Between Rus' and the Cossacks: the Lithuanian–Polish era

Not Moscow, but Central Europe

After the mid-fourteenth century, the Ukrainian lands entered not the Muscovite but the Central European political sphere. Galicia and part of Podillia passed to the Kingdom of Poland (formalized from 1434 as the Ruthenian and Podolian voivodeships), while Volhynia, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Eastern Podillia passed to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; the south and east remained under the rule of the Golden Horde^[1]. This was a living, settled space with its own administration — not an “emptiness” between Rus’ and Russia, as the imperial narrative presents it.

Lithuania and Moscow: competing for the Rus’ inheritance

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania was to a large extent a Ruthenian state by culture (the Ruthenian language, the Ruthenian legal and cultural heritage). And it was precisely over these Rus’ lands that the Grand Duchy competed with the Grand Duchy of Moscow. The conflict was so acute that at the beginning of the sixteenth century Lithuania lost roughly one-third of its territory as a result of a series of wars lost to Moscow; not even dynastic marriages between the rulers settled the matter^[2].

Hence the key conclusion: Moscow did not “inherit” the Rus’ lands — it acquired them by war, competing with Lithuania. This shatters the myth of Moscow as the sole natural heir of Rus’ (more on this in “How Rus’ Became Russia”).

The nobility as the political nation

The political nation of the era was the nobility (szlachta): it was the nobility that decided the major questions, while the peasantry and townsfolk had almost no voice. Society was estate-based, yet not entirely closed — a certain mobility existed: some townsfolk of Lviv, for example, managed to cross into the noble estate^[3].

European law and legal pluralism

The Ukrainian lands lived under European law. The Statute of Wiślica became the basis of “Crown law” for the Ruthenian and Podolian voivodeships, and the towns enjoyed Magdeburg law. Moreover, a striking legal pluralism prevailed here: in Kamianets-Podilskyi, three urban jurisdictions operated simultaneously — Magdeburg, Ruthenian, and Armenian — each with its own law within a single town^[4]. This was a European, multiethnic legal order centuries before “Russia” appeared.

Not an emptiness, but continuity of the elite

Why, then, is this period so easily portrayed as a “failure”? Because sources about it are scarce — and it is precisely on this scarcity that the imperial scheme feeds. As the historian Serhii Olefir notes, up to the mid-thirteenth century there existed a Rus’ state; with the arrival of the Mongols, Lithuania, Poland, and Muscovy appear on the historical maps of Ukraine — while Ukraine’s own statehood seemingly vanishes, and of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries “we cannot say for certain what was there,” because written sources are lacking^[5].

But continuity is provided not by the state, but by the elite. The Rus’ elite did not go anywhere — it began to serve new overlords (Lithuanian, Polish) while remaining in place: the Rurikid lines continued to rule, just as in Europe foreign dynasties ruled local lands (for example, German dynasties on the British throne). If one looks not at the coat of arms of the state but at this elite and population of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, one sees continuity — at first common-Slavic, and then properly Ukrainian^[6]. This is the very soil from which the Cossacks would grow — not a “no man’s land” between two “Russes.”

How the label was rewritten, not the substance

It is telling how mechanically the imperial scheme has eaten its way even into museum captions. Olefir recalls a concrete case: Soviet museum captions were thoroughly Russo-centric — in the early 2000s they still spoke of the “formation of the Russian centralized state of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries” on Ukrainian lands. Later the captions were redone — but often the word “Russian” was simply swapped for “Ukrainian”: now the visitor reads about the “formation of the Ukrainian centralized state of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries”^[7]. Changing the label without changing the flawed frame leaves the same error in place: an anachronistic scheme of a “centralized state” is imposed on the Ukrainian lands of this period, whereas in reality they lived under different political and legal systems — those of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, with European law.

The Cossacks: not an “exit,” but a search for a place in Europe

It was from this European soil that the Cossacks grew — and their state, too, arose not as a “reunification with Russia” but within the Commonwealth’s system. Modern historiography describes the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648 as a “Cossack revolution”: the Cossacks did not intend to leave the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth but were seeking a place for themselves within its political structure — the right to self-government, so that the Polish authorities would not interfere in the lands under Cossack control^[8]. By the Treaty of Zboriv (1649), a Cossack state effectively came into being — the Zaporozhian Host; after the defeat at Berestechko (1651), the rights of the Cossacks were curtailed^[9].

