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The Treaty of Pereiaslav in 1654 put the newly formed Ukrainian Hetmanate into an intimate relation with the Russian state, a situation for which neither side was prepared. For the Russian court the Cossack revolt was as much a thunderbolt out of the blue sky as for the King of Poland. Russia had been steadily improving relations with Poland since 1634, while her relations with the Cossacks, frequent before that time, seem to have languished. In 1648-50 relations were tentative and often depended on accidental intermediaries such as Paisios, the patriarch of Jerusalem. For the Cossacks to have some influence in the Russian court and government, they had to understand how those worked, not just the formal side of audiences and negotiations in the Ambassadorial Office but also the informal levers of power. In a word, they needed to know who had the tsar's ear. Similarly, as Russia gradually became involved in the Cossack struggle and absorbed the Hetmanate as an autonomous unit, her court needed similar informal ties among the Cossack commanders. Had the Ukrainian lands simply been absorbed as a province, such ties would not have been necessary: it was the autonomy of the Hetmanate that required such ties. Unfortunately, Russian and Ukrainian historiographies, both of which possess strong (if different) statist traditions that identify the seventeenth-century political units with modern states, have largely ignored informal ties and emphasized formal institutions.
In 1648-49, when the Cossack rebels first tried to make contact with the Russian court, they had to understand both the formal centres of power and the network of informal ties-the court factions, the tsar's favourites, and the ways of getting access to the tsar. The formal administrative structure was simple. News from Ukraine usually came to Moscow via the border town of Putyvl, whose voevoda also handled letters and emissaries from whatever source reaching Russia through Ukraine. In Moscow all business from political entities outside Russia was handled by the Ambassadorial Office. In 1648-53 it was headed by the Duma secretary Mikhail Volosheninov and then by the Duma secretaries Larion Lopukhin and Almaz Ivanov (1653-65). At the same time, Tsar Aleksei's principal favourites in these years were his father-in-law, the boyar Ilia Danilovich Miloslavsky, who headed most of the military...