Book Description
No period in Bohdan Khmelnytsky's hetmancy was as rich in international and dynastic plans as the years 1650 to 1653. After the Zboriv Agreement of 1649, when the hetman resolved to find a way to break forever with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he set out to create the military and political conditions to achieve his goal. From Venice to Moscow the wily hetman spun his diplomatic and military plans. In his search for allies and in pursuit of his goal of establishing a political system that secured the Ukrainian Hetmanate, he looked above all to the Ottomans and their Danubian vassal states. Fusing the interests of his new state to those of his own family, the hetman aspired to found a new dynasty by marrying his son into the ruling house of Moldavia. And as Khmelnytsky was pursing these goals and aspirations, the Cossacks’ military victories and defeats were shaping the fate of a new Ukraine. The book also covers the dramatic development of Ukrainian-Moldavian relations in the years 1650–53, beginning with the Cossacks’ victorious campaign against Moldavia. The period witnessed the marriage of Tymish Khmelnytsky to Roksanda Lupu, the daughter of the Moldavian hospodar, and it ended with Tymish's tragic death during the siege of Suceava by allied Polish, Wallachian, and Moldavian forces—a major blow not only to Khmelnytsky's policy in the Danube region, but also to his dynastic aspirations. In covering these events, Hrushevsky again proved himself an outstanding researcher with scrupulous attention to detail. His portrait of Tymish, whom Bohdan Khmelnytsky was grooming to become his successor, remains the most complete in the literature. The book concludes on the eve of the Battle of Zhvanets (1653) and the Pereiaslav Council of 1654, events crucial to the future of Ukraine. It includes an extensive historical introduction, a full bibliography of the sources used by Hrushevsky, 3 maps, and an index. Preparation of the manuscript has been generously sponsored by Mrs. Sofiia Wojtyna of Hamilton, Ontario, in memory of Vasyl Bilash, Mykhailo Charkivsky, and Mykhailo Wojtyna.

About the Author
Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1866–1934) was Ukraine's greatest historian. His academic career began at Kyiv University, where in 1890 he graduated from the Department of History and Philology. Appointed professor of history at Lviv University in 1894, he became a leading figure in the Shevchenko Scientific Society and in the scholarly and cultural community centered in Lviv. In 1918, he was head of the government of the independent Ukrainian republic. From 1924 to 1931, in Kyiv, he organized historical studies at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. An extraordinarily prolific writer, he produced some 2,000 scholarly works. His magnum opus, the Istoriia Ukraïny-Rusy (History of Ukraine-Rus'), appeared between 1898 and 1937. These ten published volumes (in eleven books) trace Ukrainian history from the earliest times to the post-Khmelnytsky era in the late 1650s. The History was internationally acclaimed at the time of its publication, but in Soviet Ukraine after the 1930s no scholarly references to it were permitted to appear. Attempts in the 1960s to "rehabilitate" Hrushevsky and his works failed, and it was only in the late 1980s that the Ukrainian public began to regain access to the History. About the Translator Dr. Bohdan Struminski (1930–98) was a distinguished Slavic linguist and translator of early modern Ukrainian texts. Born in Bialystik, Poland, Dr. Struminksi studied Polish and Ukrainian philology at the University of Warsaw. In 1975 he was invited to teach at Harvard University. Dr. Struminski is the author of Pseudo Melesko: A Ukrainian Apocryphal Speech of 1615–1618, Linguistic Interrelations in Early Rus': Northmen, Finns, and East Slavs (Ninth to Eleventh Centuries), and the translator of Lev Krevza's Defense of Church Unity (1617) and Zaxarija Kopystens'kyj's Palinodia or Book of Defense of the Holy Apostolic Eastern Catholic Church and Holy Patriarchs' (1620–1623). His final work was the translation Mykhailo Hrushevsky's History of Ukraine-Rus', volume seven The Cossack Age, 1600–1625.