Letting Mazepa Speak

It is in this speech that the author of the History gives Mazepa an opportunity to present his case. The long speech was allegedly delivered at the moment, decisive for Mazepa and his homeland, when the hetman decided to switch sides and join Charles XII.

Mazepa’s call to arms is based on the dire circumstances in which his fatherland and the Cossack nation find themselves. “We stand now, Brethren, between two abysses prepared to con­sume us if we do not choose a reliable path for ourselves to avoid them,” begins Mazepa’s apocryphal speech, referring to the fact that two imperial armies are approaching the borders of Ukraine and that a clash between them is all but inevitable. Thie hetman tars Peter I and Charles XII with the same brush, depicting them as tyrants who rule arbitrarily over conquered peoples: “Both of them, given their willfulness and appropriation of unlimited pow­er, resemble the most terrible despots, such as all Asia and Africa have hardly ever produced.”

The hetman claims that the victory of either despot would bring nothing but destruction to Ukraine.

Mazepa’s solution to the seemingly insoluble problem of choosing between the two despots is most unusual. He proposes to remain neutral in the conflict between them, but that neutrality is of a particular kind. Ukraine would accept the protectorate of the Swedish king and fight only against those forces that at­tacked its territory, which under these circumstances could only be Russian forces. The Swedish king, along with other European powers, would guarantee the restoration of Ukrainian indepen­dence. Mazepa’s speech, at once passionate and highly rational, leaves no doubt that he is acting in defense of his nation (natsiia), which he wants to save from destruction and lead to freedom, restoring its independence and placing it on a par with other European nations.

Parts of his speech specifically counter the arguments of his critics, including the anonymous author’s own claim that Mazepa betrayed the tsar for personal advantage. “And so it remains to us, Brethren,” says the apocryphal Mazepa to his troops, “to choose the lesser of the visible evils that have beset us, so that our descen­dants, condemned to slavery by our incompetence, do not burden us with their complaints and imprecations. I do not have them [descendants] and, of course, cannot have them; consequently, I am not involved in the interests of our descendants and seek nothing but the welfare of the nation that has honored me with my current post and, with it, has entrusted me with its fate.”¹¹

The text of Mazepa’s speech in the History of the Rus' is a prod­uct of historical imagination, but it is not completely divorced from the realities of Mazepa’s era.

According to Orlyk, Mazepa told him in 1707: “Before God the Omniscient I protest and swear that it is not for my private gain, not for higher honors, not for greater enrichment, nor for other whims of any kind, but for all of you who remain under my rule and command, for your wives and children, for the general good of my mother, my fatherland, poor unfortunate Ukraine, for the whole Zaporozhian Host and the Little Russian people, as well as for the promotion and expansion of the rights and freedoms of the Host, that I wish to act, with God’s help, in such a way that you, with your wives and children and our native land, along with the Zaporozhian Host, do not perish because of the Muscovite or the Swedish side.”¹²

Mazepa’s speech in the History of the Rus' presents an image of the hetman that not only directly contradicts the imperial depic­tion of him as a Judas, a traitor to the tsar and his own people, but also departs significantly from the image of him presented by most eighteenth-century Ukrainian chroniclers. Writers of the first half of the century, including the author of the Hrabianka Chronicle, preferred to steer clear of a detailed discussion of the politically dangerous age of Mazepa, limiting themselves to a few short, dispassionate entries on the events of 1708 and 1709. Authors of the second half of the century, including Petro Symonovsky and especially Aleksandr Rigelman, did not shy away from the con­troversial topic but accepted and promoted the official viewpoint in their treatment of Mazepa. Even so, the image of Mazepa as a defender of Ukrainian rights, which emerges—though not without difficulty—from the History of the Rus', was not entirely without precedent in Ukrainian historical writing.

We know that a text of Mazepa’s speech circulated in Ukraine in the first decades of the nineteenth century, but we do not have the text itself: Dmitrii Bantysh-Kamensky was promised a copy but never received it. Nevertheless, Mazepa’s speech in the His­tory of the Rus' finds parallels in certain extant sources. The main points of the speech correspond closely to the hetman’s arguments as summarized in the BriefHistoricalDescription of Little Russia. This narrative—written, according to a date on its title page, in 1789—is known today in a copy dated 1814. Its author claims that “Hetman Mazepa undertook to make use of the continuing war in Russia with the Swedish king in such a way as to renounce his subjection to the Russian sovereign and establish himself as an autocratic prince in the Little Russian regions with the help of Charles XII.” The hetman “suggested to the Little Russian officers, first, that Little Russia had been subjected to destruc­tion owing to the war with the Swedes, not for the sake of any interests of its own, but, in his opinion, even with impairment of its liberty; second, that the sovereign, exhausting it with taxes, would freely abrogate the treaties whereby it still prospered; third, that the present time offered a chance to think of the future; and, fourth, how difficult it was, having become accustomed to liberty, to endure never-ending bondage.”¹³

What was certainly new in Mazepa’s speech as rendered by the author of the History of the Rus' was the eloquence and persua­siveness with which the hetman presented his argument. Among the first to be persuaded was the anonymous author himself—as- suming, of course, that he was not the author of the speech but the person who cited or edited an existing text. One can hardly imagine that he would have included such a text in his work if he were not at least partly sympathetic to Mazepa’s argument and, by extension, to the hetman himself. Through the medium of Mazepa’s speech, the anonymous author gave voice to many of his own ideas that he could not express on his own behalf.

Still, the strongest support for Mazepa’s argument is not ex­pressed by the author directly but through the medium of speech­es by other characters, including the proclamation issued by Maz­epa’s ally, Charles XII. The king corroborates everything declared by Mazepa in his own speech and sounds the same themes of struggle against tyranny and the restoration of Rus'/Cossack independence (samoderzhavie} as does the apocryphal Mazepa. According to the History, Charles declares in his proclamation to the people of Ukraine:

The Muscovite tsar, being an intransigent foe of all the nations on earth and desiring to make them bend to his yoke, having subjected the Cossacks as well to his dishonorable bondage; despising, revoking, and annulling all your rights and freedoms established by solemn agreements and treaties with you, has forgotten and shamelessly contemned gratitude itself, held sa­cred by all nations, which is owed to you Cossacks and the Rus' nation by Muscovy, reduced to a nullity and almost to nonbeing by its internal conflicts, by pretenders, and by the Poles, but maintained and strengthened by you. For the whole world knows that the Rus^z nation with its Cossacks was orig­inally an autocratic nation—that is, dependent on itself alone, under the rule of its princes or autocrats....¹⁴

The author of the History of the Rus' also gives voice to the other side, that of Tsar Peter I. Unlike Mazepa’s speech and the proclamation of Charles XII, Peter’s manifesto was not a product of the author’s (or of a predecessor’s) imagination but an actual document well known in Ukraine.

If Mazepa’s statements are corroborated in the History of the Rus' by those of Charles XII, and vice versa, Peter’s declarations are left with no narrative support or corroborating evidence, and what the author of the History says about the behavior of Russian troops in Ukraine raises serious doubt about the validity of the tsar’s statements. Judging by the space allotted to Mazepa and Charles on the one hand, and Peter on the other, to present their cases, there is little doubt that the author’s sympathies lay with the former, not the latter.¹⁵