Then a purely European logic of vassal–seigneurial relations came into play: if the lord does not protect the interests of the vassal, the vassal has the right to pass to another lord. Such a lord was found in the person of the Muscovite tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (the Articles of March 1654) — but one could equally have been found in the person of the Ottoman sultan: Khmelnytsky did in fact accept Ottoman suzerainty (1651), and the sultan (Mehmed IV) recognized him as a vassal ruler of the Moldavian type^[10]. In other words, Moscow was one of several possible suzerains, not a “natural center of gravity”; more on the act itself in the article “Pereiaslav 1654”.

Division along the Dnipro and the myth of the “purchased Kyiv”

The military rivalry over the Cossack lands continued until 1686 — the so-called Eternal Peace, which divided the Ukrainian lands along the Dnipro: the left bank passed to Muscovy, the right bank to the Commonwealth^[11]. To this is attached a widespread Russian trope: that “Kyiv was bought from the Poles for four carts of gold and silver.” A trifling detail explains the mechanism: Kyiv lies on the right bank and should have gone to Poland, but Moscow negotiated a compensation — and kept the city for itself^[12].

The reality looks even less like a “purchase” than even this retelling suggests. Kyiv had been under Muscovite control already since the Truce of Andrusovo of 1667 (formally “temporarily”), and the Eternal Peace of 1686 merely secured it for Moscow permanently — in exchange for a monetary compensation to the Commonwealth (about 146,000 rubles), and the Polish Sejm never even ratified this treaty. “Four carts of gold” is a folkloric formula, not a fact: what is meant is a diplomatic compensation within the framework of a peace treaty, not a marketplace deal in which a city can be “bought.”

Two different states, not “runaway serfs”

The imperial narrative reduces the Cossacks to a band of “runaway serfs” — and obscures the fact that this concerned two separate state structures. The Zaporozhian Host (the north — the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Zhytomyr regions) existed as a state from 1649 to 1764; the Lower Zaporozhian Host, that is, the Zaporozhian Sich (the south), was a separate territory and order, from the mid-sixteenth century until 1775. Both were abolished by Catherine II^[13]. The last kosh otaman of the Sich, Petro Kalnyshevsky, was exiled to the Solovki, where he lived to a great old age (by traditional estimates, about 112 years); and in the Hetmanate the very title of hetman was abolished under Kyrylo Rozumovsky, the regimental-company order was liquidated, and the documents were carried off to St. Petersburg^[14].

Soviet historiography did indeed emphasize the flight of peasants from serfdom — and that happened too. But this is only part of the picture: the Sich was formed above all as a military-estate community (its backbone was the petty nobility, and only later did townsfolk and peasants flee there) with elective offices — a kind of “democracy of the early modern period”^[15]. This was not a “wild steppe of fugitives” but a self-governing structure of the European type — the same legal gene as the Magdeburg towns and the Commonwealth’s noble tradition.

The Cossacks were a full-fledged estate with their own rights and obligations. A registered Cossack paid the state not in money but with a “tax of blood” — he fought, and in exchange was exempted from the direct taxes and state-wide obligations that fell upon the nobility and townsfolk; in addition, the Cossack held economic privileges (distilling, the right to keep an inn, the keeping of promissory notes), and land of “Cossack tenure” could not pass to a non-Cossack owner^[26]. This was not a “free-for-all” but a legally formalized estate of early modern Europe.

The Sich itself was not reducible to a fortified camp. Alongside the Sich proper (a military camp without women) there existed a territory under its control with homestead farms — zymovnyky, where well-off Cossacks raised families; within the Cossack body there was marked social stratification — from very wealthy proprietors to the “have-nots” (holota) who hired themselves out to them. The Cossacks lived by trades (salt, potash — a component of gunpowder — hunting, fishing), that is, they ran a real economy rather than only fighting^[28]. After the abolition of the Sich in 1775, some of the Zaporozhians resettled to the Kuban, and some to the Ottoman Empire, where the religiously tolerant authorities did not regard the Orthodox as enemies; the Danubian Sich survived there right up to 1828^[27]. In other words, the Cossacks did not “dissolve” after Catherine II’s decree — they continued to exist for another half-century beyond the empire’s borders.

