Mykhailo Hrushevsky – författare

The ninth volume of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine-Rus’ is by far the longest in the ten-volume series. Written in the late 1920s, after Hrushevsky had returned to Ukraine from exile, the volume is based mainly on a wealth of documents gathered by Hrushevsky and his students in the Moscow archives. Many of these documents were little used or unknown to previous historians. The pivotal event in this part of the volume is the Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, which brought Cossack Ukraine under a Muscovite protectorate. Needing military assistance to continue the struggle with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, against which the Cossack Host and much of the Ukrainian populace had rebelled in 1648, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky was prepared to make an agreement that brought Muscovy into the conflict on terms favorable to the Cossacks. Hrushevsky analyzes the diplomatic and military developments that led up to the agreement, and in chapter 7 he presents the most detailed and thoughtful treatment in modern historiography of the Pereiaslav Council of January 1654 and the subsequent understandings with Moscow. In his discussion Hrushevsky deals not only with previous historiography and the documentary record, which is incomplete, but also with the negotiations, taking account of the conflicting motivations of the two sides. The subsequent chapters trace the difficult course of Cossack Ukraine’s relations with Muscovy in 1654-55: the joint military campaign against the Commonwealth, which almost led to disaster because of poor coordination; the Cossack leadership’s efforts to take control of the western Ukrainian and southern Belarusian lands; the ferocious battle of Dryzhypil; and the devastation of the Bratslav region by Polish and Tatar forces, against which Muscovy provided no effective protection. On the basis of the travel diary of Paul of Aleppo, a Syrian cleric, Hrushevsky gives an account of daily life in Ukraine at the time, with many details unavailable in other sources. Unparalleled in breadth of research, Hrushevsky’s work brings to life a turbulent and politically decisive period in the life of the Ukrainian people. This volume was translated by Marta Daria Olynyk and edited by Serhii Plokhy (consulting editor) and Frank E. Sysyn (editor in chief) with the assistance of Myroslav Yurkevich. The volume includes an extensive historical introduction, a full bibliography of the sources used by Hrushevsky, 3 maps, and an index. The preparation of this volume for publication was funded by a generous donation from Mrs. Daria Mucak-Kowalsky (Etobicoke, Ontario) in memory of her husband, Mykhailo Kowalsky.

This tome, in which Mykhailo Hrushevsky analyzes the last two years of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s rule, consists of the final chapters (10-13) of volume 9. Hrushevsky presents the most comprehensive discussion to date of Khmelnytsky’s foreign policy in the aftermath of the Treaty of Pereiaslav (1654), a topic closed to research in Soviet Ukraine from the 1930s to the 1980s. He also discusses Khmelnytsky’s renewed efforts to annex the western Ukrainian territories and to control the Belarusian lands conquered by the Cossacks. He concludes with an assessment of the hetman and his age that has long been controversial in Ukrainian historiography.The volume shows how Ukraine’s relations with Muscovy were strained by the Muscovites’ failure to help fend off devastating Polish and Crimean attacks, which prompted Ukrainian leaders to seek support elsewhere. Tensions were exacerbated by the Ukrainian-Muscovite dispute over Belarusian territory. When Charles X of Sweden attacked the Commonwealth in 1655, while Khmelnytsky sought to recover the western Ukrainian lands, a Swedish-Ukrainian alliance seemed to be in the making. A military convention was concluded, but Charles, under pressure from his allies among the Polish nobility, would not cede western Ukraine to the Cossacks. Once Muscovy declared war on Sweden in 1656, it opened peace negotiations with Poland to which Cossack envoys were not admitted, convincing Khmelnytsky’s officers that the Muscovites had betrayed them. Khmelnytsky then began a complicated diplomatic offensive to break up Muscovite-Polish negotiations. After the Vilnius accord between Muscovy and the Commonweath (November 1656), he sought to form a Swedish-Transylvanian-Ukrainian league in cooperation with Brandenburg and supported the abortive effort by György Rákóczi II of Transylvania to gain the Polish throne. Khmelnytsky also negotiated with the Ottoman Porte, giving rise to the vexed question of his possible request for vassal status. Hrushevsky’s exhaustive discussion of diplomatic affairs greatly advances understanding of the role of Ukraine and the countries of East Central Europe in the political crisis of the mid-seventeenth century.This volume was translated by Marta Daria Olynyk and edited by Yaroslav Fedoruk (consulting editor) and Frank E. Sysyn (editor in chief) with the assistance of Myroslav Yurkevich.In a comprehensive introduction to the volume, Yaroslav Fedoruk considers issues of foreign policy, as well as the larger problem of national historiographies and their limitations with regard to the highly complex European situation. Frank Sysyn analyzes Hrushevsky’s assessment of Khmelnytsky’s rule in chapter 13 as a polemic with the conservative historian Viacheslav Lypynsky (1882-1931). The preparation of this volume for publication was funded by a generous donation from Dr. Maria Fischer-Slysh (Toronto, Ontario) in memory of her parents, Dr. Adolf and Olha Slyz.

