UKRAINIAN NATIONAL REVOLUTION OF THE 17TH CENTURY IN THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT: IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS
Authors: Shevchuk Liliana 
Published: August 2022

Throughout the course of the 16th – 17th centuries, a new epoch begins in the history of European civilization – the epoch of the New Age. A revolutionary formation and, subsequently, the establishment of a new state system based on political democracy, legal freedom and civil equality are taking place. As in other European countries, significant socio-political transformations in Ukraine were also due to the national revolution of 1648–1676. Analyzing the events in Ukraine in the mid-seventeenth century as a component of the pan-European revolutionary movement, the author considers the attitudinal and ideological origins of the Ukrainian revolution. Their common European features, as well as specific features are clarified and characterized. In general, the change in the worldview system in Ukraine is associated with the renaissance-humanist and reformation ideas that began to spread in the Ukrainian lands without losing its original meaning, but acquiring here a kind of national color, aimed at understanding the urgent problems of Ukrainian society. In the field of political and legal doctrine, the assertion of the legal worldview takes place, replacing the theological. Its classic embodiment became the theory of natural law with its concept of inalienable natural human rights as well as the concept of social contract. These ideas became, to a greater or lesser extent, the basis of the Ukrainian revolution of the seventeenth century. Their embodiment can be found in the works of Ukrainian «Renaissance humanists» of the 16th – early 17th centuries: S. Orikhovsky, J. Vereshchynsky, I. Dombrovsky, S. Klenovych, S. Pekalid, J. Shchasny-Herburt, K. Sakovych. It is found that in the seventeenth century, the works of such prominent political thinkers, theorists of natural law as J. Lipsius, G. Grotius, later B. Spinoza, T. Hobbes, S. Pufendorf were becoming widespread in Ukraine. They found a favorable ground in Ukraine and directly influenced the Ukrainian revolution, as the state and legal ideas of these thinkers became especially popular not only among the intellectual elite, but also among the Cossacks – the main driving force of the revolution. A number of Ukrainian thinkers, despite the fact that until 1649 Ukraine did not have its own state, were considering the future path of its political development. Specific plans of forming own state are embodied, in particular, in the works of J. Vereshchynsky, P. Mohyla, Y. Nemyrych, and others. They became a logical continuation and development of the state approaches of Ukrainian Renaissance humanists and reflected the tendency to combine the understanding of the history of their own state-building tradition with the study of Western experience. The analysis of political and legal ideas of Ukrainian authors, real historical events of the seventeenth century testify to the emergence among the Ukrainian population of clear tendencies to build their own state. Since then, the idea of the Ukrainian nation-state became fundamental to the Cossack state-building and leading in the liberation struggles of the Ukrainian people of all subsequent centuries.