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various treaty negotiations with the Poles. The abortive treaty of Hadziacz, for example, would have allowed the Cossacks to choose, subject to crown approval, their own treasurer, marshal and hetman. It would have given them their own courts, mint and army, and it would have banished Polish soldiers, Jews and Jesuits from Cossack lands. From whose hands the Cossacks took autonomy, though, seems to have been immaterial. At one point, Khmelnytsky was even in talks with the Ottoman Porte about establishing the same sort of loose protectorate enjoyed by Moldova and Crimea. Pereyaslav itself may only have been intended as a temporary alliance, one more move in the Cossacks’ long juggling act between powerful, threatening neighbours.
    Like the historians, today’s Ukrainians are not quite sure what to make of Khmelnytsky. On the one hand he beat the Poles; on the other he delivered up Ukraine to the even tenderer mercies of the Russians. But they are reluctant to jettison him altogether. Ukrainians have not hit the history books often, and under Khmelnytsky, for a while at least, they were genuinely a power to be reckoned with. For a country short on heroes, he is simply too prominent to pass up. Instead, he and his Cossacks have once again been recast to suit the mood of the times – Khmelnytsky as the leader of Ukraine’s first failed stab at independence; the Sich with its Rada as a prototype democracy.
    On Khortytsya island in Zaporizhya, now a smoggy industrial city and once the site of the Sich, the local museum has installed a new Cossack exhibition, financed by the Ukrainian diaspora. My friend Roma Ihnatowycz – a Ukrainian-Canadian journalist – and I arrived on a bleak Sunday in February, when the museum was half-closed and the surrounding park thigh-high in grimy snow. The curator was surprised to see anyone in such weather, and pleased that a foreigner was writing about Ukraine. She showed us hetmans’ batons and model Viking ships, Scythian arrowheads and a panorama of the Rada in full raucous swing. Did we know, she asked, that Marx had called the Sich the ‘first democratic Christian republic’? Did we know that the Cossacks had helped France defend Dunkirk during the Thirty Years’ War? Did we know that Orly airport, in Paris, was named after Pylyp Orlyk, author of the first Ukrainian constitution? Some might pretend, she said, that the Cossacks were nothing but bandits, but all cultured, scientific people knew they were early social democrats. The Cossack experience might even help the Ukrainian government work out its new constitution. Ukrainians didn’t need to copy America or Germany, for ‘we have our own history, our own system’.
    The drive home to Kiev took us through the old Cossack heartlands – the gently folded plains which skirt the northern edge of the Ukrainian steppe. Covered in snow, the countryside looked one-dimensional, like an overexposed black-and-white photograph. Crows, fluffed into balls against the cold, crouched motionless in the bare trees either side of the empty road. Concrete signposts, topped with hammer-and-sickle or block-jawed proletarian, marked the entrances to ‘Labour-loving’ village or ‘Peace’ collective farm. As the monochrome landscape lurched past, I suggested to Roma that as national figureheads the Cossacks weren’t up to much. Weren’t they violent? Weren’t they drunk? Above all, weren’t they failures? Didn’t even Gogol make fun of his Cossack hero Taras Bulba? Roma got cross. ‘Cossacks,’ she said, ‘are all we’ve got. Other people’s heroes might be a bit more polished, but for Ukrainians the rawness of it all, the down-to-earthness of it all is just what we like.’ Persuading her to forgive me took the rest of the trip.
    The end of Polish rule over Ukraine turned, a century and a half later, into the end of Poland. Weakened by war, peasant uprisings, foreign machinations and the fecklessness of its own nobility, by the mid