Pereiaslav Council (1654)

The Tsardom of Muscovy exploited the critical position of the Hetmanate to impose a format of subordination, refusing from the outset to take on symmetrical obligations. To the Cossacks' demand for a mutual oath the tsar's envoy answered with a refusal - by the embassy's own report, swearing on behalf of the sovereign was "a thing that has never happened and never will, and it is unbecoming for the hetman even to say such things, for every subject must swear to his sovereign"^[3]; Khmelnytsky had to convene the council three times in a single day, 18 (8) January 1654, yet Buturlin, citing the autocratic character of the Russian monarch's power, refused a second time^[1]. The "treaty" itself was not a bilateral act: "The originals of the treaty documents have not survived. Only their copies and drafts are known"; the Ukrainian side submitted its terms "in the form of petitions to the tsar," while "the acts of the tsarist government took the form of 'grants' from the tsar"^[4] - the written terms were drawn up only in Moscow in March 1654.

The seizure of a neighboring state's territories was presented to the population of the Tsardom of Muscovy not as an act of political or military expansion, but as a sacred mission of protecting brothers in faith. This myth outlived the centuries: as late as 1990 Solzhenitsyn reproduced it verbatim – "The return of these lands to Russia was then perceived by everyone as REUNIFICATION"^[5].

From the very beginning, Moscow laid an asymmetric foundation for the relationship, harshly cutting off the autonomy's international agency. Tsar Aleksei's charter (27 March 1654) directly restricted the hetman's foreign relations: "And with the Turkish sultan and the Polish king, without our tsarist majesty's decree, no relations are to be maintained"^[2].