Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa

Ukrainian Cossack hetman (r. 1687-1709)

• Born: March 20, 1639
• Birthplace: Mazepyntsi, near Belaya Tserkov, Ukraine
• Died: October 2, 1709
• Place of death: Bendery (now Tighina, Moldova)

A prudent and statesmanlike ruler of the Cossacks of the Dnieper, Mazepa sought to work loyally with the Muscovite state, until Czar Peter the Great’s exploitation of the Ukraine led him to defect to Charles XII of Sweden, sharing in the latter’s 1709 defeat at Poltava.

Early Life

Ivan Stepanovich Mazepa (ih-VAHN styih-PAHN-uhv-yihch muh-ZYAY-puh) was born into a respected gentry (starshyna) family of Ukrainian Cossacks. For his class, he was unusually well-educated, being sent first to the Kiev Academy and then to a Jesuit college in Warsaw. Thereafter, he entered the service of the Polish king John II Casimir Vasa (r. 1648-1668) as a gentleman usher, which enabled him to travel to western Europe and acquire a broader outlook than that of the typical Cossack of his time. It was probably during his stay in Poland that there occurred, if indeed it did occur, the episode narrated in George Gordon, Lord Byron’s celebrated poem Mazeppa (1819).

In 1669, Mazepa returned to the Ukraine and entered the service of the hetman of the Cossacks of the Right Bank of the Dnieper River, Petro Doroshenko, thereby securing a first foothold on the ladder of power. Not long afterward, he fell into the hands of the Left Bank hetman, Ivan Samoilovych. Mazepa’s capture might have proved his undoing, but his sophistication and assiduous manners impressed Samoilovych, who promoted him to be his confidante.

Mazepa was one of the most significant figures in a turbulent period in Cossack history. During his lifetime, the Cossack communities of the Ukraine had grudgingly submitted to Muscovite rule. The word “Cossack” drives from the Turkish qazaq, meaning “masterless men,” and the Cossacks were indeed dissidents, runaway serfs, and criminal outcasts. Devoutly Orthodox, they were bitterly hostile to Catholics, Muslims, and Jews. Most of all, they were rugged lovers of freedom, and they resented even the abstract authority of the Russian czar over them, much less any actual exercise of that authority.

Following the 1648-1654 Cossack revolt of Bohdan Khmelnytsky against Poland, the Cossacks had become signatories to the Treaty of Pereyaslavl (1654), which placed them under Muscovite suzerainty. This treaty resulted in increased interference by Muscovite tax-collectors, law-officers, and garrison-commanders in Cossack affairs. One effect of this situation was to diminish the older egalitarianism of the Cossack social order and to replace it with far more differentiated social hierarchy. A man like Mazepa, therefore, was elevated to the rank of a virtual Cossack nobleman.

Life’s Work

In 1687, events in Russia played into Mazepa’s hands. Czarena Sophia, the Russian regent, despatched a military expedition against the Crimean Tatars with her chief minister, Prince Vasily Golitsyn, in command. On the march toward the Crimea, the Russian forces were joined by Hetman Samoilovych and his Cossacks, including Mazepa, who had a considerable personal following. The campaign proved a disaster, not least because of devastating fires lit on the steppes. At first, the Tatars were blamed for the fires, but later the rumor spread that it was Samoilovych, angered by Russia’s recent peace with Poland, and fearful that defeat of the Tatars would weaken Cossack bargaining-power, who had had them lit.

The rumors led to Samoilovych being deposed from power. Mazepa was elected hetman in his stead and confirmed by Moscow on July 25, 1687. Prince Golitsyn led a second expedition against the Tatars, in which Mazepa again participated, but it proved similarly disastrous. In September, 1689, Sophia’s half-brother, Peter I (later known as Peter the Great ), engineered a coup to get rid of her. Thereafter, freed of Sophia’s regency, Peter ruled in fact as well as name.

For approximately twenty-one years (1687-1709), the fortunes of Mazepa and those of the Ukraine were synonymous, although his rule was not without controversy. He clearly favored the starshyna, the Cossack officer elite, enriching them, as well as himself, with extensive land grants. He was also generous to the Orthodox Church, providing funds for church building and for the maintenance of religious and cultural institutions, such as the Kiev Academy. Also in Kiev, Mazepa was said to have spent seventy-four thousand gold ducats on the bell tower of the Pechersk monastery and between 1690 and 1707 to have made baroque additions to Saint Sophia. His magnificent church of Saint Nicholas in Kiev, built between 1690 and 1693, was destroyed by the Soviets in 1934. These and others structures were built in a style known as Ruthenian, Cossack, or Mazepist Baroque.

