A monument to Ivan Mazepa was unveiled in Poltava on May 7 after almost an eight-year struggle and red tape which involved the President of Ukraine and Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate) Patriarch Filaret. Commenting on this event, Poltava historians told The Day that the knowledge about and, hence, the attitude to the hetman among the general public had essentially improved in the past few years. At the same time, Poltava City Councilor Yulian Matviichuk emphasized: “Pro-Russian elements are not showing their attitudes now in public speeches or in the media. Instead, they express their hostility to all things Ukrainian through direct actions, including explosions, as they did on May 4. It’s only the beginning. I think they will also be pouring paint and brilliantine green over the monument.” The event has not only triggered approval in social networking sites, but also disturbed all the “sludge” of imperial and Soviet myths about Ivan Mazepa, even though Den has been consistently debunking these myths and revealing some little-known episodes in the hetman’s life for almost 20 years in its “Ukraine Incognita” column and in the books of its library. Moreover, our publication and the National Museum of Ukrainian History declared 2009 the Year of Ivan Mazepa.
Serhii PAVLENKO, a well-known historian and Mazepa researcher, chief editor of the scholarly journal Siveriansky Litopys, told The Day why certain falsifications still remain very tenacious and what publications can help expose them. Here follows his text.
“UNTIL NOW, THE HETMAN HAS BEEN ADEQUATELY PORTRAYED JUST IN A FEW UKRAINIAN PUBLICATIONS”
“I am now deeply absorbed in a Facebook debate. The event has caused even some well-respected people to express doubt: ‘Why is this Mazepa again? He is a wrong figure for Ukraine, a traitor, a perjurer.’ There are very many myths about Mazepa. He is said to have paid a bribe for hetmanship, which is not true, and signed the disadvantageous Kolomak Articles. But those who claim this do not know the conditions in which the 1687 Kolomak elections were held. He is accused of having been the only one allowed to buy land ‘on the territory of Russia.’ On May 10, I responded to a Kherson-based journalist who alleged that Mazepa ‘had always been betraying’ the king, Hetman Petro Doroshenko, and Peter I as follows: ‘Mazepa’s father fell ill, so he went home to Bilotserkivka from Warsaw… He betrayed the king! Doroshenko sent Mazepa to Crimea for negotiations – the envoy was intercepted in the Sich and handed over to Left-Bank Hetman Ivan Samoilovych… He betrayed Doroshenko! Peter decided in 1707 to establish Kyiv Guberniya on the basis of the Hetmanate. He made Mazepa face this fact. Mazepa did not wish to be the governor! He betrayed.’
“Very few of the general public have ever read present-day studies, including monographs. We have seen many republications of Mykola Kostomarov’s works which project a negative image of Mazepa. Kostomarov was a good historian, but he blindly trusted some documents and thus concluded that it was a negative figure. Incidentally, I took up the Mazepa topic precisely because I did not believe Kostomarov. And when I took a closer look at all kinds of accusations, I found a number of published documents that reject all the nonsense about the hetman.
“Unfortunately, many 19th-early-20th-century Russian authors, as well as the translation of Mazepa by Swedish historian Alfred Jensen, were republished in the 1990s. All of this is a compilation of Dmytro Bantysh-Kamensky’s and Kostomarov’s books that take a dim view of the hetman’s activities. Unfortunately, Ivan Mazepa by Bohdan Kentrzhynsky, a very serious work published in Sweden in 1962, was inaccessible to us until three years ago, when Tempora published it in an excellent translation of Oleh Korol. This book, which presents a really in-depth analysis and an impartial view on the hetman without any ‘isms,’ has left our Mazepa researchers much behind but, regretfully, has only come to us now.
“Many regard the Russian historian Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva as a heroine. I am also saying that Tatiana deserves kudos, for she is doing in Russia what nobody else is. There are researchers there, such as Vladimir Artamonov, who stubbornly cling to old patterns in the assessment of Mazepa and repeat age-old myths. The problem is that people of this kind also abound in Ukraine. Reading their works, you can see that the author has read Kostomarov and Bantysh-Kamensky but was too lazy to peruse something else, and, as a result, every new ‘History of Ukraine’ goes on repeating all kinds of blunders about Mazepa (a cruel serf-owner, one who signed a treacherous treaty with Polish King Stanislaw Leszczynski, the people did not support him, etc.).
