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The Making of Modern Ukraine, Class 9. Polish Power and Cossack Revolution (1)

Class 9. Polish Power and Cossack Revolution (1)

- Okay, greetings everybody, happy Tuesday.

You have an exam, not this Thursday,

but the one after that.

It will be a 50 minute exam in this space.

You will have blue books.

Very exciting.

The TFs and I are gonna remember to get blue books.

And if you have an accommodation for this exam,

please make sure that your TF knows about it

between now and then,

so we can make sure that everyone

is set up the way they need to be set up.

The format will be very simple.

There'll be a shorter essay.

There'll be a longer essay.

There'll probably be some IDs, maybe some dates.

But nothing very confusing.

Okay, any questions about the practical side of this class?

The exam?

Sections?

Everything's good?

I was just waiting to see how long it would take

for you guys to nod.

I was like letting the blank stares go by,

waiting for you to realize you had to nod.

Okay, good.

What we're gonna try to do today

is bring the Polish factor into our class.

And this is a very important thing to do

because without the Polish factor, no Ukraine,

no Ukraine as it exists today.

I hope by now you've gotten used to the idea that nations

are not vertical constructions, which were born a long time,

and then continue continuously over the same territory

in the boring way that it's presented

to you in your school textbooks.

I hope you've gotten used to the idea

that nations are a result of encounters of larger units

and things bouncing off each other,

and unexpected reactions and counterreactions.

We've already worked through how

at the basis of Ukrainian history,

we have this encounter

between the Franks and the Byzantines,

with the Vikings kind of sliding from one to the other.

Without that encounter, no Ukraine.

We've then worked through how in the 13th century there

was the progress of the Teutonic Knights from the West,

the Mongols from the East, and in that encounter,

Lithuania ends up controlling most

of what had been the territories of Rus.

Again, without that encounter,

no Ukraine as we understand it.

We're now moving into another encounter,

the encounter between Lithuania and Poland.

And in this encounter between Lithuania and Poland,

Ukraine, for the first time begins to emerge

as something like a distinct entity.

So at the end of this lecture,

it should be pretty clear that there will be the emergence

of some distinct Ukrainian political features,

which are recognizable up to the present.

Now, I'm gonna give you just a few things very abstractly

before I get into the historical part.

We need Poland for a lot of reasons,

but very briefly, like telegraphically,

the things that are going to come in from the Polish side

have to do with the West.

They have to do with the Franks,

the Holy Roman Empire, Western Christianity, right?

Like in a way, when Poland enters the story,

it's like a delayed, you know, six centuries delayed,

but it's delayed encounter with the Franks,

the Frankish version of Europe,

with the Western Christian version of Europe,

because Poland, as you'll remember,

converts to not Eastern, but Western Christianity.

So from Poland, we are going to get Catholicism,

an encounter with Catholicism, with Roman Catholicism.

We're also going to get the emergence of something

called Greek Catholicism,

which still exists in Ukraine today.

From Poland we are going to get the Polish language

and a Polish version of the Renaissance.

And from Poland, we're going to get the idea of a republic.

It is a very important idea, a very ambiguous idea.

A republic means a state, which is for the public,

which sounds wonderful.

Republic, res publica, rzeczpospolita in Polish,

respublika, if you insist in Ukrainian.

It means the common matter, right?

But it means the public, the public matter.

But who is the public?

Is the tricky question for republics, you know,

right down to and including the republic

in which we are inhabiting, which we are inhabiting today.

So, if the republic is a state,

which is not for just a king, not just for a monarch,

but it's for a public, who's the public?

Who's in and who's out?

That political question is posed very powerfully in Poland.

As we're gonna see, it's gonna be posed vis-a-vis Ukraine.

And in some sense, an attempt to answer

that question by the Cossacks

is where a clear national history,

or at least anticolonial history of Ukraine begins.

So Poland has a structure,

and this is my very last preliminary remark,

and then we're gonna dive in.

Poland has a structure which is different from Muscovy.

So we're gonna see these points.

We're gonna see the contact

between Poland and Muscovy over and over again.

But if you think of Muscovy

as being founded as a post-Mongol state

with a very centralized vertical type of regime,

Poland is something else.

