“In the Name of the Beloved Fatherland”: The Loyalty and Treason of Ivan Mazepa

SERHII PLOKHY

On 24 July 1709, shortly after the Battle of Poltava, Teofan Prokopovych (Feofan Prokopovich), then prefect of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, greeted the victorious tsar Peter I with a sermon at St Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv.

In his sermon of 1709, Prokopovych called Peter the “father of the fatherland.” That appellation would acquire official status twelve years later in the Act of 1721, which bestowed the new title of “all-Russian emperor” on the tsar, as well as two appellations, “Great” and “Father of the Fatherland.”³ Prokopovych’s reference of 1709 to Peter as “father of the fatherland” was directly linked to his numerous ref­erences to the concept of the fatherland (otechestvo) in the text of the sermon.

The use of the term fatherland in relation to the ethnocultural community and the formation of concepts of loyalty to such a fatherland were important signs of the development of national identity in the European population in the eighteenth century, thereby making it possible to trace the changes in the self­identification of the Cossack elite in the Hetmanate era. Fatherland (otchyzna) was an important term in the Ukrainian political vocabulary of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The word corresponded to Polish ojczyzna, with which Ukrainian political discourse shared a number of important characteris­tics.⁵ In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the fatherland (ojczyzna) was conceived as quite independent of a ruler, or even of a particular state; the word could be applied to the constituent parts of a state as easily as to the whole. The Commonwealth, the Polish Crown, and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania could be considered fatherlands of their inhabitants.⁶ For example, in the Polish verses re­cited by students at the Kyiv College in May 1648 in honor of Prince Jeremi Wisniowecki (larema Vyshnevets'kyi), the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania vied for the right to be called the fatherland of the scions of the princely families of the Sanguszkos (Sanhushkos), Czartoryskis (Chartory- is'kyis), and Koreckis (Korets'kyis).

All this would change with the outbreak of the Khmel'nyts'kyi Uprising (1648), which was gathering momentum even as the students of the Kyivan Col­lege recited their verses in honor of Wisniowiecki. The new Cossack state pro­duced by the uprising created new loyalties in the region and drew new political, cultural, and geographical boundaries for the new fatherland of the Rus' elites. However, this process was gradual. The pro-Polish hetmans, who advocated reconciliation with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, continued to call the Polish-Lithuanian state their common fatherland with the Poles.⁸ As far as we can judge, the process of transferring the concept of fatherland from Poland or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to Cossack Ukraine began in the six­ties of the seventeenth century. Hetman Ivan Briukhovets'kyi was probably the first to introduce the idea of loyalty to Ukraine as the Cossack fatherland into political discourse.⁹ Even before 1663, he called Ukraine his fatherland in his letters. This tendency fully manifested itself after his proclamation as hetman.¹⁰ At the same time, his main rival, Hetman of Right-Bank Ukraine Pavlo Teteria, still regarded the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the Cossack fatherland and “common mother.”¹¹ Among the Muscovite political elite, an established tradition of using the term fatherland that could compete with the Cossack use of this concept simply did not exist. And although the term otchina, which was used by Muscovite clerks, was phonetically close to the Polish ojczyzna and the Rus' otchyzna, its main meaning - the tsar's patrimony - was quite different. Briukhovets'kyi was well aware of this difference, calling Ukraine (including the Right Bank) the tsar's patrimony.¹²

The impetus for the mass application of the term fatherland in relation to Cos­sack Ukraine was, perhaps, the Treaty of Andrusovo, according to which Ukraine was divided along the Dnipro not only de facto, but also de jure.

In the panegyric to Khmel'nyts'kyi, contained in a 1693 textbook of rhetoric, the hetman is depicted as the European Mars, Russian Leonidas and Phoebus, and Ukrainian Tamerlane, the father of the fatherland. This fatherland distinctly differs from (and is even contrasted with) Poland; its sons must be infinitely loyal to it and are obliged to glorify the exploits of the “knight Khmel'nyts'kyi.” His victories over the Poles - the Korsun Thermopylae, the Pyliavtsi Cannae, the bat­tles of Zbarazh, Zboriv, and Batih - became the object of praise.

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The concept of the fatherland became the cornerstone of attempts to both legit­imize and discredit Ivan Mazepa's uprising against the tsar in 1708.²¹ The tsar, who had seldom, if ever, used that term in his official documents prior to Mazepa's de­fection in the autumn of 1708, now emerged in his manifestos to the Cossacks as the true champion of their fatherland and the Little Russian people.²² In his cir­cular of 28 October 1708, issued immediately after Peter learned about Mazepa's defection to the Swedes,²³ the tsar presented the hetman's actions as a betrayal of his oath of personal loyalty. Apart from accusing the hetman of treason, Peter em­ployed two other political arguments. The first was related to the conditions of the Muscovite protectorate over the Hetmanate established in the days of Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi. According to those conditions, the tsar took it upon himself to protect Little Russia from the Polish threat to the Orthodox religion. Now that Charles XII was being assisted in his war with Muscovy by King Stanislaw Leszczynski of Poland, Peter exploited that motif to the fullest.

