idem, The Legacy of Genghis Khan and Other Essays on Russian Identity,
ed. Anatoly Liberman (Ann Arbor, 1991), pp. 24567.
128
Quoted in Boris A. Uspensky, Schism and Cultural Conict in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury, in Seeking God: The Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine and
Georgia, ed. Stephen K. Batalden (DeKalb, Ill., 1993), pp. 10643, here 115.
129
The illustration on the cover of Anisimovs The Reforms of Peter the Great a Russian
lubok (woodcut) depicting a barber in Western dress attempting to cut the beard of an
Old Believer over the latters protests is therefore misleading. The lubok actually dates
from1770, long after the end of Peters rule. See the reproduction of the woodcut and its
dating in Robin Milner-Gulland, The Russians (Oxford, 1997), p. 127. On Peters policy
toward the Old Belief, see Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great, pp. 7479.
The invention of Russia 291
of patriarch following his personal conict with the tsar, but it also con-
demned those who opposed his reforms. The council ruled that not only
the church but also the tsar had the right to persecute the dissenters, who
became known as raskol
, a historical
work that had circulated in Ukraine in manuscript since the late 1820s.
Its author protested against the practice (allegedly Polish) of calling the
Dnipro region Ukraine and opted for Little Russia instead.
3
1
For an interpretation of the political and cultural message of Khvyliovys pamphlets,
see Myroslav Shkandrij, Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from
Napoleonic to Post-Colonial Times (Montreal and Kingston, 2001), pp. 22331.
2
See the entry Little Russian Mentality by Bohdan Kravtsiv in Encyclopedia of Ukraine,
vol. III (Toronto, 1993), p. 166.
3
See A. V. Storozhenko, Malaia Rossiia ili Ukraina? First appeared in 1918 in the journal
Malaia Rus
helped attract the attention of scholars and the public at large to the
late medieval usage of the term but failed to convince the specialists not
only proponents of the Little Russian identity like Storozhenko but also
Ukrainian scholars. Most of themfollowed the example of Mykhailo Hru-
shevsky (often attacked in Shelukhyns publications), who believed that
the term Ukraine derived from the notion of borderland. Hrushevsky
avoided Little Russia but often used Rus
and Ruthe-
nian were often applied to Ukrainian territory and its population.
5
Hru-
shevsky claimed that Little Russia had rst been used with regard to
the Galician-Volhynian principality in the fourteenth century. It had later
fallen out of use but was reintroduced into ofcial discourse in the sev-
enteenth century to dene the Ukrainian lands under Muscovite control.
According to Hrushevsky, the term did not become popular among the
masses, which preferred to call their land Ukraine. That term, applied
since the sixteenth century to the middle Dnipro region, was chosen as
4
See Serhii Shelukhyn, Ukrana nazva nasho zemli z naidavnishykh chasiv (Prague,
1936; repr. Drohobych, 1992), pp. 1932. Cf. Ivan Linnichenko, Malorusskii vopros
i avtonomiia Malorossii. Otkrytoe pis
, Natsional
ni hromady L
no-pravovi
vzaiemyny) (Lviv, 2003), p. 153. On the Ruthenian community of Lviv in the late
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see ibid., pp. 13157. For the privileges of the
Ruthenian community of Lviv, see idem, comp., Pryvile natsional
mans
ka Ukrana,
vol. VIII of Ukrana kriz
ka derzhavna
ideia. Problemy formuvannia, evoliutsi, realizatsi (Kyiv, 1997), pp. 175235.
Ruthenia, Little Russia, Ukraine 309
Among the major factors that contributed to the Polonization of the
Ruthenian elites was the decline in the use of the Ruthenian language. In
1696, when the Commonwealth Diet adopted a resolution making the
use of Polish obligatory in jurisprudence and administration, the nobility
of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania submitted a proposal to the Diet to
introduce Polish instead of Ruthenian as the language of the local courts.
The proposal was one of a number of petitions intended to extend the
rights possessed by the nobility of the Kingdomof Poland to their peers in
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
18
Thus the equalization of noble rights
in the Commonwealth went hand in hand with linguistic and cultural
Polonization. The process was voluntary in the sense that by the turn
of the eighteenth century there was a lack of qualied people to conduct
and record court proceedings in Ruthenian. By the end of the seven-
teenth century, the higher and elementary education of the children of
Ruthenian nobles and burghers was largely in the hands of the Jesuits. In
their schools, students learned Latin and Greek as well as Polish, but not
Ruthenian. While Orthodox Ruthenians were not barred from attending
Jesuit-run colleges, they had difculty in maintaining their religion while
enrolled there. That was certainly the case at Lviv University, where in
the late seventeenth century the Orthodox were allowed to take only one
year of philosophy and barred from other courses unless they converted
to the Union. In 1725 Orthodox students were denied housing at the
university. Similar practices were adopted in other educational institu-
tions of the region. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Ruthenian lands
of the Commonwealth were covered with a network of Jesuit colleges and
schools reaching as far east as Ovruch and Zhytomyr. Around that time,
the Jesuits began teaching Polish history in their colleges. They were not
only educating young Ruthenians but also turning them into political,
religious, and cultural Poles.
19
As the Ruthenian language was squeezed out of the public sphere,
its existence was conned to the premises of the Orthodox and Uniate
churches, but even there it had to compete with other languages. The Uni-
ate clergy was encouraged to preach to the people in their own language,
but the language taught in the Uniate schools was Church Slavonic
the language of ecclesiastical liturgy not Ruthenian. The schools orga-
nized and run by the Basilian fathers included Church Slavonic in their
curriculum. Latin and Church Slavonic were obligatory subjects in the
monastery schools, while the secular schools run by the Basilians stressed
Latin, Polish, and German, with Church Slavonic as an optional subject.
18
See Sahanovich, Narys historyi Belarusi, pp. 29495.
19
On Jesuit schools and colleges in Ukraine, see Istoriia ukrans
ko kul
kyi, Ukrans
ka
tserkva mizh Skhodom i Zakhodom (Philadelphia, 1954), pp. 396406; Atanasii Velykyi,
Z litopysu khrystyians
ko
Ukrany, bk. 6 (Rome, 1973), pp. 12954.
Ruthenia, Little Russia, Ukraine 313
its practices. Latinization implied the cultural Polonization of the Uni-
ate hierarchy, especially its bishops and monks, who in 1743 were orga-
nized in one Basilian Order governed from Rome. As noted above, the
Basilians were in charge of publishing and education, contributing to the
preservation of the traditional book culture and Church Slavonic lan-
guage. But they were not immune to Polonization and often took the
lead in adopting Latin practices. This applied particularly to Belarus,
where the Union took hold much earlier than in Ukraine, and both ten-
dencies were more pronounced among the Basilians. In 1636, when the
Vilnius Basilians decreed that they would conduct church services in
Ruthenian, that decision was recorded in Polish.
24
In 1684 the monks
of the Zhirovichi Monastery in Belarus requested permission to follow
the Gregorian calendar and celebrate the Latin mass. Quite a few of the
Belarusian Basilians were former Roman Catholics. They included not
only Ruthenians but also Poles and Lithuanians. Not surprisingly, by the
mid-eighteenth century reports on visitations of Belarusian monasteries
included information on knowledge of the Ruthenian language among
the monks. Combined with Latinization, the advancing Polonization of
the Uniate clergy could not help but make the few remaining Orthodox
think of the Uniate Church as a Catholic and Polish organization.
25
Needless to say, the Uniates disagreed with that designation of their
church, for they regarded themselves as Ruthenians and were perceived
as such by the Poles. By the mid-seventeenth century Ruthenian iden-
tity, formulated in the course of debates about the Union of Brest, had
clearly taken root throughout the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands of the
Commonwealth. It was also strongly established in the self-identication
matrix of the Ruthenian population of the state, irrespective of region,
palatinate, and social group. The Eastern rite shared by Orthodox and
Uniates alike served as a clear indication of nationality, and vice versa.
To be sure, the old competition for exclusive ownership of the Ruthe-
nian brand continued within these subgroups. Judging by documents
of the second half of the seventeenth century, the Orthodox continued
24
See Marzaliuk, Liudzi da uniai Belarusi, p. 76.
25
On the history of the Basilian Order, see M. Vavryk, Narys rozvytku i stanu Vasyliians
koho
Chyna XVIIXX st.: Topohrachno-statystychna rozvidka z kartoiu monastyriv (Rome,
1979); Sophia Senyk, Womens Monasteries in Ukraine and Belorussia to the Period of Sup-
pressions, Orientalia Christiana Analecta, vol. 222 (Rome, 1983); Maria Pidl ypczyk-
Majerowicz, Bazylianie w Koronie i na Litwie: szkoly i ksia zki w dzialalno s ci zakonu (War-
saw, 1986); eadem, Kulturalna spu scizna zakon ow meskich na Bial orusi, in U schylku
tysiaclecia: ksie ga pamiatkowa z okazji szes cdziesiatych urodzin Prof. Marcelego Kosmana
(Pozna n, 2001), pp. 21125. On the gradual Latinization and Polonization of the Uni-
ate Church in the eighteenth century, see Sophia Senyk, The Ukrainian Church and
Latinization, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 56 (1990): 16587, here 18082.
314 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
to regard themselves as the sole possessors of the Rus
identity
dened in confessional terms. But even Orthodox polemicists had to
admit the existence of another, non-Orthodox Rus
were
left with its rite and . . . that schism were joined to the Union, it would
threaten the fall of Poland. Thus, if we make it Roman Catholic, we will
rst of all deprive the Muscovites of the hope of annexing it and, in time,
by rmly binding it to ourselves, we shall make it [Rus
(Pokutia).
Another map, dated 1658, bears the title Typus Generalis Ukrainae sive
Palatinatuum Podoliae, Kioviensis et Braczlaviensis terras nova delin-
eatione exhibens. It covers the territories of the three palatinates men-
tioned in the title.
35
Why did Beauplan consider them part of Ukraine?
A possible answer is to be found in another of his maps, produced in
1648 and titled Delineatio Generalis Camporum Desertorum vulgo
Ukraina. Cum adjacentibus Provinciis.
36
Thus Beauplan was using the
termUkraine to denote all the provinces of the Kingdomof Poland that
bordered on the uninhabited steppe areas (campus desertorum) in one way
or another and constituted the steppe frontier of the Commonwealth.