“Mazepa has so far been adequately presented just in a few Ukrainian publications. But, luckily, there is a website, www.mazepa.name, where I have placed my basic works which mostly focus on dispelling these myths [for example, ‘Hetman Mazepa’s Inner Circle: Followers and Henchmen’; ‘Ivan Mazepa as Builder of Ukrainian Culture’; ‘Mazepa’s Uprising: Myths and Realities, Historical and Documentary Essays,’ etc. – Ed.].
“Incidentally, Wikipedia also comprises impartial articles on this topic, and an individual who takes a positive attitude to Mazepa will find the required information there. As for school teaching, some historians have consulted with me about how to spotlight some points, for which I am grateful to them. But I wish more impartial books would be published.”
“THE DEATH TOLL OF THE PEOPLE WHO SUPPORTED THE HETMAN AND HIS IDEA IN 1708-09 WAS ALMOST 30,000”
“Somebody has expressed this doubt about Mazepa: ‘Why should we educate the younger generation only on the example of people who had a tragic destiny and were losers? There were successful personalities as well!’ I must say the following in this connection. For example, Spartacus incited an uprising that was crushed. But that was the uprising of a slave who became free. He was killed but had thrown off his shackles. The same applies to Mazepa – he rose up with a great hope to win freedom for Ukraine. The situation was that, when Charles XII entered the territory of Belarus, Peter I deprived the hetman of almost all his regiments and took them away from Ukraine. The cunning Mazepa said that the grassroots were rebelling and, therefore, Cossack regiments should remain under his command. But almost all the troops were sent to the Starodub region and then to Poland. Mazepa had in fact about 7,000-8,000 Cossacks, volunteers and mercenaries at his disposal. Although aware of this, he and his senior officers still decided to go into action because, as they wrote in their documents later, they had no other chance to launch this revolution. They lost, but their heroism resembled that of a soldier who attacks a tank with a grenade in hand. They challenged the Russian Empire and its aspiration to do away with the Cossack autonomy. It was a courageous and heroic step. This is what we must honor Mazepa and his comrades-in-arms for. I was astonished when I estimated the losses of Mazepa’s men: the death toll of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, burghers, and peasants who supported the hetman and his idea on 1708-09 was almost 30,000! These figures were kept secret from us for a long time, for they were unfavorable to imperial Russian historiography.
Photo from the website MAZEPA.NAME
“But would have Mazepa’s destiny been successful if he had bowed his head? In my view, we would not be interested now in his personality at all. He would have lived the routine life of a lackey, a Kyiv governor or something of the kind.”
“THE HETMAN DID NOT WRITE LETTERS ABOUT BETRAYING CHARLES XII”
“Ms. Tairova-Yakovleva and I have a very crucial point of disagreement in assessing the hetman. She respects and highly esteems but… does not consider him a patriot. She claims he was a person of his time, who had some weaknesses. Here is an important historical point: when the army of Charles XII came to Ukraine, the Russians seized Baturyn. Following this, Danylo Apostol went to Peter I with letters in which Mazepa allegedly repented: ‘I will bring Charles XII to you if only you spare me.’ The answers of Gavriil Golovkin and Danylo Apostol to Mazepa’s allegedly penitential letters were published in the 19th century by Bantysh-Kamensky. Tairova-Yakovleva thinks it was just the case. Doctor of History Taras Chukhlib also shares the opinion that Mazepa was able to take such a shameful action as to bring the Swedish king to Peter I’s camp. I devote a large chapter of the just-finished book Charles XII’s Army in Northern Ukraine to this episode. Firstly, I found the originals in an archive, which are noted as ‘the chancellor’s forged letters.’ In other words, those documents were cooked up to set Charles XII against Mazepa. Maybe, when Bantysh-Kamensky was preparing the letters to be printed, either he did not publish this note deliberately or censors blocked it. Then I traced Apostol’s itinerary: he traveled in a direction opposite to Peter I! Such an important letter… came back home. I also found in the archive such an important document as minutes of an interrogation of the captured senior Cossack officers. They were saying that the Lubny Colonel Dmytro Zelensky’s daughter had died and Apostol accompanied him to the funeral. As Lubny and Sorochyntsi are close by, Apostol decided to drop in home in the evening, but it turned out that a Russian regiment had occupied Sorochyntsi and, instead of having a rest, he was taken prisoner. Apostol was kept in Sorochyntsi for a long time. After being interrogated, he requested the tsar to pardon him. Then these letters suddenly came up a month later. In other words, it is a special provocative invention. There also are a host of other details. Mazepa was not the kind of a person some researchers claim he was. It is a very important detail. Mazepa had never committed a sin like this.”
