The winter of 1708–09 brought severe cold to the regions of Poltava, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv. That year Western Europe was also suffering from cold weather. Many rivers in France and Italy froze up, something that had not happened for a few decades, according to the accounts of the contemporaries.
In Ukraine the unprecedented cold in the fields and steps was hurting the Swedish army led by famous king Charles XII. His headquarters was in Hadiach, Poltava region. The normal communication between towns was disrupted by snowstorms and snowdrifts. At least 4,000 Swedish soldiers died because of severe cold. Charles’ advisors were talking secretly among themselves: “That distant and unknown Hadiach may become a common grave for our army!” In early February 1709 the king and his ally hetman Ivan Mazepa moved their residence to the nearby town of Zinkiv. The cold slacked off, but neither the Swedish and Cossacks units, nor Peter I’s troops were willing to start active military actions by the beginning of spring. However, some small Swedish units sallied out to the places where Moscow garrisons were stationed — near Romen, by the little town of Vepryk in the vicinity of Hadiach, and near Valky in Slobidska Ukraine. In general, both sides played a waiting game.
However, people’s minds were occupied with something else than the cold winter. The residents of the Hetman State were terrified and overwhelmed by fear, not the kind of fear that mysteriously comes out of nowhere, without any rational reason. This was the fear whose origins are easy to understand now — there was a real danger to lives of every disobedient Ukrainian; everybody felt upon themselves the tsar’s heavy hand that brought death. The memories of the Menshikov-orchestrated November 1708 massacre in Baturyn were still painfully fresh. The famous Hetman’s capital was burned down and razed to the ground; all women and little children were killed.
It is an interesting, albeit little-known, fact that at that time the news of the crimes committed by tsar’s cutthroats very quickly reached Europe. Periodicals in France, a very powerful country in the Old World at that time, abounded in headlines such as “Women and Children on Points of Sabers,” “Ukraine in Ruins,” “Dreadful Massacre,” etc. The newspapers of King Louis XIV of France wrote about the events in Baturyn: “The entire Ukraine is bathing in blood. Menshikov has resorted to Muscovite barbarity. According to the inhuman habits of Muscovites, all the residents of Baturyn were slaughtered regardless of their age or sex.” This was the point of view of Gazette de France’s correspondents, which was shared by periodicals Lettres historique, Mercure historique, and La clef du cabinet. However, the French government of old Louis XIV was busy with a difficult and unsuccessful war with Spain for the legacy and was neither able nor willing to interfere with battles that were crucial for the distant and still mysterious country of Ukraine.
The stake, breaking on the wheel, quartering, rack, whip, and, as the mildest punishment, gallows or ax — these were the arguments used by the tsar and his henchmen to persuade secret followers of Mazepa. Anyone could be pronounced one of them if he was suspected of sympathizing with the cursed hetman or his cause. Peter I’s terrible “secret chancellery,” aka “tsar’s room of suffering,” was located in Lebedyn in Sloboda Ukraine. (We come across a great number of similar chancelleries run by Russian tsars in the course of history.)
No one knew and probably no one will ever know how many people were tortured to death there. The barbarous methods used by Genghis Khan and Caligula pale in comparison to the bloody entertainment of Peter I the Reformer. The business-like and pragmatic tsar, who did not like wasting time, ordered his satrap Menshikov to use a four-framed wheel that could tear a human body into four peaces after breaking it, as well as stakes, red-hot iron, and needles, which were driven under people’s nails. One of Peter I’s favorite torturers liked to say: “A whip is not an angel; it does not take the soul away — rather, it makes people tell the truth.” At least 900 people died in Lebedyn at the hands of that “witty” croaker in January through March 1708. They could not stand to the end the inhuman suffering.
Let us not be tempted to simplify again the extremely complicated course of historic events. Peter I — the “torturer” and “man-eater,” according to Taras Shevchenko’s unsparing definition, subdued Ukraine not only by putting people on stakes, torturing them, and crucifying the Cossacks on crosses. He also used “terror by lies,” terror sown with demagogy and shameless propaganda and brought on the bayonets of the Muscovite occupation army.
In history lies always go hand-in-hand with violence as vividly exemplified by the famous ceremony in Hlukhiv on Nov. 23, 1708. In the Holy Trinity Church the archpriest of Novgorod-Siverskiy Afanasiy Zarutskiy publicly cursed Mazepa by letting out a frenzied cry: “Anathema be on The betrayer and apostate Ivan Mazepa be anathematized!” The ceremony was attended by the tsar, his wife, and the Cossack officers who had disowned their hetman and swore allegiance to Moscow. It should be also mentioned that The Day before it took place Colonel Chechel, a heroic defender of Baturyn and the commandant of Mazepa’s capital, died in terrible tortures, also in Hlu khiv.
“Black political PR” is a modern concept; however, specialists in this special domain could learn from Peter I and the zealot Menshikov, his advisor in genocide and propaganda issues, who gave his master very useful recommendations, as evidenced by their correspondence. It would be interesting to read again the manifestoes of Peter I addressed to the Ukrainian people and compare them with some unparalleled “masterpieces” in the recent imperial and modern historiography and propaganda. “There is no other people in the world with the liberties and privileges that Ukrainians have!” proclaimed Peter I cynically in his Nov. 20, 1708 manifesto. This brings to mind the famous Soviet 1936 song with the words: “I know no other country where man can breathe so freely!” Another case in point are odes to Putin’s “sovereign democracy.”