Peter's first use of the term fatherland probably occurred in his manifesto of 6 November 1708, by far the longest document presenting the tsar's case against the hetman. It was issued in response to letters to the “Little Russian people” from Charles XII and Mazepa that were intercepted by the tsar's troops. Peter's man­ifesto sought to discredit Charles XII and Mazepa as enemies of the “Little Russian people” who wanted to exploit Ukraine economically and then either deliver it to Poland or establish Mazepa's autocratic rule, introducing Lutheranism and the Union in order to destroy Orthodoxy. This was allegedly confirmed by the dev­astation of lands captured by the Swedes and the destruction of Belarusian churches by Swedish troops.²⁶ Peter also contended that the tsar had never vio­lated the ancient rights guaranteed by the articles of Khmel'nyts'kyi, that Muscovy had not taken a penny from Little Russia, and that “no people under the sun can boast of such liberties, privileges, and freedom, as the Little Russian people, by the Grace of Our Tsarist Majesty.” As for Mazepa's accusations that Great Russian troops were stationed in Ukraine in order to seize all power in it, Peter stated that he would not leave a single detachment there after the end of the campaign. Thus, part of the troops had allegedly already left the cities where they had been sta­tioned, and the perpetrators of riots and looting had already been punished. As we can see, the tsar counted on the support of his subjects - the “Little Russian people” - in his effort to liberate “their fatherland” - the “Little Russian land.”²⁷

In a letter to the Zaporozhian Cossacks, Peter not only promised to increase the yearly stipend for every detachment (kurin") of the Sich by 1,500 rubles, but also expressed his hope that the Cossacks would “stand up for their fatherland and for the Orthodox faith and for us, and not give ear to the blandishments of the apostate traitor Mazepa.”²⁸ In his manifesto of 21 January 1709, Peter set out to undermine Mazepa's claim that he wanted to establish Ukraine as an inde­pendent polity, claiming that the hetman had gone over to the Swedes not “for the benefit of the Little Russian land and for the preservation of liberties and so that they might be neither under Our nor under Polish rule, but remain free and independent,” but in order to deliver Ukraine into the hands of the Poles. The tsar called upon his Little Russian subjects to pay no heed to Mazepa and the Swedes but to support the Great Russian troops and oppose their enemy, “seeing this open treason on the part of the apostate Mazepa, seeking the betrayal of your fatherland into unbearable Polish bondage.”²⁹

Peter was clearly changing emphasis from qualifying Mazepa's actions as a be­trayal of the tsar - the leitmotif of his first manifesto - to a betrayal of the father­land. Not surprisingly, in all the manifestos and letters known to us, Peter wrote only about “your,” not “our,” fatherland - a clear indication that otechestvo was associated in his mind with the specific character of Ukrainian political discourse and not directly related to the “all-Russian” political discourse and vocabulary.

Those who wrote about “our” fatherland were the Hetmanate's secular and re­ligious authorities, forced by the swift and resolute actions of Peter's troops to condemn Mazepa. In his manifesto of 8 December 1708, the new hetman, Ivan Skoropads'kyi, responded to Mazepa's circular of November 10th, specifically to his claim that “Moscow, that is, the Great Russian people, has always been hateful to our Little Russian people; in its malicious intentions it has long resolved to drive our people to perdition.” Skoropads'kyi wrote that the “Little Russian people [...] with our whole fatherland” should be grateful to the “Great Sovereigns, Our Orthodox Monarchs” for the protection they offered and for the prosperous con­dition of “Ukraine, our fatherland” (Ukrama, otchyzna nasha) after the end of the lengthy wars of the second half of the seventeenth century. He also stated that Mazepa had committed treason not in order to protect “our fatherland” but for his own gain; never having been its true son, “now he has become all the more manifest an enemy and destroyer.” Skoropads'kyi also asserted that “in general, our Little Russian fatherland must beware of that self-styled son, or, one should say, degenerate, the infamous Mazepa” and accused Charles XII of wanting to hand over “our fatherland” to the Polish king. The new hetman called upon his followers to support the Great Russian troops in the name of the Orthodox faith, the true churches, and “their fatherland.”³⁰ The letter of the “Little Russian hier­archs,” distributed in Ukraine at the insistence of the tsar, similarly portrayed Mazepa not only as a traitor who had abandoned the Orthodox tsar for a heretical monarch but also as one who had “alienated himself from his Little Russian fa­therland,” sought to subject it to the Polish yoke, and wanted to turn the Orthodox churches into Uniate ones.³¹

It is safe to assume that it was Mazepa's statements and manifestos that intro­duced the concept of the fatherland into the ideological battle. Characteristically, Mazepa's first public act on joining forces with Charles XII was to take an oath in front of the Cossack officers who accompanied him, claiming that he had acted not for his own sake but for the good of the whole fatherland and the Za- porozhian Host.³² In a letter to Colonel (and future Hetman) Ivan Skoropads'kyi, Mazepa called upon him to attack the Muscovite troops as a “true son of the fa­therland.”³³ Mazepa also invoked the good of the fatherland in his manifestos to the Ukrainian people. Additional light on the political language and ideological concepts employed by Mazepa in his confrontation with the tsar can be shed by the writings of his followers, especially his successor in exile, Hetman Pylyp Orlyk, who as Mazepa's general chancellor apparently penned many of his man­ifestos in the autumn and winter of 1708. It was Orlyk who recalled in a letter to Stefan Iavors'kyi in 1721 that when Mazepa confided his intention to rebel against the tsar, he claimed to be doing so “for all of you who are under my rule and command, for your wives and children, for the common welfare of my father­land, poor unfortunate Ukraine (matky moiei otchyzny bidnoi Ukrainy), for the whole Zaporozhian Host and the Little Russian people, for the elevation and ex­pansion of the Host's rights and privileges.”³⁴ The author of the Pacta et consti­tutions also explained Mazepa's actions as a result of his concern for the unity and welfare of the fatherland. In that regard he was presented as continuing the cause of Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, who had allied himself with Charles X of Swe­den in the mid-seventeenth century in order to liberate his fatherland from the foreign yoke. As Mazepa's successor, Orlyk in turn was to take care of the needs of the fatherland, whose name was given in the Latin text of the Pacta et consti­tutions as Ucraina or Parva Rossia.³⁵