The Military Revolution: why the Hetmanate did not “fall behind”

A separate imperial accusation is that the Cossack state was “archaic” beside “modern” Russia. In reality, the Hetmanate was part of the same pan-European process that historians call the Military Revolution. The concept was formulated by the British historian Michael Roberts in studying the Eighty Years’ War of the Netherlands against Spain: the key was a change in military technology — firearms and artillery ended the monopoly of the knightly cavalry, brought infantry and artillery to the fore, and broke the old feudal military system^[18].

The new armies were terribly expensive — and for their sake monarchs rebuilt the entire machinery of state: taxation, administration, structure. The most successful states centralized taxes, abolished the tax immunities of the estates, and even “milked” the church through secularization; this type historians named the fiscal-military states (the model being Britain, and to some degree Sweden)^[19]. It is precisely in this context that the myth of Russia’s “organic” might collapses: its military leadership was a consequence of Peter’s reforms driven by the needs of the Great Northern War, which “pulled” the Muscovite tsardom out of its self-isolation and gave birth to the empire^[20]. Here too, then, power was acquired by reform and war, not “inherited.”

The Hetmanate, too, was a militarized state: the Cossack host was sustained by self-provisioning, while in parallel the hetmans created a standing mercenary army at the state’s expense — with special taxes and obligations, with appointed (not elected) colonels — a classic professional army^[21]. Sokyrko’s summation: the Hetmanate was a full participant in the Military Revolution, but “failed to board the train” — it was riding along on it but stepped off prematurely, without having finished building an effective professional army, and this became one of the causes of the loss of statehood^[22].

This was not “inferiority” but, on the contrary, a phenomenon of record speed: the Hetmanate built its elite and state in about 50 years, whereas Lithuania or Poland needed 150–200 years for the like^[23]. And even after the dismantling of its autonomy, its “genes” proved tenacious: the social and cultural structures formed by the Hetmanate carried over into the nineteenth century, and the Russian Empire was unable to root them out^[24].

Poltava and the “autumn of the Hetmanate”

The dismantling of this statehood was drawn out across the entire eighteenth century. The turning point was the Battle of Poltava in 1709: against the backdrop of a pan-European “fashion for absolutism,” two strong figures collided — Peter I and Hetman Mazepa — and each sought to make his power absolute. Mazepa’s defeat (in alliance with Charles XII) put an end to Ukrainian autonomy; more broadly, this was the collapse of the vassal–seigneurial relations of the early modern period and the establishment of centralized states^[16] (on the episode itself, see the article “Mazepa’s ‘treason’”).

The dismantling struck above all at elective office — the very core of the Cossack order. Already after Mazepa, Peter I rejected the winner of the election, Pavlo Polubotok, as “too cunning a man” and imposed the more convenient Ivan Skoropadsky upon them; subsequently the senate and the imperial cabinet began to appoint colonels directly — often Serbian officers who did not know local traditions and owed their power to the emperor rather than to the community. The historian Viktor Horobets devoted a separate monograph to this subject — “The Twilight of the Hetmanate”^[25]. In this way contractual, elective power was gradually replaced by appointment from above.

Then came the “autumn of the Hetmanate”: under the last hetman, Kyrylo Rozumovsky, autonomy was already more of a “game of independence” — for as long as St. Petersburg permitted it. When Catherine II came to power, the choice became stark: renunciation of the hetman’s power or death. It is telling how the fate of the Cossack upper stratum concluded: the Cossack officers (starshyna) were equated with the Russian nobility — it sufficed to prove one’s rank by document, and a former captain (sotnyk) or regimental judge became an imperial nobleman^[17]. Part of the Ukrainian elite integrated into the empire that it had itself helped build — and Cossack statehood vanished from the map.

What this means

Between Rus’ and modern Ukraine there is no “failure” but unbroken continuity: the Lithuanian–Polish era, out of which the Cossacks grew, and the Cossack era, which Moscow dismantled by war and by decree, rather than “inheriting.” Throughout all this time the Ukrainian lands were part of Europe — with their own elite, European law, self-governing towns, and an elective Cossack state. It is precisely this continuity, and precisely the fact that Moscow was only one of several possible suzerains rather than a “natural center,” that the scheme “Rus’ = Russia” erases. And myths such as “Kyiv for four carts of silver” are an attempt to turn conquest and diplomatic bargaining, after the fact, into something “natural and lawful.”