Ukraine had been used in that sense in ofcial Polish documents at
least since 1580, when a decree issued by King Stefan Batory made men-
tion of Ruthenian, Kyivan, Volhynian, Podolian, and Bratslavian Ukraine.
In so doing, Batory was merely subscribing to a tradition that went back
at least to the twelfth century, when a Rus
ko suspil
kykh het
kykh het
, Khmelnytsky
claimed Ukrainian ethnic territory as far as Zamo s c in early 1649. Ele-
ments of the Orthodox clergys vision of Ruthenia are apparent in Khmel-
nytskys claim to Belarusian territories south of the Prypiat River and in
the Right-Bank hetmans demand for guarantees of Orthodox ecclesias-
tical rights throughout the Commonwealth.
46
As for nobiliary projects,
Cossack Ukraine included the Chernihiv palatinate, which was part of
Ruthenia as imagined by Adam Kysil in the early 1640s. Conversely, it
did not include Volhynia, which was a crucial part of Kysils Ruthenian
vision. What differentiated Cossack Ukraine from all the earlier projects
was its possession of Zaporizhia, the ultimate steppe borderland, with its
symbolic role as cradle and virtual capital of the whole Cossack land. But
the most important difference lay elsewhere: if the pre-1648 Ruthenian
projects were virtual, the new Ukrainian project was very real, enhanced
by the existence of a separate polity, administrative structure, and army.
44
For the text of Briukhovetskys letter, see Universaly ukrans
kykh het
maniv, p. 353.
45
Tysiacha rokiv, III, pt. 2 (Kyiv, 2001), pp. 1314.
46
See, e.g., Hetman Petro Doroshenkos instructions of May 1670 to Cossack repre-
sentatives at negotiations with the Commonwealth authorities in Ostrih (Universaly
ukrans
kykh het
when Rus
, Ruthenia domi-
nates the work. For Sofonovych, the Polish historical context remains
the most important one. Thus he discusses the Hetmanate in the third
part of his work, titled Chronicle of the Polish Land, as well as in sec-
tions on the rule of the Polish kings Wladyslaw IV and John Casimir.
49
Nor did he give any attention to Muscovy in his account of the past. As
Frank E. Sysyn has noted, Sofonovych divided his chronicle into sec-
tions concerned with Rus
and Ruthe-
nian in his works was becoming limited to the territory controlled by
the Left-Bank Cossack hetman.
For the educated elite of the Hetmanate, Ruthenian continued to
serve as the primary ethnocultural marker. But what terms and con-
cepts were popular among the population at large? Sources produced on
both sides of the Dnipro indicate that for those lacking the Renaissance-
inspired education offered by the Kyiv Mohyla College, local identities
and loyalties (including the Ukrainian or borderland identity) were
more important than the Ruthenian identity constructed by the Orthodox
clergy after the Union of Brest. That is certainly the impression one gets
from reading the chronicle/diary of the Ruthenian nobleman Yoakhym
Yerlych, a Commonwealth loyalist who was highly critical of the Khmel-
nytsky Uprising and Cossack politics in general. In the text of Yerlychs
chronicle, Ukraine appears much more often than Rus
, which he
uses mainly in reference to Orthodox church affairs. Ukraine and Volhy-
nia are the focus of Yerlychs narrative and dene the geographical base
of his identity. Yerlych began to compile his chronicle while taking shel-
ter in the Kyivan Cave Monastery after the outbreak of the Khmelnytsky
Uprising, but his worldview was formed long before the Cossack revolt
he was born in 1598 and died after 1673 and reected the image of
Ukraine familiar to us from the writings and maps of Beauplan. Judging
by Yerlychs chronicle, in the course of the seventeenth century Ukraine
emerged in the minds of the Ruthenian nobility, which was accustomed
to thinking in local terms, as a new geographical entity on a par with such
historical regions as the Rus
kyi (Kyiv, 1916), pp. 32456. For a brief biography of Yerlych and a
bibliography on the subject, see Bibliograa literatury polskiej. Nowy Korbut. Pismiennictwo
staropolskie, vol. II (Warsaw, 1964), pp. 29293.
324 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
The formation of a distinct Ukraine-based identity can be recon-
structed on the basis of the Eyewitness Chronicle, which covers Cos-
sack history from 1648 to the early eighteenth century. The chronicle is
generally believed to have been written by a Cossack ofcer turned Ortho-
dox priest, Roman Rakushka-Romanovsky. It is of particular interest to
scholars as the rst work of Cossack historical writing. The chronicle is
especially valuable for our purposes because its entries, fromthe 1670s at
least, were written year by year, not retrospectively. The bulk of the chron-
icle was written in the town of Starodub, where Rakushka spent the last
decades of his life (he died in 1703). Closely involved in many contem-
porary developments, Rakushka took part in the Khmelnytsky Uprising
and briey served as acting colonel in the Zaporozhian Host. He also
held the ofce of general treasurer under Hetman Ivan Briukhovests-
ky. After Briukhovetskys demise, Rakushka spent a few years in Polish-
controlled Right-Bank Ukraine and served as Hetman Pavlo Teterias
envoy to Istanbul. From what we know of Rakushka-Romanovskys life,
he never attended the Kyiv Mohyla College, and his thinking was only
minimally corrupted by the humanistic education and ideas of the time.
The chronicle is thus sui generis in its account of the period and gives us
a good idea of the opinions and identities of the Cossack ofcers on both
banks of the Dnipro.
54
The Eyewitness Chronicle leaves no doubt that by the early 1670s
(when Rakushka began to write annual entries and Cossack Ukraine
was divided between Muscovy and the Commonwealth), the concept of
Ukraine and Ukrainian identity had taken hold in the minds of Cossack
ofcers indeed, it seems to have all but eliminated whatever elements
of Ruthenian identity they had. Rakushka uses Rus
and Ruthenian
even less frequently than Yerlych. In his case, these terms are limited to
the sphere of the Orthodox Church and such related matters as the litur-
gical calendar. What we see instead are strong manifestations of Cossack
identity and a rm attachment to Ukraine as the land of the Cossacks.
The borders of Ukraine (whether in retrospective coverage of the events
of 164871 or in entries for the years 16721702) are clearly dened by
the Zboriv treaty of 1649. In fact, the author never uses Ukraine in
reference to any territory outside those borders and clearly distinguishes
Ukraine from Volhynia and Podilia. His work leaves the impression that
the pre-1648 use of the term with reference to all the border palatinates
of the Kingdomof Poland was all but forgotten by the Cossack elite of the
Hetmanate. The unity of Cossack Ukraine seems to be high on the list of
54
On Roman Rakushka-Romanovsky, see Iaroslav Dzyra, Vstup, in Litopys Samovydtsia
(Kyiv, 1971), pp. 942, here 2022.
Ruthenia, Little Russia, Ukraine 325
the authors loyalties and values. Rakushka clearly did not welcome the
conditions of the Truce of Andrusovo, whereby the Right Bank was ceded
to Poland, and showed sympathy for the opposition to the truce voiced
by his late superior, Hetman Briukhovetsky. According to the Eyewitness
Chronicle, the hetman had been tempted by Doroshenkos promise to
give up the hetmancy entirely, as long as Cossackdom remained united.
Thus, continued the chronicler, Hetman Briukhovetsky allowed himself
to be persuaded and began to conceive a hatred for Muscovy.
55
The division of Ukraine along the Dnipro River did not prevent
Rakushka-Romanovsky from using the name Ukraine to refer to both
parts of Cossack territory, but the devastation of the Right Bank in the
1670s and the onset of the Ruin, which impelled many Cossacks (includ-
ing Rakushka himself) to migrate to the Left Bank, could not but affect his
perception of events. Under the year 1675, describing the fate of the Right
Bank, he wrote, And so that Ukraine became desolate, for the remaining
people from the [Southern] Buh region and the merchants went beyond
the Dnipro.
56
Rakushka occasionally wrote of all Ukraine. Most often,
however, he used Ukraine without qualication to denote Left-Bank
Ukraine, which he also called Zadnipria (the lands beyond the Dnipro)
and sehobochna Ukraina (Ukraine on this side of the river). Rakushka-
Romanovskys Ukraine also included his own Siverian land, with Star-
odub as its center, and Zaporizhia with its Cossack headquarters, the
Sich. Thus Rakushkas Ukraine was slowly shifting eastward to the ter-
ritory under the tsars protectorate. The Right Bank did not cease to be
part of Ukraine, but that was the broader meaning of the term, while the
narrowone, meaning the Left-Bank Hetmanate, became dominant in the
chronicle.
The shifting of territorial identity is well illustrated by Rakushkas use
of the terms our and ours. If in earlier entries, such as those for the
years 1649, 1662, and 1663, the chronicler uses expressions such as our
land and our people to describe the territory and population of all
Cossack Ukraine, in later entries he applies them almost exclusively to
the population and Cossack troops of Left-Bank Ukraine. In the entry
for 1692, for example, he clearly distinguishes between Left-Bank and
Right-Bank Cossacks, applying the word our only to the former: hav-
ing divided [the troops], [Semen] Palii sent his to the king and our troops
to His Majesty the Tsar.
57
As a rule, Rakushka used different terms for
Muscovite forces (mentioned in the chronicle as Moskva, the Muscovite
army, or the tsars people) andCossacks, whomhe calledour army, the
Cossack army, or our Cossack troops. He also distinguishedUkrainian
55
See Litopys Samovydtsia, p. 103.
56
Ibid., p. 121.
57
Ibid., p. 153.
326 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
and Muscovite culture. Under the year 1682, he commented on the death
of Tsar Fedor Alekseevich as follows: [the tsar] had great love for our
people, for he both ordained that divine services be sung in the churches
and monasteries of Muscovy in our chant and Muscovite costumes were
abolished, but he allowed them to dress according to our fashion.
58
It
should be noted nevertheless that Rakushka also increasingly referred to
Muscovite troops as ours, for example when Left-Bank Cossacks and
the tsars forces took part in joint campaigns against the Ottomans or
the Tatars. Beginning with the 1680s, the chronicler included detailed
descriptions of events in Moscow in his narrative, while Warsaw all but
disappeared from his eld of vision. At least once he referred to the Mus-
covite rulers as our Muscovite monarchs.
