Samuil Velichko

Born 1670; died circa 1728. Ukrainian chronicler.

Velichko studied at the Kiev Academy. He knew Latin, German, and Polish. He was removed from service in the General Military Office (highest civil and administrative institution for the Left-Bank Ukraine) after the execution in 1708 of V. L. Kochubei, to whom he had been close. Velichko’s main work is The Chronicle of Events in Southwest Russia in the 17th Century (vols. 1-4, 1848-64), in which, using a relatively broad range of Ukrainian and foreign sources, he presented a history of the Ukraine in relation to the history of Russia, Poland, and Moldavia. Velichko was an ideologist of the cossack starshina (cossack commanders) and Ukrainian nobility and an advocate of the reunification of the Ukraine with Russia. He was unsympathetic toward the popular masses in their struggle against the landowners; nevertheless, he objected to the restoration in the Ukraine of serfdom in the form in which it had existed before the war of liberation of 1648-54. The value of Velichko’s chronicle is diminished by a failure to be consistently critical of sources, mistakes in dates and facts, and a flowery style.