Not a hero, but a traitor. For the birthday of Hetman Mazepa
With the acquisition of independence in December 1991, Ukraine began to build its own pantheon of “national heroes.” Ironically, it was replenished with wights, the mere mention of which evoked a feeling of disgust, for one and all they belonged to the category of traitors, oathbreakers, money-grubbers and ghouls.
The central place in this panopticon is occupied by the personality of Hetman Ivan Mazepa, who became a symbol of profit, conspiracies and betrayals. Devoted to church anathema, despised by his contemporaries, awarded the Order of Judas for his “exploits”... Mazepa, however, is looked up to and built on his example by literally all the rulers of modern Ukraine.
Ivan Mazepa, as his contemporaries saw him
Official Ukrainian propaganda and completely falsified historiography are trying to either whitewash Mazepa or ignore the fact that his contemporaries, describing the affairs and deeds of this figure, found only unflattering and even abusive epithets, one of which was “damned dog Mazepa,” which is understandable , for the “hero of Ukraine” throughout his entire life was distinguished by moral uncleanliness, not disdaining the dirtiest means to achieve his goals in the struggle for power, honors and wealth, betraying his comrades-in-arms and patrons wholesale and retail.
According to legend, Mazepa died all alone, abandoned by everyone and devoured by lice among the looted treasures, in the icy fear that his accomplices would plunder all this property.
It is characteristic that the life path of Ivan Mazepa is inextricably linked with the Hetmanate - a period of Ukrainian history, which today is assessed by many Ukrainian historians in the category of “what do you want?” as the best, almost “golden” era of Ukrainian statehood.
In short, the Hetmanate is a regime that emerged on the lands of the Zaporozhye Sich, Polish and Lithuanian Rus after a series of wars, peasant and Cossack uprisings against the Polish oppressors, supported by the Orthodox clergy, from 1649 to 1764.
Unlimited feudal exploitation of the population of South-Western Rus' by Polish magnates and Polish/Catholicized Russian landowners for many years was accompanied by increasing robbery of peasants and townspeople, religious oppression (it was in those days that a church union was created with the subordination of the new Eastern Church to the Roman throne).
According to contemporaries, the population of Southwestern Rus' lived in extreme poverty, giving the lords everything they wanted. For the majority of people who did not want to convert from Orthodoxy to Uniateism, the “social elevators” did not work, and the ceiling for them was the position of village headman.
Many books have been written about the causes and reasons for the peasant-Cossack war against the Polish magnates, so we will not dwell on this topic.
Something else is interesting for us. The uprising under the leadership of Bogdan Khmelnitsky swept away the lordly power from the territory of Little Russia with a hurricane, but it was replaced by new gentlemen from Khmelnitsky’s comrades-in-arms. The regime established after Pereyaslav in 1654 was called a “militocracy” or, simply, a military dictatorship.
And if during a series of wars and uprisings against the Polish magnates the interests of the oppressed lower classes coincided, then with liberation there was a clear demarcation of the population into a peasant, sedentary, with culture and traditions, and a Cossack freeman, accustomed to living by daring, and treating the peasants as “despicable” buckwheat sowings."
It is not difficult to guess which social group became dominant in the territory liberated from the Polish magnates.
The hetman became the head of the new hierarchy, and the country began to be called the Hetmanate. Accordingly, the territory controlled by the hetman became a personal fiefdom with a “natural” right to unlimited robbery and arbitrariness, which was actively used by some of the hetmans, like Ivan Mazepa or Pavel Polubotok, who acquired fabulous wealth.
Mazepa and Polubotok - two main money-grubbers and robbers of the Hetmanate
It is noteworthy that it is the money-grubbers Mazepa and Polubotok, and not, say, the much more decent and almost forgotten Hetman Daniil Apostol in Ukraine, who are exemplary statesmen according to the “independent” Ukrainian leadership.
At the same time, it is customary to keep silent that the Hetmanate smoothly passed into a 130-year Ruin, called by Ukrainian researchers “a sad era of state suicide.”