The favors that Mazepa lavished on the elite, the clergy, and the small student class were in stark contrast to the heavy weight of his rule upon the peasants and ordinary Cossacks. In 1692, there was even an unsuccessful uprising by a group who aspired to create an independent Ukraine centered on the Zaporozhian Sech (an island on the lower Dnieper River regarded as the birthplace of Ukrainian Cossackdom). In fact, the strength of Mazepa’s position during the 1690’s was based upon his close working relationship with Czar Peter, who seemed to trust him and to whom Mazepa looked for unfailing support. With the passing of time, however, Peter came to regard Cossack autonomy as a historical anachronism, and he may have grown increasingly suspicious of the wily old hetman. Mazepa, for his part, had little sympathy with Peter’s sweeping modernizing goals and their brutal implementation, from which the Ukraine was certainly not spared.

Mazepa’s disillusionment with Peter was brought to a head during the early phase of the Great Northern War (1700-1721), in which Russia, in alliance with Denmark and Poland, confronted Charles XII of Sweden. The struggle strained Russia’s resources to the uttermost, and Mazepa’s Ukraine was called upon to make unprecedented sacrifices in a war against Sweden, a nation with which the Cossacks (traditionally in conflict with Poles, Tatars, and Ottoman Turks) had no quarrel.

The Cossacks were treated as cannon fodder in the war, experiencing losses of 50 percent to 70 percent each year, while from 1705 onward, Russian and German officers were put in command of Cossack units, spreading bitter resentment among the starshyna. Meanwhile, Ukrainian peasants and townsmen suffered from the appalling weight of Peter’s fiscal exactions and the brutal behavior of Russian garrisons. Mazepa began to doubt the value of Russian overlordship, especially when Sweden threatened to invade the Ukraine and Peter declared that he could spare no troops to help defend it, despite the guarantees of the Treaty of Pereyaslavl.

When, in October, 1708, Charles XII, instead of advancing on Moscow, turned south to seek food and fodder for his army in the agriculturally rich Ukraine, Mazepa, with three thousand Cossacks and his principal supporters among the starshyna, defected to the Swedes. Charles promised to protect the Ukraine from the czar and, in an eventual peace treaty, guaranteed its independence, but Charles—superb commander that he was—had nevertheless blundered in his march south. He found himself beset by logistical difficulties, and he could ultimately do nothing for his new Ukrainian allies.

Peter’s vengeance came swiftly. On October 31, 1708, Peter’s favorite, Prince Aleksander Menshikov, entered Baturyn, Mazepa’s capital, and massacred the entire population of six thousand men, women, and children, following the massacre by a reign of terror throughout the Dnieper River’s Left Bank directed against supporters or supposed supporters of Mazepa. On November 11, 1708, Mazepa was excommunicated and deposed from the hetmanate. Peter ordered the starshyna to elect a new hetman, Ivan Skoropadsky. In May, 1709, Russian forces penetrated to the Zaporozhian Sech and wiped it out. Finally, on June 28, 1709, Charles XII was decisively defeated at the Battle of Poltava, after which the Swedish king, accompanied by Mazepa, fled into Ottoman territory, where Mazepa died at Bendery the following October.

Significance

Mazepa attained the hetmanate through his martial qualities, political astuteness, and powers of leadership. For over twenty years, his rule over the Ukraine was humane and enlightened, albeit calculating and autocratic. He gained much by winning Peter’s confidence, but in the end, he concluded that Moscow’s treatment of the Cossacks was unbearably exploitive, and he was beguiled into believing that Charles XII would support an independent Ukraine. It was a gamble that he lost, but, as one scholar has expressed it, “But for the tragedy of Poltava, this gifted and humane ruler might have been termed ’the Great’ by East European history, while Peter, for all his modernizing, might in many minds have joined the company and epithet of Ivan IV [the Terrible].” History, however, is written by the victors, and throughout most of the Romanov period, Mazepa was anathemized in the annual state Easter services.

Mazepa’s story is a classic case of a traditional ruler pitted against a brutal modernizer. It can also be seen as a case of a still embryonic national identity being forced to give way to one that was more developed. After Poltava, first the Dnieper River region and then the other Cossack communities were brought into subjugation to the expanding Russian state. In historical retrospect, Mazepa became a “non-person,” and those Ukrainians who dreamed of political independence were dismissed as Mazepintsy (Mazepists). Today, in an independent Ukraine, cultural tourists are proudly shown the monuments to the first stirrings of Cossack nationalism, in which Mazepa remains a somewhat ambiguous figure.

Bibliography

Arndt, Walter. Alexander Pushkin: Collective Narrative and Lyrical Poetry. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1984. Excellent translation and discussion of the epic Poltava.

Gajecky, G. The Cossack Administration of the Hetmanate. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1978. The definitive study on the subject.

Hughes, Lindsey. Russia in the Age of Peter the Great. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Excellent introduction to the period.

Longworth, Philip. The Cossacks. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970. General introduction to the Cossack phenomenon.

Subtelny, Orest. “Mazepa, Peter I, and the Question of Treason,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 2 (1978): 158-183. Discussion of Mazepa’s ambiguous relations with the Russian state.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Mazepists Ukrainian Separatism in the Eighteenth Century. Boulder, Colo.: Eastern European Monographs, 1981. Illuminating for Mazepa’s separatist legacy.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Ukraine: A History. 3d ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Authoritative overview of Ukrainian history.