Between Tsar and Nation

If the author of the History of the Rus' preferred to express his support for Mazepa’s cause through speeches and texts attributed to others, he used his own voice to express his (and, by extension, his readers’) loyalty to the Russian ruler and to declare his support for Peter.

This becomes especially clear in the author’s treatment of Pe­ter’s attempts to reach agreement with Charles on the eve of the Battle of Poltava by sacrificing Russian territorial acquisitions and claims, which the Swedish king brushes aside in humiliating fashion. The following passage leaves no doubt about the author’s sympathies in this particular case:

The Swedish king, drunk with the glory of a conqueror and with his constant victories, having rejected those offers [of peace], told those envoys of the tsar and foreign intermediaries striving to incline him toward peace that ‘he would make peace with the tsar in his capital city, Moscow, where he would force the Muscovites to pay him 30 million talers for the costs of the war and show the tsar how and over what to rule.’ Losing hope of achieving anything by peaceful means after such a brutal refusal, the sovereign began to rally his troops to the outskirts of Poltava, and at the council of war that was held there, the whole general staff decided to give resolute battle to the Swedes, come what may.¹⁷

Sympathizing with Charles and Mazepa on the strength of their arguments while remaining loyal to the ruler was no easy task, partly because the anonymous author disapproved of many of the tsar’s actions and those of his Great Russian troops.

Menshikov assaulted the unarmed burghers, who were in their homes and had no part whatsoever in Mazepa’s designs; he slaughtered them to a man, sparing neither sex nor age, nor even suckling infants. Thiis was followed by the troops’ plundering of the town, while their commanders and torturers executed the bandaged Serdiuk officers and civil authorities.¹⁸

The loyalty to the ruler expressed by the author of the History did not automatically translate into loyalty either to the tsar’s satraps or—an especially important point for our argument—to his Great Russian army and, by extension, his Great Russian na­tion. This distinction between the ruler and Great Russia was not the anonymous author’s invention. It had already been made very clearly in Semen Divovych’s Conversation between Great and Little Russia, written in 1762, shortly after Catherine Il’s ascent to the throne. The Great Russia of Divovych’s poem was forced to admit that Little Russia was not subject to her (Great Russia) but to the ruler who governed both polities. Great Russia says to Little Russia in that regard:

I acknowledge that I myself am not your sovereign,

But our autocrat is our common master.

I do not dispute that he accepted you with honors;

I see that he often made his own equal to yours.

But say in peace, of which there was question above, Do you win the war, supposedly, without my forces?¹⁹

The distinction between Great Russia and Little Russia al­lowed the author of the History to take another contentious step and distinguish his loyalty to the ruler from loyalty to the ruler’s troops.

The incursion of the Swedes into Little Russia by no means resembled that of an enemy invasion and had nothing hostile in it, but they passed through the inhabitants’ settlements and plowed fields as friends and humble travelers, touching no one’s property and committing none of the misdeeds, licentious acts, and excesses of every kind that are usually perpetrated by our troops in the villages on the grounds that “I am a servant of the tsar! I serve God and the sovereign on behalf of the whole Christian community! Chickens and geese, young women and girls belong to us by military right and by order of His High­ness!” The Swedes, on the contrary, demanded nothing of the inhabitants and took nothing by force, but wherever they en­countered them, they bought goods from them by voluntary trade and for cash.²⁰

In one case, referring to the massacres of Mazepa’s supporters by the tsar’s troops, the anonymous author even puts Russian per­secution of the Little Russian (Rus') nation on a par with its past persecution by the Poles. His attribution of the cruelty of those massacres to Menshikov does little to hide the fact that, in his mind, the Great Russian regime has proved as oppressive toward his nation as was the Polish one, which created the first Rus' martyr, Severyn Nalyvaiko. Describing the massacre of Mazepa’s supporters in Lebedyn, the anonymous author writes:

That punitive action was Menshikov’s usual employment: breaking on the wheel, quartering, and impaling; the lightest, considered mere play, was hanging and decapitation............................................................. It now

remains to consider and judge—if, according to the words of the Savior himself, written in the Gospel, which are immutable and not to be ignored, “all blood spilled on earth will be required of this generation”—what requirement awaits for the blood of the Rus' nation shed from the blood of Hetman Nalyvaiko to the present day, and shed in great streams for the sole reason that it sought liberty or a better life in its own land and had intentions in that regard common to all humanity.²¹

The figure of Mazepa, traitor to the tsar and defender of Ukrainian rights, presented the author of the History of the Rus'

with one more difficulty when it came to the anathema declared against him by the official church.

In all these cases, the anonymous author is prepared to stand up for Mazepa, speaking now in his own voice and not hiding behind one of his characters. With regard to the spilling of Chris­tian blood, the author first makes the apocryphal Mazepa declare neutrality in his speech to the Cossack Host, and then states that Mazepa maintained his neutrality during the Battle of Poltava, refusing to send his troops against the tsar’s army. If Mazepa’s declaration of neutrality was sheer invention on the part of the author, his troops’ non-participation in the battle was not. They were too insignificant in number and too unreliable in military training and political loyalty to be used in combat.