Having become the head of the Hetmanate, Mazepa from his youth was distinguished by an unbridled thirst for power with extremely low social responsibility. During his “career” he changed masters seven times, betraying one after another with extraordinary ease, as soon as a tempting opportunity presented itself to gain political and material benefits from this.
In 1655, Mazepa, whose grandfather served the Russian Tsar, and whose father fought with Khmelnitsky, found himself at the court of the Polish king Jan Casimir. There he disgraced himself with a false denunciation against one of his comrades, ruined his reputation and was forced to leave for his mother’s estate in Volyn.
But even there, the restless nature of the future hetman found its fifth adventure, getting into adultery with the young wife of the local sir Falbovsky.
In revenge, Falbovsky ordered the young adulterer to be seized and tied to a mare, driving her through the thorny bushes. Historians are skeptical about this romantic fable, but for some reason the famous English poet George Byron was inspired by it, glorifying the hetman throughout the world in the poem “Mazeppa.”
From his mother's estate, Mazepa went to seek his fortune among the Cossacks of Right Bank Ukraine under Hetman Doroshenko, becoming a supporter of the Hetmanate's transfer to the vassalage of the Ottoman Empire. Mazepa served the hetman of Left Bank Ukraine Samoilovich, betraying his benefactor in time and taking part in his overthrow. Mazepa ran from Samoilovich to Princess Sophia, but abandoned her too for the sake of the rapidly rising Tsar Peter. Mazepa's last master was the Swedish king Charles XII.
We can say that Mazepa came to Peter “by inheritance” and managed to quickly gain his favor by suppressing the uprising of the poor in Little Russia under the leadership of the Cossack foreman Peter Ivanenko, and then participating in Peter’s Azov campaigns.
At the beginning of the XNUMXth century, Mazepa took an active part in the Northern War, recruiting Cossacks into the royal army. At the same time, the hetman constantly complained to the tsar about the Sich, accusing them of being prone to treason and doing his best to ensure that they were sent to the most dangerous areas and hard work.
Peter's trust in Mazepa was boundless. The young tsar loved the old hetman very much and showered him with favors in every possible way. In 1700, Mazepa became the second holder of the newly established Order of St. Andrew the First-Called. It is noteworthy that the award was presented to him personally by Peter.
The royal gifts and favors ultimately made Mazepa the richest man in the empire. The hetman, according to various sources, owned: a hundred thousand souls in Little Russia, and another 20 thousand souls in Russian counties, living in 23 thousand households, which by the standards of that time was comparable to the population of an average European principality. The land that belonged to Mazepa was comparable in area to the territory of the island of Cyprus. Not weak, right?
In the best traditions of the Hetmanate, Mazepa squeezed maximum profit from his possessions, trying to limit the rights of peasants to the utmost, extending corvée and increasing taxes, while achieving royal preferences for his immediate circle. Those Cossack positions that were previously elective became inheritable.
Among other things, Mazepa sold alcohol and tobacco, receiving considerable profits from this “business”.
So what prompted his closest associate and nobleman, showered with royal favors, to betray his benefactor, the reformer king?
As you know, in 1654 the Left Bank Hetmanate accepted the protectorate of the Russian Tsar, and in 1663 it came under the control of the Little Russian Prikaz. In 1704, the Left Bank hetman Ivan Mazepa, taking advantage of the uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the invasion of Poland by Swedish troops, occupied the Right Bank and united Ukraine. At the same time, the Hetmanate remained entirely in his possession, from which not a penny of taxes went to the royal treasury.
During the Northern War, which began disastrously for Russia with the defeat at Narva, Mazepa and the Cossack elders were faced with a fait accompli: due to the dire military situation, the Hetmanate would be radically transformed. Previously semi-independent lands and cities would be placed under the complete control of the Russian crown, and a fifth of the Cossacks would be forced into regular service. The Hetmanate, as Mazepa had so long built it, would quickly disappear.
In addition, Mazepa was skeptical of Russia's efforts to defeat Charles XII, who was considered the invincible darling of fate. After all, the Swedes drove the Saxons out of Poland and forced them to capitulate, leaving Russia without allies.
