Convoluted Paths of Early Modern Ukrainian Nation-Formation, or Notes on the Conventional Scheme of Ukrainian History

Abstract

The goal is to suggest a revision of the conventional Ukrainian historical narrative that was created in the 19th — early 20th century in the Russian Empire and still defi nes our approach to the earlier period through forming our national symbols, myths, and places of memory. The grand narrative was based on the Cossack version of history that was strongly influenced first by imperial and subsequently by Soviet ideologies. As a result, a long period of Ukrainian history linked to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was framed primarily as the history of national, social, and religious repressions against Ukrainians by a foreign state. Therefore, the Ukrainian nobility that played an active role in political life alongside with the nobility from other regions / nations of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was declared to be traitors that had cast away their identity through “polonization” and conversion of Catholicism (conversion from Orthodox Christianity to other confessions was seen as an act of polonization).

The author points out that these approaches are methodologically outdated and do not account for either the peculiarities of early modern states that were not national by their very nature or for the beliefs and values of the time. The author applies new methodological approaches to the new sources and provides new interpretations of the sources already introduced to research literature, offering a different perspective on the nobility (szlachta), the estate that played a leading role in the processes of early modern Ukrainian nation-building until the mid-17th century. She analyzes how the idea of Rus’ as a distinct “territory with its own history,” alongside the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, was formed in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the second part of the article, the author reconsiders the traditional interpretation of the causes of Bohdan Khmelnytskyi’s uprising, taking into account the new research and new methodological approaches.

Conclusions. Th e view of Ukrainian history proposed in the article allows us to interpret the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as an integral part of the Ukrainian past, and to consider the process of Ukrainian nation-building (mainly within the noble milieu) until the mid-17th century as an important component of the Cossack revolution. Th is approach allows us to modernize the anachronistic scheme of the Ukrainian past, to fi ll in the unnecessary “gaps”, and to expand the fi eld thematically, populating the so-called “dark ages” with personalities and events.