The theme of the good of the fatherland as the highest value and object of loy­alty, which Mazepa introduced into the propaganda war, clearly sidelined the concept of personal loyalty to the monarch, which had been paramount in Peter's first letter on Mazepa's treason. By invoking the notion of loyalty to the father­land, Mazepa effectively questioned and rejected the notion that his primary loy­alty was owed to the monarch, and Peter's propagandists had little choice but to accept that logic if they wanted to win the hearts and minds of the “Little Russian people.” Another significant innovation of Mazepa's was the presentation of the ongoing conflict not as an act of personal treason but as a confrontation between two nations (peoples), Little Russian and Great Russian. Again, Peter's and Sko- ropads'kyi's responses to Mazepa's accusations demonstrate that they had to ac­cept his logic and adopt the rules of the national discourse imposed on them. They were obliged to write not only about the “Little Russian people,” “Little Russian” and “Great Russian” troops, as the Muscovite authorities had been pre­pared to do all along, but also about the Great Russian subjects of the tsar and the Great Russian people. If these terms were not entirely novel, they were by no means usual in the tsar's manifestos, which normally preferred statist to national discourse and legitimized the tsar's actions through the notion of the interests of the Russian state (Rossiiskoe gosudarstvo).³⁶

The war of manifestos between Peter and Mazepa during the months leading to the Poltava battle constitutes the ideological background against which we can properly assess the meaning of concepts, ideas, and images employed by Proko- povych in his sermon before the tsar on 24 July 1709. The war directly affected the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, as all “foreign” students - that is, those born outside the Hetmanate - were sent back across the Polish-Lithuanian border by the local Muscovite voivode on the orders of the tsar's chancellor.³⁷ Prokopovych could not but have known the content of at least some of Mazepa's manifestos and the responses to them by Peter and Skoropads'kyi: in fact, his sermon contains a ref­erence to Peter's manifesto on the Zaporozhians.³⁸ Prokopovych's rejection of Mazepa's claim to be a true son of the fatherland corresponds almost directly to the analogous passage of Skoropads'kyi's manifesto, and so on. Clearly, Proko­povych developed some of the ideas expressed in Peter's and Skoropads'kyi's man­ifestos, including the motif of Mazepa's betrayal of both the tsar and the fatherland. And yet, despite clear parallels between Prokopovych's sermon and the circular letters of the tsar and the new hetman, there were some important differences in the treatment of the issue by Prokopovych and his high-ranking predecessors in the propaganda war of 1708-09 against Mazepa.

If Mazepa, Peter, and Skoropads'kyi had in mind the Little Russian fatherland, Prokopovych, as shown earlier, considered that his own fatherland and the one betrayed by Mazepa was not Little Russia, but the entity to which Peter referred in one of his manifestos as the Russian state (Prokopovych generally called it Rus­sia). The new concept of the Russian fatherland constructed by Prokopovych was a major ideological innovation, for it not only implied a prospective change of loyalty on the part of the “Little Russian people” from the Hetmanate to the “all­Russian” state but also introduced a new object of loyalty for the rest of the pop­ulation of that state. For Prokopovych, unlike Mazepa, Peter, and Skoropads'kyi, there were no Little Russian and Great Russian troops at Poltava - there were only Russian troops; there were no Little Russian and Great Russian peoples but one united Russian people; no Little Russia and Great Russia as constituents of one “all Russian” state but Little Russia as part of a greater Russia - the new fatherland and the new object of loyalty of the tsar's subjects. That new source of legitimacy was closely linked to the old one - the person of the tsar - but henceforth the tsar had to share his place in the hierarchy of loyalties with the concept of Russia as a fatherland. The appellation “father of the fatherland,” earlier applied by Kyivan literati to Mazepa, was now reserved, with the change of the political boundaries of the fatherland, exclusively for the person of the tsar.

Was Prokopovych alone in attempting to turn the Russian state into a nation­ally defined fatherland called Russia? Probably not, but the proof of that is not easy to find. One indication that Prokopovych had a powerful ally and protector in this undertaking - the tsar himself - is to be found in the text of the tsar's order to his troops on the eve of the Poltava battle. There Peter, in an apparent departure from his earlier manifestos, addressed his country as both Russia and fatherland. “Let the Russian (rossiiskoi) army know,” reads the text of the order, “that the hour has drawn nigh in which the very existence of the whole fatherland (otechestvo) is placed in their hands; either Russia (Rossiia) will perish completely or she will be reborn for the better.”³⁹ The problem with this order is that its original text has not survived, and the one known today originates with a manuscript entitled The History of Emperor Peter the Great whose authorship is attributed to none other than Teofan Prokopovych.⁴⁰ Whether Peter indeed addressed his troops be­fore the battle in the manner indicated above, using the words Russia and father­land, cannot be known for certain. Research on the use of the term fatherland in Muscovy and the Russian Empire still lies ahead, but it seems highly appropriate to find these terms in the work of one of the original promoters of the concept of Russia as a common fatherland of the peoples that the pre-Poltava propagan­dists called Little Russian and Great Russian.