Volume 10 covers most of the hetmancy of Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s successor, Ivan Vyhovsky (1657–59). Its three chapters constitute only the first part of the volume as Hrushevsky planned it. When he wrote them in 1929–30, the Soviet authorities in Moscow had begun their sweeping attack on Ukraine’s political and cultural autonomy, including an effort to enforce conformity on the historical profession. Arrested in March 1931, Hrushevsky was exiled to Moscow, where he worked mainly on his History of Ukrainian Literature. After the historian’s death in 1934, his daughter, Kateryna, edited the incomplete volume 10 and managed to have it published in 1936.Hrushevsky’s account begins with the tensions surrounding Vyhovsky’s assumption of the hetmancy following Khmelnytsky’s death. The late hetman’s son and designated successor, Iurii, was not yet of age and did not command the loyalty of the Cossack rank and file. Vyhovsky emerged as a ‘caretaker’ identified with the Cossack officer establishment. He was soon faced with a revolt of Zaporozhian Cossacks led by a rival for command of the Host, Iakiv Barabash, and the colonel of Poltava, Martyn Pushkar. Although Vyhovsky routed their forces in battle, his relations with Muscovy grew increasingly difficult, as he suspected the tsarist government of exploiting rank-and-file dissatisfaction in order to depose him. This led Vyhovsky to consider a reconciliation with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in which Rus’ would be a co-equal principality—a settlement whose conditions were elaborated in the Treaty of Hadiach (1658). The volume closes with Hrushevsky’s detailed assessment of the treaty, on which he renders a negative judgment.Volume 10 was translated by Marta Daria Olynyk, who is also the translator of volumes 8 and 9, book 2, part 1, and 9, book 2, part 2. The volume was prepared for publication by two staff editors—editor in chief Frank Sysyn, who was involved in all aspects of the volume, and senior editor Myroslav Yurkevich, who edited the translation for content and style—and two consulting editors, Andrew B, Pernal and Yaroslav Fedoruk. Professor Pernal provided an introduction discussing the sources and structure of the volume. Dr. Fedoruk provided a second introduction, based largely on archival sources, that offers the most complete account yet written of Hrushevsky’s creative work during his final years.

With volume 4, Mykhailo Hrushevsky begins the second, ‘Lithuanian-Polish,’ cycle of his History of Ukraine-Rus’, which extends from the fourteenth-century collapse of Ukrainian statehood to the recovery of the late sixteenth century. Volume 4 covers political life, while volumes 5 and 6 deal with society and culture.The Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland were the dominant powers in the Ukrainian lands during this period. Having attained statehood in the thirteenth century, Lithuania faced strong opposition from the Teutonic Knights in the northwest and Muscovy in the east. Accordingly, it expanded southward into the Belarusian and Ukrainian lands. Its rule was accepted with little opposition because the Lithuanian ruling stratum was rapidly assimilated by the demographically dominant Ruthenians, and the cultural legacy of Old Rus’ reigned supreme. Ruthenian was the main language of the Lithuanian court, common and criminal law was adopted from that of Rus’, and Ruthenian craftsmen shaped artistic tastes. Many Lithuanian rulers converted to Orthodoxy. Thus, as Hrushevsky points out, Lithuanian annexation of Ukrainian lands passed relatively unnoticed and left no deep traces in local tradition.Poland contrasts sharply with Lithuania in Hrushevsky’s account: a strong state bent on eastward expansion, it was determined to assert its political and cultural dominance. The key to that expansion was the incorporation of Lithuania into a full union with Poland—a process that began with the Union of Krėva (1385) and culminated in the Union of Lublin (1569), which established the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and brought the Ukrainian lands under Polish rule. Hrushevsky explains the intricate politics of the period in detail. A separate chapter chronicles the rise of the Crimean Tatars and their devastating raids, which gave the Ruthenians a compelling incentive to accept union with Poland.

