Rebellion Palia

The eternal world of 1686 consolidated the division of Ukraine between the Commonwealth and the Russian Empire along the Dnieper . Left-bank Ukraine has historically been divided into two parts: Hetmanism , which, having retained autonomy, officially became part of the Russian Empire, and Sloboda Ukraine , which was controlled by the Russian administration. Left-bank Ukraine was divided into regiments and hundreds , led by colonels and centurions. Formally, these posts were elected, but in fact they were occupied by representatives of the Cossack foreman. The candidates proposed by the hetman or in Sloboda Ukraine by the tsar's governors were approved by tsarist decree.

Right-bank Ukraine remained part of the Commonwealth and was divided into three parts according to the Buchach peace of 1672:

• Edisan and Podillia (Turkish Black Sea region between the Dnieper and the Dniester)
• Bratslavschina and southern Kiev region under the rule of vassal Turkey of the Cossack hetman
• Northern Kiev region, Galicia and Volyn as part of the Crown lands of the Commonwealth

The war of Turkey and the Holy League , which was waged with the participation of the Commonwealth in the last quarter of the 17th century, put on the agenda the issue of the need to prevent the raids of the Tatars and Turks into the Commonwealth. The Polish king Jan Sobieski , who was going to take away from the Turks and master the Right Bank devastated by wars, decided to use the Cossacks for this purpose. In 1683 , he ordered the gentry Kunitsky to begin recruiting Cossacks. But at the beginning of 1684 , the Cossacks killed Kunitsky and chose Andrei Mogila as their hetman. However, by 1686 , a significant part of the Right Bank was under the rule of self-proclaimed Cossack colonels. The most famous among them was Fast Colonel Semyon Gurko, nicknamed Paliy (Pyro).

The actual autonomy of a significant part of Right-Bank Ukraine in the framework of the Commonwealth and about half of Left-Bank Ukraine in the framework of the Russian Empire led to an increase in the national identity of the Ukrainian Cossacks and their leaders. The situation was complicated by religious strife. On the Right Bank, this process took on the character of a national liberation struggle of the Ukrainian people against the Polish government. The Cossacks of Palia everywhere smashed the manor houses, expelling the nobility in central Poland. In 1688 , Paly turned to Moscow with a request to accept his citizenship. But the ruler Tsarevna Sophia did not want to violate the newly concluded eternal peace with the Commonwealth.

At the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ukrainian peasantry was undergoing a process of intensified antagonism between the Cossack "foreman", on the one hand, and the peasantry, who were stubbornly fighting against enslavement, on the other. The impoverished part of the Cossacks went to the Commonwealth to find shelter and settledness. Peasants, in turn, tried to go to the Cossacks. Landowners often “survived the old peasants from settled places” because the old ones resisted the final enslavement and replaced them with newcomers, homeless wanderers, ready to put up with any oppression. The struggle of the Commonwealth Cossacks was especially intense against the feudal encroachments of landowners in Right-Bank Ukraine, where the Polish gentry was more energetic than the landowners of the Hetman and Seversky lands , sought to enslave the Cossacks and peasants. This process in Left-Bank Ukraine was slowed down by the proximity of the steppes, where one could leave, escaping from captivity. The hetman and foreman, regimental clerks and judges invariably supported the claims of the landowners. The estate and national struggle merged in Ukraine among the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Cossack poor into a single whole.

After the Karlovitsky treaty of 1699 , by which the Ottoman Empire abandoned Podolia in favor of the Commonwealth, Warsaw decided, using a temporary alliance with the Russian kingdom, to crack down on Cossack autonomy on the Dnieper Right Bank. In June 1699, the Polish Sejm adopted a resolution on the liquidation within two weeks of Cossack regiments in the Kiev and Bratslav voivodships . The decision was motivated by the fact that after the end of the war with Turkey, the need to maintain Cossack regiments on the Right Bank disappeared.

