The visit to Ukraine in 1843 seems to have made a great difference in his ideas. The first ideal of Shevchenko was the free Kozak state, the Sich where the men made and unmade their officers, and he emphasized in his early poems the great struggle of these lovers of freedom against the Polish nobles. Later in the Hetman state, the rights and privileges of the ordinary Kozaks had been largely curtailed and a new form of aristocracy had grown up among the Ukrainian people. It was this new race of aristocrats that had made the treaty of Pereyaslavl with Moscow and had fashioned the Russian yoke upon the Kozaks. Much as he admired Bohdan Khmelnitsky, he could not help feeling that this act was the cause of all the troubles of Ukraine. He was not enough of a student of history to appreciate the complications of the situation in which Bohdan found himself and he did not see the difference between the great Hetman and his lesser followers who allowed themselves to be deluded and deceived by the Muscovite ambassadors in the seventeenth century. Perhaps there was more than a grain of truth in the artistic insight of the poet but he differed sharply with the scholars of his day, including his friend Kostomariv, and went on his own way. He was more fascinated by the figure of Mazepa who joined with Charles XII of Sweden against Peter the Great than he was with Bohdan seeking Muscovite support against the Poles. From 1843 on, Moscow and the Russians were for him the chief enemy of Ukraine. He was still free and had not yet met the personal disillusionment with the Russian regime. Still his return to Ukraine and the startling effect that the sufferings of the serfs made upon him seem to have swung his sympathies into a social channel and away from the romantic pictures of life in the Sich. This is the theme of the _Great Grave_ (_Veliky Lyokh_), a curious but effective mystical poem, in which under various forms Shevchenko pictures the past, the present, and the future of Ukraine. The lost souls come from three crucial periods of Ukrainian history. One had cooperated with Bohdan in surrendering to Moscow, the second opposed Mazepa in his attempts at liberation, and the third had aided Catherine in abolishing the Sich. Then come the three crows, the Ukrainian which recognizes what has happened to bring the land to its doom, the Polish which expresses the fate of Poland and the Muscovite which boasts of its success. There are the poor singers who in their misery are endeavoring to collect alms for praising Bohdan. Finally there is the excavation of the graves, the little one where lie the bones of Bohdan and the great one in which are buried the spirit and the independence of Ukraine and which will also one day be excavated so that the nation can rise again. The poem is one of the most famous of Shevchenko’s and perhaps nowhere does he express more powerfully and bitterly his disapproval of the oppression of Ukraine by Moscow and the Russians.