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Khmelnytsky Uprising (also Chmielnicki Uprising or Khmelnytsky/Chmielnicki Rebellion) refers to a rebellion in the lands of in present-day Ukraine which raged from 1648-1654. Under the command of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Cossacks allied with Crimean Tatars, along with the local Ukrainian peasantry, fought several battles against the armies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and eradicated the control of the Polish Szlachta, Roman Catholic priests and Jewish arendators in the area.

The Uprising curtailed the eastern scope of the Commonwealth and effectively established the possibility of a southern East Slavic state. Further weakened by internal conflicts and hostilities with Sweden, the power of Commonwealth was severely diminished during this period (referred to in Polish history as The Deluge).

Background

With the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Union in 1385, a growing number of Ruthenian lands were gradually absorbed under the control of a powerful western empire. In 1569, the Union of Lublin granted the southern Lithuanian-controlled lands of Ruthenia - Halych-Volhynia, Podlachia, Podolia, and Kiev - to the Crown of Poland under the agreement forming the new Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Although the local nobility was granted full rights within the Rzeczpospolita, their assimilation of Polish culture alienated them from the lower classes. This Szlachta, along with the actions of the upper-class Polish Magnates, oppressed the lower-class Ruthenians, with the introduction of Counter-Reformation missionary practices, and the use of Jewish arendators to manage their estates.

The local Eastern Orthodox traditions were also under siege from the assumption of ecclesiastical power by Muscovy in 1448. The growing Russian power in the north sought to reunite the southern lands of Kievan Rus' with its successor state, and with the fall of Constantinople it began this process with the proclamation that its Metropolitan was now Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus'. This sparked a philosophical debate in Ruthenia culminating with the Union of Brest in 1596, which attempted to retain the autonomy of the Eastern Orthodox churches in present-day Ukraine, Poland and Belarus, by aligning themselves with the Bishop of Rome. While all of the people did not unite under one church, the concepts of autonomy were implanted into consciousness of the area, and came out in force during the military campaign of Bohdan Khmelnytsky.

Khmelnytskyi's role

Bohdan Khmelnytsky was a noble-born product of a Jesuit education in Ruthenia. At the age of 22, he joined his father in the service of the Commonwealth, battling against the Ottoman Empire in the Moldavian Magnate Wars. After being held captive in Constantinople, he returned to life as a registered Cossack, settling in his hometown of Subotiv with a wife and several children. He participated in campaigns for Grand Crown Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski, led delegations to the King Władysław IV Vasa in Warsaw, and generally was well respected within the cossack ranks. The course of his life was altered however, when Aleksander Koniecpolski, heir to Hetman Koniecpolski's magnate estate, attempted to seize Khmelnytsky's land. In 1647, Chyhyryn starost (elder) Daniel Czapliński openly started to harass Khmelnytsky on behalf of the younger Koniecpolski in an attempt to force him off the land. On two occasions raids were made to Subotiv, during which considerable property damage was done and his son Yurii was badly beaten, until Khmelnytsky moved his family to a relative's house in Chyhyryn. He twice sought assistance from the king by traveling to Warsaw, only to find him either unwilling or powerless to confront the will of a magnate.

Having received no support from the Polish officials, Khmelnytsky turned to his Cossack friends and subordinates. The case of a Cossack being unfairly treated by the Poles found a lot of support not only in his regiment, but also throughout the Sich. All through the autumn of 1647 Khmelnytsky traveled from one regiment to the other and had numerous consultations with different Cossack leaders throughout Ukraine. His activity raised suspicions of the Polish authorities already used to Cossack revolts and he was promptly arrested. Polkovnyk (colonel) Mykhailo Krychevsky assisted Khmelnytsky with his escape, and with a group of supporters, he headed for the Zaporozhian Sich.