Fulfilling the decision of the Sejm, on August 20, 1699, the crown hetman turned to punishment hetman Samuil Samus , and Colonels Semyon Gurko, Zakhar Iskra and Andrei Abazin with a station wagon, in which he demanded to dissolve the Cossack regiments. At the same time, he sent crown troops to the Right Bank in order to force the Cossacks to fulfill the decision of the Sejm. Crown troops strengthened the garrison of the fortified city of Nemirov , and also occupied the cities of Bar , Vinnitsa , the residence of the hetman Samusya and Bratslav , which housed the regimental office of Abazin. In Podillia, the nobility returned to their estates, renewing feudal duties and, first of all, corvee . Peasants and Cossacks, as well as the urban population, rallied in a common struggle for Right-Bank Ukraine. In response to the demand to leave Fastov, Colonel Paliy said that the power of the Commonwealth did not extend to Ukrainian lands, where only the hetman of the Cossack people had the right to dispose, and when the Polish government ordered the selection of military clinches from the punishing hetman Samus: a mace, a bunchuk , a seal and five guns , the hetman refused to give his attributes of power to representatives of the Polish administration and raised an uprising in Korsuni and Lysyanka, directing the anger of the local population at the local Polish gentry and at the top of the Jewish population I.

In the fall of 1699, in the Kiev region, in the area of ​​the White Church , Chernyakhov , Borodyanka and other cities, 12,000-strong Polish troops were stationed for winter apartments, which threatened to launch an attack on Fastov in the spring. Simon Paly also gathered his regiment and brought him into combat readiness. During the winter there were constant skirmishes of small detachments. Counting on a possible change in the international situation, the leaders of the Cossack regiments gathered new forces and at the same time resorted to negotiations with the crown hetman and regimentary of the Polish-gentry troops. At the same time, the Cossacks protested in Warsaw, but the Sejm rejected it. King August II, who was preparing for war with the Swedes, in a difficult situation of choosing between the threat of an uprising of Ukrainians in the far rear and the gentry rebellion in Poland, after some hesitation, supported the demand of the Sejm to dissolve the Cossacks and transfer the land to the Polish landowners. The gentry, who understood that the Cossacks would not leave the Kiev region and the Bratslav region, went to the Right Bank, accompanied by numerous militarized detachments of mercenaries.

The outbreak of the Northern War forced the Polish government to postpone the attack on Fastov, especially since Paly, at the request of the Polish king, sent a detachment of cavalry and infantry to participate in the war with Sweden . Nevertheless, in the fall of 1700 , the crown hetman Lubomirsky sent a four-thousandth army on a campaign against Fastov. However, during the year of military alarm in Ukraine, Cossack hundreds and residents of many surrounding cities and villages pulled up to Fastov. They fortified the fortress and prepared for its defense. The Polish army that approached the fortress was limited to setting fire to the posad, after which it was forced to retreat.

The victory near Fastov contributed to the activation of the liberation movement on the Right Bank. The national movement was closely intertwined with the aggravated class opposition. The rebellious masses fought against Polish rule, feudal and national oppression. The Cossack foreman, relying on the rich elite of the Cossacks, peasantry and philistinism, tried to use the liberation movement to strengthen her dominant position, to receive land wealth and feudal privileges from the tsarist government, which the left-bank foreman already enjoyed. Among the rebels there were many peasants from the Left Bank, Moldova , Wallachia , Poland, Belarus and Russia.

Given the centuries-old desire of the Russian government to take control of Western Russia and the hopes of the Orthodox population of the Right Bank for reunification with single-faith Russia, the leaders of the liberation movement hatched plans for the complete liberation of the Kiev and Bratslav regions from the power of the Commonwealth.

In the winter of 1702 , a Cossack Council was held in Fastov, where representatives of other classes of Little Russian society were traditionally invited - from the Orthodox gentry (among them the main role was played by D. Bratkovsky), philistines (along with others they were represented by the Mezhigorsky elder Yu. Kosovsky), the lower clergy (Clevan priest from Volyn Ivan). From the Cossack foreman, the hetman Samus, colonels of Spali, Iskra and Abazin acted on the council. The meeting decided to move to an offensive war against the gentry for the final liberation of the Right Bank from the rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as campaigning among the local population in order to gather forces for an anti-Polish uprising, capture the strong Polish fortress Bila Tserkva, declare during the uprising on unification with Left-Bank Ukraine and hold a unifying Cossack Council. The Council did not set itself the task of creating an independent Ukraine, but hoped to gain significant autonomy at the hand of the Russian Tsar.