“THE RUSSIAN ARMY’S SABOTAGE UNITS WERE PRESENTED AS ‘PEOPLE’S WAR’”
“My book Microtoponyms of the Chernihiv-Siveria Region was published in 2013. I visited hundreds of villages and was not planning to write about Mazepa. But very often, when I was entering a village, I was told: ‘We have a Swedish grave.’ I thought it was just about Scythian mounds. But I was told about Swedish graves in 50 villages. As I had described these very microtoponyms, I could see that it was about something serious. I began to ‘dig in,’ translators offered me a lot of Swedish sources, and I understood that not only the army used to march here. Many of the Swedes who fought here were wounded, taken prisoner, and stayed on here after captivity. For example, there were 500 prisoners of war in Chernihiv alone. I even found descendants of the captured Swedes. When I was putting down microtoponyms in the village of Yavortsi, I asked a woman her name. She said: ‘Maun. Grandfather said we descended from the captured Swedes.’ There is even a village called Shvedchyna. The Caroleans left their traces in the names of valleys and settlements (Shvedivshchyna, Perekhod, Golden Moat, Swedish Spring, Swedish Township, etc).
“When you browse through the sources, you can see the way Russian historians were deceiving: suppose the Caroleans seized 900 horses somewhere, but they write, ‘quoting’ Swedish sources, that they killed 900 civilians. V.E. Shutoy has even written a monograph on the ‘people’s war’ of 1708-09. When I went through the sources, I felt funny. In reality, it is Russian regiments that came to the villages of Smile and Vepryk, as well as to Poltava and Sorochyntsi, to see action, but the overideologized literature alleges that the local populace put up a defense. Even the well-known historian Oleksandr Ohloblyn wrote, after reading all this, about a ‘guerrilla war’ against the Swedes. In reality, Peter I kept sending dozens of the Russian army’s sabotage units, consisting of, among others, Don Cossacks and Kalmyks, to Swedish quarters. Russian historian Sergey Ivanyuk gives a detailed account of this in a soon-to-be-published monograph.
“Incidentally, many politicians and other people caution against ‘raking over old ashes.’ But what is to be done if the historical truth was varnished and every episode and event was falsified? When I was assessing the Swedes’ daily losses, I exposed a terrible hoax: ‘embellishing’ his success in the Battle of Poltava, Peter I instructed clerks to write down that it had claimed the lives of 9,300 Swedes and 1,344 Russians, whereas the Caroleans had about 21,000-22,000 soldiers on the eve of the battle (this figure occurs in the memoirs of James Jeffreys, the English envoy to the king, who took part in the campaign), with 19,655 soldiers taken prisoner and about 2,000 fleeing with Charles XII.
“Or take the so-called Hlukhiv Rada convened by Peter I in early November 1708 to elect a new hetman in lieu of Mazepa. Historians write a lot about its scenario, but they all forget the following detail: how many senior officers took part in it? In realistic terms, the hetman was elected by 20 to 30 persons (up to 15 regimental seniors, two colonels, and two acting colonels, who were stationed among the Russian regiments, and some Hlukhiv Sotnia Cossacks). But there were 10 Cossack regiments, 10 volunteer regiments, and Zaporozhian Sich in the Hetmanate… In other words, Peter I established an entity to manipulate Ukrainians at that distant period, like Putin has done now in the shape of the ‘DNR’ and the ‘LNR.’”
A SYMBOLIC, NOT A HISTORICAL, IMAGE
“I am very pleased that a monument was unveiled at last in Poltava. It is a milestone and a reminder to the whole – Ukrainian, Russian, and foreign – community about who Mazepa really was. My only criticism is that both Chernihiv and Poltava sculptors have created some symbolic figures which can be ‘attached’ to any hetman. For we already have books and other studies (for example, I have the book The Pictures of Hetman Ivan Mazepa in the Late 17th – Early 18th Centuries) which shows how the hetman looked like in reality.
“It is no longer possible to hide the truth about Mazepa, and we must spread it further.”