Poland is a horizontal regime in which the nobles

are much more important than the monarch,

in which the nobles have rights, unlike in Muscovy,

in which the nobles rights increase over time.

And in which by the end of this lecture,

actually around the middle,

the nobles are actually selecting the monarch

rather than the other way around.

In Muscovy, the monarch selects the nobles.

In Poland, the the nobles select the monarch.

And that's a very, very different kind of setup.

And with this notion of a republic and the notion of nobles

who belong to the republic comes the idea of rights.

Again, not rights for everyone,

but rights for the people who belong to the noble estate.

That's a Polish notion.

We're gonna see how it emerges over time.

But again, you have to see the difference

between that and Muscovy where the notion

that anyone has rights is really not present at all

until much, much, much later.

And the Cassocks, the Ukrainian Cassocks

are gonna emerge in this story,

and who we saw a bit of in the last lecture,

the Ukrainian Cassocks are somewhere in between.

The Ukrainian Cassocks are going to get their idea,

some ideas about rights from the contact with Poland.

And the Cassocks in some way are going to want to,

they're gonna be a group that wants

to get inside this system in order

to enjoy the rights of being inside the system,

but are not going to be able to do so,

but are going to be able to rebel.

And that's where we're going to end, okay.

So let's, so, for the purposes of,

so you get the method, right?

This is a class about Ukraine,

but there is no way to do national history

by just doing national history, right?

If you try to tell, so you might have noticed this,

like you go to a party and you meet a new person,

and what do you do?

You talk about yourself the whole time, right?

And when you talk about your yourself the whole time,

what happens?

The other person falls in love with you instantly

and everything goes great, right?

So, national history is like that.

You can't just say,

oh, there's just me, me, me, me, me, right?

If you just say Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine,

Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine,

I might get a lot of like thumbs up, you know,

from like certain Ukrainian nationalists or whatever.

But, you can't make sense of yourself

without other people, right?

And you can't make sense of yourself without listening,

and you can't make sense of who you really are

without understanding what influences are coming in

from where and what circumstances.

So if we're gonna get to Ukraine,

but if we're gonna understand the Ukraine

of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries,

we really have to fundamentally

understand the Polish system.

So we're gonna work on the Polish system

or the Polish-Lithuanian system, okay.

So, the first thing to know about Poland,

where I just left off, the rise of the noble estate,

very important historical difference from Muscovy

and from other countries like France, for example.

The rise of the noble estate.

The noble estate is in Poland,

first of all, very big, about 10% of the population,

which means that by the time the noble estate

has a parliament and can vote,

more people in Poland can vote than in any other country.

So it's a more representative system than any other country

until British parliamentary reform in the 19th century.

More people can vote in Poland than anywhere else.

10% by early modern standards is a huge number

to participate in politics, okay.

So it's very large.

By the 15th century, the membership has been stabilized.

So all of these groups that are like,

that are very selective, you know,

you know what I'm talking about.

You're at Yale, like all these selective groups,

you know, that you can't get in all those groups.

So all these groups at one time were very open, right?

Like, so the trick of it, like all the things which used

to be which are now exclusive were once inclusive,

maybe not all, okay?

But you get the basic idea.

Historically, there's often a period where you

can join something and then that group decides,

okay, no one can join anymore.

The nobility in Poland is an example of that.

So in the 15th century,

the nobility in Poland had managed to define who it was.

The nobility is gonna pass on from father to son,

no one else is going to join.

Membership is stabilized.

And the nobility has by the 15th century at the latest,

a sense of a common identity in Poland.

Now, what happens in the Polish system

is that the power of the nobility

only ever ratchets upwards.

It only ever goes upwards until the 18th century

when they have a constitution and they break it.

And they have a very interesting moment

of political thought, which goes on for a few years.

And then the Russians come and it's all over.

If this were a Polish history class,

we'd spent a lot of time on that.

I just spent 15 seconds.

So, but for now, what we need to know

is that the power of the nobility ratchets upward.

And there are logics to this.

One logic is that the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, okay?

So, oh yeah, the essence of the Polish system

is that they have a Lithuanian monarch, right?

You remember that, right?

They have a Lithuanian monarch Jogaila or Jagiello,

from 1385 until until 1572.