Initial Successes of the Rebellion

In the first half of 1702, the Ukrainian national liberation movement, beginning with the uprisings in Boguslav and Korsun, swept the territories from Pripyat to the Dniester. The rebels set fire to the lords' estates, killed Poles and Jews. Peasant-Cossack uprisings began in the Kiev region, where there were Polish-gentry detachments, who arrived with the goal of crowding out the Cossack regiments and returning to the gentry the lands it had lost. In Podillia and the Bratslav region, insurgent groups were grouped around a Cossack regiment led by Abazin. Fastov turned into the main center of the struggle, which was headed by Semyon Paly.

In early August 1702, a detachment led by the punishable hetman Samus, headed south and on September 4 besieged the stronghold of the Commonwealth in Ukraine - the White Church. On September 7, Samus sent a station wagon to all Cossack elders from his camp near the White Church, in which he announced that he swore allegiance to the Little Russian people to be faithful to the Tsar’s blessed majesty and obey the hetman Mazepa . September 12, the first assault took place, which ended unsuccessfully. Leaving several thousand Cossacks led by Paly at the walls of the White Church, Samus, together with the main forces, went to the northern wooded part of the Kiev region to communicate with the Bratslav colonel Abazin, who had recently recaptured Bratslav and moved to Vinnitsa.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ruin under the command of Felix Casimir Potocki , which came out towards Sandomierz , hastily turned back and occupied Berdichev . On October 26, Cossacks Samus broke into Berdichev and massacred Poles and Jews there. Pototsky fled, and his defeated army dispersed. Samus occupied the Kiev region along the Ush river and threatened the borders of the Volyn and Podolsk voivodships .

Meanwhile, Colonel Abazin captured Vinnitsa, Bar, Dunaevtsy , and under Medzhibozh defeated a 1,500-strong detachment of Polish troops of the Kiev voivode. The rebels liberated Kotelnaya , Berdichev, Bykhov , Shargorod , Rashkov , Kalush , Zhvanets , Mogilev-Podolsky and other cities. Three thousand Zaporozhye Cossacks, led by Fyodor Shpak, acted in Transnistria , who not only cracked down on Catholics and Jews, but also sold them into slavery to the Crimean Tatars .

Meanwhile, Paly, after a long siege on November 10, took possession of the White Church, destroyed the garrison left in it, and transferred his residence there. After that, he occupied Korsun and Boguslav, having killed the Polish gonfalons who stood there and escaped under their protection by the gentry, entered the Bratslav Voivodeship and established himself in Uman . Numerous trophies fell into the hands of the rebels: 28 guns, 11 barrels of gunpowder, 2 barrels of sulfur, 6 thousand large and 10 thousand small cores, several grenades, lead, various military weapons, ammunition, supplies and so on. The fortified city of Nemirov was taken by the joint actions of the Cossacks Samusya and Abazin. After a three-day assault, the Cossacks were supported by the rebels against the Polish garrison, the townspeople, who provided for his surrender. 12 city cannons became the prey of the rebels. In January 1703, the detachment of Fyodor Shpak approached the walls of the Kamenetz-Podolsk fortress , but made no attempt to seize it.

The universals published by the leaders of the uprising called on the population to decisively fight the Poles to expel them from the Right Bank. The battles unfolded not only in the Bratslav and Podolsk voivodships, but even in Galicia and Volhynia. Peasant detachments appeared in the vicinity of Zolochev and Sokal . In a short time, the rebel army reached 5 thousand people. A big loss for the rebels was the arrest by the Poles in Volhynia of the author of numerous appeals to the Ukrainian people Daniil Bratkovsky. On November 25, he was convicted of treason by a military court, subjected to three degrees of torture, and beheaded on the market square in Lutsk .