The notion of the fatherland was associated in Prokopovych's mind with a par­ticular polity and constituted a natural object of loyalty for its sons from the most ancient times. The Trojans had their own fatherland, as did the Romans and, later, the Poles.⁴¹ The borders of the fatherland could apparently change with those of the state. For example, in Prokopovych's opinion, Alexander Nevskii had “revived Russia and these members of it, Ingria, I say, and Karelia, which were then about to be cut off; he preserved and consolidated them in the body of his fatherland.”⁴² Thus, as was often the case in Prokopovych's sermons, the notions of the father­land and Russia merged into one concept. As noted above, the notion of Russia had a clear national connotation in Prokopovych's sermons, for he considered Russia a “national name” (obshchenarodnoe imia), often compared it to other peo­ples, and occasionally called it a narod.⁴³ The concept of Russia as a fatherland linked the concept of the Russian monarch (all-important to Prokopovych) with the concepts of the Russian state (gosudarstvo, derzhava) and the Russian people.

It is reasonable to assume that the new meaning of such concepts and terms as Russia and fatherland employed in Prokopovych's sermons and writings of the post-1709 period manifested the arrival of a new type of identity in the Romanovs' realm - one based on loyalty not to the ruler alone or to his state but to a new type of proto-national entity. Prokopovych actively promoted these new terms and concepts in his numerous speeches and sermons. In so doing, he echoed the Protestant preachers on the Swedish side of the Northern War, as well as their colleagues in other countries of Northern Europe. All of them were busy pro­moting the notion of the fatherland and the concept of loyalty to it in their own sermons and writings.⁴⁴ Even more than by the genre of the sermon, Proko­povych's fatherland project was promoted by an act of the Senate (1721) that be­stowed the title of “all-Russian emperor” and the appellations “Great” and “father of the fatherland” on the Muscovite monarch in connection with the victorious conclusion of the Northern War. Some scholars assume that the text of the act originated with the Synod, in particular with its vice-president at the time, Teofan Prokopovych.⁴⁵ Whether that was the case or not, it is quite clear that the concept of Russia as a fatherland and object of loyalty for the subjects of the tsar made spectacular progress in the Muscovite realm during the age of Peter, and in that progress it is difficult not to see the hand of Prokopovych and the influence of concepts originally developed in the Cossack Hetmanate.

Prokopovych's writings demonstrate that the new understanding of the con­cepts of Russia and the fatherland was an important element in the reconstruction of his own identity, as well as in the construction of the identities of those Ukraini­ans (mostly representatives of the Kyivan clergy) who followed him in making their careers in the North. The latter were prepared by his writings to make a switch from the Rossiia of Petro Mohyla to the Rossiia of Peter Romanov. The new imperial Russia also became their new fatherland, with Little Russia relegated to the status of a local patria or birthplace - the significance attributed to the Hetmanate in Prokopovych's St Petersburg letters.⁴⁶ By the end of the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the Kyiv-educated intellectuals were a long way from imagining their fatherland as part of the Polish Crown or the whole Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth as opposed to barbaric Muscovy - the image pre­sented by the Kyivan writer Pavlo Ostropols'kyi in his Polish verses published by the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press in 1636.⁴⁷ Now the selfsame Muscovy was conveniently reintroduced to the Kyivans as “Russia” and depicted as part of their new fatherland. True, for the Kyivans their homeland always remained part of any new fatherland they imagined, but in the process they changed not only the names of those fatherlands but also the word they used to define the concept itself - from Mohyla's ojczyzna to Sofonovych's otchyzna and Prokopovych's otechestvo.

There is good reason to believe that the alumni of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy who worked in the imperial service accepted such changes of identity. But did Prokopovych's redefinition of such terms as Russia and fatherland affect the broader elite circles of the Hetmanate? It seems particularly important to ask this question in light of the report submitted by the Muscovite voivode of Kyiv on the eve of the Battle of Poltava. He not only informed his superior of the expulsion

from Kyiv of students not born in the Hetmanate, but also listed Prokopovych, the prefect of the academy who was supposed to care for the welfare of those stu­dents, as the only representative of the Kyivan clergy who was well-disposed (sniskhoditelen) to the Muscovites.⁴⁸ The answer to the above question should be more negative than positive. Relatively few representatives of the Hetmanate's secular elites accepted the institution of the Russian state as their new fatherland. As indicated by a recent analysis of the Cossack chronicles of the period, at least one of their authors, Samiilo Velychko, regarded the Hetmanate (which he usually called either Little Russia or Ukraine) as his sole fatherland.⁴⁹

The historico-political and cultural significance of Velychko's chronicle, and also that of Hryhorii Hrabianka's chronicle, written in the same era, can be fully understood only against the backdrop of the historical, political, and ideological debate launched by the war of manifestos of 1708-09, the echo of which is heard in the above-mentioned works.⁵⁰ Whose side - Peter's or Mazepa's - did the post-Poltava chroniclers take? Judging from what we know to date, the Cossack starshyna had no reason to like Mazepa. First, they criticized him for fawning on the tsar, then they refused to join his rebellion. Even those who supported him barely waited for his death to conclude the Bendery Constitution of 1710 and pre­vent the appearance of another Cossack autocrat like Ivan Mazepa in the office of hetman. Samiilo Velychko, a protege of Mazepa's enemy, General Judge Vasyl' Kochubei, was also not a supporter of the late hetman. However, it was one thing not to support Mazepa, and quite another to support Peter's offensive against the autonomy of the Hetmanate, which led to the abolition of the hetmancy.