So for almost two full centuries,

they are governed by a Lithuanian dynasty, right?

So the, the greatest,

or at least the most interesting period of Polish history

is when they had Lithuanian monarchs.

This is very important for our class, right?

Because it's because there's a Lithuanian connection

for Poland that there's a Ukrainian connection for Poland.

Because when Lithuania and Poland come together,

Lithuania controls most of what is today Ukraine.

So, it's through the monarch,

it's through Jagiello and his descendants,

descendants, descendants for almost 200 years

that Ukraine and Poland are in the same state.

It's through the body of the Lithuanian ruler,

but the Lithuanian Grand Duke,

in order to become the Polish king

had to make promises to the nobility, okay?

And so every time, I'm simplifying a little bit

that basically every time the Lithuanian ruler dies,

the Lithuanian ruler then has to go to the Polish nobility.

They make tours, actually.

They travel from castle to castle.

It's not you imagine because of, you know,

you imagine that the king has a big castle

and everyone comes to him.

That's a little bit later.

These were actually itinerant monarchs.

They would, you know, you'd travel from place to place.

You'd go like seasonally, you'd hunt with this person,

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Class 9. Polish Power and Cossack Revolution (1) Klasse 9. Polnische Macht und Kosakenrevolution (1) Clase 9. El poder polaco y la revolución cosaca (1) Klas 9. Poolse macht en Kozakkenrevolutie (1) Klasa 9. Polska potęga i rewolucja kozacka (1) Aula 9. O poder polaco e a revolução cossaca (1) 第九课 波兰政权与哥萨克革命(一)

- Okay, greetings everybody, happy Tuesday.

You have an exam, not this Thursday,

but the one after that. その次のものです。

It will be a 50 minute exam in this space. このスペースで50分の試験となります。

You will have blue books. 青いブックレットを使用します。

Very exciting.

The TFs and I are gonna remember to get blue books.

And if you have an accommodation for this exam, |||||accommodation||| |||||試験の配慮|||

please make sure that your TF knows about it

between now and then,

so we can make sure that everyone

is set up the way they need to be set up.

The format will be very simple.

There'll be a shorter essay.

There'll be a longer essay.

There'll probably be some IDs, maybe some dates.

But nothing very confusing.

Okay, any questions about the practical side of this class? |||||hands-on||||

The exam?

Sections?

Everything's good?

I was just waiting to see how long it would take

for you guys to nod. ||||gesture of agreement

I was like letting the blank stares go by, ||||die|leeren||| |||||empty expressions|blank expressions|| Я ніби пропускала повз себе порожні погляди,

waiting for you to realize you had to nod. ||||||||nicken

Okay, good.

What we're gonna try to do today

is bring the Polish factor into our class.

And this is a very important thing to do

because without the Polish factor, no Ukraine,

no Ukraine as it exists today.

I hope by now you've gotten used to the idea that nations

are not vertical constructions, which were born a long time,

and then continue continuously over the same territory |||without interruption||||

in the boring way that it's presented

to you in your school textbooks.

I hope you've gotten used to the idea

that nations are a result of encounters of larger units ||||||interactions|||

and things bouncing off each other, ||prallen ab||| ||rebounding|||

and unexpected reactions and counterreactions. ||||Gegenreaktionen ||||opposing responses

We've already worked through how

at the basis of Ukrainian history,

we have this encounter |experience or face||meeting

between the Franks and the Byzantines,

with the Vikings kind of sliding from one to the other.

Without that encounter, no Ukraine. ||meeting||

We've then worked through how in the 13th century there

was the progress of the Teutonic Knights from the West,

the Mongols from the East, and in that encounter,

Lithuania ends up controlling most

of what had been the territories of Rus.

Again, without that encounter,

no Ukraine as we understand it.

We're now moving into another encounter, |||||遭遇に入ります

the encounter between Lithuania and Poland.

And in this encounter between Lithuania and Poland,

Ukraine, for the first time begins to emerge |||||||auftauchen

as something like a distinct entity. |||eine|| |||||独立した存在

So at the end of this lecture,

it should be pretty clear that there will be the emergence ||||||||||arrival or development

of some distinct Ukrainian political features,

which are recognizable up to the present. ||erkennbar||||

Now, I'm gonna give you just a few things very abstractly

before I get into the historical part.

