The Period of Ruin in Ukrainian history, which ended in 1686 after the establish­ment of the so-called eternal peace between Muscovy and Poland,

was followed by another quarter century in which Ukraine was for long periods of time the scene of foreign invasion, civil war, and political upheaval. In a sense, the crises of seventeenth-century Europe were continuing in the eastern half of the continent.

The quarter century from 1686 to 1711 was characterized by the first stage of the Great Northern War. Looked at in another way, it was the final phase in the centuries-long struggle between Muscovy and Sweden for control of the Baltic Sea, and the continuation of Muscovy’s struggle against the Ottoman Empire (and the latter’s Crimean allies) for access to the Black Sea. Caught between these monumental conflicts was Ukraine. The intensity of the military and political struggle during eastern Europe’s last ‘seventeenth-century crisis’ was heightened by the presence of dynamic, young, and talented leaders who ruled two of the great powers in question, Charles XII of Sweden (reigned 1697-1718) and Peter I of Muscovy (reigned 1689-1725). Their contemporary in Ukraine was Ivan Mazepa, himself an experienced and very capable leader who held the post of het­man from 1687 to 1709, and who, next to Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, was the most influential of all Cossack leaders. Because the quarter century before 1711 was a turning point in the history of eastern Europe, and because these three figures - Charles XII, Peter I, and Mazepa - played such a dominant role during these years, an enormous historical literature on each of them exists. Not surprisingly, there is great controversy about their personalities and careers.

The image of Mazepa

Mazepa was traditionally viewed by Russian historians of the imperial era (Bantysh-Kamenskii, Solov'ev, Kliuchevskii) as a ‘traitor,’ because he deserted Peter I at a critical moment and allied himself with Sweden’s Charles XII.

In contrast, Soviet writers, whether Ukrainian or Russian, continued to propa­gate the traditional Russian imperial conception. In the multivolume Radians'ka entsyklopediia istorii Ukrainy (Soviet Encyclopedia of the History of the Ukraine, 1971), the entry on Mazepa begins with the terse and uncompromising identifica­tion ‘Ivan Stepanovych Mazepa (1644-1709), traitor of the Ukrainian people,’² and another multivolume work, Istoriia Ukrains' koi RSR (History of the Ukrainian SSR, 1979) refers to ‘Mazepa, whose name has gone down in history as a synonym of treachery and betrayal.’³ Such views defined the popular image of Mazepa in some Russian emigre circles as well as in Soviet society, whereby the hetman sym­bolized the treacherous desires of all those ‘evil forces’ who wanted to separate from an ‘indivisible mother Russia,’ whether a Soviet or a non-Soviet Russia. The term Mazepintsi - the Mazepa-ites - came to be used in the Soviet and non-Soviet Russian vocabulary with reference to people who display disloyalty toward the state and an opportunistic separatism.

Mazepa initially found little favor among Ukrainian historians as well, espe­cially those of the populist school during the second half of the nineteenth century (Kostomarov, Kulish, Lazarevs'kyi, Antonovych), who considered him a traitor because he seemed to have acted primarily in the interests of the Cossack elite and not of the nation as a whole.

It is interesting to note that even in the early nineteenth century Mazepa was a hero for the Romantic movement in western as well as eastern Europe. The era’s most famous writers - Lord Byron in England, Victor Hugo in France, Juliusz Slowacki in Poland, and Aleksander Pushkin in Russia - all composed poems about Mazepa, usually based on tales of real or imagined episodes in the life of the Ukrainian leader. Musicians were even more attracted to the Mazepa legend. Three operas were written entitled Mazepa, the most famous by Peter I. Tchaikov­sky (1884; the others were by little-known composers in Russia, B. Fitingof-Shele, 1854, and A. Minheimer, 1875); two cantatas for chorus, by the Irish composer Michael Balfe (ca. 1850s) and the Spaniard Felipe Pedrell; and a piano work by the German Johann Karl Loewe (1830). Perhaps the most famous musical work was the tone poem for orchestra, ‘Mazepa,’ by the Hungarian Franz Liszt (1854). Finally, as recently as 1958, the Polish composer Tadeusz Sz^ligowski wrote a score for ballet entitled Mazepa. Who, then, was this controversial Ivan Mazepa, and how did his career affect developments in Ukraine?