59
A careful reading of the Eyewitness Chronicle shows how the authors
focus, and even his loyalty, were shifting more and more to the east, even-
tually becoming almost completely identied with the Left-Bank Het-
manate. But because Rakushka-Romanovsky had been raised to think of
Ukraine as a united country encompassing both banks of the Dnipro,
he had little desire to articulate that new reality. Moreover, lacking the
humanistic education offered by the Kyiv Mohyla College and Polish
schools and academies, he did not think in national terms (to him, narod
meant a group of people, not a nation). His dominant identity, like
the main focus of his narrative, remained largely social (Cossack), not
national. That identity served the useful purpose of distinguishing the
elites of the Hetmanate from the Ruthenian elites of the Commonwealth
on the one hand and the inhabitants of the Muscovite state on the other.
What it lacked, however, was a clearly articulated ethnonational designa-
tion.
Little Russia
From the Rus
origins. To be sure,
their Orthodoxy was not identical to that of Kyiv, nor was their Muscovite
identity the same as that of the Rus
and
the metropolitanate (later patriarchate) of Moscow, which were called
Great Russia or Great Rus
kykh
het
maniv, p. 456.
Ruthenia, Little Russia, Ukraine 329
part of Little Russia.
63
While clerical elites, faithful to the old tradition,
continued to use Little Russia in its original broader sense, political
developments made it necessary to adjust the meaning of the term once
again and further reduce the territory dened by it. Since the Truce of
Andrusovo left only the Left-Bank territories under Muscovite control, a
tendency emerged to limit not only the notions of the Zaporozhian Host
and Ukraine but also that of Little Russia to the connes of the Left Bank.
In order not to be accused by the Poles of violating the agreement or
advancing illegitimate claims to the Right Bank, Muscovite diplomats
were careful to establish that their new agreements with Left-Bank het-
mans pertained only to the Zaporozhian Host on this side of the Dnipro
and generally avoided referring to the Right Bank as Little Russia.
The Cossacks, on the other hand, were reluctant to abandon the con-
cept of Little Russia on both banks of the Dnipro when they negotiated
with the Muscovite authorities, just as they were unwilling to forsake
the vision of Ukraine on both banks of the river.
64
Only in 1674, when
Muscovite forces and Left-Bank Cossacks crossed to the Right Bank and
Ivan Samoilovych was proclaimed hetman of both banks of the Dnipro,
did the Muscovite authorities dare to include the trans-Dnipro regi-
ments in the category of Little Russian towns.
65
The extension of the
tsars authority to the Right Bank turned out to be short-lived, and the
usage of Little Russia soon reverted to pre-1674 practice. The Left-
Bank Cossacks, whose hetmans maintained references to both banks of
the Dnipro in their titles, continued to think of Little Russia/Ukraine as
extending to both banks of the river, while Muscovite diplomats generally
limited the notion of Little Russia to the Left Bank and the city of Kyiv.
While the territorial dimension of Little Russia was obviously shrink-
ing, the popularity of the term among the Cossack elites was gaining new
ground during the second half of the seventeenth century. If at rst the
Cossack ofcers used it only in their relations with Moscow, by the end
of the century they were also using it in dealings with other powers in the
region. An indication of this usage occurs in the text of a treaty signed
in May 1692 between the Crimean khan and Hetman Petro Ivanenko,
better known as Petryk, one of the challengers to Ivan Mazepa in the
Hetmanate. According to the treaty text, the parties to the agreement
63
See the text of the letter in Tysiacha rokiv, III, pt. 1: 474.
64
See, e.g., Ivan Briukhovetskys circular letters to the inhabitants of the Right Bank (1663)
in Universaly ukrans
kykh het
,
reaching all the way back to Kyivan times. That terminology could also
give the new generation of the Cossack elite an opportunity (denied by
the Cossack-based discourse) to articulate its vision of itself as a separate
Rus
kykh het
kykh het
kykh het
maniv, p. 266).
75
See Universaly ukrans
kykh het
maniv, p. 266.
76
See Tysiacha rokiv, III, pt. 2: 16.
Ruthenia, Little Russia, Ukraine 333
Unreliability was also one of the features ascribed to our people by
the author of the Eyewitness Chronicle. Interestingly enough, Rakushka-
Romanovsky associatedthat unreliability withthe failure of the Cossack
elites to remain loyal to their hetmans, not to the tsars.
77
The constant
need for political maneuvering among three neighboring powers, each of
whichclaimedthe Cossack polity for itself, left animprint onthe character
of Hetmanate politics and of the emerging nation. Unable to restore the
unity of their homeland, which had been devastated by decades of warfare
and internal conict, the Cossack elites in different parts of Ukraine were
mastering the art of political and physical survival on their own. Hetman
Ivan Mazepa regarded the lack of unity among the Cossack ofcers and
their readiness to serve the Ottomans, Poland, and Muscovy as Ukraines
principal curse. In a duma attributed to him by his foes, Mazepa called
upon the Almighty: O God, take pity on Ukraine, / Whose sons are not
in concord.
78
Lazar Baranovych made an almost identical plea in one
of his poems: O God, grant concord to holy Ukraine. If Baranovych
considered the Ruthenians no less devoted to their faith than the Poles,
and praised their readiness to ght for it, he regretted the readiness of
Ruthenian peasants to rebel against the nobility and of Ruthenians in
general to ght one another. Once again, he appealed to the deity: It
happens that the father does not believe the son, or the son the father /
Lord, extinguish the re that is burning in Ukraine.
79
The fatherland
The denition of ones homeland in ethnocultural terms and the formu-
lation of the concept of loyalty to ones patria (fatherland) were among the
most important factors in the formation of national identity in eighteenth-
century Europe, and their study presents a unique opportunity to trace
changes in the identity of the Cossack Hetmanates elite.
Fatherland (otchyzna) was an important term in the Ruthenian and,
later, Ukrainian political vocabulary of the seventeenth and early eigh-
teenth centuries. The word was a borrowing from Polish, with which
Ukrainian political discourse shared a number of important characteris-
tics.
80
In the Commonwealth, the fatherland (ojczyzna) was conceived as
independent of the ruler, or even of a particular state; the word could be
77
See Litopys Samovydtsia, pp. 87, 91.
78
See Tysiacha rokiv, III, pt. 2: 23840, here 239.
79
See the Ukrainian translation of Baranovychs poem, ibid., pp. 8193, here 85.
80
On the use of the term fatherland in Polish political discourse, see Ewa Bem, Termin
ojczyzna w literaturze XVI i XVII wieku. Reeksje o jezyku, Odrodzenie i Reformacja
w Polsce 34 (1989): 13157.
334 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
applied to a constituent part of a state as easily as to the whole. The Com-
monwealth, the Polish Crown, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania could
be considered fatherlands of their inhabitants.
81
For example, in the Pol-
ish verses recited by students of the Kyivan College in May 1648 in honor
of Prince Jeremi Wi sniowiecki (Yarema Vyshnevetsky), two fatherlands
the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania vied for the
right to call the scions of the princely families of the Sanhushkos, Char-
toryiskys, and Koretskys their sons. Notably, Polish-Lithuanian Rus
was
not mentioned as a possible fatherland of the Rus
kykh het
maniv,
pp. 34, 98, 384.
84
Muscovite documents also record earlier references by the Cossack elites to their
otchyzna. A case in point is the report of a conversation between a Russian merchant and
General Chancellor Ivan Vyhovsky in January 1652 (see Vossoedinenie, II: 199). Given
the ambiguity of the word otchizna in Muscovite political vocabulary of the time, it is dif-
cult to say whether these were references to the fatherland or to the Cossack patrimony
and possessions in general.
85
See Briukhovetskys letter of April 1662 to Bishop Metodii in Tysiacha rokiv, III, pt. 1:
383.
Ruthenia, Little Russia, Ukraine 335
opponent, the Right-Bank hetman Pavlo Teteria, was still referring to
the Commonwealth as the Cossack fatherland and our mother.
86
The
Muscovite political elites had no concept of fatherland with which to
challenge Cossack usage and probably did not understand what was at
stake. Although their word otchina closely resembled the Polish ojczyzna
and the Ruthenian otchyzna, its meaning the tsars patrimony was
entirely different. Briukhovetsky paid tribute to this Muscovite notion as
well when he referred to the Ukrainian lands (including the Right Bank)
as the tsars patrimony.
87
The development that removed much of the ambiguity concerning
the Cossack usage of fatherland was the Truce of Andrusovo, which
divided Ukraine along the Dnipro not only de jure but also de facto.
After that, the Cossacks used fatherland to refer to their divided coun-
try, whether Little Russia or Ukraine. Calls to unite the fatherland and
save it from further destruction became common in Cossack leaders
appeals to their countrymen. In 1668 Briukhovetsky explained his own
rebellion against the tsar as a reaction against the plans of the Com-
monwealth and Muscovy to destroy Ukraine, our dear fatherland.
88
At about the same time, Hetman Doroshenko rallied support in Left-
Bank Ukraine with references to the fatherland, our Ukraine. In the
1670s, the now pro-Ottoman Yurii Khmelnytsky and the pro-Polish het-
man Mykhailo Khanenko followed suit.
89
While this fatherland was
no longer the Commonwealth or the Kingdom of Poland and clearly
excluded Muscovy, in other respects its boundaries were as ambiguous
and indenite as those of Ukraine, Little Russia, or Ruthenia. The old
Ruthenian intellectuals in Kyiv continued to think in pre-1648 cate-
gories and regarded not only Cossack Ukraine but also Ruthenia as their
fatherland. In the 1670s, such chroniclers of the Hetmanate as Mykhailo
Losytsky andFeodosii Sofonovychpledgedtheir loyalty to the Rus
father-
land.
90
But as early as 1683, Dymytrii Tuptalo wrote an epitaph for the
deceased general judge of the Hetmanate, Ivan Domontovych, charac-
terizing him as a true son of the fatherland,
91
which most probably
meant the Hetmanate, given the ofce that Domontovych had held. So
86
See references to fatherland in Teterias letters in Universaly ukrans
kykh het
maniv,
p. 232; Tysiacha rokiv, III, pt. 1: 38190.
87
See Universaly ukrans
kykh het
kykh het
kyi, Ukrans
kykh
het
ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, bk. 8 (Moscow, 1962), pp. 243
44.