We need Poland for a lot of reasons, Wir brauchen Polen aus vielen Gründen,

but very briefly, like telegraphically, ||||telegraphisch ||||電報のように簡潔に

the things that are going to come in from the Polish side

have to do with the West.

They have to do with the Franks,

the Holy Roman Empire, Western Christianity, right?

Like in a way, when Poland enters the story, In gewisser Weise, wenn Polen in die Geschichte eintritt,

it's like a delayed, you know, six centuries delayed,

but it's delayed encounter with the Franks,

the Frankish version of Europe,

with the Western Christian version of Europe,

because Poland, as you'll remember,

converts to not Eastern, but Western Christianity.

So from Poland, we are going to get Catholicism, ||||||||den Katholizismus

an encounter with Catholicism, with Roman Catholicism.

We're also going to get the emergence of something

called Greek Catholicism,

which still exists in Ukraine today.

From Poland we are going to get the Polish language

and a Polish version of the Renaissance.

And from Poland, we're going to get the idea of a republic.

It is a very important idea, a very ambiguous idea. ||||||||unclear concept|

A republic means a state, which is for the public,

which sounds wonderful.

Republic, res publica, rzeczpospolita in Polish,

respublika, if you insist in Ukrainian.

It means the common matter, right?

But it means the public, the public matter.

But who is the public?

Is the tricky question for republics, you know, |||||Republiken|| ||difficult|||||

right down to and including the republic

in which we are inhabiting, which we are inhabiting today. ||||leben||||| ||||living in|||||

So, if the republic is a state,

which is not for just a king, not just for a monarch,

but it's for a public, who's the public?

Who's in and who's out?

That political question is posed very powerfully in Poland. ||||presented||||

As we're gonna see, it's gonna be posed vis-a-vis Ukraine. |||||||||with respect to||

And in some sense, an attempt to answer

that question by the Cossacks

is where a clear national history,

or at least anticolonial history of Ukraine begins. |||against colonialism||||

So Poland has a structure,

and this is my very last preliminary remark,

and then we're gonna dive in.

Poland has a structure which is different from Muscovy.

So we're gonna see these points.

We're gonna see the contact

between Poland and Muscovy over and over again.

But if you think of Muscovy

as being founded as a post-Mongol state

with a very centralized vertical type of regime, z bardzo scentralizowanym reżimem pionowym,

Poland is something else.

Poland is a horizontal regime in which the nobles

are much more important than the monarch,

in which the nobles have rights, unlike in Muscovy,

in which the nobles rights increase over time.

And in which by the end of this lecture,

actually around the middle,

the nobles are actually selecting the monarch

rather than the other way around.

In Muscovy, the monarch selects the nobles.

In Poland, the the nobles select the monarch.

And that's a very, very different kind of setup.

And with this notion of a republic and the notion of nobles

who belong to the republic comes the idea of rights.

Again, not rights for everyone,

but rights for the people who belong to the noble estate.

That's a Polish notion.

We're gonna see how it emerges over time.

But again, you have to see the difference

between that and Muscovy where the notion

that anyone has rights is really not present at all

until much, much, much later.

And the Cassocks, the Ukrainian Cassocks

are gonna emerge in this story,

and who we saw a bit of in the last lecture,

the Ukrainian Cassocks are somewhere in between.

The Ukrainian Cassocks are going to get their idea,

some ideas about rights from the contact with Poland.

And the Cassocks in some way are going to want to,

they're gonna be a group that wants

to get inside this system in order

to enjoy the rights of being inside the system,

but are not going to be able to do so,

but are going to be able to rebel.

And that's where we're going to end, okay.

So let's, so, for the purposes of,

so you get the method, right?

This is a class about Ukraine,

but there is no way to do national history

by just doing national history, right?

If you try to tell, so you might have noticed this,

like you go to a party and you meet a new person,

and what do you do?

You talk about yourself the whole time, right?

And when you talk about your yourself the whole time,

what happens?

The other person falls in love with you instantly ||||||||immediately

and everything goes great, right?

So, national history is like that.