The rise of Mazepa

Mazepa was born sometime between 1639 and 1644 in Bila Tserkva, on the Right Bank of the Kiev palatinate.

In 1669, Mazepa entered the service of Petro Doroshenko, the Right Bank het­man who, with the aid of the Ottoman Turks and Crimean Tatars, was trying to reunite the divided Cossack Ukraine. Mazepa rose rapidly through the ranks and became general aide-de-camp {hen er al' nyi osaul) in Doroshenko’s General Staff. In 1674, Mazepa was sent on a mission to the Crimea, but he was captured en route by the Zaporozhian Cossacks (who at the time were pro-Muscovite and fiercely anti-Crimean). He was imprisoned by the Zaporozhians and eventually sent to Moscow. His imprisonment did not last long, however, since he managed to find his way into the good graces of the Muscovite government - revealing to them all the pro-Ottoman and pro-Crimean plans of Hetman Doroshenko in the process.

The next stage in Mazepa’s career was determined by Muscovite foreign policy.

Having concluded the ‘eternal peace’ with Poland in 1686, Muscovy decided to eliminate the Crimean menace (the Tatars had participated in Doroshenko’s anti­Muscovite ventures) once and for all. An anti-Turkish so-called Holy Alliance was struck between Austria, Poland, the Papacy, Venice, and Muscovy. The Muscovite government, led by Sophia (as regent 1682-1689), decided to take action first. In early 1687 Sophia dispatched southward an enormous army of 100,000 men led by Prince Golitsyn. Golitsyn’s forces were to be joined by 50,000 Cossacks and were to strike at the heart of the Crimea. Hetman Samoilovych opposed the plan and only reluctantly went along. The ill-planned military venture ended in a fiasco, but to avoid total disgrace Prince Golitsyn - the favorite of regent Sophia - found (prob­ably with the connivance of Mazepa) a scapegoat in Hetman Samoilovych. The very person who had been opposed to the military campaign was now blamed for its failure. As a result, Samoilovych was arrested and sent to Moscow, and in July 1687 the Muscovites managed to have the ever-resourceful Ivan Mazepa elected to the office of hetman in his place.

As part of the new hetman’s confirmation, the prerogatives of the Muscovite government and the traditional privileges of the Cossacks were reaffirmed. The governmental prerogatives included Cossack recognition of the supremacy of the tsar, Cossack agreement not to conduct foreign affairs, and a limitation of 30,000 on the number of registered Cossacks. Among the traditional Cossack privileges were exemption from having to pay taxes, reaffirmation of the right to retain existing landholdings, and restrictions on the power of the Muscovite governors (with their garrisons in Kiev, Chernihiv, Pereiaslav, Nizhyn, and Oster) to inter­fere in local affairs.

Mazepa as hetman: the early phase

The first thirteen years of Mazepa’s rule, from 1687 to 1700, were marked by an attempt to stabilize conditions in the Hetmanate. It was also a period that wit­nessed a flowering of culture and an improvement in the economic and legal sta­tus of the Orthodox church (see chapter 20). Mazepa began his career as hetman with no real local power base. He was viewed by the established Cossack starshyna (officer class) as an upstart and foreigner from Poland. Mazepa was a master of political intrigue, however, and before long he was able to create a small coterie of staunch supporters. These consisted mainly of members of the Cossack star­shyna and of Orthodox church hierarchs, whom he enriched by making them large land grants. Himself a member of the gentry, Mazepa protected the interests of his estate by suppressing the peasant and rank-and-file Cossack revolts which broke out at the beginning of his rule and by reinforcing laws which fixed the number of days (at two) that manorial peasants were required to work for their landlords, whether hereditary Cossack gentry or Orthodox monasteries.