The Uprising

On January 25, 1648, Khmelnytsky brought a contingent of 300-500 Cossacks to the Zaporizhian Sich and quickly dispatched the guards assigned by the Commonwealth to protect the entrance. Once at the Sich, his oratory and diplomatic skills quickly struck a nerve with oppressed Ruthenians. As his forces repelled an attempt by Commonwealth forces to retake the Sich more recruits joined his cause. The Cossack Rada elected him Hetman by the end of the month. Khmelnytsky threw most of his resources into recruiting more fighters. He sent emissaries to Crimea, enjoining the Tatars to join him in a potential assault against their mutual enemy, the Commonwealth.

By April of 1648, word of an uprising had spread through the Commonwealth. Either because they underestimated the size of the uprising^[1], or because they wanted to act quickly to prevent it from spreading^[2], the Commonwealth's Grand Crown Hetman Mikołaj Potocki and Field Crown Hetman Marcin Kalinowski sent 3,000 soldiers under the command of Potocki's son, Stefan, towards Khmelnytsky, without waiting to gather additional forces from Prince Jeremi Wiśniowiecki. Khmelnytsky quickly marshalled his forces to meet his enemy en route at the Battle of Zhovti Vody, which saw a considerable amount of defections on the field of battle by registered cossacks who changed their allegiance from the Commmonwealth to Khmelnytsky. This victory was quickly followed by rout of the Commonwealth's armies at the Battle of Korsun, which saw both Grand Crown Hetman Mikołaj Potocki and Field Crown Hetman Marcin Kalinowski captured and imprisoned by the Tatars.

In addition to the loss of significant forces and military leadership, King Władysław IV Vasa passed away in 1648, leaving the Crown of Poland leaderless and in disarray at a time of rebellion. The Szlachta was on the run from its peasants, their palaces and estates in flames. All the while, Khmelnystky's army marched westward.

Khmelnytsky stopped his forces at Bila Tserkva, and issued a list of demands to the Polish Crown, including raising the number of Registered Cossacks, returning Churches taken from the Orthodox faithful, and paying the Cossacks for wages which had been withheld for 5 years^[3].

At this point, news of the peasant uprisings troubled a noble born such as Khmelnytsky; however, after discussing information gathered across the country with his advisors, the cossack leadership soon realized the potential for autonomy was there for the taking. Although Khmelnytsky's personal resentment of the Szlachta and the Magnates influenced his transformation into a revolutionary, it was his ambition to become the ruler of a Ruthenian nation which fueled the Uprising past a simple rebellion and into national movement. Khmelnytsky had his forces join a peasant revolt at the Battle of Pyliavtsi, striking another terrible blow to weakened and depleted Polish forces.

Khmelnytsky was persuaded not to lay siege to Lviv in exchange for 200,000 red guldens. He then rested in Zamość, awaiting the election of a new Polish King. Assured that John Casimir II would not interfere with his designs on Ruthenia, Khmelnytsky made a triumphant entry into Kiev on Christmas Day of 1648, where he was hailed as "the Moses, savior, redeemer, and liberator of the people from Polish captivity ... the illustrious ruler of Rus". In February 1649 during negotiations with a Polish delegation headed by senator Adam Kysil in Pereiaslav, Khmelnytsky declared that he was "the sole autocrat of Rus" and that he had "enough power in Ukraine, Podilia, and Volhynia... in his land and principality stretching as far as Lviv, Chelm, and Halych"^[4]. It became clear to the Polish envoys that Khmelnytsky had positioned himself no longer as simply a leader of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, but that of an independent state and stated his claims to the heritage of the Rus'. A Vilnius panegyric in Khmelnytsky's honor (1650–1651) explained it this way: "While in Poland, it is King Jan II Casimir Vasa, in Rus it is Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky"^[5].

Following the battle at Zbarazh and Zboriv, Khmelnytsky gained numerous privileges for the Cossacks under the Treaty of Zboriv. When hostilities resumed, however, Khmelnytsky's forces were abandoned by their former allies the Crimean Tatars, suffered a massive defeat in 1651 at the Battle of Beresteczko, and were forced at Bila Tserkva (Biała Cerkiew) to accept a loser's treaty. A year later, the Cossacks had their revenge at the Battle of Batoh.

