Bohdan Khmelnytsky

Bohdan Khmelnytsky was a minor Ruthenian noble and Cossack officer who in 1648 led a great revolt against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and built a self-governing Cossack state in the lands along the Dnieper. The uprising he led was also marked by mass killings of Jews and Poles, and in 1654 he placed his state under the protection of the Russian tsar. He is honoured in Ukraine as a founder of the nation, while Polish and Jewish memory remembers him very differently.

His exact birth date is unknown; he was probably born around 1595, most likely at Subotiv near Chyhyryn, on the estate of his father, a Cossack officer. He was educated at a Jesuit college, in Lviv or Jarosław. In 1620 his father was killed at the battle of Cecora against the Turks, and the young Khmelnytsky was taken prisoner and held for about two years in Constantinople. After his release, by escape or ransom, he ran the family estate and served as a registered Cossack, the paid Cossack troops recognised by the Polish crown.

In 1638, after earlier Cossack revolts were put down, he lost his rank of colonel. In 1646–1647 a local official, Daniel Czapliński, backed by the magnate Aleksander Koniecpolski, seized Subotiv, raided it and drove out his family. Appeals to King Władysław IV brought no remedy. The grievance gave Khmelnytsky's cause its spark, but wider anger lay behind it: Orthodox Ruthenian peasants and Cossacks resented Polish landlords, the pressure of the Catholic and Uniate churches, and the Jewish leaseholders who often managed noble estates. Arrested and nearly executed, Khmelnytsky fled to the Zaporozhian Sich.

At the end of January 1648 the Cossacks elected him hetman. Allied with the khan of the Crimean Khanate, he destroyed Commonwealth armies at Zhovti Vody on 16 May and Korsuń on 26 May 1648. In early 1649 he described himself as the sole ruler of Rus. He then set about building a state, with a new military and civil administration led by Cossack officers.

As the revolt spread in 1648–1649, Cossack and peasant forces killed tens of thousands of Jews and Poles, and many more people were handed to the Tatars as slaves. Estimates of Jewish deaths during the uprising range from about 18,000 to 100,000, including deaths from hunger and disease. Accounts of the atrocities spread across Europe, and the pogroms of these years are remembered as among the most traumatic events in Jewish, as well as Polish, history.

The fighting went on with shifting results. The Treaty of Zboriv in 1649 was a compromise, and in June 1651 the Cossacks were heavily defeated at Berestechko when their Tatar allies abandoned them. Looking for a stronger protector, Khmelnytsky negotiated with the Ottoman Empire and with Moscow. On 18 January 1654, at Pereiaslav, a Cossack council accepted the overlordship of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. Historians still dispute whether he meant this as an alliance, a loose protectorate or full union. War with Poland widened as Russia and then Sweden joined in, and in 1656 the tsar made a separate truce with the Poles without the hetman's envoys, which Khmelnytsky angrily protested.

Already ill, he suffered a stroke in July 1657 and died at Chyhyryn on 27 July (6 August in the modern calendar). He was buried at Subotiv. Russian imperial and Soviet histories praised him for joining Ukraine to Russia, while the poet Taras Shevchenko and others condemned that union. In Poland he was long seen as the man who began the Commonwealth's decline. In today's Ukraine he appears on banknotes and gives his name to a city.

Our 1650 map shows the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth during the uprising, with the Tsardom of Russia to the east, the power to which the Cossack lands turned in 1654.