Mazepa was helped in his struggles for power by Muscovy. While he was in Mos­cow on an official visit in August 1689, a palace revolution took place in which the regent Sophia was deposed and her younger half-brother and rival, Peter I, was brought to the throne. Although he had been a supporter of Sophia and her advisers, the adept Mazepa quickly befriended Peter, who developed a strong lik­ing for and trust in the older Cossack hetman. Mazepa continued to enjoy the confidence of the new tsar, with the result that in the years following, when politi­cal rivals in the Hetmanate made use of the Cossack privilege (which had become common practice) of sending denunciations against the hetman directly to the tsar, Peter rejected all their attacks outright. For his part, Mazepa served Peter faithfully in his anti-Ottoman wars, and the tsar reciprocated with a steadfast loyalty and friendship as well as with lavish gifts and land grants. With such help from the highest quarters, Mazepa was able to survive all attempts by his Cossack rivals to unseat him. At least until 1700, the relations between Mazepa and Peter I were as good as relations had ever been between a hetman and a tsar.

As well as having no local power base, Mazepa faced a source of anti-hetman activity in the Zaporozhian Sich. In theory, Zaporozhia was dependent on both the hetman and the tsar, but juridically it was beyond the territorial administra­tion of the Hetmanate, and in practice it followed its own autonomous policy. After the death of Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi in 1657, the sich was generally opposed to the hetmans, whether those on the Right or those on the Left Bank. As had been the case since at least the beginning of the seventeenth century, the hetman and his registered Cossack entourage were suspected of fostering their own aristo­cratic ambitions at the expense of the rank-and-file Cossacks in Zaporozhia. More­over, the sich remained an implacable foe of Poland and of any notion of renewed Polish rule in Ukraine, an idea favored by some of Khmel'nyts'kyi’s successors. Zaporozhia, therefore, nominally remained in the pro-Muscovite camp.

Zaporozhia’s pro-Muscovite policy began to fade, however, as a result of Mos­cow’s anti-Crimean campaigns. It may seem paradoxical, but the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who had come into existence because of the need for protection against Crimean Tatar raids, were now beginning to be dissatisfied with Muscovy’s con­certed efforts to destroy their ‘enemy’ in the Crimea. After all, the ‘Tatar threat’ was in itself a justification for the Cossacks’ existence. If there were no more threat, then Muscovy would have no more need of its Zaporozhian frontier defenders. In this sense, the underdeveloped steppe, with potentially lucrative booty in the Crimea just to the south, was something the Cossacks of Zaporozhia wanted to preserve. For this reason, the Zaporozhians did not take part in Mus­covy’s abortive campaign against the Crimea in 1687, or in a similar campaign with similar results led by Prince Golitsyn two years later, in 1689.

The Zaporozhians did not trust Hetman Mazepa. In particular, they opposed his participation in Muscovy’s anti-Crimean campaigns and his policy of settling refugees from the Right Bank on Zaporozhian territory (near the Oril' and Samara Rivers). Motivated by their distrust, in 1692 the Zaporozhians revolted. They were led by a Cossack named Petro Ivanenko, or Petryk, a figure otherwise little known to historians. Petryk declared himself the true hetman, signed an alliance with the Crimean Tatars, and proclaimed his intention to liberate the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine by establishing an independent state in alliance with the Tatars. In 1692 and again in 1693, Petryk led a combined Zaporozhian and Crimean Tatar force into Hetmanate territory. Although he was rebuffed both times by Mazepa, he continued to foment anti-Hetmanate plots in the Cri­mea and, together with the Tatars, to lead raids into Hetmanate territory. Sud­denly, in 1696, however, he disappeared. The Petryk episode reveals the degree to which Ukrainian Cossack society remained deeply divided even under Muscovite hegemony.

Muscovy moved next in its effort to subdue the Tatars and to gain access to the Black and Azov Seas in 1695. This time, the Zaporozhians participated with Mazepa and the Muscovites in an attack on the powerful Turkish fortress of Azov, at the mouth of the Don River. After an initial defeat, they took the fortress in 1696. Four more years of war followed, with Cossacks renewing their sea raids on Turkish and Tatar towns along the Black Sea until a thirty-year truce was finally signed in Constantinople between Muscovy and the Ottoman Empire in 1700. As a result of this treaty, Muscovy gained access to the Sea of Azov and Black Sea, and each side agreed to dismantle its fortresses along the lower Dnieper River. Tsar Peter was now free to turn to Muscovy’s other historical goal, the Baltic Sea.