As mentioned above, in the manifestos of 1708-09, Peter accused Mazepa of apostasy from his oath to the tsar, to which Mazepa replied that he was guided by the highest loyalty - to the fatherland, the liberties of the Sich, and the welfare of the Little Russian people. Orlyk developed this position further in exile, but the chroniclers of the Hetmanate did not seem to build on this theme. According to Frank Sysyn, Hrabianka assessed the actions of the hetmans primarily by the criterion of loyalty to the tsar.⁵¹ Velychko, giving the reader an account of the death of his patron Vasyl' Kochubei, noted that he had served God, his ruler, his fatherland, and the Zaporozhian Host.⁵² In this hierarchy of loyalties, the father­land came after the ruler. And although in his chronicle Velychko emphasized loyalty to the fatherland, in general, he apparently agreed with the tsar's theses of 1708-09: love for the fatherland can lead the Cossacks against the hetman who threatens the fatherland, but it cannot lead them against the Muscovite monarch.⁵³ Velychko could criticize the actions of individual tsars, even Peter's, but he was not ready to put loyalty to Ukraine, his Little Russian fatherland, above loyalty to the tsar. That is why Velychko seems less consistent than Mazepa or Orlyk: he recognized Khmel'nyts'kyi's right to rebel against the Polish king in the name of the fatherland but denied his followers the right to rebel against the Russian tsar. The fact that the Polish monarchs were Catholics, while the Russian tsars were Orthodox and the defenders of the Orthodox Church, probably also played a role. However, one should not look for only a religious rationale; as Sysyn notes, Velychko's support for the Orthodox tsar could also be the result of the simple recognition of the “political reality, resulting from the late seventeenth-century struggles and the Battle of Poltava.”⁵⁴

Although it seems that Velychko and Hrabianka sided with the Orthodox monarch in the discussion between Peter and Mazepa, they leaned toward his opponent in matters concerning the rights and liberties of the Zaporozhian Host and the Little Russian people. Velychko, for example, criticized Peter's decision to transfer Right-Bank Ukraine to Turkey, as well as the establishment of the Little Russian Collegium. He also quoted the tsar's words that no nation on earth had as many liberties as Ukrainians.⁵⁵ And although the criticized decisions were made after the Battle of Poltava, Velychko was clearly continuing his polemic with the assertions of the tsar's manifestos of 1708-09. In his chronicle, we also find echoes of Mazepa's statements that his revolt was caused by a desire to preserve the in­tegrity of the Cossack fatherland. It is no accident that Velychko, as well as Hra- bianka, condemned the Truce of Andrusovo, which divided Ukraine, and considered Right-Bank Ukraine to be part of his country.

Important for the views of both chroniclers was their interpretation of the Pereiaslav Treaty of 1654 as the Magna Carta of the Hetmanate's liberties. Velychko interpreted Pereiaslav as a mutually binding agreement between equal partners. Of course, this interpretation contradicted the views of the Muscovite boyars, who regarded military rights and privileges as a gift from the tsar, which could be taken away at any moment. The Muscovite side never took seriously the promises made during the Pereiaslav council. As noted above, in the fateful year of 1708, Peter de­nied that the tsars had violated the articles of 1654. In actual fact, he continued the policy of his predecessors and further reduced Cossack privileges, initially limiting the powers of the newly elected Hetman Ivan Skoropads'kyi, and then, in 1722, completely abolishing the office of the hetman. In their interpretation of the Pereiaslav Agreement as a mutually binding agreement, the Cossack chroniclers projected on Muscovy the model of the Commonwealth's political relations. To expect that an autocracy would adhere to the traditions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a striking lack of understanding of political realities, which could still be forgiven, to use David Frick's expression, by such “former Ruthenians” as Sofonovych or Baranovych, but not by the chroniclers of the Hetmanate of the 1720s. But then, they were only victims and hostages of the new political situation.

After the Poltava defeat, even the most profound understanding of the mecha­nisms of autocratic rule would not have helped them to restore the Cossack rights taken away by Peter and his predecessors. The chroniclers, together with the entire society, were forced to seek solace in the models and hopes of the times of the Polish-Lithuanian state.

Neither of the chroniclers went into the details of Mazepa's revolt. Hrabianka recalled the hetman's “treason” and Velychko ended his chronicle at the end of the seventeenth century. His attitude to the choice made by Mazepa can only be reconstructed based on his attitude to the revolt of Petryk, who defected to Crimea in 1693. In relating Petryk's letter to the Sich, Velychko actually repeats the argu­ments from Mazepa's manifestos of 1708: the war against Russia is being waged for the sake of restoring Cossack liberties and the welfare of the whole people, with the aim of returning the idealized times of Khmel'nyts'kyi. Petryk's letter is countered in the text of the chronicle with the probable response of Velychko's own Poltava regiment. The Poltava letter denied that the Muscovite authorities did harm to the Cossacks or the Little Russian people, but if something like that happened, the way out of the situation should be sought by wise leaders and not such rebels as Petryk. Velychko clearly did not consider Petryk a wise leader. We can assume that he was no better disposed toward Mazepa. Although he agreed with some of his theses, he did not consider insurrection a good means of achiev­ing political change.⁵⁶

In 1728, twenty-three years after the performance of Prokopovych's Vladimir, Kyivans attended another play staged by students of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Entitled Mylost’ Bozhiia (The Grace of God), it celebrated the restoration of the hetman's office, which had effectively been abolished by Peter in 1722. It was clearly influenced by Prokopovych's play, and its epilogue included an appeal to God to bestow his grace on the tsar (now Peter II) and his “faithful chief” (virnyi vozhd'), the hetman (now Danylo).

