the Caspian. Trappers and traders had crossed the whole length of Siberia, followed by officials staking out taiga and pine-forest for Moscow. But compared to their neighbours the Russians were still backward and thinly spread. With about 8 million inhabitants, Russia’s population was about the same size as Poland’s and only half as large as that of France. To turn into a true European power Russia needed to push towards the rich, populous West. Though nobody saw it that way at the time, its alliance with Khmelnyt-sky was the first step in a process which came to an end only with the collapse of the Soviet Union – and perhaps not even then.
The transfer of Ukraine’s loyalties from Cracow to Moscow took place in January 1654 at Pereyaslav, a small town on the eastern bank of the Dnieper, not far south of Kiev. From the beginning, the partnership was an unhappy one. The two delegations, headed by Khmelnytsky and the Russian envoy Vasiliy Buturlin, met in a church. Khmelnytsky had expected that in exchange for an oath of loyalty on the Cossacks’ side, Buturlin would, on behalf of Tsar Alexey, swear ‘that he would not betray the Cossacks to the Poles, that he would not violate their liberties, and that he would confirm the rights to their landed estates of the Ukrainian szlachta ’. Buturlin refused. Polish kings might make oaths to their subjects, he said, but they also often broke them, whereas ‘the tsar’s word is unchangeable’. Furious, Khmelnytsky stalked out of the church, only to stalk back in again a few hours later, and sign a unilateral oath of obedience. The tsar’s title changed from ‘the autocrat of all Russia’ to ‘the autocrat of all Great and Little Russia’, and the Cossack hetman took a new seal substituting the tsar’s name for that of the Polish king.
Symbolism aside, Pereyaslav’s significance became apparent only with hindsight. Over the next thirty years Russian, Polish, Cossack and Tatar armies swept repeatedly through Ukraine in a series of formless wars dubbed ‘The Deluge’ by Poles and ‘The Ruin’ by Ukrainians. The situation did not stabilise until 1686, when Poland and Russia – this time without even consulting the Cossacks – signed a so-called ‘eternal peace’, handing Kiev and all lands east of the Dnieper over to Muscovy. For the next three and a quarter centuries Kiev would be ruled from Moscow.
Khmelnytsky left lots of unanswered questions behind him. Historians disagree about why he started his rebellion, the extent to which he controlled its course, and why he ended it the way he did. Easier than saying what his rebellion was is saying what it was not. One aim he certainly did not have was to free Ruthenian peasants from serfdom. Their interests were consistently ignored during the various treaty negotiations, and one of the prices Khmelnytsky paid for his alliance with the Tatars was allowing them to march whole villages away to the Crimean slave-markets for auction. Nor is it clear that the rebellion – initially at least – was even anti-Polish. Marching westward at the outset of the 1648 campaign, Khmelnytsky wrote letters to the Polish king in the style of a loyal subject protesting his grievances, signing himself ‘Hetman of His Gracious Majesty’s Zaporozhian Host’. For much of the time, the rebellion looked more like a war between different Ruthenian interest groups than an ethnic conflict. Wisniowiecki and Adam Kysil, the chief general and chief negotiator on the Commonwealth side, were both Polonised Ruthenian magnates. Kysil was Orthodox; Wisniowiecki was a great-nephew of the founder of the Zaporozhian Sich and had converted to Catholicism only sixteen years previously.
The Ukrainian version of events, of course, is that Khmelnytsky led an early, failed, war of independence. Probably he never aimed that high. But that the Cossacks did want political and religious autonomy is clear, as proved by the demands they laid down in their