Achinoam Bentov

My dissertation project, 1648 – 1649: The Collapse of Early Modern Rus’, is a document-centric reconstruction of a civil war that dramatically shaped the political, cultural, demographic, and physical landscape of early modern Eastern Europe. Shining a microscopic lens on the day-by-day details of the conflict, which scholars have variously called the “Khmelnytsky Rebellion” or the “Ukrainian War of Independence,” I conducted a study of several thousand letters, court records, battlefield reports, and scrap documents. I also comparatively analysed the entire corpus of publications by the war’s immediate survivors, together constituting twelve memoirs in six different languages. While doing research in Polish archives, I uncovered a miscataloged but exceedingly rich copy-book that had not been cited by any previous historian. I was thus able to rewrite the narrative of the war both in terms of
structure and day-to-day experience.

My dissertation argues that the war of 1648-1649 was not a binary conflict between coherent “sides” but a highly complex and paradigmatically dynamic conflagration. I demonstrate that allegiances during the war were fluid and acts of violence were both banal and omnidirectional. I also analyze the war’s causes, decentering the biographies of leading politicians and focusing instead on patterns of economic parasitism that promoted the proliferation of violence in seventeenth-century Ukraine. I discuss the experiences of Ukrainians, Poles, Belarusians, Tatars, Jews, Armenians, and many individuals who transgressed the boundaries of these identities. Above all, I emphasise the conflict’s collective consequences and
highlight a pacifist criticism of the war’s objectives.