Nevertheless, the ideological messages of these plays showed more differences than similarities. The drama of 1728 made no attempt to link the power of the hetmans to that of the Kyivan princes. It compared the new hetman, Danylo Apostol, not to Volodymyr, as did Prokopovych in the case of Mazepa, but to Khmel'nyts'kyi. The playwright's main interlocutor was not Russia but Ukraine. He called upon Ukraine to change her sorrow to joy and celebrate Khmel'nyt- s'kyi's victories: “do not weep, o Ukraine, cease to grieve, / It is time to turn your sorrow into joy.”⁵⁷ The confusing sequence of “all-Russian” terms was now aban­doned in favor of clearly defined “Ukrainian” ones that promoted local Ukrainian patriotism and identity. The Cossacks were presented as the patriots of Mother Ukraine, while the play's main character, Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, was portrayed as a true patriot of his Ukrainian fatherland: “Having come to love the fatherland above all else, and for its sake having scorned all / Luxuries, peace, advantages, and all private gain.”⁵⁸ Everyone who loved his fatherland was encouraged to love Khmel'nyts'kyi as well.⁵⁹ The fatherland in this play is Ukraine, not Russia - an important factor that attests to the endurance of Ivan Mazepa's traditions in the Hetmanate and his view of the essence and the geographical and political bound­aries of the Cossack fatherland.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta Skorupsky

NOTES

Originally published as: Serhii Plokhii, “'V im'ia myloi vitchyzny': virnist' ta zrada Ivana Mazepy,” Sotsium. Al'manakh sotsial’noi istorii no. 6 (2006): 267-81. Copyright 2006 by Serhy Plokhy. Translated and reprinted with permission.

1 For the text of the Slovo, see Feofan Prokopovich, Sochineniia, ed. I.P. Eremin (Moscow, 1961), 23-38.

2 Ibid., 152.

3 Ibid.

4 This particular meaning of the term otechestvo can be traced back to fif­teenth-century texts and is directly linked to Bulgarian cultural influences. See the discussion of the use of the terms otchina and otechestvo in V.V. Kolesov, Mir cheloveka v slove Drevnei Rusi (Leningrad, 1986), 242-6.

5 On the use of the term “fatherland” in Polish political discourse, see Ewa Bem, “Termin ‘ojczyzna' w literaturze XVI i XVII wieku. Refleksje o jczyku,” Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce 34 (1989): 131-57. On the use of term father­land in German lands, see Oliver Auge, “Der Fürst als ‘pater patriae': Zur Wiederbelebung eines Herrschertitels an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit,” in Fürsten an der Zeitenwende zwischen Gruppenbild und Individualität. Formen fürstlicher Selbstdarstellung und ihre Rezeption (1450-1550); wissenschaftliche Tagung, Landeskulturzentrum Schloss Salzau, 27.-29. März 2008 (2009), ed. Oliver Auge, Ralf-Gunnar Werlich und Gabriel Zeilinger (Ostfildern, 2009), 77-102.

6 For the use of “nation,” “state,” and “fatherland” in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, see Arturas Tereskinas, The Imperfect Body of the Community: Formulas of Noblesse, Forms of Nationhood in the Seventeenth-Century Grand Duchy of Lithuania (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1999), 47-60.

7 “Maiores Illustrissimorum Principum Korybut Wiszniewiecciorum,” in Ros- tyslaw Radyszewskyj, ed., Roksolanski parnas: polskojpzyczna poezja ukrainska od konca XVI do poczqtku XVIII wieku. Antologia, vol. 2 (Cracow, 1998), 225-6. Most likely, the authors of the poems were students of the college, and the editor was Teodosii Baievs'kyi, who then taught poetics at the school. For more information, see Natalia Iakovenko, “Koho topchut koni zvytiazhnoho Korybuta: do zahadky kyievo-mohylians'koho panehiryka 1648 r. ‘Majores Wiszniewiecciorum',” in Synopsis: A Collection of Essays in Honor of Zenon

E. Kohut, ed. Serhii Plokhy and Frank E. Sysyn (Edmonton, 2005), 191-218.

8 See also mentions of the “common fatherland” in the text of the Treaty of Hadiach (1658), Vyhovs'kyi's universal (1660), and Doroshenko's instructions to envoys to the Commonwealth (1670) in Ivan Butych, Ihor Teslenko, and Viacheslav Rynsevych, eds, Universaly ukratns’kykh het'maniv vid Ivana Vy- hovs’koho do Ivana Samoilovycha (1657-1687) (Kyiv-Lviv, 2004), 34, 98, 384.

9 Muscovite sources contain even earlier mentions of the Cossack otchizna (fatherland), for example in the record of a conversation between a Russian merchant and General Chancellor Ivan Vyhovs'kyi in January 1652, see Vos- soedinenie Ukrainy s Rossiei, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1954), 199. But given the duality of the concept of otchizna in the Muscovite political lexicon, we cannot say with certainty whether Vyhovs'kyi meant the fatherland or Cossack patri­monies (votchyny) and property in general.