The dynamic Peter was the first tsar to travel to western Europe, and he was particularly fascinated by what he saw in Holland and England. He was deter­mined to bring western ways to the antiquated Muscovite governmental and social structure. He also saw western technology as a means of modernizing the Musco­vite army and fulfilling his other dream, military conquest. The Baltic Sea became Peter’s symbolic ‘window to the West,’ and to make clear his orientation he planned to build a new capital for Muscovy on the marshes of the Neva River near where it flows into the Gulf of Finland, an arm of the Baltic Sea.

First, however, Peter had to wrest control of the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea from Sweden. In order to do so, he forged new diplomatic alliances with Sweden’s traditional enemies, Denmark and Poland. (The second alliance was actually with August of Saxony, who recently had been elected king of Poland and who prom­ised to involve Poland on Muscovy’s side if that should be necessary.) Accordingly, by 1700 all sides were preparing for the outbreak of what was to be called the Great Northern War.

Mazepa during the Great Northern War

Notwithstanding the impressive diplomatic and military alliance he had forged, Peter soon discovered that he had a formidable foe in eighteen-year-old King Charles XII of Sweden. In 1700, the first year of hostilities, Charles defeated the armies of Denmark and Muscovy at the Battle of Narva, near Russia’s present-day border with Estonia. Charles then proceeded south to Poland, and by 1702 he had captured Warsaw and Cracow. Many Polish nobles gave their support to Charles, and Sweden proposed its own candidate, Stanislaw Leszczynski, as king of Poland. Poland was thus divided between supporters of King August of Saxony and sup­porters of Sweden’s ally, Leszczynski. It was at this point that Ivan Mazepa was drawn directly into the conflict.

Fearing that his ally, August, would be completely overwhelmed by Swedish forces and Polish Leszczynski supporters, Tsar Peter needed to act quickly. He desperately wanted to preserve the existence of an anti-Swedish Polish kingdom, and to this end in 1705 he ordered Mazepa to cross over into the Right Bank and to give support to the beleaguered King August of Poland. Mazepa promptly com­plied and succeeded in occupying Poland’s Ukrainian-inhabited palatinates of Kiev and Volhynia. Then, when Sweden’s Charles turned westward in pursuit of August, the Cossacks took the opportunity to move even farther west and to cap­ture L'viv, in Galicia. For the next two years, 1705-1706, Mazepa controlled the Right Bank, thereby uniting Ukrainian territory much as it had been under Khmel'nyts'kyi. The local Cossacks in the Right Bank welcomed the fact that Mazepa had driven out the Poles, although Tsar Peter now expected the region to be returned to his Polish ally, King August.

Mazepa had other plans, however. Since the outbreak of the Great Northern War in 1700, Ukraine’s dependence on Muscovy had cost Ukraine dearly. More than 40,000 Cossacks had been sent into battle, and the annual casualty rates in some regiments were as high as 60 or 70 percent. Moreover, the Cossacks had had to serve primarily in regions far from their homeland or to engage in building for­tifications or in other supportive and, in their eyes, militarily demeaning tasks for the Muscovite army and government. Most deeply resented was their having had to participate in the construction of the new imperial capital of St Petersburg, during which hundreds of Cossacks perished in the swamps and low-lying regions near the Gulf of Finland. The Cossacks were also apprehensive of Peter’s plans to reorganize them and to send them to Prussia for training as foot soldiers (dragoons). Finally, the civilian population of Ukraine was deeply discontent. Between 1705 and 1708, both the hetman and the tsar received numerous com­plaints from peasants and town dwellers about the abusive conduct of Muscovite troops stationed on Ukrainian territory. All these factors contributed to an atmos­phere in which Mazepa and some of his closest advisers began to have serious doubts about the advantages of being an ally of Muscovy, especially when so strong a power as Sweden’s Charles XII seemed to be the dominant force in east­ern Europe.

