The Bells of Klevan′: Was the Polish-Lithuanian Rule in Rus′ a Form of Colonial Oppression?

By Tomasz Hen-Konarski

Klevan′ is a small town not far from Rivne. In the late eighteenth century, Klevan′ lay within the borders of the Volhynian Palatinate in Poland-Lithuania. It was a private property of the Princes Chortoryis′kyi (Czartoryski in Polish), an old Lithuanian-Ruthenian family that had become one of the most powerful houses of the eighteenth-century Commonwealth. Spending most of their time in Warsaw or in countryside palaces in more convenient locations, the owners of Klevan′ were absentee lords. Even though they still liked to emphasise their Ruthenian pedigree, they would be very surprised to see their family name rendered in a Ukrainian form in an English-language text. By the 1780s, the Chortoryis′kyi were indistinguishable from other magnates of the Commonwealth: Polish- and French-speaking Latin Catholics who looked to West European capitals for cultural and intellectual inspiration. Klevan′, in turn, was a sleepy town, located far from the centres of power and main channels of communication. Its petty burghers were mostly Ruthenian-speaking Uniates, although Latin Catholics and Jews were also present.

One day in June 1789, the inhabitants of Klevan′ were alerted by the bells of their church. Their mayor was calling for help: a detachment of Poland-Lithuania’s National Cavalry had invaded his house to rape his daughter. The mayor failed to save her, the only result of his desperate resort to church bells was that the soldiers severely beat him in retribution. Yet, the story did not end there. On 19 June, a report reached the Commission of Order in Lutsk, Volhynia’s emergency authority established a few months before. According to that account, Father Illia Husakovs′kyi (Eliasz Husakowski), a Uniate dean based in Klevan′, had rung the bells to summon his Ruthenian parishioners to their church, where they would allegedly plot something ominous against the Latin Catholics. Luckily for Father Husakovs′kyi, his friend Felicjan Dąbrowski was present at that meeting of the Commission of Order and he immediately offered to ride to Klevan′ to find out what had happened there. Two days later, Dąbrowski was back in Lutsk bringing the news of the assault on the mayor’s daughter, additionally explaining that Father Husakovs′kyi had been out of town for two weeks, visiting his relatives in the Kremenets′ area.

We know of this episode from only one account, which means that many important details are missing, for example we cannot be sure where the bells used by the mayor were located: at the Latin Catholic church, at the Uniate one, or maybe at the town hall? Similarly, it is not even clear who exactly was Ruthenian and who was Latin in that story. Although we cannot cross-examine this story with the help of other sources, it fits very well in the overall context of what was happening in the Ruthenian Palatinates of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth throughout 1789. As the Diet in Warsaw shook off Catherine II’s constitutional “guarantees” and embarked upon a path of Enlightenment reform, there started to spread rumours that Russian agents, posing as peddlers and sutlers, were inciting a rebellion of Ruthenian peasants. These fears, harking back to the koliivshchyna, a disastrous Ruthenian jacquerie of 1768, resulted in a veritable moral panic among the Latin Catholic nobility of the region. Emergency Commissions of Order were elected by the local noblemen to deal with the grave matter, hundreds of noble families escaped their manors, while scores of Ruthenian peasants and Uniate priests were arrested and tried on the basis of conspicuously thin evidence. In fact, one of them was Father Illia Husakovs′kyi, eventually acquitted and released on 28 May 1789, after five weeks of pre-trial detention. Others were less lucky: several random priests, peasants, and peddlers were found guilty of preparing a rebellion and executed. Whatever actually happened in Klevan′ in June 1789, it is clear that the Ruthenian Palatinates constituted a space of exception where the Polish-Lithuanian cavalrymen could easily harass civilians and go unpunished.

This is no place to recount that fascinating period of Polish-Lithuanian history in detail. We can note, however, that it does bring into relief several important aspects of our knowledge about the Commonwealth’s rule in its Ruthenian Palatinates: i) most importantly, the persistence of mutual distrust between the Latin Catholic Poles and the Eastern Christian (Uniate or Orthodox) Ruthenians; ii) the widespread violence and inequalities resulting from and unequivocally coloured by the Polish-Ruthenian divide; iii) the paradoxical position of the predominantly Latin Catholic nobles of the region, usually identifying themselves as Ruthenians but at the same time fearful of their Ruthenians peasants; iv) the intimate closeness of some individuals and the irreducible variety of social situations (think of Father Husakovs′kyi’s friendship with the nobleman Dąbrowski, who went to great lengths to save him from prosecution); v) the complex and fragmentary character of historical evidence, foiling our attempts to establish a clear and certain sequence of facts.