At the end of November 1702, the penal hetman Samus and Cossack colonels Istra and Paly sent Mazepa a letter asking them to take the White Church under the authority of the king. However, the hetman Mazepa and the left-bank foreman were hostile to the new wave of anti-feudal and liberation movement on the Right Bank. They refused to provide military assistance to the Cossack regiments and tried to convince the government of Peter I not to accept the Right Bank as part of the Russian state. In December 1702, Peter I sent a letter to Samus and Paly with a proposal to free the conquered right-bank cities in favor of the Poles and take part in the war with the Swedes. In response, Paly reasonably remarked that if Fastov were left unprotected, then the Poles would ruin him immediately, and the Orthodox inhabitants would be killed.

Shlyakheti revenge in Right-Bank Ukraine

The liberation movement, which had become rampant, forced the Polish gentry to adopt a series of resolutions aimed at suppressing the uprising. The Polish-gentry punitive troops on the Right Bank were transferred under the command of the full hetman Adam Nikolai Senyavsky , who on December 4 ordered all units to gather for a campaign on the Right Bank in Berezhany . In January 1703, the 15,000th punitive army with 44 guns entered Podillia, where rebel forces did not exceed 12,000 and were scattered over a large territory. Polish officials turned to the Crimean Khan, the Russian Tsar and the Hetman Mazepa with a request to help with the suppression of the uprisings. Crimeans allocated a part of the Tatar cavalry, but the Russian government, playing the Little Russian card in relations with Augustus, preferred to remain neutral and prevent Mazepa from speaking.

The Poles approaching in winter took the Cossack units by surprise, which scattered around the winter apartments, and dealt them sensitive blows. The crown army and the Commonwealth movement captured Letichev , Bar, Vinnitsa, Novokonstantinov , Medzhibozh, Khmelnik . Near Starokonstantinov, the punitive army met a significant detachment of Cossacks and rebellious peasants, led by Samus. In a fierce battle, the rebels suffered heavy losses. The beaten hetman, along with the surviving units, went to the White Church. In January-February 1703, the rebels were driven out from Podillia. Their clear supporters were executed, and 70 thousand peasants, suspected of supporting the rebels, were cut off their left ear. The Polish courts on charges of rebellion sentenced to excruciating death on a stake of residents of entire villages, both guilty and right-wingers.

In the Bratslav region, the rebels tried to keep Nemirov, but after suffering several defeats in battles with superior enemy forces, they retreated to Bratslav and then to Ladyzhin , while losing guns taken out of the Nemirov fortress. In the decisive battle at Ladyzhin, a two-thousand detachment of Cossacks and rebel peasants under the command of Abazin was defeated. Having entered Ladyzhin, Polish troops executed 2 thousand of its inhabitants, not sparing women and children. Among others, a seriously wounded Colonel Abazin was imprisoned. Some of the rebels retreated to Moldova .

Rebel Attempts to Receive Russian Military-Diplomatic Assistance

March 18, 1703 Senyavsky in the wagon announced the suppression of the uprising. However, the main focus of the liberation movement - Kiev region, where significant peasant-Cossack forces under the leadership of Paliy, Samus and Iskra were stationed in the fortress cities of the White Church, Fastov, Korsun and Boguslav, remained unconquered. It was troubled in the territory of Volyn, Podolia and Bratslavschina.

In mid-February 1703, a well-known diplomat and general Johann Patkul visited the Senyavsky army camp from Vienna to Moscow, offering to reconcile the Cossacks with Poland, and then arrived in Bila Tserkva. Patkul invited Colonel Paly to conclude a truce with the Polish government for three months on the terms of the exchange of prisoners, the obligation to send Cossacks to participate in the war with the Swedes and to allow all exiles (including the gentry) to return to their estates. Paly rejected some of the proposals, and to the proposal of the diplomat to transfer the White Church to the gentry troops, Paly answered that he would do this immediately if he received a written order from the Russian tsar. Assessing the activity of Paly as beneficial for Moscow, Patkul accepted the Cossack point of view that the conflict on the Right Bank arose through the fault of the nobility and praised the leader of the Cossacks Semyon Paly. In March and May, 1703 Russian financial assistance was provided to right-bank Cossacks. As a result, in 1703, the rebels retained the White Church, Fastov, Boguslav, Korsun and were ready to continue the struggle.

