Uprising on the Right Bank or Koliivshchyna
At any stories There are reasons and very deep roots. The problems of Little Russian-Polish relations have been going on since Andrusov, since 1667. According to the truce concluded there, Little Russia was divided along the Dnieper - that which was to the west remained with the Poles, that which was to the east became a territory with broad autonomy as part of the Russian kingdom. Somehow it so happened that in the Left Bank Hetmanate it was quieter, calmer, freer and more satisfying, but on the Right Bank ... Throughout the end of the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries, Poland was in agony, the model of governance that existed there turned the state into something amorphous and anarchist. Neighbors began to look at this territory with unhealthy interest, and the people themselves were not enthusiastic about what was happening. As a result, the protege of Russia, Stanislav August Poniatowski, was elected king of Poland. This caused indignation among some of the gentry and magnates, and away we go.
Bar Confederation
The new Polish king, feeling the power of Russia behind him, decided on a terrible thing - to strengthen the central government at the expense of the magnates and the gentry. It is clear that the answer was a riot, a number of magnates with private armies gathered in the city of Bar in the Vinnitsa region and created a confederation. The rebellion is rather strange, in fact against the king, but officially against Russia, in order to stop the reforms, but the dissidents were the first to suffer. So in the Commonwealth they called those who were not Catholics. And the Confederates struck the first blow against them - priests were killed and imprisoned, people were tortured, villages and towns were devastated ... On a wave of atrocities, Koliivshchina was born, a phenomenon no less terrible than Polish punitive actions.
Different opinions
“The largest specialist in the history of memory Y. Yerushalmi notes that all the events of the mass murder of Jews in Ukraine during the uprising of B. Khmelnitsky and Koliyivshchyna are equated in Jewish sources with similar events of previous periods. In particular, to the pogroms after the first crusade.
And the Jews have a right to it, the massacre in Uman was terrible. The Poles also have their own opinion:
“For the Polish tradition, Uman has also become the main and practically the only place of memory associated with the Koliyiv region. Just as in Jewish historical memory, the Haidamak uprising for the Poles is, first of all, a terrible tragedy, a symbol of martyrdom.”
And among the Ukrainians, for whose historians this is a national liberation uprising without any semitones. The reality was more prosaic and scary. Economic oppression, multiplied by religious and national oppression, bore fruit - the people were terribly embittered, and the outright massacre that the Confederates staged on the Right Bank became the trigger. Hope for success was given by Russia's intervention in Polish affairs, and it flared up.
Leaders
There were two of them - Ivan Gonta, a court Cossack who joined the rebels in Uman and Maxim Zaliznyak, also a Cossack, but Zaporozhye. From the age of 15 in the Sich, he gathered a small detachment of Haidamak rebels and declared that he had a letter from Catherine II calling for an uprising and extermination of Poles and Jews. It flared up almost instantly, and soon the rebels approached the town of Uman. It was there that the local Cossacks, in the service of the magnate Potocki, went over to the side of the Haidamaks, and the city was taken. Then the horror began:
“... when the Haidamaks broke into the city, they first of all rushed at the Jews, who were rushing about in terror through the streets: they were brutally killed, trampled under the hooves of horses, thrown from the roofs of high buildings; children were lifted to the ends of peaks, women were tortured. A mass of Jews, numbering up to three thousand people, locked themselves in a large synagogue. The Gaidamaks put a cannon to the synagogue doors, the doors were blown up, the robbers entered the synagogue and turned it into a slaughterhouse... Having done away with the Jews, the Gaidamaks turned to the Poles; many they slaughtered in the church; the governor and all the other pans were killed. The streets of the city were littered with corpses or mutilated, unfinished people. About twenty thousand Poles and Jews died during this Uman massacre.
Justice for, no different from what the Confederates did a little earlier. According to Zaliznyak, the rebels were forced to leave the city because of the abundance of corpses. It is clear that St. Petersburg did not want to help the Haidamaks even before, and even after that it did not want doubly. Moreover, the scattered Haidamaks attacked the Ottoman Empire:
“After the capture of Uman, Maxim Zaliznyak sent a detachment of the centurion Vasily Shilo to the Polish-Turkish border, to the border with the Khan's Edisan to the Balta in Paliyevo Lake. 500 confederates were hiding there, who were just waiting for the help of the Crimean Tatars. The rebels attacked Paliyevo Lake. Fleeing, the Confederates crossed the Kodyma River and hid in the Turkish town of Balta. Vasily Shilo demanded from the Turkish commandant of the city Yakub-aga to extradite the Poles, but he refused. The Gaidamaks attacked Balta and slaughtered the non-Orthodox population.”
And their statements that they were acting on behalf of Russia led directly to war. It was not difficult to predict what happened next, Russian troops entered the Right Bank, dispersed the Gaidamaks and captured Gonta and Zaliznyak. The first, as a foreigner, was given to the Poles, Zaliznyak himself was exiled to Siberia. They did not beat him with a whip, they did not pull out his nostrils, in this part the sentence was never executed. The Russian-Turkish war began. Relative peace reigned in the Commonwealth, the Russian regiments, like that forester, came and dispersed everyone.
The question remains - what was it? And if we look for answers in national myths, then we will get anything but the truth. And the truth is that a peasant uprising of illiterate and embittered people broke out, without any special goals, not considering revenge for everything. And in the end, everything ended in tragedy for the Poles and Jews, and for the Ukrainians. A tragedy that must be remembered, because the world is fragile, and national contradictions are often resolved with great bloodshed, and in the end there is no one to blame, everyone has their own truth.
Information