In fact, as early as 1705, when Mazepa and his Cossacks first appeared on the Right Bank, the Ukrainian hetman was contacted by supporters of the pro­Swedish candidate for the Polish throne, Stanislaw Leszczynski. At first Mazepa rejected the approach, but a year later he was more receptive. Nothing specific was agreed upon, but as time passed it seemed to Mazepa that Ukraine, which had suffered so much as a result of Tsar Peter’s military ventures, might best be served by an alliance with Poland and, in particular, with its Swedish protectors. Mazepa seemed to be following in the footsteps of Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, who during the early 1650s had tried to forge a Cossack alliance with Protestant countries in which Sweden would play a leading role. Again, no firm decisions were reached. Mazepa’s negotiations were kept secret, and certainly no plans were made for an uprising against Muscovy. Mazepa remained Peter’s faithful servant. External events, however, forced Mazepa to reconsider his position.

Having decisively defeated August of Saxony in 1706, and having installed the pro-Swedish King Stanislaw I Leszczynski (reigned 1706-1709) on the Polish throne, Charles XII led a force of 50,000 men eastward toward Moscow in early 1708. At the same time, rumors spread that Charles’s Polish ally King Stanislaw was about to attack Left Bank Ukraine. Mazepa turned to Peter, requesting Mus­covite troops to help in the Cossack defense. Peter refused, however, claiming he had no forces to spare. In the context of other complaints against the Muscovites, this refusal seemed to Mazepa a breach of the Pereiaslav accord. At that moment, in the summer of 1708, Charles XII himself suddenly turned southward toward Ukraine in order to rest and to strengthen his army as the first step in a planned sweep around the right flank of the Muscovite army. In response, Peter dis­patched Muscovite troops under Prince Aleksandr Menshikov to intercept the Swedes, and ordered Mazepa to attack the invaders. Mazepa was now faced with a dilemma: obey the tsar’s orders as he had done so many times in the past, or join Charles in the hope that a Cossack-Swedish alliance might bring eventual peace and political advantages to Ukraine. After delaying several weeks in a desperate attempt to put off the inevitable, Mazepa finally made his decision in October 1708. With fewer than 4,000 Cossacks, he defected to the Swedes. In return for the hetman’s support and a Cossack uprising against Muscovy, Sweden, which Mazepa thought soon to be the undisputed power in eastern as well as northern Europe, would guarantee the independence of a Cossack Ukraine on both banks of the Dnieper River. Both these hopes turned out to be illusions. Mazepa had made no plans for a popular uprising, and none occurred.

When Peter learned of Mazepa’s defection, he was shocked, disbelieving that the seventy-year-old hetman to whom he had remained loyal despite frequent denunciations from Ukraine (one had been brought to him from the Het- manate’s general judge, Vasyl' Kochubei, and the colonel of the Poltava regiment, Ivan Iskra, as recently as 1708) would turn on him. But finally the tsar had to believe the truth. His retribution was swift. He ordered the advancing Muscovite army under Prince Menshikov to take the hetman’s capital, Baturyn. It was cap­tured, sacked, and burned to the ground. He established a special court at Lebe­dyn to try all remaining supporters of Mazepa. Reportedly, 900 Cossack officers were tortured, found guilty, and executed. During this nightmare, several Cos­sacks turned informer and were richly rewarded for their services. The remaining Cossack officers were summoned to the town of Hlukhiv, where a new hetman, Ivan Skoropads'kyi, was chosen.

Meanwhile, Mazepa and his followers in the Swedish camp were joined by an unexpected ally, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, led by Kost' Hordiienko. Hordiienko had become disillusioned with Muscovy’s anti-Tatar policies and now accepted the idea of the Swedish alliance. In the spring of 1709, about 8,000 Zaporozhian Cossacks went to join the Swedish army. In their absence, however, a Muscovite army attacked their stronghold, the Stara Sich, and destroyed it.

Finally, in June 1709, Charles XII, with Mazepa and his Zaporozhian Cossack allies - a total force of 22,000 to 28,000 - reached the city of Poltava, on the Left Bank. They were met on 8 July by a Muscovite army which with its Cossack allies numbered 40,000. The tsar’s forces won a resounding victory. Although all the leading Swedish generals and officers were captured, Charles XII and Mazepa