At the beginning of 1704, Samus and Iskra arrived on the Left Bank in order to achieve their acceptance, together with the Cossack army and the population of the territory they occupied, under the protectorate of the Russian state, thus uniting Ukraine at the hands of Moscow. However, at the negotiations held in Baturin , the hetman Mazepa resolutely refused to help the right-bank Cossacks in this matter. Under pain of death, Mazepa forbade left-bank peasants and Cossacks to cross to the right bank of the Dnieper. The hetman sent denunciations to Palia in Moscow, accusing him of treason and relations with tycoons, supporters of Sweden. He repeatedly suggested that the tsarist government arrest the leaders of the uprising and crack down on the Cossacks, expelling them from the occupied fortresses.

The July Crisis of 1704 and the defeat of the rebellion

Lacking sufficient and reliable information about the situation in Right-Bank Ukraine, prompted by the demands of Mazepa and Augustus II, the Russian government decided to provide assistance to the rebel enemies. The rebels' hopes for the support of the Russian monarch and the involvement of Moscow in the Ukrainian-Polish conflict did not materialize. On March 2, 1704, Peter I ordered Pali to surrender immediately and transfer the White Church to the Poles by special letter. However, Paly did not comply with this requirement. The activity of partisan detachments in Volyn, in Polesie and in Galicia also intensified.

Meanwhile, in connection with the occupation of central Poland by the Swedish troops and the actual deposition of August II by the January Warsaw Diet, Peter I ordered the left-bank Cossack army to cross to the right bank of the Dnieper and begin the fight against the troops of Polish supporters of the Swedes together with the full hetman Senyavsky. In May 1704, Mazepa crossed the Dnieper with the Cossack army.

Samus, together with Paly and Iskra, joined the parts of Mazepa. On June 15, at a camp near Pavolochi, Samus handed Mazepa his regalia - a mace, a bunchuk and a royal station wagon for hetman, in return receiving the post of colonel of the Boguslavsky regiment and two hundred Cossacks. Paly handed over to the White Church to Mazepa without attack, and he attacked and stormed Nemirov, where in July there was an anti-slander rebellion.

The arrival of the left-bank forces and the fall of Nemirov served as a signal for a new general uprising in Podolia and Bratslav. July 1704 was critical for the fate of not only the uprising, but also for the future of the entire Right-Bank Ukraine. On July 2, dual power reigned in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - in contrast to Russia's ally in the Northern War, King Augustus II, the pro-Swedish part of the Polish gentry elected governor Stanislav Leshchinsky as his king. A significant part of Poland was under Swedish occupation, there was no central government, and the nobility was demoralized. The uprising received solid chances for the successful completion and liberation of Right-Bank Ukraine from under Polish rule.

Taken aback by the upsurge of the popular movement, Mazepa issued a wagon to the gentry of the Kiev Voivodeship on July 12, 1704, in which he stated that the left-bank Cossacks did not come to support the uprisings, but solely to help the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the fight against the Swedes and their accomplices. Hetman demanded that the peasants put an end to the uprising and threatened them with reprisal.

In the evening of July 31, 1704, Simon Paliy, who was with a small detachment in the camp of the Cossack army near Berdichev, was arrested by order of Mazepa. The hetman sent a large detachment of Serdyukov and companions to ensure control of the White Church, which was a garrison of several hundred right-bank Cossacks. Hetman troops also entered Fastov, Korsun and Bohuslav. The fortified city of Nemirov hetman ordered the transfer to the Polish garrison. The unambiguous pro-blasphemous policy of the representative of the Russian government and the fall of all strongholds forced the rebels to immediately stop fighting.