97
For the text of the letter, see ibid., pp. 24647.
98
For the text of Skoropadskys manifesto, see Oleksandr Rigel
pro
Malu Rosiiu ta narod i kozakiv uzahali (repr. of 1847 edn of Letopisnoe povestvovanie o
Maloi Rossii (Kyiv, 1994)), pp. 55562.
99
See an excerpt from the letter in Solov
kyi separatyzm na pochatku XVIII st. (Kyiv, 1994), pp. 15882, here 170.
103
See the Latin original of the Pacta, the Ruthenian version, and translations into contem-
porary Ukrainian and English in Konstytutsiia ukrans
ko het
mans
ko derzhavy (Kyiv,
1997).
340 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Muscovites and the Ruthenian population of the Commonwealth. The
concept of Rus
ko het
mans
nyc
nyc
kyj. For a scholarly edition of the rst volume of the Velychko chronicle, see
Samiila Velychka Skazaniie o voini kozatskoi z poliakamy, ed. Kateryna Lazarevs
ka (Kyiv,
1926); the complete text was published under the title Letopis
sobytii v Iugo-Zapadnoi
Rossii v XVII veke, 4 vols. (Kyiv, 184864).
109
On Hrabianka, see Yurii Lutsenkos introduction to Hryhorij Hrabjankas The Great
War, pp. xviiixxii.
Ruthenia, Little Russia, Ukraine 345
in the historical works of Hrabianka and Velychko were not seeking to
extend their once broad political autonomy but merely to preserve it.
A reading of their chronicles shows that the Petrine reforms and the
resounding defeat of Cossack independentist aspirations gave rise to a
new type of identity in the Hetmanate.
The meaning of Hrabiankas and Velychkos works is best understood
against the background of the historical, political, and ideological debate
initiated by the war of manifestos between Mazepa and Peter in 17089
and echoed in Orlyks writings in exile. Whose side, Peters or Mazepas,
did the chroniclers of post-Poltava Ukraine take? Judging by what we
know today, the Cossack elites generally had little reason to cherish
Mazepa. At rst they criticized him for kowtowing to the tsar, and then
they were more than reluctant to support him in his rebellion. Even his
supporters could hardly wait for his demise to compose the Pacta, which
was a reaction to Mazepas authoritarian rule and was intended to limit
the powers and aspirations of his successor, Pylyp Orlyk. And one of our
chroniclers, Samiilo Velychko a prot eg e of Mazepas enemy, General
Chancellor Vasyl Kochubei was also no friend or admirer of the late het-
man. But it was one thing to withhold support from Mazepa and quite
another to endorse Peters encroachment on the Hetmanates autonomy,
which culminated in the abolition of the hetmancy.
One of the major issues discussed in the manifestos was that of loy-
alty and treason. As noted above, Peter accused Mazepa of violating his
oath to the tsar, and Mazepa responded that he was bound by a higher
loyalty to his fatherland, the liberties of the Host, and the welfare of
the Little Russian nation. Orlyk sustained Mazepas line of argument in
exile (probably with the hetmans active participation), but intellectuals
in the Hetmanate do not appear to have followed suit. As Frank E. Sysyn
has argued, Hrabianka adopted the idea of loyalty to the tsar as his main
criterion for judging the activities of individual hetmans.
110
Velychko,
informing the reader about the death of his patron, Vasyl Kochubei, noted
that he had served God, his sovereign, his fatherland, and the Cossack
Host.
111
In this hierarchy of loyalties, fatherland followed the sovereign.
Although Velychko gave substantial attention in his chronicle to the idea
of loyalty to the fatherland, he basically subscribed to the tsars propagan-
distic thesis of 17089: love of the fatherland could trump a Cossacks
duty to serve a hetman acting against the interests of the fatherland, but
it could not justify rebellion against the Muscovite monarch. In gen-
eral, Velychko tried to avoid counterposing loyalties to the Muscovite
110
See Sysyn, The Image of Russia, p. 131.
111
Ibid., p. 139.
346 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
tsar and to the Cossack fatherland.
112
While Velychko might criticize
the individual actions of monarchs, including Peter, he stopped short of
putting loyalty to Ukraine, his Little Russian fatherland, ahead of loyalty
to the sovereign. In that regard, Velychko turned out to be less consis-
tent than either Mazepa or Orlyk: he recognized Khmelnytskys right to
rebel against the Polish king in the name of the fatherland but apparently
denied that right to his successors who rebelled against the Russian tsar.
To be sure, the Polish monarchs were non-Orthodox, while the Muscovite
sovereigns were rst and foremost Orthodox tsars and protectors of the
Orthodox Church. Yet one need not search for an ideological justication:
as Sysyn notes, Velychkos support for the Orthodox tsar may have been
based on his mere acknowledgment of the political reality resulting from
the late seventeenth-century struggles and the Battle of Poltava.
113
While both Velychko and Hrabianka took the tsars side in the loyalty
debate between Peter and Mazepa, there are clear indications that they
leaned toward the latter when it came to the liberties and freedoms of
the Cossack Host and the Little Russian nation. Velychko particularly
criticized Peter for surrendering Right-Bank Ukraine and introducing the
rule of the Little Russian College, despite the tsars claim that the Little
Russians enjoyed more rights than any other nation on earth.
114
While
that critique of the tsar was provoked by Peters actions after Poltava, it
was nothing if not a direct response to the tsars manifestos of 17089,
in which he claimed that the Cossacks were more privileged than any
other nation under the sun. It was also an echo of the accusations leveled
against the tsar by Mazepa, who justied his rebellion by invoking his
desire to protect the unity of the fatherland. The authors of both Cossack
chronicles, like the author of the Eyewitness Chronicle before them, were
highly critical of the Truce of Andrusovo, which had divided Ukraine,
and continued to treat the Right Bank of the Dnipro as part of their
homeland.
Crucial to the rights argument of both Cossack chroniclers was the
interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654 as the Magna Carta
of the Hetmanates liberties. Velychko dened Pereiaslav as a mutually
binding treaty between two equal partners. That interpretation was of
course contrary to the views of the Muscovite authorities, who treated
the rights and privileges of the Host as a grant fromthe tsar to his subjects
and thus liable to revocation at the tsars whim. The Muscovite side never
acknowledged the binding character of the Pereiaslav Agreement and the
112
On the meaning and importance of fatherland in the Velychko chronicle, see Sysyn,
Fatherland in Early Eighteenth-Century Political Culture.
113
See Sysyn, The Image of Russia, p. 138.
114
Ibid., p. 140.
Ruthenia, Little Russia, Ukraine 347
subsequent Khmelnytsky Articles, but, in negotiations with his succes-
sors, it also denied having violated them. In 1708, at a time of crisis, Peter
denied any violation of the Pereiaslav Agreement by the tsars. In reality
he continued the policy of his predecessors and signicantly curtailed
Cossack privileges, rst by issuing new articles that drastically reduced
the powers of the newly elected Hetman Ivan Skoropadsky and then by
abolishing the hetmancy altogether in 1722. In their interpretation of the
Pereiaslav Agreement as a contract binding on both parties, the Cos-
sack chroniclers, not unlike their predecessors of 1654, were projecting
the legal and political practices of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
onto Muscovy. Treating that autocratic tsardom as if it conformed to
Commonwealth traditions was a clear misunderstanding of political real-
ity for which one might forgive such former Ruthenians as Sofonovych
or Baranovych, but not Hetmanate intellectuals of the 1720s. Yet they,
too, were ultimately victims of political circumstance. Acknowledging the
realities of the tsarist autocracy would not have helped themmake a better
argument for the restoration of Cossack rights taken away by Peter and his
predecessors. In the end, despite everything, they stubbornly reiterated
their defense of Cossack rights.
Neither chronicler discussed Mazepas choice in any detail. Hrabianka
simply mentions the fact of the hetmans treason, while Velychkos
chronicle ends with the events of the late seventeenth century. The latters
response to Mazepas revolt can be detected only on the basis of his
reaction to arguments in favor of the rebellion staged by Petryk, who
sided with the Crimea in 1693. In his account of Petryks appeal to the
Host, Velychko presented the same arguments as those that appeared in
Mazepas manifestos of 1708: the war against Muscovy was conducted for
the sake of Cossack liberties and the common good of the nation, with the
goal of returning to the idealized times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky. Petryks
letter is countered in the text of the chronicle by the alleged response
of Velychkos own Poltava Cossack regiment. The Poltava letter refused
to admit that the Muscovite authorities had wronged the Cossacks and
Little Russia in any way but suggested that if something like that should
ever happen, a remedy should be sought by wise leaders, not by rebels
like Petryk. Since Velychko did not consider Petryk a wise leader, it may
be assumed that he was no more favorably disposed toward Mazepa.
115
While Velychko appears to have thought that the rebels had raised valid
concerns, he did not endorse rebellion as a means of redress.
115
For the text of Petryks proclamation and the response of the Poltava regiment, see
Letopis
sobytii, III: 11116. The exchange of letters is discussed in Sysyn, The Image
of Russia, p. 138.
348 The Origins of the Slavic Nations
Not unlike Mazepa himself and his possible proxy in Velychkos chroni-
cle, the unfortunate Petryk, the Cossack chroniclers envisioned a solution
to their problems in a return to the times of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who
emerges fromthe pages of both chronicles as the ideal hetman. In the Het-
manate, the Khmelnytsky era was generally regarded as a golden age
against which the failures and accomplishments of new Cossack leaders
were judged. References to the Articles of Bohdan Khmelnytsky were
almost obligatory in the texts of treaties drafted for his successors by
the Muscovite authorities. The Ottomans certainly wanted to exploit the
popularity of the old hetman when they installed his son Yurii Khmelnyts-
ky as prince of Little Russian Ukraine in 1678. The Muscovites, for
their part, drew a clear distinction between the father and the son, whom
they branded as a traitor along with Ivan Vyhovsky and Ivan Briukhovets-
ky in the Konotop Articles granted to Hetman Ivan Samoilovych in
1672.
116
The rst signs of Khmelnytskys evolution into a cult gure can be
traced back to the era of Ivan Samoilovych, when the professors of the
restored Kyiv Mohyla Academy began to represent him as the foremost
hero of the Hetmanate. Khmelnytsky appears in the above-mentioned
eulogy of 1693 as the leader of an anti-Polish struggle and has no con-
nection to Muscovy and the Pereiaslav Articles, for which he was known
in agreements between Muscovy and the Cossacks in the second half of
the seventeenth century.
