Putin

But the Cossacks rebelled against Polish rule, rising up periodically against the Poles and the Jewish middlemen who were used by the ruling classes to collect rents and debts, thereby deflecting anger onto them. The greatest Cossack rebellion of all, the 1648 uprising, was led by Hetman (Chieftain) Bohdan Khmelnitsky, who slaughtered Jews and Poles in great numbers, making him a heroic freedom fighter to this day in Ukraine, while for Jews he remains a figure of biblical evil like Haman.

A few years into the uprising Khmelnitsky was deserted by his Tatar allies (steppe politics also made for strange bedfellows) and faced a stark choice: defeat by the Poles or alliance with Muscovite Russia.

In January 1654, in a small town near Kiev called Pereyaslav, Hetman Bohdan Khmelnitsky formally swore Ukraine’s allegiance and union with Moscow. For many years the Ukrainian national anthem asked:

Oh Bohdan, Bohdan,
Our great Hetman,
Why did you give Ukraine
To the wretched Muscovites?

Except for the briefest of intervals in the twentieth century during times of war and upheaval, Ukraine was not so much ruled by Russia as it had become an integral part of it. It was “to Russians what Ireland and Scotland were to the English—not an imperial possession, like Canada or India, but part of the irreducible centre, home.”

Ukraine was a county, not a country. The Ukrainian language almost died out like Gaelic. In any case, the Russians considered it only an amusing dialect spoken only by yokels. A classic quip has it that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But for the eastern Slavs, for whom language and literature assumed an especial importance, that quip might be amended to read: A language is a dialect with an army, a navy, and a great poet. Russia, Poland, and Ukraine all got their great national poet at roughly the same time: Russia’s Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), and Ukraine’s Taras Shevchenko (1814–61).

Shevchenko, who would turn the patois of servant and serf into poetry, was himself born a serf and soon orphaned. He seemed fated to a life of dreary and anonymous labor. But he had a passion for drawing and would exercise it with whatever was at hand, a lump of coal, a stick of chalk. Taken to St. Petersburg, he drew copies of the statues in the Summer Garden. His talents were noticed and encouraged by other artists and writers, Ukrainian and Russian alike. They took up a collection, and in 1838, when he was twenty-four, they bought his freedom for the sum of 2,500 rubles. Shevchenko was delighted, even giddy, with his new freedom, cutting a chic swath in St. Petersburg nightlife in his new coat, for which he had paid 100 rubles, and thus we know that the exact worth of the freedom of a human being in the Russia of that time was twenty-five coats.

Now he devoted more time to his poetry, “an odd mixture of pastoralism, xenophobia and self-hatred. His themes are the beauty of Ukraine’s landscape, her lost Cossack greatness and her shame in laboring under the Russian and Polish yokes. Though Russians, Poles (and, embarrassingly, Jews) all get short shrift, most of his bile is directed at the treachery and complacency of the Ukrainians themselves.”

Success and excitement were immediate. The Ukrainians had their poet.

Shevchenko now moved between St. Petersburg and Kiev, where in 1846 he joined an underground discussion group that espoused the abolition of serfdom and a democratic confederation of Slavs headed by Ukraine. As was nearly always the case in both Tsarist and Soviet times, such groups were infiltrated and betrayed by an informer. Shevchenko was arrested in 1847 and dispatched to St. Petersburg. There, in a rare honor, he was interrogated by the head of the secret police, Count Alexei Orlov, who concluded: “Shevchenko has acquired among his friends the reputation of a brilliant Ukrainian writer, and so his poems are doubly harmful and dangerous. His favorite poems could be disseminated in Ukraine, inducing thought about the alleged happy times of the Hetman era, the exigency of a return to those times, and the possibility of Ukraine’s existence as a separate state.”

Socially, creatively, amorously, Shevchenko had enjoyed life to the fullest in his nine years of freedom between his liberation and his arrest. He would spend the next ten years in exile near the border with Kazakhstan. In his own hand Tsar Nicholas I, so absolute a monarch that he considered criticism sedition and praise impertinence, added a note to the paperwork on the poet’s exile: “Under the strictest surveillance, prohibited from writing or painting.”