Historian Every Saturday: Natalia Starchenko. On Ukrainian early modern history (15.09.2024)
An academic lecture by historian Natalia Starchenko (the “Historian Every Saturday” series) on the early modern history of Ukraine. The key point: the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a country of many peoples and the distinct agency of the Ruthenians-Ukrainians within it; liberum veto as a culture of consent; noble privileges as an analogue of Magna Carta; the continuity of the “Ruthenian nation” with its memory of ancient Rus’, extending to Adam Kysil’s speeches of 1641; and Teplov’s imperial view (1762) as an inadvertent testimony to genuine Ukrainian autonomy. A source for the article on the legal tradition of early modern Ukraine.
Key moments
- 14:50 Liberum veto as an instrument for seeking compromise and protecting the minority, not 'anarchy'
- 36:09 Noble privileges as an analogue of Magna Carta: protection of the person and private property — the root of Ukrainian individualism
- 40:52 Peasants were not without rights: court books record them suing their lord and winning
- 44:35 The Ruthenian nobility of the Polish Crown retained its Ruthenian identity and did not dissolve into the Polish one
- 47:21 A dual identity: Stanisław Orzechowski — 'I am a Ruthenian and proud of it'
- 58:44 Adam Kysil (1641): 'we came not to a state but with a state; not to a people but with a people'
- 1:05:32 Teplov's memorandum (1762): 'the chief trouble of the Little Russians is their own rights, which give an imagined freedom' (a hostile witness to autonomy)