117
He also emerges untainted by his ties with
Moscow in the historical introduction to the Pacta. His name was raised
in the war of manifestos in late 1708 and early 1709 in connection with
the rights granted him by the tsars. Khmelnytskys main function in the
Pacta seems to be that of legitimizing the political choice made by Mazepa
and Orlyk in 1708. He is portrayed as the hetman who not only lib-
erated his fatherland but also initiated alliances with Sweden and the
Crimea, the two nations on whose support the exiles counted. Khmel-
nytskys acceptance of the Muscovite protectorate is treated as an honest
mistake. After Poltava, this interpretation of Khmelnytskys role in rela-
tion to Muscovy could only be advanced in writings produced outside
the Hetmanate, which came under increasingly stringent Muscovite con-
trol. In the Hetmanate itself, there developed a very different image of
Khmelnytsky and his historical role. Hrabiankas and Velychkos image
of Khmelnytsky differs very signicantly from the one in Orlyks Pacta.
If they retained the characterization of Khmelnytsky as the leader of an
anti-Polish uprising and protector of the Orthodox faith, the rights of the
116
See the text of the articles in Universaly ukrans
kykh het
Bozhiia in Ukrans
nationality that later gave birth to the three modern nations of Russia,
Ukraine, and Belarus? Or was the East Slavic world divided fromthe very
beginning, and did the three nations already exist in Kyivan times? The
evidence presented in this book supports a negative answer to both ques-
tions. Astudy of changes in the collective identities of people who dened
themselves primarily by reference to the name Rus
population
clearly did not measure up to that criterion. Not all Kyivan subjects were
Slavs, to say the least, and not all Slavs were Christians, while those who
were never developed East Slavic identity to a level clearly discernible
in the literary sources of the time. What the Rus
literature
written in Church Slavonic. The post-Kyivan elites adopted the political
name Rus
model con-
structed by the Kyivan bookmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Although the sense of a Rus
, points to the
formation of a separate Muscovite identity (and ethnicity) in the fteenth
and sixteenth centuries. Built around the idea of loyalty to the tsar, based
on the view of Muscovite Orthodoxy as the only true religion, and lim-
ited to the boundaries of the grand-princely (subsequently tsarist) state,
Muscovite identity may be regarded as a distant but still direct precursor
of the Russian imperial and national projects of the modern era.
The rst East Slavic entity that might be called an early modern nation
is the Ruthenian community formed on the Ukrainian and Belarusian
lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the late sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Ruthenian identity grew out of the identities of
Lithuanian and Polish Rus
was highly
signicant in establishing a sense of Rus
kyi, I. 257
Hosking, G. 142, 250, 251, 255, 295
Hrushevs
, M. 307
Karamzin, N. 6869
Kazakova, N. A. 76
Keenan, E. L. 67, 122, 126, 13132, 133,
135, 140, 142, 146, 152, 154, 158, 202,
226, 232, 294
Kentrschynskyj, B. 277
Kharlampovich, K. 254
Khlevov, A. A. 10
Khodarkovsky, M. 144, 148, 150, 224
Khoroshkevich, A. 54, 79, 88, 95, 108,
137, 141
Kivelson, V. 122, 159, 215, 216, 221
Kleimola, A. M. 142
Kliuchevsky, V. 17, 46, 53, 12728
Kl oczowski, J. 181, 182
Kohut, Z. E. xiv, xvii, xviii, xix, 259, 262,
264, 340
Kojal owicz, A. W. 238
Kolesov, V. V. 25, 106, 277
Kollmann, N. S. 122, 123, 202, 213, 214,
215, 220
Korduba, M. 89
Koroliuk, V. D. 20
Kot, S. 166
Kotliar, M. 51, 56, 57, 59, 91
Kotliarchuk, A. S. 89, 307
Krajcar, J. 181, 182
Kraliuk, P. 185, 190
Kra utsevich, A. K. 86
Kravtsiv, B. 300
Krom, M. M. 86, 111, 138, 155
Krypiakevych, I. 51, 89
Kuchkin, V. A. 77
Kupriianov, A. 131
Kutrzeba, S.
Kuzio, T. 2, 16, 18, 203
Kuz
min, A. G. 15
LeDonne, J. P. 252
Lenhoff, G. 72
Lidov, A. 146
Lieven, D. 250
Likhachev, D. S. 34, 129, 130, 154
Lindner, R. 12
Lipi nski, W. (V. Lypynsky) 239, 300
Liubavskii, M. 86, 88, 97, 99, 112,
127
Lobachev, S. 244
Lomonosov, M. 10, 266
Lopatynsky, T. 275, 276
L owmia nski, H. 86, 99
Lunt, H. 24
Lutsenko, Yu. 344
Author index 365
Luzhnyts
kyi, H. 312
Lynnychenko (Linnichenko), I. 51
Lyzlov, A. 264
Maczak, A. 172
Magocsi, P. R. 14, 45
M aki-Pet ays, M. 74
Malaniuk, Y. 300
Mal
tsev, A. N. 238
Mankiev, A. 262, 266
Martin, J. 14, 53, 78, 138, 144, 145
Marx, A. W. 3
Marzaliuk, I. 89, 96, 100, 107, 111, 185,
198, 228, 307, 313
Mavrodin, V. 17
Mazur, K. 116
Meyendorff, P. 196
Michels, G. 291
Mikulich, A. I. 55
Miliukov, P. 12627, 131, 132, 158
Miller, A. 254
Miller, D. B. 71
Milner-Gulland, R. 144, 290
Mironowicz, A. 311
Moser, M. 90, 91, 92, 93
Motsia, O. P. 43
M uller, G. F. 10
Murav
eva, L. L. 68, 70
Myl
do, F. 86
Shakhmatov, A. 14, 15, 23, 32
Shaskol
skii, I. P. 10
Shchapov, I. N. 43
Shelukhyn, S. 301, 302, 317, 332
Shepard, J. 14, 16, 29, 44
Sherbowitz-Wetzor, O. P. 15
Shevchenko, F. 54
Shevelov, G. Y. 44, 45, 257
Shkandrij, M. 300
Shtykhov, G. V. 12, 55
Sinitsyna, N. V. 145
Skarga, P. 182
Skrynnikov, R. 78, 126
Smirnova, E. S. 294
Smith, A. D. 34, 360
Smolii, V. 237, 238, 308
Smolin, M. 302
Snyder, T. 87, 166
Sobolev, L. 179
Sobolevsky, A. 46
Solov
ianovs
kyi, P. 335
Zhukovich, P. 190, 193, 230
Zhukovs
kyi, A. 198
Zhylenko, I. V. 260, 263, 266
Ziborov, V. K. 15, 20
Zimin, A. A. 138
Zorin, A. 221
Zubkova, E. 131
General index
Abetsedarski, L. S. 210
Adamovych, Symeon 332
Adrian, Patriarch of Moscow 274, 275
Ahapyt 66
Ahinski, Aliaksandr 305
Ahinski, Prince Bahdan 22829, 288
Ahmed, Khan, battle with Ivan III 124
Aleksandr, Grand Duke 120
Aleksei Mikhailovich, Tsar 253, 284, 289
offensive against Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth 303
Aleksii, Metropolitan of all Rus
102
Algirdas, Grand Duke of Lithuania 85,
102
all-Rus
identity 18, 19
and Metropolitan Cyprian 103
and Prince Dmitrii Donskoi 7172
sources for 1921
Andrew, Saint 27, 28
and Polianian tribe 2930
Andrii, Prince of Galicia-Volhynia 61
Andrusovo, Truce of 252, 259, 302, 304,
311, 319, 325, 329, 335, 346
Anna Ioannovna, Empress 298
Apostol, Hetman Danylo 344, 350
Askold 28, 30
Assembly of the Land 214, 242, 243,
245
Astrakhan, addition to Russian tsardom
125, 141, 143, 145
Avramov, M. P. 265
Avvakum, Archpriest, and Old Belief 292,
29495, 297
Balaban, Bishop Hedeon 227
Baranetsky, Pavlo 268
Baranovych, Archbishop Lazar 253, 259,
333, 347, 352
PolishLithuanianRuthenian identity
32223
Barkalabava Chronicle 227
Basilian Order 313
Batory, King Stefan 14849, 151, 152,
154, 155, 162, 317
Batu 64
Beauplan, Guillaume Le Vasseur de,
description of Ukraine 31617
maps of 317
Belarus 1
divergence from Kyivan Rus
50
historians view of Kyivan Rus
2, 11
historical legacy of Lithuania 87
importance of Rus
identity 9396
and Little Russia 328
Mongol invasion 93
national identity 5, 8, 46, 54, 89, 356,
358, 360, 361
Polatsk principality 54
RussianPolish war 252, 303
and Ruthenia 6
underdevelopment of ethnic terminology
131
Uniate Church 313
Union of Lublin 115, 16567
White Russia 327
see also Lithuania; Orthodoxy
Bila Tserkva Agreement 318
Bogoliubsky, Prince Andrei 42, 44,
7475
Bolotnikov, Ivan 205, 213, 219
Book of Degrees 143, 146
Boretsky, Metropolitan Iov 189, 190, 230,
234
Borys (Boris), Saint 136
Braichevsky, Mykhailo, challenge to
reunication paradigm 19
Briukhovetsky, Hetman Ivan 25859, 319,
324, 325, 328, 329, 33031, 332,
348
loyalty to Ukraine 33435
Buturlin, Vasilii 225, 246, 248
Buzhynsky, Samuil 276, 297
Byzantine emperors, and Qipchaq khans
134
367
368 General index
Byzantine historical chronology
and Primary Chronicle 15, 28
and Rus
Land 38
Caesar, Augustus, and genealogy of
Rurikid princes 139
Calvinism, in Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth 162, 181
Casimir III, King of Poland 51
Casimir IV, King of Poland 103, 104
Catholicism, union with Orthodoxy
