On the morning of 27 June 1709, two armies faced each other in the fields near the Ukrainian city of Poltava.
One was led by the young and ambitious king of Sweden, Charles XII, the other by the not so young but no less ambitious tsar of Muscovy, Peter I. Both were backed by detachments of Ukrainian Cossacks—one led by Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who had rebelled against Peter and joined Charles, the other by Hetman Ivan Skoropadsky, appointed by the Russians to replace Mazepa.
Thie ensuing battle has often been regarded as a significant turning point in Russian and, indeed, European history. Peter won, defeating his archenemy, saving his country, securing his hold over the Hetmanate (a Cossack polity subordinated to Moscow), and turning the tide of the long Northern War. Charles lost and had to seek refuge on the territory of the Ottoman Empire.The Battle of Poltava is often perceived as a turning point in European history. At the end of the war Peter proclaimed himself emperor of Russia, and his country became a major European power. In time, Russia not only put an end to Swedish dominance in the Baltic region and Northern Europe but also embarked on a prolonged course of westward expansion that took its troops all the way to Paris during the Napoleonic Wars of the next century. Few scholars disagree with the conventional wisdom that Mazepas revolt and the subsequent defeat of Charles had major negative consequences for the Hetmanate—the polity in which the battle was fought. While Mazepa had hoped to increase the autonomy of the Cossack state under the nominal rule of a distant sovereign, his defeat led to its severe curtailment. The hetman’s right to appoint colonels was taken away by the tsar, who later availed himself of Hetman Skoropadsky’s death to abolish the office altogether and place the Hetmanate under the rule of the Little Russian College.
The Battle of Poltava remains an important component of Russian and Ukrainian historical mythology.
It also continues to generate interest among scholars, writers, and the public at large. If one understands myth in the broadest terms as a phenomenon that helps large collectivities define the foundations of their identity and system of values, then the term is clearly applicable to the verbal and visual presentation of the Battle of Poltava over the last three hundred years.1 It can even be argued that the “Myth of Poltava” is one of the founding myths of the Russian Empire. Its origins can be traced back to the months, if not weeks, following the battle. Many elements of the imperial myth of Poltava were first laid down by Feofan Prokopovych in his sermon delivered before Peter I at St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv on 22 July 1709, less than a month after the tsar’s victory. Prokopovych’s sermon includes themes that later became standard: the role of the tsar not only as a great military victor but also as the savior of Russia and father of his fatherland, and a portrayal of his enemy, Hetman Ivan Mazepa, as a traitor and instrument in the hands of foreign powers.An essential element of the imperial myth of Poltava is the image of the “second Judas,” the Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa, first denounced with that epithet by Peter himself. The tsar ordered that Mazepa be anathematized after he learned that the hetman had sided with Charles XII in the fall of 1708, in the midst of the Northern War. This anathema, repeated every year in the churches of the vast empire, turned Mazepa into the most hated figure of the Russian political and historical imagination. The tsar even had an Order ofJudas made, intending to bestow it on the elderly hetman once he was captured. Peter won the Battle of Poltava in June 1709, but the hetman was never caught. Instead, he became a symbol of treason to the ruler and the state; an object of government-sponsored hatred, association with whom was tantamount to sacrilege—a betrayal not only of secular authority but also of the Christian faith.
Admiring Mazepa under such circumstances was extremely dangerous, but not everyone was prepared to cast aside the memory of the old hetman.2Condemned by the tsar, abandoned by many of his followers, and anathematized by church hierarchs he had patronized in churches he had helped build, Mazepa was turned into a symbol of treason whose infamy outlasted that of the primary villain of Poltava, King Charles XII. But the power of imperial mythology had its limits. Simultaneously with the formation of the imperial myth of Poltava, its countermyth was born in Ukraine, presenting Mazepa not only as a protector of the Orthodox Church but also as a defender of the rights and freedoms of his people. Like the imperial myth, this countermyth of Mazepa began its life in the war of manifestos between Peter, Charles, and Mazepa on the eve of Poltava. It survived the most difficult post-Poltava years and took on new characteristics in nineteenth-century Ukraine.
In 1810, just over a century after the Battle of Poltava, Oleksii Martos, a young officer in the Russian military and a descendant of an old Cossack family, visited Mazepa’s grave in the Moldavian town of Galati. Two years later his father, the celebrated sculptor Ivan Martos, best known for his statue of Kuzma Minin and Dmitrii Pozharsky in Moscow’s Red Square, unveiled a monument to Catherine II at the Column Hall in the same city. While the father celebrated the empress who had put an end to the existence of the Cossack polity in Ukraine, his St. Petersburg-born son took a different attitude to the imperial past and its heroes. A few years after visiting Mazepa’s grave, most probably around 1819, the year that Byron’s Mazeppa was published, Oleksii Martos left the following record in his memoirs:
Mazepa died far from his fatherland, whose independence he defended; he was a friend of liberty, and for this he deserves the respect of generations to come......................................................... He is gone, and the
name of Little Russia and its brave Cossacks has been erased from the list of nations not great in numbers but known for their existence and their constitutions. Besides other virtues, Mazepa was a friend of learning: he enlarged the Academy of the Brotherhood Monastery in Kyiv, which he renovated and embellished; he supplied it with a library and rare manuscripts. Yet the founder of the academy and of many churches and philanthropic institutions is anathematized every year on the Sunday of the first week of Great Lent along with Stenka Razin and other thieves and robbers. But what a difference! The latter was a robber and a blasphemer. Mazepa was a most enlightened and philanthropic individual, a skillful military leader, and the ruler of a free nation.3