Self-Governing Ukraine of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Self-government instead of a pyramid

According to the research of the historian Natalia Starchenko, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had no bureaucratic vertical of the kind familiar to us. Offices (posts) were regarded as an act of service to the community: there were no salaries paid for them, and judges in the localities were elected. Order was maintained by self-governing units, not by a state monopoly on violence^[1].

That is precisely why historians of the 19th century, who measured the past by the étatist templates of their own age, mistakenly saw here “sheer anarchy.” In reality this was a society built on the principles of self-government — Magdeburg law in the towns, noble self-government in the localities^[1].

The rule of law: the Lithuanian Statute

The legal framework provided local autonomy. The Ukrainian voivodeships — Kyiv, Volhynia, Bratslav, and later Chernihiv — were adjudicated by the Second Lithuanian Statute. The Lublin privilege of 1569 expressly forbade altering this Statute otherwise than on the initiative of the inhabitants of the voivodeships themselves^[2]. The local community itself enacted the laws that applied within its bounds.

”Nothing about us without us”

The king was limited by law. The constitution of 1505 “Nihil novi” established that no resolution could be adopted without the consent of the Sejm — the principle of “nothing new about us without us”^[3]. Each voivodeship behaved as a separate republic (which is precisely how “Rich Pospolyta” translates). Starchenko draws a direct line to the modern slogan “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” — this is not an innovation but a continuity of tradition^[3].

What we today consider “the treasury of democracy” — the inviolability of the person and of property — was likewise an achievement of this political culture, later extended to all citizens^[4].

Even the notorious liberum veto was not from the outset an instrument of anarchy, as it is often portrayed. Introduced at the beginning of the 16th century, it was in fact not applied until the middle of the 17th — for nearly a century and a half it served the search for compromise and the protection of the minority from the dictate of the majority: a culture of consensus, not paralysis^[8]. And the noble privileges themselves Starchenko directly equates with the Magna Carta: the protection of the person and of private property — it is precisely from here, in her view, that Ukrainian individualism descends, which Muscovy lacked^[9].

It is also important that this was not the power of a narrow caste. The nobility in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth made up perhaps the largest share of the population in Europe — from 5–10 to 20–25 percent in various regions — and it was not a homogeneous mass of “feudal lords”: alongside the magnates there existed a petty nobility, sometimes poorer than a peasant, yet equal in rights. And the peasants too were not without rights: the court records register cases in which peasants sue their lord over an excess tax, send a deputation to the king at their own expense — and win the case^[10]. This is the picture of a society with a functioning law, not of “savage feudalism.”

Not Muscovy: service to another ≠ treason

The sharpest contrast is with Muscovy. The privilege of Casimir of 1447 guaranteed the nobility the inviolability of the person and of property, the right to inherit land (including by daughters), and the right to travel beyond the borders of the country — even into the service of another ruler. And such service was not regarded as treason^[5]. In Muscovy, departure into the service of another ruler was a grave crime — the difference lies in the very nature of power: contractual, limited by law — versus autocratic.

The Ruthenian nation: a distinct subjecthood, not “part of Poland”

The Kremlin narrative appropriates the word “Ruthenian/Rus’” for Moscow, and depicts the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as simply “Poland.” In reality the Commonwealth was a country of many peoples, and the Ruthenians-Ukrainians held within it a distinct subjecthood. The Ruthenian nobility of the Polish kingdom did not dissolve into the Polish — it always preserved its Ruthenian belonging; the jurist Jakub Przyłuski, as early as 1553, in his code of laws separately distinguished the “Ruthenian principality” (three voivodeships), behind which, as everyone understood, stood its own statehood tradition^[11].

This was not ethnic insularity but rather a dual identity. The ethnic Pole and Catholic Stanisław Orzechowski said of himself: “I am a Ruthenian and proud of it.” Even in the middle of the 16th century people remembered that they descended from old Rus’, which had received Christianity from Constantinople^[12]. And a nation, Starchenko reminds us, rests precisely on the memory of a common past: the “Ruthenian people” constructed itself through old Rus’ and the princes — descendants of Volodymyr the Great, drawing symbolic strength from this. Thus the expression “Ruthenian state” was quite current in the Commonwealth: the Ukrainian voivodeships were credited with a statehood tradition that no one even denied^[13].

This was formulated most vividly by the Kyiv voivode Adam Kysil in a speech of 1641: “We came not to a state, but with a state, and we came not to a people, but with a people.” Kysil emphasized that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a republic of three peoples (Poles, Lithuanians and Ruthenians), and that if the rights of the Ruthenians were violated and not restored, it would turn into a “simulacrum”^[14].