16263, 181
Charles XII, King of Sweden
manifesto 338
war with Muscovy 254, 278
Chartoryisky, Oleksander 98
Christianity, struggle with Islam 14748
Christianization
resistance to 40
and unity of Rurikid realm 43
introduction of Church Slavonic 44
Church Slavonic 172
decline of Ruthenian language 30910
introduction as literary language 44
and Old Belief 294
and Synopsis 265
translation of Bible 245
Clement VIII, Pope, union with
Orthodoxy 163
Commendone, Cardinal Giovanni
Francesco 170, 171
Confederation of Bar 306
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus 32, 38,
40
Contarini, Cardinal Gasparo 170, 172
Cossacks 162
alliance with Muscovy 303, 357
atrocities against Muscovites 229
attitude to Mazepa 345
change in concept of fatherland 33438
(see also Pacta)
control of Orthodox Church 19596
decline after Eternal Peace 3034
defense of Orthodoxy 164, 194
distinction between rank-and-le and
ofcer elite 351
Eyewitness Chronicle 32426
and Khazars 34142, 350
rebaptism, payment for 233
religious denition of nation of Rus
193
resistance to Polonization 3078, 316
revolts of 162, 165
status of 192
support from Crimean Tatars 2078
Time of Troubles 205
Truce of Andrusovo 319
Union of Hadiach 304
Vilnius Agreement 252
Zboriv Agreement 239
see also Briukhovetsky; Don Cossacks;
Hetmanate; Khmelnytsky Uprising;
Little Russia; Zaporozhian Host
Cyprian, Metropolitan 103
and Muscovys interest in Kyivan past
136
Cyril, Saint, and Cyrillic alphabet 23
Dabrowski, Jan 186
Danylo, Prince of Halych 59, 6061,
181
alliances with Lithuania 91
attitude to Poles 62, 63
and Mongol invasion 64
use of Rus
in ofcial titles 61
Danylo Mstyslavych, Prince 50
Deluge 302
Denisov, Semen 295
Denmark, and Ivan IV 125
Derevliamian tribe, in Primary Chronicle
31
Detko, Dmytro 51
Deulino, armistice of 222
Devlet Giray, Khan 150
Dir 28, 30
Dmitrii Ivanovich (Donskoi), Grand
Prince 52, 70, 7273, 79
Battle of Kulikovo Field and Kyivan past
136
Domontovych, Ivan 335
Don Cossacks 262
Donskoi, Prince Dmitrii 137
and Land of All Rus
5051
identication with Rus
5657, 6162,
65, 66
Mongol invasion 65
Polish control of 51
reestablishment by Prince Yurii I 51
transfer of concept of Rus
Land 6566,
74
tribal territories in Poland-
Lithuania 5759
Galician-Volhynian Chronicle 50, 56
attitude to Mongols 64
attitude to Poles 6263
attitude to Polovtsians 6364
image of Lithuanians 9091, 92
Mongol invasion 65
notion of Rus
Land 5961
reference to Kyiv region as Rus
Land
59, 66
Gediminas, Grand Duke of Lithuania 85,
101, 139
capture of Kyiv 85
treaty with Eberhard Mannheim 95
Gerasim, Metropolitan 99, 106
execution of 98
Gerden, Prince of Polatsk and Vitsebsk 95
G eza II, King of Hungary 63
Ghinucci, Cardinal Hieronymus 170
Gizel, Inokentii 259, 260
Godunov, Boris, Tsar 146, 205, 212
Golden Horde (Qipchaq Khanate) 52, 133
Battle of Kulikovo Field 5253
disintegration of 123
and Orthodox Church 134
Golitzyn, D. M. 264
Golovin, Iakov 265
Great Horde 52
and Khan Ahmed 124
Gregory the Bulgarian, Metropolitan of
Kyiv and all Rus
104, 105
Griboedov, Fedor 264
Hamartolos, Georgios 34
Henri de Valois, King of Poland and
France 161
Herbest, Benedykt, union between
Orthodox and Catholic church 174
Hermogen, Patriarch of Moscow 206,
214, 218, 219, 231
Hetmanate 207, 208, 299, 35859
abolition of 344, 347
anti-Polish sentiment 35152
banning of Uniate Church 310
boundary with Muscovy 35253
changes after Battle of Poltava 343
restoration of 350
see also Hrabianka
Hlib (Gleb), Saint 136
Hlynsky, Mykhailo, revolt of 117
Hondius, Wilhelm 349
Hrabianka, Hryhorii 342
chronicle of 34345, 351
and Khmelnytsky era 34849
and liberties of Cossack Host and Little
Russian nation 34647
and war of manifestos 34546
Hustynia Chronicle 230
identity
approach to 5
connection between premodern and
modern identities 360
effect of political and ecclesiastical elites
67
importance of church 35960
importance of state institutions 359
origin of Rus
Land 21, 25
Ihor, Prince 30
Ilarion, Metropolitan 2829
reference to Rus
identity 15859
and Novgorod 137, 147
overthrow of Mongol supremacy 124
and tsar of Kazan 141
Ivan IV (the Terrible), Tsar 123, 139,
14041, 142, 143, 179, 180, 212
attacks against Kazan 147
conversion of non-Christians 14849,
150
Kyivan dynastic roots 126, 151
Livonian War 125, 149
papal assistance for 125
newly annexed tsardoms 142
oprichnina policy 12526, 14445
and Protestant rulers 14950
reforms of 125
Rus
23940
Pereiaslav Agreement 203, 207, 242,
243, 246, 357
Prince of Kyiv and Rus
2078, 237
reference to Great and Little Rus
24748, 327
see also Khmelnytsky Uprising
Khmelnytsky, Hetman Yurii 304, 335,
348
geographical boundaries of Ukraine
318, 319
and Little Russian Ukraine 331
Second Pereiaslav Agreement 328
Khmelnytsky Articles 347
Khmelnytsky Uprising 161, 162, 165,
167, 208, 211, 23641, 299, 340
blow to Uniate Church 310
conict between Rus
and Poland
24041
creation of Kyivan principality 238
ethnic characteristics 23637
and foreign intervention 302
impediment to Polonization of
Ruthenian elites 306
shift in meaning of Ukraine 318
Zboriv Agreement 239
Khvyliovy, Mykola (Fitilev) 299300
Kliuchevsky, Vasilii 209, 211, 287
Klonowic, Sebastian Fabian 17677
Klymentii Smoliatych, Metropolitan 44
Kochubei, Vasyl 345
Konashevych-Sahaidachny, Hetman Petro
192, 196
attack on Muscovy 229
Konotop Articles 348
Kopynsky, Metropolitan Isaia 231
arrest of 195
Kopystensky, Bishop Mykhail 227
Ko sciuszko, Tadeusz 306
Kosov, Sylvestr, Metropolitan, and all
Russia 267
Kosynsky Kryshtof, revolt of 164
Kotsel, Prince 23
Krivichians, separate identity of 94
Kuchma, Leonid 203
Kulikovo cycle 70, 135
and concept of Rus
Land 71, 73
interest in Kyivan past 136
and Rus
identity 157
Kulikovo Field, Battle of 81, 263, 266
symbol of Russian nationalism 13031
Kulish, Panteleimon 209
General index 371
Kuntsevych, Archbishop Yosafat 185
Kurbsky, Prince Andrei 152, 180
Lithuanian journey 15354
Kurtsevych, Bishop Iosyf 230
Kyiv
anniversary of 130
center of Orthodox learning 164,
24445
decline of 40, 66
opening of Muscovy to West 251
and Truce of Andrusovo 303
Kyiv Chronicle
and denition of Rus
Land 38
Galician Land 57
image of Lithuanians 90
reference to Polovtsians as pagans 6364
Kyiv Mohyla Academy
and Petrine reforms 25658
and Polish educational system 352
and use of Russia 268
and war of manifestos 280
Kyivan Cave Monastery
decline of Kyiv 66
and Muscovite tsar 26061
and Primary Chronicle 14, 19
publications program 25960
Kyivan church
devolution of economic and
ecclesiastical power 4344
split over union with Catholicism 163
and unity of Rurikid realm 43
Kyivan Rus
12
all-Rus
nationality 1718, 47
origins of 11, 12
Scandinavian 12
and Rus
Land 84
and Russian search for identity 1012,
1617, 126, 12728, 29697
Ukrainian movement 10
see also Lithuania; Rossiia
Kyryl, Bishop of Tura u 44
Kysil, Adam 195, 239, 320
language, crystallization of East Slavic 54
Latinization, of Uniate Church 31213
Laurentian Codex 67
Leszczy nski, Crown Vice-Chancellor
Andrzej 237
Leszczy nski, King Stanisl aw of Poland
278
Lev, Prince of Galicia-Volhynia 61
Linnichenko (Lynnychenko), Ivan 301
Lithuania, Grand Duchy of
alliance with Poland 86, 96, 114,
11516
attempt to preserve integrity 11617
and Belarus 87, 303
Christianity in 91, 93, 97 (see also Rus
church)
Chronicle of 99100, 106, 107, 109
concept of Rus
85,
151
perception of Muscovites as others
11819
Rus
population 89
territorial extension 92
territories of former Kyivan realm 85,
100
and Ukraine 87
wars with Muscovy 1089, 124, 125,
138
see also Galician-Volhynian Chrionicle;
Kurbsky, A.; Kyiv Chronicle;
Prokopovych, Skaryna, F.; Union of
Lublin
Little Rus
184
Little Russia 269, 272, 27779, 299,
35859
borders of 32728
concept of fatherland 28081, 336 (see
also Pacta)
increased usage of term 32931
integral part of Russia 300
and Khvyliovy manuscript 299300
myth of Pereiaslav 351
Second Pereiaslav Agreement 328
stereotypical perceptions of 33233
372 General index
Little Russia (cont.)
