The rise and fall of Ivan Samoilovych
In Ecclesiastes it was said that there is nothing new under the sun... Our modern elite, campaigners and image-makers often invent some supposedly new and superlative (at least think so) political patents that enable one to win a brilliant victory over his adversary. And how really gratifying it is to believe that you are a trailblazer in this perilous and most subtle job of balancing between different warring groups in the unfathomable art of walking a tightrope and not falling over the precipice!
But, the same Ecclesiastes added, quite aptly, “And they say, ‘behold, this is new.’ But it has already been, in the ages before us...” On close examination, political passions as well as mistakes turn out to be not new at all. This is why not to study the experience, miscalculations, and illusions of past political leaders (even of the very distant past) means to doom oneself to groping in the dark, to employing the most primitive method of trial and error. In particular, one of the figures of Ukrainian history, still insufficiently understood by our scholars, politicians, and journalists, is Ivan Samoilovych, a hetman of the late Ruin period. This clever, very well educated, and politically adroit individual still remains in the shadow of his successor Ivan Mazepa. Meanwhile, his destiny is quite characteristic of not only those times. The rise and fall of Ivan Samoilovych, who was Ukraine’s hetman for a full fifteen years (1672-1687), are truly instructive.
RISE
We know comparatively little about the life of Ivan (also known as Popovych, for he came from a priest’s family) before he was awarded the hetman’s mace in 1672 under very interesting circumstances. Samoilovych, the son of a Right Bank clergyman who settled in what is now Sumy oblast and took over a parish near Konotop, received an excellent education, graduating from the Kyiv- Mohyla Academy. The first step in his political career was to serve the notorious Hetman Ivan Briukhovetsky whose overt pandering to the multitude, thirst for power, and simultaneous kowtowing to Moscow was perhaps a good school for the hero of this story. Having stood the test of fate (for example, he took part in the 1668 anti-Moscow uprising led by Briukhovetsky who suddenly awakened and became a patriot of Ukraine), Samoilovych later sided with Hetman Demyan Mnohohrishny who, trying to legally formalize relations with Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich, was compelled to sign the clearly discriminatory Hlukhiv Articles of 1669. A man of harsh disposition, Mnohohrishny more or less trusted Samoilovych, appointing him chief justice. But...
In March 1672, Cossack senior officers (those days’ oligarchs, I should say), disgruntled with Mnohohrishny’s unpredictable and authoritarian style of leadership, reported him to Moscow and staged a coup d’etat. Accused of contacts with public enemies and of financial abuses, Mnohohrishny was taken into custody, deported to Moscow, severely tortured and exiled to Siberia, where he died decades later. This coup resulted, first, in signing the so-called Konotop Articles of 1672, which limited the hetman’s power in favor of the senior Cossack officers (as well as in favor of Moscow, for those were parallel and logically interconnected processes), and, secondly, in the election of Samoilovych as Hetman of Left Bank Ukraine by the Cossack Rada near the town of Kozacha Dibrova on June 16, 1672. The elections, held under most strict control of senior officers and tsarist government representatives, were attended by 4000 rank-and-file Cossacks who had in fact no right to vote. Significantly, this show was conducted by the Muscovite Voyevoda, Prince Romodanovsky.
Thus the new hetman took power on clearly defined conditions that prohibited the appointment of senior officers without a military court ruling and drastically reduced the Ukrainian government’s diplomatic rights — even with respect to neighboring states. In this way Samoilovych was in fact made, irrespective of his personal intentions, a henchman of the then political oligarchs and was doomed to negotiate with the tsar from a position of weakness. A participant in the plot against Mnohohrishny (there are ample grounds to believe that he also took an active part in denouncing the latter to Moscow) and a priest’s son, Samoilovych must have hoped to gradually and steadily strengthen his power, maneuvering between the senior officers, Moscow, rank-and-file Cossacks, Poland, Turkey, and the Crimea. Let us see to what extent he managed to do so and what his political priorities were.