Volumes 1 through 3 of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s ten-volume magnum opus, History of Ukraine-Rus', form a foundational unit for the history of the Ukrainian lands and people wherein the eminent historian explores the history of the Ukrainian lands from antiquity up until the dissolution of the Rus' state on western Ukrainian territories in the fourteenth century. Volume 2 acts as a chronological bridge within that unit. The first half of the volume provides what is still the best political history of medieval southern East Slavic territory in any language. It draws on an extraordinarily wide range of evidence to document events from the time of the death of Volodymyr the Great in 1015 through the period of Mongol devastations in 1237–41. Hrushevsky describes the consolidation of the Rus' state in the middle Dnipro region and its rapid political and cultural growth and increasing prosperity in East Slavic territory under the ever-expanding lines of Volodymyr’s dynasty. In the second half of the volume, Hrushevsky exploits all of the literary and archaeological evidence available at the turn of the twentieth century to describe as accurately as possible the physical presence of Rus' society on Ukrainian territory, including in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Pereiaslav lands, in Volhynia and Galicia, and in the steppe (what is now southern and eastern Ukraine). These two parts of the volume together make Hrushevsky’s case that the Ukrainian people had in their past a period of political statehood lasting for almost four centuries and that by 1900, they and their ancestors had lived continuously in the same territory for almost 1,500 years. Thus, Hrushevsky declares in his introductory remarks, “The history of the territory of present-day Ukraine is the history of the Ukrainian people.”

Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine-Rus’. Volume 7: The Cossack Age to 1625 inaugurates the History‘s subseries entitled “The History of the Ukrainian Cossacks”. It focuses on the history of the Ukrainian Cossacks from their origins in the fifteenth century to their rise as an important military, social, and political force in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Hrushevsky examines the early history of the Cossacks in the context of Ukrainian colonization of the steppe and the extensive social changes taking place on the Ukrainian frontier. He discusses the causes and consequences of the Cossack anti-Polish uprisings of the period and investigates the interconnections between Cossackdom and the Ukrainian national, religious, and cultural revival. Hrushevsky’s exhaustive study of the period marked a turning point in the historiography of Ukrainian Cossackdom. It largely ended the stage in which historians engaged mostly in the collection and publication of sources and the reconstruction of the sequence of events. Concurrently, it inaugurated the stage in which the analysis and interpretation of established facts became the primary goal of historical research. This volume was translated by Bohdan Struminski and edited by Serhii Plokhy (consulting editor) and Frank E. Sysyn (editor in chief) with the assistance of Uliana M. Pasicznyk.

Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine-Rus,’ Volume 8: The Cossack Age, 1626-1650 deals with the period when the Cossacks’ emergence as a political power and the Khmelnytsky Uprising made Ukraine a focal point in European and Near Eastern affairs. Based on an exhaustive examination of the sources and scholarly literature, Hrushevsky’s volume 8 stands as the most comprehensive account of this dramatic period in Ukrainian history. Ukraine’s central role in the international politics of the time makes the volume important to specialists and students of East European, Central European, Ottoman, Russian, and Jewish history, as well as to those studying revolution and state building in early modern Europe. For her work in translating volume 8 Marta Daria Olynyk was awarded the 2004 AAUS Translation Prize. This volume was translated by Marta Daria Olynyk and edited by Frank E. Sysyn (editor in chief) with the assistance of Myroslav Yurkevich.

No period in Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s hetmancy was as rich in international and dynastic plans as the years 1650 to 1653. After the Zboriv Agreement of 1649, when the hetman resolved to find a way to break forever with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he set out to create the military and political conditions to achieve his goal. From Venice to Moscow the wily hetman spun his diplomatic and military plans. In his search for allies and in pursuit of his goal of establishing a political system that secured the Ukrainian Hetmanate, he looked above all to the Ottomans and their Danubian vassal states. Fusing the interests of his new state to those of his own family, the hetman aspired to found a new dynasty by marrying his son into the ruling house of Moldavia. And as Khmelnytsky was pursing these goals and aspirations, the Cossacks’ military victories and defeats were shaping the fate of a new Ukraine.The book also covers the dramatic development of Ukrainian-Moldavian relations in the years 1650–53, beginning with the Cossacks’ victorious campaign against Moldavia. The period witnessed the marriage of Tymish Khmelnytsky to Roksanda Lupu, the daughter of the Moldavian hospodar, and it ended with Tymish’s tragic death during the siege of Suceava by allied Polish, Wallachian, and Moldavian forces—a major blow not only to Khmelnytsky’s policy in the Danube region, but also to his dynastic aspirations. In covering these events, Hrushevsky again proved himself an outstanding researcher with scrupulous attention to detail. His portrait of Tymish, whom Bohdan Khmelnytsky was grooming to become his successor, remains the most complete in the literature. The book concludes on the eve of the Battle of Zhvanets (1653) and the Pereiaslav Council of 1654, events crucial to the future of Ukraine.This volume was translated by Bohdan Struminski and edited by Serhii Plokhy (consulting editor) and Frank E. Sysyn (editor in chief) with the assistance of Uliana M. Pasicznyk.The volume includes an extensive historical introduction, a full bibliography of the sources used by Hrushevsky, 3 maps, and an index. The preparation of this volume for publication was generously sponsored by Mrs. Sofiia Wojtyna of Hamilton, Ontario, in memory of Vasyl Bilash, Mykhailo Charkivsky, and Mykhailo Wojtyna.