The decisive moment of the defensive campaign led by Ivan III against the horde of Khan Ahmad, in October-November 1480.
Relations between the Great Horde and Moscow entered a crisis in the 1470s. Ivan III refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of Akhmad or to pay him tribute. Entering into an anti-Muscovite alliance with the grand prince of Lithuania and the Polish King Casimir, Ahmad started to campaign in the late spring of 1480. Ivan III adopted defensive tactics: In July he marched to the town of Kolomna and ordered his troops to guard the bank of the Oka River, but Ahmad made no attempt to force the Oka; instead he moved westward to the Ugra River where he hoped to meet his ally, King Casimir. The latter, however, never came.
For several months both sides temporized, and only in October did fighting break out. Muscovite troops, led by Ivan’s III son Ivan and brother Andrew, repulsed several Tatar attempts to cross the Ugra. Clashes alternated with negotiations which, however, met with no success. Finally, on November 11, 1480, the khan withdrew, thus acknowledging the failure of his attempt to restore his lordship over Rus.
In Russian historical tradition this event is celebrated as the end of the Mongol yoke. The roots of this tradition date back to the 1560s, when anonymous author of the so-called Kazan History wrote of the dissolution of the Horde after the death of Ahmad (1481) and hailed the liberation of the Russian lands from the Moslem yoke and slavery. In modern historiography, Nikolai Karamzin was the first to link the liberation with the events of 1480. Later, Soviet publications echoed this view. Another judgment of the same events was pronounced by the famous nineteenth-century Russian historian, Sergei Soloviev, who ascribed the downfall of the yoke not to the heroic deeds of Ivan III but to the growing weakness of the Horde itself. The same argument was put forward by George Vernadsky (1959), who maintained that Rus freed itself from dependence on the Horde not in 1480 but much earlier, in the 1450s. In Anton Anatolevich Gorskii’s view, the liberation should be dated not to 1480 but to 1472, when Ivan III stopped paying tribute to the khan.
Military aspects of the 1480 event also remain controversial. Some scholars consider the battle a
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
large-scale military operation and honor the strategic talent of Ivan III; but others stress his hesitations or even deny that any battle took place, referring to the events of 1480 as merely the “Stand on the Ugra River” (Halperin, 1985). See also: GOLDEN HORDE; IVAN III
Halperin, Charles. (1985). Russia and the Golden Horde: The Mongol Impact on Medieval Russian History. Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press. Vernadsky, George. (1959). Russia at the Dawn of the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
A decree, edict, or order issued by higher authority and carrying the weight of law. In English, ukase.
The Dictionary of the Imperial Russian Academy (1822) defined ukaz (plural ukazy) as “a written order issued by the Sovereign or other higher body.” Senior churchmen and the Senate, for example, could issue an ukaz, but no one had power independent of the ruler. An edict or order signed personally by the ruler was known as imennoi ukaz. Up to the end of the seventeenth century, the tsar’s ukazy were recorded by scribes, but from the 1710s onwards the more important ones were printed, either as individual sheets or in collections. In 1722 Peter I issued an ukaz on the orderly collection, printing, and observance of existing laws. It ended: “Let this ukaz be printed, incorporated into the regulations, and published. Also set up display boards, according to the model supplied in the Senate, to which this printed ukaz should be glued, and let it always be displayed in all places, right down to the lowest courts, like a mirror before the eyes of judges. . . . This ukaz of His Imperial Majesty was signed in the Senate in His Majesty’s own hand.” The very sheets of paper bearing the ruler’s printed command were imbued with his authority.
Given the significance attached to the Russian sovereign’s written command and signature, the anglicized term “ukase” has connotations of absolutism. It is often coupled with other instruments
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of autocratic rule, such as the knout and exile to hard labor, as a symbol of despotic government. See also: PETER I
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe, the second most populous among the Soviet successor states and Europe’s second largest country after Russia. Its population in 2001 was 48,457,100, with ethnic Ukrainians comprising 77.8 percent of the total. Russians constitute by far the largest ethnic minority in the country (17.3%). Ukrainians are an Eastern Slavic people who speak the Ukrainian language, which is closely related to Russian and uses the Ukrainian version of the Cyrillic alphabet. The capital of Ukraine is Kiev (Kyiv). Geographically, Ukraine consists largely of fertile level plains that are ideal for agriculture. The country’s main river is the Dnieper (Dnipro).
Ukraine did not exist in its current territorial form until the twentieth century. In ancient times, different parts of Ukraine were inhabited by the Scythians and Sarmatians, but Slavic tribes moved into the area during the fifth and sixth centuries. During the ninth century, the Varangians, who had controlled trade on the Dnieper, united the East Slavic tribal confederations into the state known as Kievan Rus. During the late tenth century, the Rus princes accepted Christianity and began developing a high culture in Church Slavonic. Scholars, however, believe that modern Ukrainian is a lineal de-scendent of the colloquial language that was spoken in Kievan Rus. The power of Kievan Rus began declining during the twelfth century, and during the thirteenth it was conquered by the Mongols. After the fall of Kiev, linguistic divergences between the languages spoken by Eastern Slavs in the Ukrainian and Russian lands began to harden.
Indigenous state tradition in the Ukrainian territories was extinguished during the early fourteenth century with the decline of the Galician-Volhynian Principality in the west. During the second half of this century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a rising Eastern European empire at the time, annexed virtually all the Ukrainian lands ex1600 cept Galicia, which was claimed by Poland. But the East Slavic lands preserved considerable autonomy, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania even adopted the local Ruthenian language as its state language. This changed in 1569, when the dynastic union between Lithuania and Poland evolved into a constitutional union. The indigenous nobility gradually became Polonized, cities came to be dominated by Poles and Jews, and the local peasantry was en-serfed and exploited. In 1596 a crisis in the Orthodox Church and pressure from Polish Catholics prompted the majority of Ukrainian Orthodox bishops in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to sign an act of union with Rome, resulting in the creation of the Uniate Church and a religious rift between the Orthodox and Uniate churches. From that time, social grievances of the Ukrainian lower classes coalesced with religious and national anxieties.
These growing tensions found their expression in the Cossack rebellions. The Cossacks were a class of free warriors that emerged during the sixteenth century on Ukraine’s southern steppe frontier. Although originally employed by Polish governors to defend steppe settlements against the Crimean Tatars, the Cossacks, many of whom had been peasants fleeing serfdom, identified with the religious and social concerns of lower-class Ukrainians. In 1648 a large Cossack revolt turned into a peasant war. Led by a disgruntled Cossack officer named Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the rebels, who had secured Tatar support and had seen their ranks swelled with peasant recruits, inflicted several crushing defeats on the Poles. Khmelnytsky, who had been elected the Cossack leader, or hetman, and calling himself a defender of Orthodoxy and the Ruthenian people, soon began building a de facto independent Cossack state. Looking for allies against Poland, in 1654 Khmelnytsky concluded the Pereiaslav Treaty with Muscovy; the significance of this treaty remains a subject of controversy.
Whether it was intended as a temporary diplomatic maneuver or a unification of two states, according to the treaty, the Cossack polity accepted the tsar’s suzerainty while preserving its wide-ranging autonomy. In the long run, however, the Russian authorities gradually curtailed the Cossacks’ self-rule and, by the late eighteenth century, had established their direct control of Ukraine. The last serious attempt to break with Russia took place under Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who joined Charles XII of Sweden in his war against Tsar Peter I, but