On August 30, 1704, Peter and August concluded a new union treaty, and Augustus acted not only as the sovereign of Saxony , but also on behalf of the Commonwealth. The allies pledged to fight against the Swedish king, on land and at sea until complete victory without concluding separate treaties with the enemy, which, however, did not prevent Augustus from concluding the Altranstad peace with the Swedes two years later. A separate article of the treaty, Peter I undertook to force the Cossacks Palia to stop the struggle against Poland and return the cities he had taken. The Livonian cities and fortresses subjugated by the Russian army, the king promised to cede the Commonwealth. The tsar also promised to transfer 12 thousand troops under the command of the Polish king and pledged to pay 200 thousand rubles a year to maintain the Polish army before the war ended.

The unfavorable historical conditions and the class solidarity of the Polish gentry, the left-bank and right-bank Cossack foreman, as well as the Russian government led to the defeat of the uprising in the fight against the overwhelming military superiority of its opponents.

Leaving the three thousandth detachment of Cossacks on the Right Bank, at the end of October 1704, Mazepa with regiments returned to the Left Bank. Paly spent almost a year in the prison of the Baturin fortress. In June 1705 he was sent to Moscow in custody. Having eliminated the competitor, Mazepa tried to secure the right-bank lands by organizing seven Cossack regiments there. The Umansky, Chigirinsky and Mogilevsky regiments joined the existing Korsunsky, Belotserkovsky, Boguslavsky and Bratslavsky regiments. Mazepa appointed his elders in the right-bank cities, took control of the development of trade, and launched an active policy of enslaving the peasantry, distributing land between representatives of the local Cossack administration, Orthodox monasteries and gentry, not forgetting about their own interests.

The Polish landowners, who crushed Mazepa with the connivance of the shortsighted Russian government, the peasant-Cossack uprising, also immediately strengthened the policy of enslaving the peasantry on the lands of Right-Bank Ukraine. So the decree of the nobility of the Podolsk Voivodeship of December 4, 1704 stated that free peasants, who had been on the land of the pan for three years, became hereditary serfs of this pan. As a result, Mazepa, incredibly rich in campaigns, received up to 100 thousand serfs on both sides of the Dnieper. Hetman, who won an unlimited credit of trust of Peter I and Augustus II, got the opportunity to conduct an independent adventurous policy. Playing on the contradictions of the warring powers, he struck up a secret relationship, first with Leshchinsky, and then with Charles XII , Ahmed III and the Crimean khans.

Semyon Paliya was exiled to Siberia on July 30, 1705 , first to Verkhoturye , then to Tobolsk , where he remained until the end of 1708 , when Mazepa's explicit transition to the side of Charles XII opened the eyes of Peter I to the anti-Russian orientation of the left-bank hetman. However, participation in the defeat of "Palievshchina" played a nasty joke with the hetman himself. It led to popular distrust of his politics and the lack of interest in Ukraine in the uprising, which Mazepa tried to raise in 1708 in support of the Swedish campaign against Russia. Under the Adrianople Peace Treaty of 1713, Russia accepted the obligation to refuse interference in the internal affairs of the Commonwealth and Zaporizhzhya Sich . Ukraine remained divided in two between a growing Russian and a weakening Polish eagle.

Guided by class solidarity, the Russian government and Peter I showed themselves in an episode of "Paleyism" in a limited and short-sighted way. They overestimated the military and political importance of the help of Polish magnates, who provided Russia with dubious services in the Northern War. Participation in the suppression of the Ukrainian peasant-Cossack movement, which counted on the help of Moscow, caused significant damage to the Orthodox Ukrainian population of the Dnieper Right Bank, left for 90 years living in conditions of national and religious oppression as a colony of the Catholic Commonwealth, when even incomplete Cossack autonomy on these lands has been eliminated.

• Chukhlib T. Kozatska Volnitsa Seeds Palіya pіd at a glance of a single-headed and two-headed eagle // Win same. Kozaki and monarchs. The International Vidnosini of the Early Modern Ukrainian State. - K., 2009