symbol of Russian control over Ukraine
300
territorial limits of 32829
and Velychko Chronicle 34647
in war of manifestos 338
see also Ukraine
Little Russian Ukraine 33132, 348
Liubartas, Prince of Lithuania 51, 62
Livonian war 115, 125, 151
Lopatynsky, Teolakt 288
Losytsky, Mykhailo 335
Lukaris, Cyril, Patriarch of Constantinople
232
Luther, Martin 170
Lutheranism, in Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth 162, 181
Lviv, and Ruthenian burghers 307
Lviv Chronicle 143
Lyzohub, Colonel Yakiv 278
Makarii, Metropolitan 79, 110, 143, 147,
151
Mamai, Khan 52, 70
Massa, Isaac 215
Maximilian, Emperor
recognition of Vasilii III 125
and title of tsar 285
Maximos, Metropolitan 79, 134
Mazepa, Hetman Ivan 254, 26970, 271,
272, 274, 276, 329, 331, 333,
33637, 34243, 346, 347, 349,
351, 352, 358
comparison with Khmelnytsky 349
defeat at Battle of Poltava 343, 344
war of manifestos with Peter I 27780,
33738, 345
see also Pacta
Melanchthon, Philip 170
Methodius, Saint 23
Michael the Lithuanian 175
Mikhail, Grand Prince of Tver 79
Mikhail Romanov, Tsar of Moscow 206,
215, 221, 222, 231, 245
Mindaugas, Grand Duke of Lithuania 91
Minin, Kuzma 206, 215, 221
Mnohohrishny, Hetman Demian 320,
331, 332
Mohyla, Petro, Metropolitan of Kyiv
19499, 232, 240, 293
boundaries of Russia 26768
revival of Orthodoxy 165
MolotovRibbentrop Pact 86
Mongol identity 356
Mongol invasion
and Belarus 93
and Kyivan Rus
14, 50
and notion of Rus
Land 59, 83
and religion 64, 93
and Russian nationality 128
Mongol khans
impact on Russian history 13233
and Rus
Lands 5253
Monomakh, Prince Volodymyr 13, 14, 58,
143
cap of 139
and concept of Rus
Land 36
expedition against Polovtsians 63
and Pereiaslav 35
Moscow
chronicle writing 6970
identity of territories 75, 76
Novgorod 7576
link to Kyivan Rus
126, 138
and territorial claims 136
and Mongol invasion 52
as New Jerusalem 14647, 150
rise to tsardom 14045
and Rus
123
as Third Rome 14546, 150, 155, 158,
205
troubles with Poles and Ruthenians
2056
see also Muscovy
Mstyslav, Grand Prince
and cathedral building 42
and Chernihiv 35
and Mongol invasion 5051
and Polovtsians 95
Mstyslav Davydovych, Prince of Smolensk
94
Muscovite Codex 137
Muscovy
alliance with Hetmanate 252
attitude to Catholics 223
attitude to Tatar elite 224
boundaries of identity
political 21618
religious 21820
centralized power 111
changes under Ivan III and Vasilii III
12425
concept of fatherland 335
concept of land 21415
geographic 21516
denition as Great Russians 338
dissociation of ruler from state 21314
effect of Mongol period 13334,
15758
General index 373
formation of modern Russian national
identity 22122
identity of 6, 7, 77, 1078, 12223,
147, 356, 35758
incorporation of Tatar elites 144
inuence of learned Kyivans 253
and Kyivan history 132, 13540,
14344, 15152, 158
Polish-Lithuanian connection 15253
and ruling dynasty 23132
legacy of Ivan IV 126
Little Russian boundaries 327, 32829
national solidarity 22021
origins of Great Rus
15660
and Orthodoxy 158, 22324, 22526
peace treaty with Sweden 222
reaction to Ruthenian alms-seeking 231
and Ruthenian identity 2012
Slavonic Bible 180
suspicion of Ruthenian religion 232
ethnic afnity 235
insistence on rebaptism 23234
and Synopsis 26466
territorial growth of 7879, 81, 142
attitude to Lithuania 81
concept of all Rus
7980
and Poland 149, 156
and religious tolerance 150
wars with Lithuania 1089, 115, 147,
151
Westernization of culture 253
see also Truce of Andrusovo,
Baranovych; Ivan III; Ivan IV; Little
Russia; Moscow; Old Belief;
Pereiaslav Agreement; Stryjkowski;
Time of Troubles; Ukraine
Muzhylovsky, Colonel Syluian 241
mission to Moscow 241
Mykhail, Prince of Chernihiv 64
Mylost
identity 295
Old Rus
nationality
chronological boundaries 1819
concept of 1718
early modern East Slavic identities 56
split after disintegration of Kyivan Rus
5455
Olearius, Adam 223, 224
Oleh, Prince of Kyiv 28, 30, 37, 192
Olelkovych, Prince Mykhailo of Kyiv 137
Ole snicki, Bishop Zbigniew 99
Ordin-Nashchokin, A. L. 252
Orlyk, Hetman Pylyp 352
notion of fatherland 339
and Pacta 34546
Ornovsky, Yan 272
Orsha, Battle of 107
Orthodoxy
anti-Tatar spirit 135
benet from Tatar yoke 13435
connection with national identity 361
conversion to 22425
decline in Poland-Lithuania 163, 309
feasts of Muscovite church calendar 136
Kyivan monks attitude to Muscovite
tsar 26061
leanings of Ruthenians to Muscovy 227
conicting loyalties 22731
legal rights in Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth 19394
374 General index
Orthodoxy (cont.)
Muscovite 146
need for reform 244
and Orzechowski 173
and Pereiaslav Agreement 243, 244
priests lack of education 19798
and Protestation 230
revival of 164
Ruthenian identity 31314
Ruthenian nobility 186, 18788, 193,
3056
conict with 19093, 19499
union with Rome 16365, 18183
and war of manifestos 279
see also Khmelnytsky Uprising; Mohyla,
Petro; Slavonic Bible; Time of
Troubles; Uniate Church
Orzechowski (Orikhovsky), Stanisl aw
ethnic and national identity 16973
impact of Reformation 170
married priesthood 170, 182
Ottoman threat to Commonwealth 170
Ostrozky, Janusz 18687
Ostrozky, Prince Kostiantyn (Vasyl) 176,
177, 17881, 182
and church union 226
Ostrozky, Prince Kostiantyn
Ivanovych 1078, 118, 162, 163,
178
dynastic control 177
opposition to Union of Brest 164
Otrepev, Grigorii (First False Dmitrii)
205, 214, 215, 218, 220,
227
Pacta et Conditiones 339
emergence of distinct Cossack
nation 33940
historical genealogy of 34041
and Khmelnytsky 348
reconceptualization of Cossack relations
with Muscovy 339
treatment of Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth and Muscovy
34243
Palii, Colonel Semen 308, 325
Peace of Buchach 308
Peace of Nystadt 283
Pereiaslav Agreement 203, 208, 327, 346,
357
diplomatic exchange between Muscovy
and Hetmanate 24142
ideological arguments 243
legal status of 242
nation-based discourse 24849
opposing perspectives of Ukrainian and
Russian academics and politicians
2034
reaction of Muscovite authorities
24346
references to Little Russia 328, 351
tsars patrimony 247
turning point in relations with West
25154
Perm, and Rus
Land 76
Peter I (the Great)
acceptance of imperial title 284, 285
bow to Muscovite political tradition
28586
importance of Vasilii III 284
attacks on autonomy of Hetmanate 343,
344
contribution to Russian identity
29598
father of the fatherland 283, 28687
the Great 287
and Kazan Cat 144
Pereiaslav Agreement 347
Russian equality in Europe 289
secularization of state 28990
use of fatherland 278, 281
vision of empire 289
war of manifestos with Mazepa 27780,
33738, 345, 351
see also Prokopovych
Petr, Metropolitan 73, 103
Petryk, see Ivanenko
Petryk rebellion 34748
Photius, Metropolitan 103
Pimen, Metropolitan 102, 105
Piskarev Chronicle 219
Platonov, S., and Time of Troubles
21112, 221
Podolian Land, in Lithuanian Chronicle
110
Pogodin, Mikhail 209
Poland, and Livonian war 125
Poland, Lithuania, Samogitia, and All Rus
Chronicle 175
Polatsk principality 15556
Belarusian sovereignty 54
and Ivan IV 125
and Rus
Land 9495
Polatsky, Simeon 245, 253, 292, 293
Polianian tribe, in Primary Chronicle
2933, 37, 38
ruling dynasty 30
Polikarpov, Fedor 265
General index 375
Polish nation, and Union of Lublin
16669
PolishHungarian relations, and Rus
51
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
intervention by Muscovy 3023
Ruin 304
Swedish invasion 302
Polish-Lithuanian Rus
and Varangians
29
and Polianians 31
and Galicia-Volhynia 58
inconsistency in choice of tribal names
31
interests of Kyivan Cave Monastery
42
and Lithuania 90
origin of Rus
Land 21
preservation of unity of Rurikid realm
4142, 43
and search for identity 2122, 2425,
2728
religious criteria 2627
Slavic theme 2526
and Tower of Babel 354
tribal territories in Galician-Volhynian
principality 5759
see also Nestor; Rus
Land
Prokopovych, Teofan 253, 287, 297, 353,
357
eulogy for Peter the Great 287, 296
fatherland 277, 28083, 286
and imperial title 284
Little Russia 272
Old Belief 292
one united Russian nation 27576
place in Russian culture 25758,
27071
Russia, and relation to tsar 27374,
276
sermon on Poltava victory 270, 271,
272, 273, 276, 28081
Vladymyr 26970, 27172, 350
Pskov, republic of, and Muscovite rule
124, 15456
Pufendorf, Samuel 275, 297, 344
Putin, Vladimir 203
Radziwil l , Prince Janusz 238
Rakushka-Romanovsky, Roman 32426,
330, 333
Ramusio, Paolo 172
Reformation, importance of 113
and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
181
see also Orzechowski
religion, in Galicia-Volhynia 63 (see also
Orthodoxy; Reformation)
retinue culture 31
reunication of Rus
230
ethnic afnity 23031, 235
Pereiaslav Agreement 24648
reunication paradigm (Russo-Ukrainian)
challenge to 210
origins of 2089
rejection of 21011
Soviet view 20910
Riazan, principality of, and absorption by
Moscow 124
Roman, Metropolitan 103
Roman Mstyslavych, Prince and
