In 1648 a new cossack revolt in Ukraine, led by Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi and in alliance with the Crimean Tatars, dealt devastating defeats to Polish armies at Zhevty Vody and Korsun'. The massacre of another Polish army at Batih in May 1652 placed Khmel'nyts'kyi in control of most of Ukraine as far west as Kamienets in Podol'ia and made the prospect of Muscovite alliance with rebel Ukraine more attractive and war with the Commonwealth in Ukraine and Belarus' more likely. The Military Chancellery therefore began organising foreign formation units for the southern field army, not just for local defence. Four regiments (8,000 men) of soldaty were formed at Iablonov, in the Belgorod razriad, filled largely from conscripts levied from the non-taxpaying populations of eighteen southern districts. The next year some soldat regiments were also formed near Smolensk on the north-western front.[64]
Moscow also took steps to tighten its control over the Don cossack host. Larger Don shipment subsidies were dispatched in 1644,1646 and 1647, but there were also attempts in 1646 and 1648 to 'reinforce' the host with new Muscovite manpower in such a way as to bind it to Moscow-directed operations. Larger expeditions, resupplied by river flotillas built on the Voronezh and upper Don, were sent down in 1659-62; although they still held back from assaulting Azov, they did join the Don cossacks in land and sea raids to harass Ottoman forces building new fortresses on the Mertvyi Donets and Kalancha rivers. From 1662 to 1671 Muscovite forces on the lower Don refrained from operations against the Turks and devoted their attention to distributing the Don shipments and keeping the host under surveillance.
All of these Don expeditions suffered heavy losses to hunger and desertion, and they did not accomplish much against the Tatars and Turks. But they did give the Muscovite army valuable experience in land-sea operations and did begin to restrict the Don cossack host's freedom of initiative. By the late 1660s the host was in transformation. Muscovite military colonisation of the Belgorod Line had set off a cascade migration of thousands of deserters and fugitive peasants southward into the Don host. The resources provided by the Don agricultural economy and Don shipments were not enough to support them. Meanwhile Moscow's diplomacy to get the sultan and the khan to stop attacks in Ukraine on behalf of Hetman Doroshenko (see below) meant that Moscow could no longer sanction Don cossack raids on the khanate or on Ottoman coastal towns. Denied plunder opportunities on the Black Sea, part of the host rebelled and followed Stepan Razin on a campaign of piracy on the Caspian and then on a revolt against Ataman Kornilo Iakovlev and Muscovite garrisons on the lower Volga. Razin's defeat in 1671 left the host further servilised to Moscow.[65]
The Thirteen Years War, 1654-67
As early as 1649 Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi had tried to convince Moscow to assist his revolt against the Commonwealth and put Ukraine under the tsar's protection. At that time Moscow had not been interested; taking responsibility for Ukraine as a client or vassal polity had been a major objective of Muscovite grand strategy, and joining the Ukrainians in war upon the Commonwealth also meant going to war against the Crimean Tatars, who had left their alliance with Khmel'nyts'kyi. By late 1652, however, the tsar's government was ready to ally with Khmel'nyts'kyi. Khmel'nyts'kyi's great victory at Batih meant that Muscovite intervention in Ukraine was likely to meet a greatly reduced Polish military threat, and there was still hope that Ukrainian and Muscovite diplomacy could convince the Crimean khan to rejoin the alliance against the Poles. But the primary reason Tsar Alexis accepted Khmel'nyts'kyi's alliance proposal in June 1653 and formalised it in the Pereiaslav (Pereiaslavl') Treaty in January 1654 had much less to do with Ukraine than with Muscovite designs upon Lithuanian Belarus'. The Commonwealth's war against Khmel'nyts'kyi's cossacks had left very few troops defending Lithuania and the west Rus' territories - Smolensk, Seversk, Chernigov - wrested from Muscovy during the Troubles. Reconquering these territories promised to be considerably easier than in 1632-4, particularly now that Khmel'nyts'kyi promised to send thousands of cossack troops north to assist such a campaign. Furthermore, Moscow felt that the window of opportunity to accomplish this was closing, for Lithuanian Grand HetmanJanusz Radziwill, aware of Lithuania's vulnerability to Muscovite invasion, was trying to get the hospodar of Moldavia to mediate a peace treaty between the Commonwealth and Khmel'nyts'kyi's hetmanate.
There was therefore an impulsive element in Moscow's decision to intervene in Ukraine. Muscovite military preparations for the war were thorough: the invasion of Lithuania was soundly planned, and it was decided that foreign formation units would comprise a larger part of the field armies on the Lithuanian and Ukrainian fronts, towards which end 40,000 muskets were bought from the Dutch and Swedes and more enlistees and conscripts were taken into the soldat regiments of the Belgorod razriad.15 But the full strategic consequences of placing Ukraine under Muscovite protection were not yet apparent. Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi had created a de facto independent het- manate across most of Ukraine in six years of war; it was Khmel'nyts'kyi's military leadership and diplomatic cunning which held this hetmanate together;
15 A. N. Mal'tsev, RossiiaiBelorussiiav seredine XVllveka (Moscow: MGU, 1974), p. 23.
and it was Khmel'nyts'kyi's vision of an autonomous Ukraine in loose confederation and military alliance with Muscovy that his colonels understood to be the objective of the Pereiaslav Treaty. But once Khmel'nyts'kyi passed from the scene the hetmanate would be riven by conflicts between the cossack elite and rank-and-file, between cossacks and townsmen and peasants and between the cossack colonels and the Muscovite commanders garrisoning the larger Ukrainian towns. The task of protecting Ukraine would inevitably give Moscow reason to increase the number of its garrisons, make greater demands upon Ukrainian revenue sources to provision them and thereby encroach upon Ukrainian liberties. Furthermore, because Khmel'nyts'kyi had been pursuing an imaginative but complicated diplomacy since i648 before turning to Moscow for protection, the Crimean Tatars, Moldavians, Wallachians, Tran- sylvanians, Ottomans and Swedes had come to have stakes in what happened to Ukraine. Muscovite protectorate over Ukraine therefore had serious repercussions for Muscovy's relations with these nations, and Ukrainian cossacks growing disillusioned with Muscovite protectorate would have alternative alliance models (Ottoman-Tatar protectorate, reincorporation in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, and later, Swedish protectorate) to which to turn.
65
On the Don expeditions, see V P. Zagorovskii, 'Sudostroenie na Donu i ispol'zovanie Rossieiu parusnogo-grebnogo flota vbor'be protivKrymskogo khanstvai Turtsii', Kan- didatskaia dissertatsiia, Voronezhskii Gosudarstvennyi Universitet, 1961. On the Razin Rebellion, see E. V Chistiakova and V M. Solov'ev,