This historical fact is interpreted by the anonymous author in a way that allows him to advance the thesis of Mazepa’s neutrality, thereby undermining official accusations of political treason and betrayal of the Orthodox religion. According to the author of the History, Mazepa and his troops

remained at their camps and the Swedish ones at all times, constantly avoiding engagements with the Russians and main­taining the strictest neutrality toward them, stipulated by Ma­zepa with the Swedish king and announced in his declarations throughout Little Russia.

The History’s emphasis on Mazepa’s support of the Ortho­dox Church and the construction of Orthodox monasteries and shrines corresponds closely to the treatment of Mazepa by Oleksii Martos in his memoirs and was probably an important element of the Mazepa myth in early nineteenth-century Ukraine. Martos, who was close to the author of the History of the Rus' not only in his assessment of Mazepa but also in his treatment of the Pere- iaslav Agreement of 1654 and other episodes of Ukrainian histo­ry,²³ may have had an opportunity to acquaint himself with the History between 1818 and 1821, when he was actively working on his own history of Ukraine. It is much more likely, however, that both authors utilized the same sources or reflected the same at­titudes of the Ukrainian nobility (the Martos family, the Shyrais, and the anonymous author of the History of the Rus' either came from the Chernihiv region or had strong connections with it).

In any case, both Martos and the author of the History of the Rus' are highly critical of the anathema declared against Mazepa by the Russian Orthodox Church. The anonymous author charac­terizes the ritual declaration of anathema as “something new that had never yet existed in Little Russia; something terrible that was called ‘Mazepa’s companion to Hades.’” There can be little doubt that the author disapproved of Peter’s presence at the ceremony, but, as always, he was prepared to shift the blame to one of the tsar’s advisers, this time Feofan Prokopovych: “The numerous Lit­tle Russian clergy and the Great Russian clergy closest to these borders, deliberately summoned to Hlukhiv, under the leadership and inspection of the well-known bishop Prokopovych, having constituted itself as a so-called local synod, consigned Mazepa to eternal damnation, or anathema, on the ninth day of that same November.

In both the History of the Rus' and Martos’s memoirs, Mazepa emerges not only as a defender of the interests of the Little Rus­sian (Rus') nation but also as a proponent of its independence. The vision of an independent Ukraine, admittedly harking back to the past, is presented in the History as one of the goals of Mazepa and his ally, Charles XII. It must have been highly con­sonant with attitudes dominant in some segments of Ukrainian society, if Martos’s memoirs are any indication. Given that the anonymous author’s main strategy was to convince the imperial government to treat the Ukrainians as equals, Mazepa’s references to independence should be regarded more as a threat than as a real political program.

**

The author of the History of the Rus' was caught between two con­tradictory imperatives: his loyalty to the ruler and the Romanov dynasty conflicted with his clear admiration for Mazepa as an embodiment of the Enlightenment ideals of struggle against tyr­anny, defense of human dignity, and protection of national rights. The solution to this seemingly insoluble problem was found in the concept of the nation, deeply rooted in Ukrainian historical writing of the previous era. While the anonymous author of the History remained loyal to the tsar in his description of the Polta­va episode and shifted responsibility for Peter’s ruthlessness and cruelty to his advisers, he found no difficulty in denouncing the tsar’s Great Russian nation. If revolt against the tsar remained illegitimate for the author, the struggle of one nation against an­other in defense of its freedom and liberties certainly did not. The anonymous author was still faithful to Jean Bodin’s notion that only God could judge and punish a ruler, but he was no less attuned to the ideal of national sovereignty as promoted by the leaders of the American and French revolutions.

In its interpretation of the Ukrainian past the History places the nation on a par with the ruler. The Rus' nation of the Histo­ry was first and foremost that of the Cossack officers and their descendants, but on occasion it could include the popular masses as well. The author of the History was dismissive of people of low social status and critical of the actions of uneducated peasants, but he had no qualms about using their deeds as an argument in his exposition when it suited his purpose. In his treatment of Little Russians and Great Russians, the anonymous author was unques­tionably following in the footsteps of Semen Divovych and his Conversation between Great and Little Russia, but he was prepared to go even further and treat their relations as those between sep­arate nations, not just distinct historical and legal entities.

The anonymous author also emerges from the pages of his History as the first Ukrainian intellectual to struggle with the notion of the religious and ethnic closeness of Russians and Ukrainians. He recognizes the depth of the cultural association between the two nations but rejects the actions of the popular masses informed by that affinity. Instead, he turns the affinity into his principal weapon, claiming Ukraine’s historical primacy as the Rus' nation, attributing the Rus' name almost exclusively to his compatriots, and trying to shame the Russian state and society into granting equal rights to their Little Russian brethren.

If one judges by the History of the Rus', the Ukrainian elites of the early nineteenth century could not help admiring Mazepa despite their best efforts to remain loyal to the monarchy. Mazepa, however, never became an unambiguously positive character in Ukraine. Unable to resolve the problem of Mazepa’s disloyalty to Peter, the elites had to conceal and qualify their admiration for the hetman. After all, according to Pogodin’s diary, the Chernihiv nobility not only “loved Mazeppa” but also admired Osyp Su- diienko, a descendant of a prominent Cossack officer family who in 1811 donated one hundred thousand rubles to build a church commemorating Peter’s victory at Poltava.