“Decolonisation” has become one of the most popular buzzwords in the field of Ukrainian history. Many historians and social scientists will easily recognise in my account of the bells ringing over Klevan′ the broad outlines of a situation that we could label “colonial domination”. Should we adopt this vocabulary and conceptualise the Polish-Lithuanian rule in its Ruthenian Palatinates as a form of colonial oppression? How would this help us to understand the complex realities on the ground or to grasp the bigger picture of the Commonwealth as a whole?

Several scholars, Poles, Ukrainians, and others, readily use the (post)colonial analytical framework, while others reject it with vehemence suggesting that for them much more is at stake than a purely academic analysis of a society long past. Those arguing that the Polish-Lithuanian rule over Rus′ was of colonial, or at least colonial-like, character tend to offer a clear-cut contrast between the Polish-Lithuanian nobility as a ruling class and the Ruthenian peasantry as its oppressed subalterns. Scholars of this persuasion relish in analogies with the French and British Empire building in countries such as India or Algeria. They note that Latin Catholic nobles could employ confessional and other cultural differences to justify their exploitation of Eastern Christian peasants in a manner resembling that in which the West European entrepreneurs justified the enslavement of Black Africans with the help of racism. In this context, they also argue that the selfish Polish-Lithuanian nobles constituted a sort of comprador elite, happily accepting that their country had been reduced to a position of West’s informal colony specialised in exporting cheap grain and timber (produced by the enserfed peasantry).

The critics of this approach counter that such comparisons amount to distorting oversimplifications. They point out that the noble elites of the Commonwealth not only included numerous Ruthenian magnates but also welcomed the upward mobility of Ruthenians of more modest means; that neither the commoners nor the nobles were monolithic blocks in terms of socio-economic status and ethnicity; that the East European serfdom, although deplorable, was still a far cry from the obscene crimes of the Atlantic chattel slavery; that similarities between the nineteenth-century maritime empires and an early modern composite polity must, by the very nature of things, be very superficial; and that, on the whole, this (post)colonial talk is yet another methodological fad that only gives its practitioners the pleasant sense of being more “Western”, but does not really add anything substantial to our understanding of the past.

There is much merit in each of these critical points, but at the same time one cannot fail to notice the surprising emotionality of some negative reactions to the (post)colonial framework, indicating that this debate also strikes another chord: several historians, especially Polish ones, seem to take deep offence at the very possibility of the (post)colonial analysis of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This showcases again the way in which history is inextricable from memory, even for many academics. Although on the surface, it is a rather technical discussion about the scholarly usefulness and accuracy of a certain interpretive model, in actual fact many of us treat it as a jury trial with the early modern Polish-Lithuanian elites accused of stranding their polity on the wrong side of history. The real, albeit seldom articulated, questions seem to be the following: Was the Commonwealth great or evil? Should we be proud or ashamed of it? Who shall identify with the early modern Poland-Lithuania: only Poles or perhaps also Belarusians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians?

I believe that, in our capacity as scholars, we cannot provide answers to such problems, because they have little to do with the academic discipline of history. This does not mean that people cannot, or should not, ask them, but we need to be aware that they belong to another order of things. Every concerned and reflective citizen can ponder upon the evidence provided by professional historians and then formulate their own assessment. In this context, our role as academics is auxiliary, namely to mine and explain the relevant evidence to the broader public. When necessary, we need to be ready to defend the integrity of our argument against factual distortions, but I find it profoundly problematic when professional scholars try to use their academic authority, their metaphorical “lab coat”, to tell their fellow-citizens how they should feel about the memory of their community. It is even worse when someone tries to intervene in the memory of a community to which they do not belong.

This brings us to another interesting aspect of the ongoing discussions on Poland-Lithuania. They take place in more than one country, in several communities of scholars that are not completely isolated from each other but nevertheless remain autonomous environments, each having its internal dynamic. Whereas Polish elites treat the pre-1795 polity as “ye old Poland,” usually talking about it with the help of pronouns “we,” “us,” and “our,” Ukrainians used to have a much less positive attitude, harking back to the work of the nineteenth-century narodnyk historians and activists. Those scholars did not hesitate to characterise the Commonwealth as a vehicle for Polish colonial oppression in Rus′ and for many decades their opinions on this topic remained the order of the day among the Ukrainian intelligentsia.