Jews and the Uprising

Prior to the Uprising, magnates had sold and leased certain privileges to the Jewish arendators for a percentage of an estate's revenue (rent) and, while enjoying themselves at their courts, left it to the Jewish leaseholders and collectors to become objects of hatred to the oppressed and long-suffering peasants. Khmelnytsky told the people that the Poles had sold them as slaves "into the hands of the accursed Jews." With this as their battle-cry, Cossacks and the peasantry massacred a huge number of Jews during the years 1648-1649.

Historian Jacob Rader Marcus summarizes the situation as follows:

In 1654 neighboring Russia turned against Poland, a year later the Swedes poured in from the north, and all these groups, including the native Poles, ravaged and massacred defenseless Jewish victims throughout the land (The Jew in the Medieval World, 1896)^[6].

The Eyewitness Chronicle detailes:

Wherever they found the szlachta, royal officials or Jews, they [Cossacks] killed them all, sparing neither women nor children. They pillaged the estates of the Jews and nobles, burned churches and killed their priests, leaving nothing whole (Eyewitness Chronicle)^[7].

The death tolls of the Khmelnytskyi uprising, as many others from the era of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, vary. Historian Orest Subtelny, in his acclaimed Ukraine: A History (p.127–128), notes:

Jewish losses were especially heavy because they were the most numerous and accessible representatives of the szlachta regime. Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history. Estimates of Jews killed in the uprising have been greatly exaggerated in the historiography of the event. According to B. Weinryb, the total of losses reported in Jewish sources is 2.4 million to 3.3 million deaths, clearly a fantastic figure. Weinryb cites the calculations of S. Ettinger indicating that about 50,000 Jews lived in the area where the uprising occurred. See B. Weinryb, "The Hebrew Chronicles on Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the Cossack-Polish War," Harvard Ukrainian Studies 1 (1977): 153-77. While many of them were killed, Jewish losses did not reach the hair-raising figures that are often associated with the uprising. In the words of Weinryb (The Jews of Poland, 193-4), "The fragmentary information of the period—and to a great extent information from subsequent years, including reports of recovery—clearly indicate that the catastrophe may have not been as great as has been assumed.

A study by Israeli demographer Shaul Stampfer concludes that 18,000-20,000 Jews were killed out of a total population of 40,000^[8].

Paul Robert Magoczi has similar estimates of the Jewish casualties, with the 50% casualty rate in a total population estimated at 60,000.

The precise number of dead may never be known, but 300 Jewish communities were destroyed, and the final peace accords stipulated that there would be no Jews east of the Dnieper.

The aftermath

Within a few months, almost all Polish nobles, officials, and priests had been wiped out or driven from the lands of present-day Ukraine. The Commonwealth population losses in the Uprising were over one million; Jewish losses were especially heavy because they were the most numerous and accessible representatives of the szlachta regime. The Uprising began a period in Polish history known as The Deluge (which included a Swedish invasion of the Commonwealth), that temporarily freed the Ruthenian peoples from Polish domination but in short time subjected it to Russian domination. Weakened by wars, in 1654 Khmelnytsky persuaded the Cossacks to ally with the Russian tsar in the Treaty of Pereyaslav which led to the Russo-Polish War (1654-1667). Although the Commonwealth tried to regain influence over Cossacks (of note is the Treaty of Hadiach of 1658), the new Cossack subjects became even more loyal to Muscovy. With the Commonwealth becoming increasingly weak, the Cossacks became more and more integrated into the Russian Empire, with their autonomy traded for state privileges. By the time partitions of Poland ended the existence of the Commonwealth in 1795, many Cossacks have already left Ukraine to colonize the Kuban.

See also

• Kodak fortress
• Kostka-Napierski Uprising

References

External links

• Cossacks' Uprising, Jewish Encyclopedia
• The Zaporozhian Cossack Battle at Korsun