History of creating the monument appeared in public on initiative of a historian and professor of the Kyiv University Nikolay Kostomarov in 1840s. The assistant director of the Kyiv School District Mikhail Yuzefovich supported that idea and originally wanted to establish the monument for the 200th anniversary of the Council of Pereyaslav. The monument was supposed to be installed at the Bessarabian Square, for which the square carried the name of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1869-1881. However, the construction was postponed due to the Crimean War. After receiving permission from the Tsar government in 1860 on establishment of the monument there was created a committee headed by Mikhail Yuzefovich, a professor of the St.Vladimir Imperial University, the head of the Kyiv Archaeography Commission, theorist of the Omni-State movement in Ukraine. As result, the initial draft of the monument created by Mikhail Mikeshin was outright chauvinistic – the Khmelnytsky's horse was dropping a Polish szlachcic, Jewish leaseholder, and Jesuit from a cliff, in front of which a Little Russian, Red Russian, White Russian, and Great Russian were listening to the song of a blind kobzar. Basrelief of the pedestal was showing images of the Siege of Zbarazh, the Council of Pereyaslav, and the scene of entering Kyiv by the Khmelnytsky's Cossack Host.