Galicia-Volhynia 50, 59, 60
Rossiia, meaning of term 26670, 299
Rostislav, Prince 23
Rostov, and Rus
Land 7677
Roxolania 17677
Rurikid dynasty 13, 21, 30, 137
attitude to steppe nomads 63
internecine warfare 57
and Lithuania 92
and power of Kyivan princes 36
see also Rus
church
jurisdictional history 1015
Kyivan heritage 13637
Polish-Lithuanian identity 1056
376 General index
Rus
Land
all-Rus
and
Outer Rus
38
changing meanings of term 9, 100,
140
defense of 36
geographic and ethnopolitical extent of
date of emergence 34
defense of 36; in Galician-Volhynian
Chronicle 5961
narrow denition 3839, 46
and Outer Rus
1617
and imperial identity 25051, 358,
360
roots of 25455; Old Belief
schism 255, 256; in Petrine era
25558
origins of Great Rus
15660
relation to tsar 27374
schism 28995
secular absolutism 28788
see also Kliuchevsky; Muscovy; Peter I;
Prokopovych; Rossiia; Soviet
historians; Synopsis
Russian Archaeological Congress 301
Russian nationality, literary
interpretation 13031
origins of, see Kliuchevsky; Soviet
historians
Russian-Polish war, and Belarus 252
Ruthenia
characteristics of identity 6, 7, 8, 167,
16869, 199, 299, 35657, 358
geographical boundaries 199200
after Khmelnytsky Uprising 32126
and Muscovite Rus
2012
opposition to Poland 201
religious discourse 2001
decline of Cossackdom 3034
equal partner with Poland and
Lithuania 18889
and Eternal Peace 303
national concept after Union of
Brest 18689, 31314, 356
conict between nobility and church
hierarchy 19093, 19499
and Polonization 305, 31516
Cossacks 3078
decline of Ruthenian language
30910
status of burghers 3067
vulnerability of nobility 3056
and Ukrainian territory 301
use of Russia terminology 269
General index 377
see also Mohyla; Orthodoxy;
Orzechowski; Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth; Skarga;
Stryjkowski; Synopsis; Time of
Troubles; Uniate Church
Rylo, Archbishop Vassian 146
Sakovych, Kasiian 192, 196, 197, 229
Samoilovych, Hetman Ivan 268, 329, 331,
336, 348
Sapieha, Jan Piotr 220
Sarmatism 263, 341
see also Baranovych
Satanovsky, Arsenii 245
Scandinavian origins of Kyivan Rus
12,
29
Second False Dmitrii 205, 206, 217, 229
Semen Ivanovich, Grand Prince 79
Sergii, Saint, of Radonezh 71, 7677,
7879
Sharov, Pavel 284, 286
and war with Sweden 288
Shakhmatov, Aleksei, and all-Russian
language 45
Shakhovskoi, Prince Semen 225, 232
Shemiaka, Dmitrii 135
Short Kyivan Chronicle 11011
Short Volhynian Chronicle 107
Shuisky, Tsar Vasilii 205, 212, 21415
Shumliansky, Bishop Yosyf 312
Shvarno, Grand Duke of Lithuania 92
Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland
161
Sigismund III, King of Poland and
Muscovy 205, 218
and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
162
Simeon Chronicle 68, 71, 72
Siverianian tribe, in Primary Chronicle 31
Skarga, Piotr, and Church Slavonic 294
and religious union 17475
Skaryna, Frantsishak
ethnocultural identity 11314
geographic boundaries of Rus
people
114
loyalty to homeland 113
religious publications of 11213
Skoropadsky, Hetman Ivan 274, 337, 338,
347, 353
Slavic theme in Primary Chronicle 25
and Christianity 2628
linguistic unity 27
tribal divisions 2526
Slavonic Bible, publication of 17879,
180
Slavynetsky, Yepyfanii 245, 253
Sleszkowski, Sebastian 18687
Slovenians, in Primary Chronicle 32
Smolensk
acquisition by Muscovites 155
control by Muscovy 124
war 194, 206
Smotrytsky, Herasym
and Ostrozky 180
and Rus
peoples 183
and Slavonic Bible 17879, 190
Smotrytsky, Meletii 18586, 18889, 192,
201, 229, 293
anti-Union 227
and Cossack pressure 195
Threnos 267
Sobieski, Jan, King of Poland 308, 312
Sofonii of Riazan 81
Sofonovych, Feodosii, and Ruthenian
identity 32122, 335, 341, 347
Solikowski, Archbishop Jan Dymitr 174
Somko, Hetman Yakym 304
Soviet historians
and all-Russian nationality 5455
and history of centralized Russian state
128
and impact of Mongol suzerainty 133
interdisciplinary commission 12830
and linguistics 4548, 128
and Lithuania 8788
Spiridon-Savva, Metropolitan of Kyiv
139
St. Sophias Cathedral 19697
Stefan, Saint, of Perm 7273, 76, 7879,
80, 141
Storovsky, Ivan 217
Stryjkowski, Maciej 263, 341
and Ruthenian identity 175
Sukhanov, Arsenii 243
Suprasl Chronicle 99
Suzdal-Vladimir Land
and Mongol rule 51
and Rus
nations 230
Time of Troubles 123, 146, 204, 2056
civil war 21213
formation of modern Russian identity
35758
and Ivan IV 126
meeting between two parts of Rus
2068
Muscovite isolation 22226
Platonov 21112
Tokhtamysh, Khan 52
Tower of Babel 354
Tranquillon-Stravrovetsky, Kyryl, and Old
Belief 293
Trinity Chronicle 6768, 103
Trubetskoi, Georgii Petrovich 259
Trynografe 22829
Tsamblak, Metropolitan Gregory 104,
1056
Tuptalo, Saint Dymytrii 292, 335
Tver, and ascendancy of Moscow 52
Ugra River, confrontation at 124, 146
Uniate Church
connection with Ruthenia 310, 31516
conversion of bishops 314
importance for identity-building process
359
and Khmelnytsky Uprising 310
perception of Roman Catholic Church
as Polish 314
reform of parishes 31213
Truce of Andrusovo 311
Ukraine 1
association with Lithuania 87
attitude to Kyivan Rus
2, 10, 11, 12
avoidance of Polonization on Left Bank
316
borderland 301
concept of fatherland 33435
Cossack identity 8, 361
end of Kyivan Rus
50
Eyewitness Chronicle 32426
geographical concept of 316, 320
and Beauplan 317
and Khmelnytsky 318
golden peace 165
Hrushevsky denition 3012
independent of Russia 300
Little Russia 300, 302, 32829
national identity 5, 6, 17, 18, 46, 53,
54, 55, 89, 323, 350, 356, 35859,
360
and Khmelnytsky Uprising 236
Ottoman interference 308
Ruin 304
and Ruthenia 6
Truce of Andrusovo 319
underdevelopment of ethnic terminology
131
Union of Lublin 115, 16567
use of Rossiia-based terminology
26869
and Zaporozhian Host 299
Zboriv borders 31820
see also Little Russia; Orthodoxy;
Poltava, Battle of; reunication
paradigm; Ruthenia, characteristics
of identity
Union of Brest 118, 16364, 167, 182
and Ruthenian identity 199
Union of Florence 104, 134, 136, 146,
153, 158, 163, 205
Union of Hadiach 304, 308, 310, 314,
319, 334
Union of Horodlo 97
Union of Kreva 86, 96, 97
Union of Lublin 86, 11418, 119, 120,
125, 161
extension of Polish identity 17374,
176, 177
importance for Eastern Slavs 16567
legal status of nobility 17778, 187
rights of Orthodox Church 188
Ruthenian culture 305
Ushakov, Simon 294
USSR
disintegration of 1
effect on historiography 5556, 131,
166
Ustrialov, Nikolai 209
Vai selga, Grand Duke of Lithuania 9192
Valuev, P. A. 254
Varangian controversy 10
Varangian identity 29
and Polianian tribe 30
Vasilii I, Prince 79
Vasilii II, Prince 1034, 135
Vasilii III, Tsar
changes to Muscovite state 12425
expansion of Muscovy 124
and Kazan 141
General index 379
Moscow as Third Rome 145
recognition as tsar 125, 139
Vasylko, Prince, alliance with Lithuanians
91
Velychko, Samiilo 34445, 351
and fatherland 34546
and Khmelnytsky era 34849
liberty of Cossack Host and Little
Russian nation 34647
war of manifestos 34546
Vilnius Agreement 252
Volhynian Land
identity of Rus
elites 178
in Short Kyivan Chronicle 11011
in Synopsis 262
Volhynian princes, heirs of Kyivan rulers
17981
Volodymyr, Saint (the Great) 13, 31, 73,
136, 137, 17879, 192
campaign against Poles 57
colonization policy 35
introduction of Byzantine Christianity
13, 2223, 27, 28
Kyivan origins of Muscovite ruling
dynasty 23132, 341
Polatsk Land 94
Volodymyr Olherdovych, Prince
(Algirdaitis) 102
Volodymyr Vasylkovych, Prince and
Galician-Volhynian Chronicle 51,
65, 66
Vsevolod III, Grand Prince 137
campaign against Volodymyr of Halych
58
Vydubychi Monastery, and Primary
Chronicle 14
Vyhovsky, Hetman Ivan 239, 343, 348
agreement at Hadiach 304, 319, 334
Vynnytsky, Bishop Inokentii 312
Vyshensky, Ivan 184, 186, 197, 294
Vyshnevetsky, Prince Dmytro (Baida)
153
Vyshnevetsky, Yarema (Prince Jeremi
Wi sniowiecki), and fatherland 334
Vytautas, Grand Duke of Lithuania 98,
100, 1034, 1067, 109
Waldemar, Royal Prince of Denmark 225
marriage debate 244
White Russia 327
Wl adysl aw IV, King of Poland 162, 193,
207
Yanovsky, Feodosii 284, 286, 287
Yaroslav the Wise, Prince of Kyiv 13, 32,
90, 94, 178, 196
appointment of metropolitan 43
and Galicia-Volhynia 57
and sees of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and
Pereiaslav 35
Yaroslav Vsevolodovych, Prince of
Vladimir-Suzdal 64
Yasynsky, Metropolitan Varlaam 268, 271
Yatvingians 91
Yavorsky, Metropolitan Stefan 265, 274,
292, 339
Yerlych, Yoakhym, and Ukrainian identity
323
Yurii I, Prince 51, 52
Yurii II (Bolesl aw), Prince 51, 61, 101
Zahorovsky, Vasyl 178
Zamo s c synod 312
Zaporozhian Host 217, 240, 244, 299,
318, 328, 329, 331, 340, 351
and Pereiaslav Agreement 243
protectors of Orthodox hierarchs
19193
and Synopsis 262
and Ukrainian Orthodoxy 164
and war of manifestos 279, 280
Zboriv Agreement 207, 239, 310, 327
boundaries of Ukraine 31819, 324
see also Khmelnytsky Uprising
Zealots of Piety 244