The Puzzle
Martos was not the only “dissident” who questioned the official line toward Mazepa and regarded him as a protector of the rights and freedoms of his homeland. On 3 June 1822, Mikhail Pogodin (1800-1875), then a twenty-one-year-old student at Moscow University, later a prominent Russian historian and one of the leaders of the Slavophile movement, recorded in his diary a conversation he had that day about the prevailing moods in “Little Russia”— the former Cossack lands of Ukraine.
“Not a shadow of their former rights remains among them now. The Little Russians call themselves the true Russians and the others moskali. They do not entirely like them. Muscovy was thus something apart. They also call the Old Believers moskali. They love Mazeppa [szc]. Earlier they did not supply recruits but [Cossack] regiments. Thus, there were regiments from Chernihiv, [Novhorod]-Siverskyi, and so on. That was much better: they were all from one region and therefore more comradely, more in agreement. But now, someone from Irkutsk stands next to a Kyivan; a man from Arkhangelsk—next to one from Astrakhan. What is the sense of it?”4What exactly did Pogodin have in mind when he referred to the Ukrainians’ “love of Mazepa?” We shall answer this question by taking a close look at his Ukrainian acquaintances and the views of history to which they subscribed. We know that Pogodin discussed Ukrainian grievances and aspirations with Aleksei Kubarev, his older friend and mentor at Moscow University, and with Kubarev’s close friend Mykhailo Shyrai, the son of Stepan Shyrai (1761-1841), a retired general, wealthy landowner, and marshal of the nobility of Chernihiv gubernia. It was from the younger Shyrai, also a student at Moscow University and Pogodin’s rival in the dissertation competition for the university’s gold medal, that Pogodin obtained the information on Ukrainian moods and their “love” for Mazepa.
The rest of the conversation, as summarized by Pogodin, focused on “a certain Sudiienko, who, holding no civic office, governed the whole town merely by the respect that he commanded,” and “Metropolitan Mikhail [of St. Petersburg],” who was “idolized in Chernihiv.”The impressions recorded by Pogodin came from Shyrais family circle in Ukraine. The Sudiienkos were related to the Shy- rais, and Mykhailo Shyrais father, Stepan, was closely associated with Metropolitan Mikhail Desnitsky of St. Petersburg, formerly archbishop of Chernihiv, who had visited his family estate in Solova near Starodub on several occasions.5
Stepan Shyrai was an important figure in Ukrainian political circles of the first decades of the nineteenth century. A retired major general who had taken an active part in the Russo-Turkish wars under Aleksandr Suvorov, Shyrai was elected marshal of the Chernihiv nobility in 1818 and spent a decade leading the struggle for its rights and privileges. He became a strong critic of the high quotas of recruits whom the serf-owning landlords were required to contribute to the imperial army. Shyrai was also well known for his stories of the good old days. Around 1828, when he was about to leave office or had just left it, the sixty-seven-year-old Shyrai, at odds with Governor General Nikolai Repnin of Little Russia, took it upon himself to disseminate to the wider world arguably the most subversive text produced in nineteenth-century Ukraine, a history of the Cossacks entitled Istoriia Rusov (History of the Rus').6
Although the manuscript is attributed to the long-deceased archbishop of Mahiliou, Heorhii Konysky (1717-95), and is supposed to have been completed in the late 1760s, its main ideas correspond closely to the list of Ukrainian grievances recorded by Pogodin. The author, whoever he was, and whenever he wrote his text, believed that the Cossacks, or the “Little Russians”—not the “Great Russians” or “Muscovites”—were indeed the true heirs of Rus' and bona fide Rusians.
He believed that Rus' and Muscovy were different entities, disliked the Muscovites, and was a sworn enemy of the Old Believers. The unknown author argues that the Cossacks had not received due recognition for the services they had rendered to the empire. There seems to be almost a perfect match between the views of the Ukrainian elites of the 1820s and the historical manuscript that popped up in the libraries of local notables around that time. Whether the History influenced the mood of the Chernihiv nobility or simply reflected it, there is little doubt that the work offers unparalleled insight into the historical views held by descendants of the Cossack officers of the Hetmanate at a time when Ukrainian culture was entering the all-important stage of “heritage gathering,” which led to the rise of the Ukrainian national movement in the mid-nineteenth century.7There is, however, an important problem to be addressed before the thesis of a close correlation between the views of the Ukrainian nobility of the 1820s and those of the author of the History can be accepted without major reservations. This problem is expressed in Pogodin’s phrase about the Ukrainian elites’ “love of Mazeppa.” Unlike Pogodin’s Ukrainian landowners, the author of the History of the Rus' has an ambivalent attitude toward Ivan Mazepa and his actions, and his feelings for the old hetman would be hard to characterize as “love” or admiration. Could Pogodin have misunderstood his fellow student back in June 1822 or exaggerated what he had heard from him? Or did Mykhailo Shyrai accurately express the views of his father’s circle, and does the problem lie with the author of the History? A first reading of the History offers no immediate answer to these questions. Depending on the nature and circumstances of the episodes described in the book, its author can be either critical or supportive of Mazepa, judgmental or forgiving. He appears to be seeking a balance between a frankly negative assessment of the hetman and an apology for him. In the process, he creates quite a contradictory figure who embarks on a dangerous path, “along which he was led by excessive courage and extreme bitterness into an immeasurable abyss.”8