The image of Dmytro Vyshnevetsky in Ukrainian historiography

The image of Dmytro Vyshnevetsky in Ukrainian historiography has followed the changes in history as an academic discipline. At the time when the Cossack myth was created, historians’ romantic views of the Cossack past resulted in an image of the prince as a noble knight, the Cossack father-hetman, and the founder of the first Zaporozhian Sich. Once positivism made its way to historiography, the activities of the prince were subjected to a more critical analysis, and historians began to question his role of the founder of the first Sich. However, it was not denied that the fortress built by the prince could have served as a prototype for the Cossack Sich. During the Soviet era, three currents in Ukrainian historiography emerged: Soviet, Galician from the Interwar period, and foreign. An ideological confrontation took place between Soviet and foreign historiography, in relation to the assessment of the prince’s activities and the view of the Cossacks. In the 1990s, censorship was lifted and Ukrainian historians gained access to archives. This resulted in a large number of works on the Cossacks. Again, just like 70 years before, there was a need for the emergence of national awareness (based on the Cossack myth), so in addition to purely academic investigations with a critical attitude towards the work of the predecessors and the involvement of new source material, amateur researchers produced a number of works. By the mid-1990s, the prince had been somewhat idealized in Ukrainian history which stemmed from a search for heroic figures among representatives of the Ukrainian elite in the young Ukrainian state. Since the early 2000s, Ukrainian researchers have been trying to assess Dmytro Vyshnevetsky’s activities in a pan-European context, relying on newly available sources, particularly abroad.