You can't just say,

oh, there's just me, me, me, me, me, right?

If you just say Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine,

Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine,

I might get a lot of like thumbs up, you know, |||||||positive feedback|||

from like certain Ukrainian nationalists or whatever.

But, you can't make sense of yourself

without other people, right?

And you can't make sense of yourself without listening,

and you can't make sense of who you really are

without understanding what influences are coming in

from where and what circumstances. ||||situations

So if we're gonna get to Ukraine,

but if we're gonna understand the Ukraine

of the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries,

we really have to fundamentally

understand the Polish system.

So we're gonna work on the Polish system |we are|going to|||||

or the Polish-Lithuanian system, okay.

So, the first thing to know about Poland,

where I just left off, the rise of the noble estate,

very important historical difference from Muscovy

and from other countries like France, for example.

The rise of the noble estate.

The noble estate is in Poland,

first of all, very big, about 10% of the population,

which means that by the time the noble estate

has a parliament and can vote,

more people in Poland can vote than in any other country.

So it's a more representative system than any other country

until British parliamentary reform in the 19th century. ||of Parliament|||||

More people can vote in Poland than anywhere else.

10% by early modern standards is a huge number

to participate in politics, okay.

So it's very large.

By the 15th century, the membership has been stabilized. ||||||||made stable ||||||||安定した

So all of these groups that are like,

that are very selective, you know, |||とても選り好み||

you know what I'm talking about.

You're at Yale, like all these selective groups,

you know, that you can't get in all those groups.

So all these groups at one time were very open, right?

Like, so the trick of it, like all the things which used |||Method||||||||

to be which are now exclusive were once inclusive, ||||||||inclusive |||||排他的な|||

maybe not all, okay?

But you get the basic idea.

Historically, there's often a period where you

can join something and then that group decides,

okay, no one can join anymore.

The nobility in Poland is an example of that.

So in the 15th century,

the nobility in Poland had managed to define who it was.

The nobility is gonna pass on from father to son,

no one else is going to join.

Membership is stabilized.

And the nobility has by the 15th century at the latest,

a sense of a common identity in Poland.

Now, what happens in the Polish system

is that the power of the nobility

only ever ratchets upwards. ||increases|increases ||上昇し続ける|

It only ever goes upwards until the 18th century

when they have a constitution and they break it.

And they have a very interesting moment

of political thought, which goes on for a few years.

And then the Russians come and it's all over.

If this were a Polish history class,

we'd spent a lot of time on that.

I just spent 15 seconds.

So, but for now, what we need to know

is that the power of the nobility ratchets upward.

And there are logics to this.

One logic is that the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, okay?

So, oh yeah, the essence of the Polish system

is that they have a Lithuanian monarch, right?

You remember that, right?

They have a Lithuanian monarch Jogaila or Jagiello,

from 1385 until until 1572.

So for almost two full centuries,

they are governed by a Lithuanian dynasty, right? ||||||王朝|

So the, the greatest,

or at least the most interesting period of Polish history

is when they had Lithuanian monarchs.

This is very important for our class, right?

Because it's because there's a Lithuanian connection

for Poland that there's a Ukrainian connection for Poland.

Because when Lithuania and Poland come together,

Lithuania controls most of what is today Ukraine.

So, it's through the monarch,

it's through Jagiello and his descendants, |||||offspring

descendants, descendants for almost 200 years

that Ukraine and Poland are in the same state.

It's through the body of the Lithuanian ruler, リトアニアの統治者の身体を通して

but the Lithuanian Grand Duke, しかし、リトアニア大公は

in order to become the Polish king ポーランドの王になるため

had to make promises to the nobility, okay? ||||||aristocracy|

And so every time, I'm simplifying a little bit

that basically every time the Lithuanian ruler dies,

the Lithuanian ruler then has to go to the Polish nobility.

They make tours, actually.

They travel from castle to castle.

It's not you imagine because of, you know, それは|||||||

you imagine that the king has a big castle

and everyone comes to him.

That's a little bit later.

These were actually itinerant monarchs. |||traveling rulers|

They would, you know, you'd travel from place to place.

You'd go like seasonally, you'd hunt with this person, |||seasonally||||| |||季節ごとに|||||