The Ukrainian Idea in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Abstract

When in 1654 Hetman Bohdan Khmelnyts´kyi led his Cossack host under the protection of the tsar's "high hand," two peoples came into contact who had some things in common, while others markedly differentiated them. Turning their backs to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Cossacks made a point of emphasizing what they shared with the people of the Muscovite state. They both called themselves Rus´ and they confessed the same Holy Orthodox faith. But both understood that they were far from identical. The Muscovites translated Cossack documents, even when written in what was supposed to be the same Church Slavonic language that they used. The spoken vernaculars were much more distant. The two versions of Orthodoxy met each other uneasily. The Cossack officers and their churchmen were influenced by Polish and Latin culture and thought politically in terms of the pacta conventa and the republican constitution of the Commonwealth. The Muscovites knew little of the Western learning, and autocracy lay at the base of their political culture.