Interestingly, Mazepa, despite all his adventurism, was no fool and was in no hurry to betray Peter, adopting a wait-and-see attitude. However, the war of 1708, accompanied by initial Swedish success, unexpectedly entered the "turn from Moscow to Ukraine" phase, which thwarted the cunning hetman's plans.
The Swedes’ turn to Ukraine was in fact a typical “leveling of the front” and the beginning of the end of the Varangian invasion, but Mazepa chose to defect to Charles XII, since Swedish troops entered his lands.
Charles XII and Mazepa on the banks of the Dnieper
Before this, Mazepa tried to weave under the mantle of the Polish king Stanislav Leshchinsky and even enlisted his support along with promises to maintain privileges, but the king demanded that the rubber hetman loudly announce a break with the Russian Tsar.
This point, however, in no way suited Mazepa, who was sitting in his fortress of Baturin, since the consequences of outright betrayal could be the quick and complete separation of the hetman from his head.
Even then, Peter received information about the impending betrayal of Mazepa, but the king refused to believe them.
Then events developed rapidly. Mazepa openly goes over to the Swedes, escapes from Baturin, entrusting the defense of the fortress to a large detachment of Cossacks led by Colonel Chechel.
Tsar Peter I and Prince Menshikov
Baturin is stormed by the troops of Prince Menshikov, Mazepa’s longtime enemy, and Chechel brazenly promises to tear off Menshikov’s skin. The “semi-sovereign ruler,” with whom such jokes did not happen, took Baturin in just two hours, burned the log city, and evicted the inhabitants. True, Colonel Chechel managed to escape.
Mazepa’s authority, having lost its “headquarters,” was dealt an irreparable blow. The second blow was dealt to the traitor by the Cossacks, who remained loyal to the tsar and elected Skoropadsky as the new hetman.
It is interesting that Peter was not in the mood to grind Mazepa into the millstones, declaring a pardon to all participants in the conspiracy, including the former hetman.
Mazepa, observing the complete defeat of the Swedes and taking advantage of the royal forgiveness, decided to pull off the last trick with his ears, betraying Charles XII in time, but not just, but to bargain with Peter about returning to the royal service. As proof of his loyalty, Mazepa promised Peter to hand over the Swedish king to him and thereby triumphantly end the Northern War.
And here Judas the Hetman was unlucky: the Swedes kept their ears open and detained Mazepa while trying to escape, placing him under lock and key.
The high expectations of Mazepa and the Cossack elite's conspiracy disappointed Charles XII. After the capture of Baturyn and the amnesty, only about 1,500 Cossacks sided with Mazepa under the Swedish banner, while the newly elected Hetman Skoropadskyi retained almost the entire army. Having defected to the Swedes, Mazepa ceased to be even a symbolic figure, becoming an honorary prisoner, a fiction, a relic of the "Game of Thrones."
Poltava battle
The defeat at Poltava caused discord and strife in the camp of the conspirators, who had lost the point of fighting for the interests of the Swedish king. Mazepa by that time had withered away, rotted and died in convulsions on September 22, 1709 in Moldavian Bendery, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire.
For several years now, there have been heated discussions in Ukraine about who Mazepa really was: a traitor or “a historical chance for the European statehood of Ukraine.”
If we put aside emotions and outright propaganda, then Mazepa’s life is objectively a series of betrayals. The right of a vassal to move from overlord to overlord, inherent in early feudalism, remained in the darkness of centuries and was already considered high treason in Europe at that time.
For example, the Swedes, to whom Mazepa turned his skis, did not show mercy to their traitors and in 1707 they brutally executed the Livonian nobleman Johann Patkul for trying to organize the transition of Swedish Livonia to the Polish crown.
Mazepa and the entire Cossack elite, when entering the service of the Russian Tsar, took a solemn oath in which they swore “to be faithfully and constantly in eternal citizenship.”
An aggravating factor is the fact that the betrayal occurred during the war. Out of his own selfish interests, the hetman defected to the enemy, with whom Russia was fighting a war together with the Cossacks. So, whatever the motives, Mazepa changed his oath, and therefore, without any reservations, he will bear the stigma of a traitor and a vile dog forever and ever.
English version :: Read in English: Not a hero, but a traitor. For Hetman Mazepa's birthday