Right Bank Ukraine was devastated in population and economy by the decades of war that accompanied the Khmelnytsky uprising. In the 1680s the Polish government allowed Cossacks to return and reclaim their lands, but also moved in Polish landholders, setting in motion social tensions that played out in the next century. Serfdom and the Polish social class structure endured. Under Catholic pressure the Orthodox Church in the Right Bank was transferred to the Union in the early eighteenth century. West of the Right Bank, Galicia and Volhynia remained the most Polonized Ukrainian-speaking lands, with no Cossackdom, a serf-based noble manorial economy, and the vibrant, multi-ethnic town of L'viv.
The Cossacks of the Hetmanate enjoyed virtual autonomy for at least fifty years. It was a relatively densely settled territory with about eleven cities, 126 towns, and about 1.2 million in population by the end of the century. Standing for Cossack independence and Orthodoxy, the Hetmanate eradicated the Uniate Church, exiled Polish landlords, and abolished the Polish-Lithuanian parliamentary system with county noble assemblies. In its place the Hetmanate created a regimental administration ruled by Cossack officers and law. The Hetmanate never established legal corporate estates such as a Cossack equivalent of nobility, but within a generation or two, a clear social hierarchy was developing.
Initially the Hetmanate continued the tradition of easy access to Cossack status; peasants, burghers, and Ruthenian petty nobles won Cossack status with rights of landholding, free taxation, and participation in local government. At its height in 1650, the number of Cossacks was 50,000. The admixture of so expansive an elite, in a setting of Polish parliamentary political culture and tremendous agrarian productivity, rapidly transformed the Hetmanate's Cossacks into an exclusive landed nobility with sharp social divisions (parallel to the process occurring on the Don). The Hetmanate's Cossack officer elite (starshyna) took over Polish crown and noble lands; they gradually excluded lesser officers and rank and file Cossacks from landholding, office-holding, and political rights. Lesser Cossacks fell into poverty and were decimated by the warfare of the second half of the century. By 1669 there were only 30,000 Cossacks; by 1730, only 20,000, many of them impoverished.
Culturally and politically, however, the first half-century of the Hetmanate (1648-1709) is considered a high point in Ukrainian history, particularly the reign of Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1687-1709), for its cultivation of early modern national consciousness. A cultural centerpiece was the distinguished Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, which featured a twelve-year classical and modern curriculum offering languages such as Latin, Greek, and Slavonic, classical fields such as rhetoric, oratory, philosophy, and theology, and modern disciplines such as astronomy, geography, and mathematics. It nurtured in its students a Renaissance call to civic engagement around a revived Orthodoxy. From here came two of Russian Tsar Peter I's most influential advisors—Stefan Iavorsky and Feofan Prokopovich—who brought to St. Petersburg potent ideas of absolutism and political and religious reform. In Kyiv at the Mohyla Academy, Prokopovich authored school dramas that celebrated Cossack history and Hetman Ivan Mazepa. Mazepa himself was a graduate of the Mohyla, as well as of a Jesuit college in Warsaw; having served at the Polish court, the urbane Mazepa demonstrated his power and culture in lavish building projects of churches, monastery, and secular edifices done in a "Mazepa baroque" style. His palace at Baturyn, for example, featured a gracious hall for entertainment adorned with portraits of contemporary European rulers and a library filled with books in Latin, German, and Ukrainian and a collection of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Its Mazepa baroque combined the Italianate design of Vilnius architecture of the time, such as a columned facade, with local decorative traditions including colorful ceramic rosettes created by Kyiv artists.
Kyiv continued to be a center of publication reflecting the area's multi-ethnic diversity: thirteen printing presses included nine in Ukrainian, three in Polish, and one in Hebrew. Political identity was greatly contested: David Frick has written of the fluidly shifting identities of Uniate and Orthodox that some Ukrainian theologians and polemicists (Lavrentii Zyzanii, Meletii Smotritsky, Kasian Sakovych) navigated as they traveled between Kyiv, Rome, and Moscow, physically or intellectually. Iakovenko describes the relative religious tolerance, or at least indifference to theological quarrels, of high nobility, while Orthodoxy continued to be central to some ideologues. In Synopsis (1674) Innokentii Gizel, faculty member at the Mohyla Academy, for example, postulated a unified history of Orthodox Slavs, depicting the Dnieper region as the heartland of a common Orthodox civilization in the Russian empire. Others found in Cossackdom and the Hetmanate a defining identity: secular authors penned "Cossack chronicles" to memorialize the Cossack wars and the independence of the Hetmanate and Rus' lands defined by Orthodoxy. The "Eye Witness Chronicle" of the late seventeenth century, attributed to Roman Rakushka (d. 1703), presents a contemporary's dramatic first-hand account.
In the second half of the seventeenth century Russian rule in the Hetmanate was relatively light, based on the Treaty of Pereiaslav in 1654. Khmelnytsky and the Cossacks intended it as a bilateral agreement and military alliance that would allow them to remain virtually independent; it guaranteed Cossack institutions, tax-free status, and military autonomies, carving a wide sphere of independence in the context of the Russian empire. But the hetman and Cossacks had to swear allegiance in the name of their people to the tsar, and whenever the treaty came up for renewal, Russia tried to infringe on Cossack autonomies, most tangibly by stationing Russian governors in five cities with garrisons in 1659 and more thereafter. Although they were not to intervene in city politics, in practice over time townsmen often called on the governor to support them in conflicts with the Cossack administration, and Russian authority grew. Nevertheless, the Hetmanate experienced what Zenon Kohut calls a renaissance of strong hetman power from 1672 to 1709, after the worst of the warfare had subsided.
Another locus in which Russia tried to control Ukraine was the Orthodox Church. In 1686 the Moscow patriarchate took oversight of the Kyiv metropolit- anate from the patriarch of Constantinople. Gradually Moscow shrank the metropolitan's jurisdiction to the Hetmanate alone, moving some Belarus'an dioceses to the Moscow patriarch (others in the Right Bank had gone to the Union). But the Kyiv metropolitan initially was guaranteed autonomies from Moscow in its ecclesiastical court system, its schools, and printing presses and control of its extensive landholdings.
The "Deluge" that the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, particularly in the Rus' palatinates and Grand Duchy, suffered in the second half of the century is aptly named: Sweden invaded from the north, Russia and Zaporozhian Cossacks from east and south, and Brandenburg-Prussia meddled in Polish affairs on the west. By the end of the century, Russia, Brandenburg-Prussia, and Sweden had emerged as the potent players in central and eastern Europe and the Commonwealth had been crippled as a sovereign power and had lost territory. In addition to gaining the Left Bank Hetmanate as a vassal, Russia had won a valuable north- south strip of territory on its western border, lands that were politically, economically, socially, culturally, and religiously very different from the Moscow center. The city of Smolensk is a case in point. Moscow had won Smolensk from the Grand Duchy in 1514 and kept it until 1611; when regained in 1654, Smolensk had become a very different place, an outpost of political pluralism unknown in Russia. Its burghers enjoyed self-government under Magdeburg law; its Ruthenian noblemen enjoyed Polish political institutions and legal privileges; the Uniate Church was dominant. In the seventeenth century, Muscovy adhered to its laissez-faire colonial policy: it guaranteed the social rights and privileges of the nobility and Magdeburg-law privileged towns and burghers; it governed indirectly through a chancery devoted to this area. But Russia also deployed coercion, forcibly moving over 300 Smolensk nobles and local Cossacks to the Trans-Kama frontier and abolishing the Uniate Church in these areas. Peasants had already been enserfed under Polish control, and that status endured.