PART ONE I Introduction
November 10, 1708. In the Ukrainian town of Hlukhiv, Tsar Peter I, the newly elected Cossack Hetman, Ivan Skoropadskyi, numerous members of the Ukrainian Starshyna and ecclesiastical hierarchy participate in a most unusual ceremony.
Amidst somber hymns and clouds of incense, the name of Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who several weeks earlier had defected to the invading Swedes, is declared anathema. On the same day, in the Uspenskii Cathedral in Moscow, in the presence of Tsarevich Aleksei Petrovich and Russian boiars and ministers, a similar ceremony is enacted. Every year for almost two centuries thereafter, on the first Sunday of the Great Fast, Mazepa’s anathemization is repeated in the churches of the Russian empire. In the view of the rulers, servitors and loyalists of the empire, these repeated condemnations were necessary because the Hetman had committed an t‘unpardonable sin” — he had tried to withdraw Ukraine from Russian rule. Little wonder that, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the opponents of the evolving Ukrainian national movement in the Russian empire habitually referred to Ukrainian activists as Mazepists and labeled their movement mazepynstvo. The identification was meant to be derogatory. If the incipient movement could be linked to the name of Mazepa which, in the Russian empire, was associated with treason, then the movement itself could also be denounced as treasonous.July 12, 1918. The Russian empire has crumbled. In Kiev, a Ukrainian state bearing many of the trappings of the old Cossack hetmanate and headed by Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, a direct descendant of Ivan Skoropadskyi, has come into existence. Thousands of Ukrainians jam St. Sophia’s Cathedral and the adjoining square to attend an elaborate service during which the anathema is removed from Mazepa’s name and prayers are offered for his soul.
Immediately after the service, plans are discussed (but never implemented) for bringing the Hetman’s remains back to Kiev from Rumania. For Ukrainian nationalists the identification with Mazepa was welcome because it meant that their new and foundering movement and, more specifically, their desire to break away from Russia, had a centuries-long tradition which, they felt, conferred on it political legitimacy. By virtue of these and similar arguments, Mazepa and his associates have remained to this day the idols of Ukrainian nationalism.1Even a cursory examination of the historiographical treatment (or, more accurately, mistreatment) of Mazepa quickly leads one to the conclusion that, in scholarship as well as in ideological polemics, he has been for the proponents of Ukrainian separatism a revered symbol and, for the devotees of Russian centralism, a whipping boy. As a result, the goals, motives, ideas and interests which were germane to Mazepa and to Pylyp Orlyk, his epigone in exile, were usually distorted or misrepresented. This being the case, the task before us is clear: Ranke’s famous dictum “wie es eigentlich gewesen” must be applied and it is in the context of their own times, not in the framework of anachronistic ideologies, that Mazepa’s and Orlyk’s endeavors and activities must be examined.