January was marked by the 360th anniversary of the Pereyaslavl Rada of the Zaporozhia Army's gathering in the town of Pereyaslavl to swear allegiance to the Russian Tsar. The Pereyaslavl Rada is considered a historical act of reunification of the "Greater and Lesser Russia”. However, over the past few years the understanding of the role and importance of those events in Ukraine is quite controversial. Some regard them as a betrayal that led to the loss of Ukrainian statehood. Others insist that the decision of the Pereyaslavl Rada was an agreement of two equal sides.
President of the Center for Systematic Analysis and Forecasting, Rostislav Ishchenko, says, “Pereyaslavl was about an oath sworn by the Zaporozhia Army, by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky to Russian Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich. All the other aspects of this oath, the relations between Ukraine and Russia and so on, were indeed formulated during a long period of time, a large number of agreements were concluded which were revised actually until the mid-17th century, until Catherine defeated the Zaporozhian Host. Therefore we cannot talk about Pereyaslavl as a single-step process. An oath took place in Pereyaslaval and the Russian tsar received the right to be titled king not only of Greater but also of Lesser Russia”.
Ischenko believes that “Pereyaslaval marked the beginning of a rather lengthy process. This process, in general, ended in 1917, when all oaths to all Russian rulers became, in fact, invalid. A completely different legal culture followed, as well as completely different legal relations. Relations between Ukraine and the Russian Federation developed also on completely different legal grounds, the Soviet Union was founded also on a completely different legal foundation. Pereyaslavl's oath has had some political significance until now, because it gave a start to the gathering of Ukrainian lands under the scepter of the Russian sovereign, and as a result, a territorial body which is now outlined by the borders of modern Ukraine has been formed. They might have been completely different if Pereyaslavl's oath had not taken place, or there might have been none, in fact”.
“The Pereyaslaval Rada was the start of the gathering of Ukrainian lands under the authority of the Russian ruler, in fact, the beginning of the restoration of the western border of Kievan Rus'… and from that moment on the Russian state border had been pushing towards the West”, says Ischenko. In his opinion, “today it is a very common point of view, even though not supported by everyone, that it was a time when the Orthodox people united, because in fact even nowadays there is a widespread opinion that the Greater Russians, the Lesser Russians and Belorussians constitute one Orthodox people, which cannot be divided into three nations. In general, even in Ukraine there is quite a large number of people who identify themselves as Ukrainians, but there is also quite a large number of people who identify themselves as Lesser Russians belonging to the Russian people. The longer the Ukrainian state exists, the sharper political contradictions are, the more radicalized these points of view become”.
Andrey Marchukov, senior researcher of the Center for the History of the Peoples of Russia and Inter-ethnic Relations at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences agrees with his colleague that the Pereyaslavl Rada cannot and should not be considered either as a momentary legal decision. “It was a logical consequence of historical processes, the reunification of the pan-Russian body. This meaning is not accepted by a large part of the Ukrainian establishment, humanitarian intelligentsia, pro-Ukrainians. I must say that modern interpretations in many Ukrainian textbooks or other works have been developed not as a result of search for scholarly truth.
It is the ideology of rejecting the Pereyaslavl Rada as an act of reunification between Western and Eastern Russia, as the reunion of the Russian world which comes from their ideology and the practice of the Ukrainian nationalist movement and Ukrainian identity, which is based on denying their belonging to the Russian world, denying their roots. In fact, this is a denial of the whole past of the cultural heritage of Lesser Russia, inherent to the ideology of Ukrainians: Ukrainians: is not a nation with Russian roots, with Russian culture, with Russian religion, and of course, there is nothing in common with Russia, Greater Russians and Belarusians… Of course, with this ideology and this orientation the only direction left was the West. The "West" was changing in accordance with politics, different geopolitical entities, but a pro-Western orientation is present in Ukrainian ideology as inherently non-Russian.