That this autonomy was real is involuntarily attested by the imperial officials themselves. The Hetmanate was built upon the legal culture of the Commonwealth: the Cossacks were still, in the 18th century, adjudicated by the Lithuanian Statute — a thing utterly impossible in the Russian Empire. And the memorandum of Hryhorii Teplov “On the Disorders in Little Russia” (1762), with irritation, acknowledges the main point: the “trouble” of the Little Russians is that they have their own rights, which give them an “imaginary freedom” and distinguish them from others who have submitted to the monarch’s power^[15]. A hostile witness confirms what the propaganda denies: Ukrainian autonomy and a distinct law actually existed.

What an early modern state is

In order to see that the Cossack state was a full-fledged early modern state, it is worth having a measuring stick. The historian Oleksii Sokyrko, in an article for the Ukrainian Historical Journal, set out six criteria of the “ideal type” of the early modern state. The first three: the sovereign power of the ruler and the political elite over a territory (a state that is at once territorial and dynastic, where the king is influenced by the elite); the presence of stable institutions resting both on public mechanisms and on private ties; complexly structured institutions of governance and law^[19]. The rest: the monopoly on violence, which was held not only by the state but also by local cells; representative institutions (sejms and sejmiks); and a gradual secularization — the subordination of the church to secular power^[20].

This state itself evolved: from a fiscal-military state (which the prolonged wars of the era of the Military Revolution gave rise to) to a well-ordered state with a new political philosophy that for the first time separated the person of the ruler from the state as such. The bearer of sovereignty became the political people — the estate endowed with the right to influence politics^[21]. By all these features, the Ukrainian lands of the Commonwealth and the Hetmanate were not a “borderland without a state” but participants in a pan-European process of state-building.

The Cossack variant of the Commonwealth

This tradition did not vanish with the Cossack revolution — it continued it. According to the research of the historian Viktor Horobets, the Cossacks themselves were not homogeneous: by the middle of the 17th century a distinction was drawn between the Zaporozhian (lower), the town, and the registered Cossacks (taken by the Commonwealth into state service for pay and privileges), whereby the lower Cossacks maintained reciprocal — mutual — relations, while the state ones maintained redistributive relations^[6].

Most importantly: the Cossack state — the Hetmanate — was in essence a “Cossack variant of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.” The Cossack officer class was genetically a product of the Commonwealth’s democracy, and the early modern states were not yet centralized. That is why, when Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1657 attempted to introduce the hereditary transfer of power to his son Yurii, this contradicted the very political culture of the officers. Moscow, by contrast, saw a different — autocratic — model: the envoy Buturlin frankly wrote that upon the hetman’s death it would be “all as you may wish, sovereign”^[7]. The same clash of contractual and autocratic principles as at Pereiaslav in 1654.

It is also worth dispelling the popular myth of “free and equal Cossacks.” The Cossack world was deeply estate-based and heterogeneous — a complex mosaic of ranks (rank-and-file Cossacks, banneret, standard-bearer, and noble fellows), not a brotherhood of equals. Yet there is nothing “underdeveloped” in this: estate-based society was the norm for all of Europe before the Great French Revolution, where each estate had its own set of rights and obligations. The Cossack revolution of the mid-17th century even renewed this estate, bringing into it the petty, “castle” nobility with its military and political experience^[16].

But the chief feature of the Cossack order was electivity. The Cossacks held that all offices — hetman, colonels, and captains alike — ought to be elective, unlike the Commonwealth, where the king appointed administrative posts. The logic was explained by Hetman Danylo Apostol: an elected colonel feels responsibility to the community, while an appointed one does not. This electivity was enshrined as a “tradition” in agreements — from the Kurukove agreement of 1625 to the articles in relations with Moscow after 1654^[17]. At the same time the Hetmanate was no monolith: between the regiments there were striking differences — in the north (the Starodub and Chernihiv regions) power de facto became hereditary (the Zabila family held the captaincy for about 130 years, until 1782), while in the south, in the Poltava regiment, constant elections continued^[18].

The summit of this contractual tradition was the Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk of 1710 — the first written treaty of the Cossack officers with the Cossacks. Its history shows well what an early modern “constitution” was. The document is preserved in two redactions: in the Latin one there is the word Constitution, while in the Church Slavonic one the word “constitution” itself is absent. For “constitutions” at that time meant not a basic law in the modern sense, but agreements — first of all between the king and the nobility^[22]. Hence to call it “the first constitution of Ukraine” is rather a modernization: the document itself in fact never came into force (Orlyk controlled only a small part of the Right Bank, and only for a short time), and the first constitution in the modern sense appeared in Ukraine in 1918^[23]. Yet as a monument of contractual authority limited by law, Orlyk’s Constitution is a direct continuation of that same Commonwealth-Cossack tradition, and not of Muscovite autocracy.

What this means

The Ukrainian political tradition is not a “gift” of the empire but a heritage of its own, of a European pattern: self-government, electivity, the rule of law, representation. It is older than the Russian Empire and fundamentally distinct from it. Understanding this matters, because it is precisely this continuity — from “nothing about us without us” of 1505 to “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” today — that the Kremlin narrative is trying to erase.