10 See Briukhovets'kyi's letter of April 1662 to Bishop Mefodii in Tysiacha rokiv ukratns ’koi suspil ’no-politychnot dumky, ed. T. Hunchak et al., vol. 3, part 1 (Kyiv, 2001), 454-5.

11 See mentions of the “fatherland” in Pavlo Teteria's letters in Universaly ukratns’kykh het'maniv, 232; Tysiacha rokiv, 3/1: 281-90.

12 Universaly ukratns kykh het'maniv, 318, 330.

13 See Briukhovets'kyi's letter of 10 February 1668 in Tysiacha rokiv, 3/1: 454-5.

14 Universaly ukratns kykh het'maniv, 184-7, 425, 579-81.

15 See Frank E. Sysyn, “Fatherland in Early Eighteenth-Century Political Thought,” in Mazepa e il suo tempo: storia, società, ed. Giovanna Siedina (Alessandria, 2004), 39-53.

16 For the text of the epitaph, see Pavlo Zholtovs'kyi, Ukratns 'kyi zhyvopys XVII-XVIII st. (Kyiv, 1978), 220.

17 See quotations from the panygeric to Ivan Velychkovs'kyi in Natalia M. Iakovenko, “‘Hospodari vitchyzny': uiavlennia kozats'koi ta tserkovnoi elity Het'manshchyny pro pryrodu, reprezentatsiiu i obov'iazky vlady (druha polovyna XVII - pochatok XVIII st.),” in Mazepa e il suo tempo: storia, società, ed. Giovanna Siedina (Alessandria, 2004), 25. See also the references to Ukraine as to the fatherland in Samoilovych's universals: Universaly ukrain- s’kykh het’maniv, 697, 808, 811, 821.

18 Tysiacha rokiv ukrains ’koi suspil ’no-politychnoi dumky, 3/2: 366-72.

19 For references to “Malorossiiskaia nasha otchyzna” and “otchyzna Malorosi- iskaia,” see Ivan Butych, ed., Universaly Ivana Mazepy. 1687-1709, vol. 1 (Kyiv, 2002), 344, 433.

20 In the text of one of the engravings produced at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 1708, Mazepa was called “munito patri patriae, ecclesiae defensori, belli et pacis atrium cultori et patrono.” See Konstantyn Bida, Soiuz het'mana Ivana Mazepy z Karlom XII (Winnipeg, 1959), 38.

21 For Peter I's manifestos, as well as excerpts from the correspondence of Peter, Mazepa, and Aleksandr Menshikov, see Pis 'ma i bumagi Petra Velikogo, vol. 8, part 1 (Leningrad-Moscow, 1948), 2760-94; Oleksandr Rihel'man, Litopysna opovid pro Malu Rosiiu ta ii narod i kozakiv uzahali. Reprynt vydannia 1847 r. Letopisnoepovestvovanie o Maloi Rossii (Kyiv, 1994), 531-74; Sergei Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii, vol. 8 (Moscow, 1962), 240-52. More about the “war of the manifestos” can be found in Bohdan Kentrschynskyi, “Propagandakriket i Ukraina,” in Karolinska Forbundets Arsbok (Stockholm, 1958), 195-6.

22 See the discussion of that terminological innovation in Peter's propaganda in Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism. Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, ma, 1992), 195-6.

23 See the text of Peter's circular of 28 October 1708 in Rihel'man, Litopysna opovid ’, 531-2.

24 See the text of the tsar's letter to Colonel lakiv Lyzohub of Chernihiv dated

3 December 1690 in Rihel'man, Litopysna opovid’, 501-02.

25 See the texts of Peter's letters of that period, Rihel'man, Litopysna opovid ’, 535-45. The idea of using manifestos to enumerate Mazepa's abuses of his own people in order to secure the support of the “simple folk” and prove that Mazepa was acting in his own interests rather than for the good of Ukraine was suggested to Peter by Menshikov on 26 October in the same letter in which he informed the tsar about Mazepa's “treason.” See Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 8: 244. On Peter's accusing Mazepa of treason and the antagonists' opposing interpretations of the conditions of the Pereiaslav Treaty, see Orest Subtelny, “Mazepa, Peter I, and the Question

of Treason,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 2, no. 2 (1978): 158-83.

26 The tsar and his henchmen not only enlarged on the arguments put forward against Mazepa in the first manifesto, but also refuted the accusations levelled against them by their opponents. For example, Charles and Mazepa in their manifestos claimed that Peter was negotiating with the Pope in order to in­troduce Catholicism on the territory of his tsardom. The rest of the charges were directed against the very nature of the war with Sweden, violations of the ancient rights and liberties of the “Little Russian people,” and the plunder of Ukrainian lands by Great Russian troops. In response, Peter listed his reasons for waging war: to reclaim former Muscovite territories, liberate churches that had been forcibly converted to Lutheranism, and defend the tsar's honor, violated by the Swedish king and his allies. For more informa­tion, see: Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 8: 250-2.

27 See the text of the manifesto in Pis’ma i bumagi Imperatora Petra Velikago, 8/1: nos. 2816, 276-84; Rihel'man, Litopysna opovid’, 539-45. In this manifesto, Peter used the term fatherland twice, in both cases referring to the fatherland of his addressees.

28 Cited in Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 8:250.

29 For the text of Peter's manifesto, see Pis 'ma i bumagi Imperatora Petra Velikago, 8/1: 299, 38-41; Rihel'man, Litopysna opovid’, 565-7.