AT THE TOP
Samoilovych’s main goal in the first years of his rule was to extend his jurisdiction to the Dnipro’s other bank, which was, naturally, impossible without a political and military victory over Right Bank Hetman Petro Doroshenko. As to his foreign policy strategy, the hetman felt deep mistrust toward Poland and its government and, on the other hand, strove to improve relations with the Crimea and, to some extent, with Istanbul.
Following a long series of well-thought-out strategic, propagandistic, and military operations, Samoilovych achieved his goal: Doroshenko found himself politically isolated as a result of, among other things, terrible punitive expeditions of his Turkish allies to Podillia and southern Kyiv region, and was removed from the political arena. But that was a Pyrrhic victory. First of all, the hetman lost any remaining negotiating power in his contacts with Moscow. Mykhailo Hrushevsky noted, “Samoilovych was uncommonly obsequious to and believed in Moscow. So, fearful of having to lay down his mace if Moscow made a deal with Doroshenko, he did his utmost to keep Moscow from making peace with Doroshenko and advised fighting him instead. In this he succeeded.” Thus, rivalry over the mace between Doroshenko and Samoilovych, a sad page in the era of Ruin, finally undermined the foundations of hetmanate statehood. Then Samoilovych, actively supported by Moscow, forced his rival to relinquish power, much to the detriment of Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity.
Samoilovych was also involved in another tragic and far-reaching event in our history — the siege and ruin of Chyhyryn during the war against Turks in 1678. The hetman followed in the wake of the tsar’s perfidious and ambiguous policies, being very well aware, though, that whoever holds Chyhyryn, Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s capital, would hold sway on both banks of the Dnipro but be unable to act on his own. When the Muscovite government understood it was incapable of avoiding the sultan’s invasion and decided to ruin Chyhyryn, all Samoilovych could do was look silently on this disaster. In 1678- 1681 Right Bank Ukraine was finally devastated, with tens of thousands of people being forcibly resettled on the Dnipro’s left bank (this operation, called the Great Expulsion, was conducted by the hetman’s son Semen), while millions of other Ukrainians had to hastily flee the regions of Podillia, Kyiv, and Cherkasy from the Turks and Poles.
FALL
As the years passed, Hetman Samoilovych, naturally and predictably enough, was busy consolidating and stabilizing his power. The pattern was basically as follows: acting strictly within the autonomy Moscow had outlined in the Konotop Articles), Left Bank Ukraine’s ruler strove to establish the foundations of a hetman-ruled nascent state (for the right bank was ceded to Warsaw under the 1686 so-called Treaty of Eternal Peace). It should be noted the question was of a class state, where the richest strata of society increasingly formed the basis of political power, while issues of social justice, which Bohdan Khmelnytsky had cared about, were being irreversibly pushed to the background.
By bolstering his personal power, Ivan Samoilovych gave more and more reasons to be accused of striving to establish the institution of hereditary hetmanship, with one of his sons being a colonel in Stary Dub and the other in Chernihiv. Yet, this was not the point. Relying on oligarchic senior officers, the hetman gradually became fully dependent on them. Thus it turned out that his authority continued only as long as he suited his perfidious and ambitious entourage.
History is not, of course, a book of moral lectures. But is it not natural that our hero’s career began and ended — disastrously and suddenly — the same way with a denunciation? Taking advantage of the failure of an utterly ill-prepared Crimean expedition of Muscovite and Ukrainian troops in 1687, Samoilovych’s entourage (Lyzohub, Hamaliya, and Zabila) secretly reported the hetman to Tsars Peter and Ivan and Tsarina Sofia (after enlisting the support of the latter’s favorite Vasily Golitsyn), accusing him of high treason, contacts with the Turks, and bribery. Moscow made short work of him. The hetman was exiled to Siberia, only to die shortly after. His son, Chernihiv Colonel Hryhory, was cruelly tortured to death. The mace was handed to Ivan Mazepa.
Our hetmans were different. In spite of all mistakes, Doroshenko, Khmelnytsky, and Vyhovsky wished Ukraine well. But there were also others about whom Taras Shevchenko wrote harshly but justly, “slaves, sycophants, scum of Moscow, and dregs of Warsaw...” who, instead of defending the freedom and sovereignty of their homeland, only thought of their own enrichment. This kind of ruler usually comes to a bad end.