The situation started to change in the 1990s when Natalia Iakovenko, an eminent historian based in Kyiv, initiated a process that could be described as a historiographical Ukrainisation of the Commonwealth. Since then, there has emerged a whole cohort of excellent Ukrainian scholars who present Poland-Lithuania as a loose nobiliary republic, in which the Ruthenian nobles felt perfectly at home, and consequently saw it as their fatherland (today, Nataliia Starchenko is probably the most visible champion of this current). In this reading, the Khmel′nyts′kyi Uprising of 1648 was not so much a national war of liberation as rather a civil war within the bosom of the Commonwealth’s Rus′. Although the debate on the alleged Polish-Lithuanian colonialism is not central to the work of these historians, their findings have a direct and self-evident bearing on it. Nevertheless, we must not ignore that the motivations of Ukrainian Commonwealth lovers are quite different from those of their Polish counterparts: whereas most of the latter continue to conceptualise the old Poland-Lithuania as, first and foremost, Poland (but note Andrzej Sulima Kamiński’s tireless efforts in the opposite direction), the former aim to rescue the sense of Ukrainian-Ruthenian subjectivity and effective agency in the early modern period. In this way, they strive to overcome the curse of a “non-historical” stateless peasant nationality and document the continuity between the early modern nobiliary elites, on the one hand, and the nineteenth-century national movement, on the other. The high quality of their original research speaks for itself.

Does all of this mean that the nineteenth-century titans of narodnyk scholarship were completely wrong? Did Mykola Kostomarov, Volodymyr Antonovych, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and Mykhailo Hrushevs′kyi deliberately misrepresent historical evidence and social realities around them? Of course, they had their prejudices (as we all do): it is especially visible in their one-sided treatment of the Jesuit Order. Yet on the whole, they were outstanding scholars and thinkers and we should think twice before dismissing their contributions. Nineteenth-century narodnyk historians tried to offer a holistic view of the historical development of the Polish-Lithuanian rule in Rus′. In practice, this meant that they privileged in their analyses the end result, namely the social configuration of their own time, in which the mass of Ukrainian-Ruthenian commoners found itself in a structural conflict with the Polish-Lithuanian noble landowners and their henchmen recruited from among the petty landless nobility and Jewish burghers. Those scholars were perfectly aware that the Polish-Lithuanian noble families of their region had Ruthenian roots, but they argued that in the second half of the nineteenth century this was a mere genealogical fun fact, because they had already become Poles for all practical purposes. Having adopted a foreign culture and basing their privileged position on an unfair and backward socio-economic order (serfdom), the landowners stymied the civilizational development of the Ruthenian-Ukrainian people. Looking from a long-term perspective, Ukrainian narodnyk intellectuals cast the Polish-Lithuanian political order as one of the main historical culprits of the sorry state of affairs, against which they struggled.

In the twenty-first century, we must not swallow the narodnyk vision of history without critical consideration, as there is much in it that begs problematisation: most importantly, its unilineal teleology and its all too neat “us vs. them” logic. This is why the fantastic work of contemporary Ukrainian students of the early modern Commonwealth proves of such critical value. But we also need to appreciate that the narodnyk interpretation of the past stems from very real social issues and painful lived experiences of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century actors. No matter how alluring we find the decentralised governance of the Commonwealth’s Rus′ from the 1560s through the 1640s, we cannot shun the well-documented fact that by the early 1860s the bulk of the Ruthenian-Ukrainian peasantry treated the idea of restoring an independent Poland-Lithuania with indifference, if not outright hostility. It would require additional intellectual acrobatics to deny that this situation resulted from two centuries of serious tensions, sometimes erupting into bloodbaths, that pitted a privileged class identifying with the political ideal of a Free Poland and its empowered noble citizenry against a mass of subalterns identifying with the ideal of a Holy Rus′ and its equally empowered free Cossackdom. The clash of these two mythologies is one of the key reasons why Polish national projects never stood a chance among the Ruthenian-Ukrainian masses of the former Commonwealth.

So what are the takeaways from this cursory overview? Firstly, we can see here that there are always some hidden costs of importing a scholarly concept from one academic context to another. In social sciences and humanities, analytical tools are, in the final analysis, figures of speech. To fully grasp their meaning one needs to have a firm command of the language, in which they were originally formulated, including broad knowledge of the cultural and historical nuance. A metaphor grafted into a new environment starts interacting with it in ways that could not be foreseen in its place of origin: it changes its meaning, although initially the change may be barely perceptible. When we talk and think about “colonialism” with regard to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, it cannot produce the same results as the ones achieved in the study of the overseas empires created by West Europeans. This does not mean that we should never reflect upon such analogies, as this would imply that Poland-Lithuania was somehow fundamentally different from the rest of Europe, leading us to unwittingly reproduce Frederick II’s vilification of the “Polish Iroquois”. But we should be careful not to treat “colonialism” (or any other such term) as a ready-made solution. Comparisons with West European colonial powers (or those from other geographical and chronological contexts) should help us to see both similarities and differences. No historical comparison must be an end in itself but rather a conversation starter allowing us to articulate diverse facets of the phenomena we are exploring.

