Pereiaslav, the treaty that started modern Russo-Ukrainian history
In January 1654, in the town of Pereiaslav in modern-day Ukraine, leaders of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks pledged allegiance to Muscovite (Russian) Tsar Alexei I in exchange for his protection against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
While Soviet and Russian historiography has presented the event as the “reunification of the Rus” and proof of perpetual affinity between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy takes a wholly different view.
Pereiaslav’s impact has rippled through centuries, representing a very different legacy for both nations.
For Russia, the treaty has played a crucial role in its imperial narratives about the Russo-Ukrainian “historical unity.”
Plokhy retorts, however, that rather than a unification of one “Rus nation,” it was the beginning of the shared history of Ukrainians and the Russians, two separate peoples that have, since the fall of Kyivan Rus, evolved in a wholly different political and cultural milieu.
For Ukraine, it was the start of a painful story that ended in Ukraine’s subjugation by Moscow. What began as a pragmatic alliance against Poland ended up in Russia completely dissolving the hetmanate a century later.
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Pereiaslav, the treaty that started modern Russo-Ukrainian history
In late April 2024, in central Kyiv, heavy cranes began dismantling a sculpture erected to commemorate 17th-century Pereiaslav Treaty between the Cossacks and Muscovites, symbolically closing a chapter of a shared history.
It was the very same agreement…
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