30 For the text of Skoropads'kyi's manifesto, see Rihel'man, Litopysna opovid’, 555-62.

31 See the excerpt from the letter in Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 8:250.

32 Ibid., 8:243-4.

33 For the text of the letter, see Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 8:246-7.

34 See the English translation of Orlyk's letter of June 1721 to Stefan lavors'kyi in Orest Subtelny, “Pylyp Orlyk's Letter to Stefan lavorskyi (1721): An Eye­Witness Account of Hetman Ivan Mazepa's Defection,” in The Mazepists: Ukrainian Separatism in the Early Eighteenth Century (Boulder, 1981), 178-205, here p. 190.

35 See the Latin original of the Pacta et constitutiones, the Ruthenian version, and translations into contemporary Ukrainian and English in Konstytutsiia ukratns’kot het’mans’kot derzhavy (Lviv-Kyiv, 1997).

36 If Peter's scribes reserved the term all-Russian (vserossiiskii) for the tsar's title (Vserossiiskii Samoderzhets), while using Great Russian as opposed to Little Russian to denote non-Ukrainian troops and subjects of the tsar, the scribes in Skoropads'kyi's office apparently had a hard time distinguishing between the alleged all-Russian character of the tsar's autocracy and the Great Russian nationality of his Muscovite subjects. In the above-mentioned circular of 8 December 1708, Skoropads'kyi wrote about the protection extended to Little Russia by the wings of the “high-flying all-Russian eagle.” See Rihel'man, Litopysna opovid, 599. But in his letter of 22 June 1709 to Peter, he wrote about the tsar's Great Russian autocratic Orthodox monarchy (velikorossi- iskaia, samoderzhavnaia,pravoslavnaia... monarkhiia), see Pis’ma i bumagi Imperatora Petra Velikago, vol. 9, part 2 (Leningrad-Moscow, 1950), 967. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 8: 268.

In his manifesto of 26 May 1709, the tsar accused the Zaporozhian Cossacks of, among other things, wishing to bring about the “destruction of their fatherland, the Little Russian land” (razorenie otchizny svoei, Malorossiiskogo kraia). See the text of the manifesto in Pis 'ma i bumagi Imperatora Petra Velikago, 9/2: 907-14, here p. 912.

Pis’ma i bumagi Imperatora Petra Velikago, 9/1: 980-3.

For a discussion of the textual history of the order, see Pis’ma i bumagi Imperatora Petra Velikago, 9/2: 980-1.

For references to the Trojan, Roman, and Polish fatherlands, see Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 26, 137.

See “Slovo v den' Sviatogo Blagovernogo kniazia Aleksandra Nevskogo,” in Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 100.

Prokopovich, Sochineniia, 52, 91, 133, 137.

On the development and promotion of the concept of fatherland in Northern Europe, see Pasi Ihalainen, “The Concepts of Fatherland and Nation in Swedish State Sermons from the Late Age of Absolutism to the Accession of Gustavus III,” Scandinavian Journal of History 28 (2003): 37-58.

Elena Pogosian, Petr I - arkhitektor rossiiskoi istorii (St Petersburg, 2001), 220-9.

See Prokopovych's letters in: F. Prokopovych, Filosofs 'ki tvory (Kyiv, 1980), 3:187-308.

See references to the fatherland and Muscovy in: Ostropols'kyi's (Pawel Holodowicz Ostropolski) Trigonus Radosci, dedicated to one of the leaders of Ruthenian society - Bohdan Stetskevych, in Radyszewskyj, Roksolanski par- nas, 2:147-54. Ostropols'kyi was the guardian of Stetskevych's son Mykhailo while the latter was a student at the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium.

See the quotation from the report and discussion of its meaning in James Cracraft, “Prokopovyc's Kiev Period Reconsidered,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 2, no. 2 (1978): 155.

Frank E. Sysyn, “Fatherland in Early Eighteenth-Century Ukrainian Political Culture.”

S. Velichko, Letopis' sobytii vIugo-Zapadnoi Rossii vXVIIveke, 4 vols (Kyiv, 1848-64); Hryhorii Hrabianka, The Great War of Bohdan Xmel’nyc’kyi, ed. Yuri Lutsenko (Cambridge, ma, 1991).

Frank E. Sysyn, “The Image of Russia and Russian-Ukrainian Relations in Ukranian Historiography of the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries,” in Culture, Nation, and Identity. The Ukrainian-Russian Encounter (1600-1945), ed. Andreas Kappeler et al. (Edmonton-Toronto, 2003), 131.

52 Ibid., 139.

53 On the meaning and importance of the concept of the “fatherland” in Velychko's chronicle, see Sysyn, “Fatherland in Early Eighteenth-Century Ukrainian Political Culture.”

54 Sysyn, “The Image of Russia and Russian-Ukrainian Relations,” 138.

55 Ibid., 140.

56 For Petryk's letter and the Poltava regiment's response, see: Velichko, Letopis' sobytii v lugo-Zapadnoi Rossii vXVII veke, 3: 111-16; Sysyn, “The Image of Russia and Russian-Ukrainian Relations,” 138.

57 “Mylist' Bozhiia,” in Ukrains 'ka literatura XVIII st. Poetychni tvory. Dramaty- chni tvory. Prozovi tvory (Kyiv, 1983), 314.

58 Ibid., 323.

59 Ibid., 317.