Secondly, we must continue reflecting upon the extent to which the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth should be presented as a Polish state, an older version of our contemporary Poland or, alternatively, as a joint venture of several nobiliary nations: Lithuanians, Livonians, Poles, Prussians, and Ruthenians. There is no easy answer to this question, not only because the available historical evidence is extremely rich, multifaceted, dynamic, and sometimes contradictory, but more importantly because it brings together two planes of understanding: that of the scholarly knowledge about the past, traditionally called history, with that of contemporary community-building, usually referred to as memory. All the doubts and reservations of professional historians notwithstanding, contemporary Polish elites take it for granted that they are direct inheritors of the Polish-Lithuanian political culture, even those (or perhaps especially those) who denounce it as a negative legacy. This “imagined lineage” is a social fact that we cannot ignore.

Lastly, we must acknowledge the complexity of early modern Poland-Lithuania, both synchronically and diachronically (1560s through 1790s, if not even 1860s). Although some privileged Ruthenians remained fiercely loyal towards the Commonwealth till the very end of its independent existence (and even beyond), it cannot be denied that as a whole the Polish-Lithuanian polity had evolved in a way that relegated some key elements of the Ruthenian culture, such as language and religious rite, to the position of the ethno-confessional otherness, always tolerated but also vilified as benighted and half-savage. If we disregard these differences and inequalities, it will be much more difficult to understand the dynamic of Polish and Ukrainian nation building in the nineteenth century. Granted, Poland-Lithuania’s Ruthenian Palatinates were not necessarily very similar to l’Algérie française of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but perhaps a comparison with the post-1542 Ireland with its ruthless domination of Anglo-Irish Protestants over disenfranchised Irish Catholics would not be completely out of place. Whether we want to call it colonialism or not, we must admit that the Enlightened Commonwealth of 1789 could be a very cruel and unfair mother to her Ruthenian children. Father Illia Husakovs′kyi and the daughter of the mayor of Klevan′ would surely tell something about it.

Even though we do not have any convincing evidence that Ruthenian peasants and priests were plotting something ominous against the nobility in 1789, we should understand that the panic of the latter was not completely irrational: only two decades earlier such a rebellion had actually taken place claiming thousands of human lives. Already in eighteenth-century sources its death toll was inflated to 200,000, which is completely unrealistic, but it shows us very well that contemporaries experienced it as a catastrophe of apocalyptic dimensions. There can be no doubt the Polish-Ruthenian imbalance of power and the conflicts resulting from it constituted a real and persistent threat to the peace of early modern Poland-Lithuania.

The Polish-Lithuanian rule over Rus′ was no colonial regime sensu stricto and there are serious reasons to question the usefulness of the (post)colonial vocabulary for the analysis of the Commonwealth. Yet, acknowledging such reservations should not result in whitewashing the glaring injustices or concealing the obvious failures of the early modern Poland-Lithuania and its self-proclaimed successors among the nineteenth-century landed nobility.

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About the Author

Dr. Tomasz Hen-Konarski is a researcher at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (IH PAN). He holds a Magister degree from the University of Warsaw and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (2017). Apart from Florence and Warsaw, he either studied or taught in Bielefeld, Budapest, London, Lviv, and Vienna. His research interests include: Polish and Ukrainian nation building in Galicia, Catholic Enlightenment, and the Greek Catholic Church as a political institution of the Austrian Monarchy.

Tomasz is a member of three research teams: Adam Kożuchowski’s “Polish Socio-Political Concepts of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century” at IH PAN in Warsaw (2021-2025, funded by Poland’s NCN), András Fejérdy’s “Negotiating Sovereignty: Challenges of Secularism and Nation Building in Central Eastern Europe since 1780” at the Research Centre for the Humanities in Budapest (2022-2027, funded by ERC), and the Ukrainian History Global Initiative (2024-2027). He published his work on Austrian, Polish, and Ukrainian topics in Acta Poloniae Historica, Austrian History Yearbook, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, European History Quarterly, and Kwartalnik Historyczny. He serves also as one of the convenors of the Assemani Seminar for Eastern Catholic History.

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Other recent articles in the TRAFO series Rethinking East European Studies in Times of Upheaval:

Olena Komar, An Angry Ukrainian Syndrome: Stereotypes About War, Peace, and Injustice, 10 September 2024

Julia Buyskykh, Enduring Through Liminality: Across and Beyond the Borders of Eastern Europe in the Wartime, 13 August 2024

Lidia Kuzemska, In Search of Stability and Purpose: Ukrainian (Displaced) Researchers in Germany, 29 July 2024

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Citation: Tomasz Hen-Konarski, The Bells of Klevan′: Was the Polish-Lithuanian Rule in Rus′ a Form of Colonial Oppression?, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 15.10.2024, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/53314

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