The hypocrisy of Peter I, who was called the “father of the Fatherland,” had no limits. Here are a few lines from his another manifesto: “Our responsibility is to take care of the Little Russian territory. We are stretching our fatherly hand over it. We will save Little Russia from slavery and ruins and will not let God’s churches be disgraced. That is why we ask all of the Cossack officers and colonels not to listen to the mendacious instigations of the treacherous hetman. We ask you to join the Russian army in its fight against the enemies.”
The words about “the disgrace of God’s churches” call for special attention. In one of his later manifestoes the tsar spoke about it in greater detail: “He, Mazepa the traitor, agreed with the Swedish King and King Stanis?aw I Leszczy?ski of Poland to again transfer Little Russia under Polish rule and God’s churches and our glorious cathedrals — to the Union.” This was said in reference to the hetman who, like none of his predecessors, defended Orthodoxy and its values. It is striking to observe that a great part of Ukrainian Orthodox high-ranking clergy, who owed their carriers to Mazepa, betrayed him.
One of those betrayers was archbishop Stefan Yavorsky, a former teacher at the Kyivan Mohyla Academy, Pylyp Orlyk’s teacher, the author of a grandiloquent panegyric in honor of Mazepa and now one of the tsar’s confidants. Not only did he take an active part in the anathematizing ceremony — he also added the following lines to the standard official formula of this ritual: “Who is that Mazepa? He is a cunning and venomous serpent, fox, devil, Judah, hypocrite, and a new Cain… He is a mad wolf hiding in the skin of a tender lamb. He is so sweet in his words and so cruel in his deeds.” All of this symbolized an event that had more than destructive effect on Ukraine’s further history — the betrayal of the idea of Ukraine’s independence by higher Orthodox priesthood, not to mention the majority of the priests. Nothing like this had ever happened before on such a vast scale. It will be remembered that, by and large, the high-ranking clergy did not welcome the 1654 Pereiaslav Treaty.
But this is not all. We should all reflect on another, perhaps most important problem — the attitude of the political elite and rich Ukrainians to Mazepa’s decisive choice. In this situation Peter I employed the classical stick-and-carrot method. He threatened the disobedient with the severest punishments (and indeed imposed them), while granting pardon to the loyal, even those who had once followed Mazepa but then “repented” (the tsar was too smart to exact cruel vengeance in this case). And not only that — some of the newly-found Moscow supporters received property and a lot of it at that. The tsar announced that all the property in possession of Mazepa and his followers did not belong to them any longer and would be given to the Cossack officers and the Cossacks who would prove their loyalty to Moscow. The move had its impact — the Cossack officers responded as was expected. Was it at this time that the seed was sowed which brought forth the Poltava catastrophe?
We have a good example in the deeds and life of Myrhorod Colonel Danylo Apostol, an outstanding, brilliant man and a real patriot of Ukraine. He opposed Peter I together with Mazepa, being conscious of the meaning and importance of his action. This is proved in his Nov. 16, 1708 letter to the regimental oboznyi (quartermaster) Vasyl Onysymovych in which Apostol asked him to hurry up and join Mazepa in Hadiach: “We are sending our guards to Sorochyntsi to inform Your Majesty that the Swedish troops are stationed in every town and village from Borzna to Romen, while near Romen they are with the Lubny regiment, to protect our Fatherland from Moscow’s attack. His Majesty the King of Sweden himself will have a station in Romen. We hope to arrive there with the hetman tomorrow, November 17. If someone dared to steal through with letters from the tsar or new hetman Skoropadsky, catch them and send them over to us.” But here is what happened: after a few days the same Apostol, the would-be hetman of Ukraine under the Muscovite rule, deserted to the tsar. In his reports to Peter I he called Mazepa a traitor and described in detail the hetman’s plans to sell Ukraine to Poland and the Uniates.
It is very surprising that the Muscovite State, long known for its barbarous and despotic attitude to its own serfs, all of a sudden became a protector of the poor and those betrayed by the hetman and his aristocracy in Ukraine. This is a truly classical method worth remembering. In one of his other manifestoes the tsar solemnly proclaimed: “Here is what we have found out. The former hetman, Mazepa the traitor, in his slyness and unbeknownst to us, imposed heavy taxes on the people that were supposed to be spent for the army but in fact went into the hetman’s own pocket. From now on these taxes shall be lifted.” According to the effective agreements between the Hetman State and Moscow, the tsar had no right to either introduce or lift any taxes, but what kind of difference did it make? A part of common Ukrainian people, the poor, believed this lie, and the terror imposed with iron was coupled with verbal terror to serve the tsar’s end.
The immortality of the Ukrainian people is not simply a slogan or nice words. One hundred and thirty years after the unprecedented bloody subjugation, a young man with glowing eyes was eagerly reading the manuscript Istoriia Rusiv (History of the Rus’ People), which read: “Now, if, according to the Savior’s words from the Gospel, those who shed blood on this Earth had to make up for every drop of it, how would the torturers of Ukrainian people be punished? The blood they shed flew in rivers — what for? There was only one reason — the Ukrainian people wanted to be free and have a better life in their own land. Aren’t these the ideals common to entire humankind?”
