Ukrainian Nation-Building Until the Middle of the 17th Century: A “New” Perspective on the Early Modern Elites’ Role

Abstract

The study objective is to analyse the main claims of the article by Natalia Starchenko. It is based on the principle of historicism, text deconstruction methods, and comparative approaches. Main results. The claim that M. Hrushevskyi placed the nobility outside the Ukrainian narrative is proved to be far-fetched. It is argued that the status of the three incorporated voivodeships was the lowest compared to all the territories included in the Crown. The statement that Warsaw did not have a “governmental vertical that could ensure the decisions of the centre” is refuted. The far-fetchedness of the following claims is exposed as follows: the majority of the nobility adhered to the multi-confessional model of the Ruthenian nation; the Cossacks emerged as a male military union and were “anti-state and non-national.” The manipulative nature of the attempt to present the Cossack uprisings and the beginning of the National Liberation War of the midseventeenth century as a military confederation is demonstrated. A number of factual statements are disproved, in particular, those regarding the typological similarity of the Cossacks and Tatars, and the fact that the nobility of Chernihiv-Sivershchyna was in the orbit of Moscow’s political culture. Conclusions. A combination of claims made by N. Starchenko forms an image of early modern Ukrainian elites that is devoid of proper scientific justification. Approaches are based on the development of concepts that absolutize the nobility rhetoric, which was not implemented in practice, and extrapolate atypical isolated cases to the entire nobility mindset. Moreover, attempts to present the Cossacks as a destructive force revive the concepts of 19th-century Polish and Russian historiography as a “new scheme.”