WAR OF THE MILLS
This tale, which could almost qualify as a war or detective story was set in motion by that ill-famed hero of the Ukrainian Clio of the mid-seventeenth century, Prince Jarema Wiszniewiecki. As we know, Prince Jarema, uncrowned Ukrainian king, owned a long string of enormous estates in Left Bank Ukraine stretching from what is now Poltava to Chernihiv oblast.
The prince chose to establish his Left Bank headquarters in the town of Lubny. It is not far from Lubny that either the magnate himself or some of his estate managers noticed the picturesque locality of the Udai River between Wiszniewiecki’s manors of Pyriatyn and Kurynka. That locality was called Krucha (cliff) because of its steep slope. It is because of this peculiar feature of the terrain that Jarema hit upon an idea of utilizing Krucha to the best economic advantage. The prince ordered that the local dike be repaired and a water mill be built on it.
No sooner had all the necessary materials been delivered and construction started than the Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s uprising suddenly broke out in Ukraine in the spring of 1648. Prince Jarema was one of the first to crack down on what he considered this revolt of the rabble with fire and sword and had no time left for economic projects. Moreover, in the summer of 1648 the prince had to flee Lubny, and soon after the Wiszniewiecki estates found new owners or, to be more exact, new owners found the estates. The Krucha locality was appropriated by the Military Treasury and was assigned to the Lubny Regiment’s Pyriatyn Company.
Under Hetman Ivan Samoilovych, when the storms of civil war had finally subsided, the Cossack starshyna (senior officer corps) — Ukraine’s new economic, not only political, elite — launched a feverish race for manors, farming and cottage-industry lands, the greater part of Wiszniewiecki’s Pyriatyn estates fell to Pereyaslav Colonel Leonty Polubotok, a trusted lieutenant of the hetman. Meanwhile, Krucha caught the eye of the then Lubny regimental osavul (captain) Leonty Svichka. He was destined to implement Jarema’s project in 1682, building a dike and a one-wheel mill on the river Udai with the permission of the local Colonel Maksym Iliashenko. Three years later, the crafty and persistent osavul was allowed to add a second “stepping” wheel to the mill.
Meanwhile, after Hetman Samoilovych stepped down in 1686, Colonel Polubotok, as a person close to him, fell into disgrace with Ivan Mazepa, the newly-elected holder of the hetman’s mace. And when Mazepa got word of a revolt being planned by Polubotok, he stripped the unruly colonel of not only his insignia but also of the overwhelming majority of his numerous estates. Polubotok’s Pyriatyn manors were taken over by the Military Treasury, but the Zaporozhzhian Sich failed to hold this luscious morsel as part of its corporate property.
In 1688, the aforesaid Leonty Svichka won the colonel’s mace in Lubny. The first thing he did in his new office was to try to get hold of the very lucrative (at that time) mill business on the river Udai. To do so, he first obtained permission from Pyriatyn millers to build what was known as a veshniak, i.e., a mill that only works in springtime high water, “on the Pyriatyn riverside dam.”
It soon became clear, however, that the colonel’s milling appetites spread far beyond the limits set by the local community. Having received formal permission to begin construction, Svichka built five wheels (instead of the one authorized) which, incidentally, worked year-round, not just in the high water season.
This arbitrary behavior of the Cossack senior officer was an extreme outrage for the Pyriatyn millers. The point was not only that Svichka openly defied the community’s will and thus intensified rivalry among the guild members. The dike he had built in Krucha promptly raised the Udai water level, which forced the other millers to modify their mills. However, the newcomer’s high position thwarted the Pyriatyn millers’ hopes to cut short Svichka’s arbitrariness, and they did not even raise complaints in his lifetime. The situation radically changed only after the death of Svichka: unlike other Cossack senior officers, he managed to hand down his property, but not the colonel’s mace, to his heirs, so in the early eighteenth century the aggrieved Pyriatyn residents began a long search for justice.
They achieved the first tangible results only in 1710. It is then that, in response to the complaint about the late colonels’ and his family’s arbitrariness lodged by the miller, Hetman Ivan Skoropadsky appointed a special commission of inquiry consisting of General Khorunzhy (Standard Bearer) Ivan Sulyma and Hadiach Regimental Judge Vasyl Veletsky. After completing their fact-finding mission, the hetman’s envoys informed Skoropadsky that Leonty Svichka’s widow Domnikiya had stubbornly continued to mill flour throughout the year, so they used the powers bestowed on them to prohibit her from doing so.
The hetman approved the commission’s resolution on May 5, 1711, by a special degree addressed to the Lubny Colonel Andriy Markevych and Pyriatyn Captain Semen Vakula.
Having received the hetman’s decree, the Pyriatyn community raised grievances against Leonty Svichka’s son Lukyan. By the existing tradition, the two sides reached an agreement, recording in the town book Lukyan’s promise to fulfill the hetman’s instruction. The record was validated by “affixing the proper Pyriatyn Town Hall seal.”
However, as the further course of events shows, keeping promises was not on the younger Svichka’s list of virtues. In the first half of 1715 the Lubny regimental chancery received Ivan Skoropadsky’s decree with ordering, “We have on more than one occasion received letters of complaint from practically all the Pyriatyn millers against Mr. Lukyan Svichka’ who, not content with the veshniak on the Pyriatyn dike, installed a new mill on the Krucha dike. With due account of Svichka’s failure to keep his promise and fulfill the court ruling, the hetman of Ukraine threatened to impose a fine of 2000 thalers on him in case of repeated infraction.
Yet, it is no accident that the years of Ivan Skoropadsky’s rule have gone down in Ukrainian history as the time of the atrophy of power, when senior officers’ licentiousness and anarchy ran riot. It perhaps for this reason that Lukyan Svichka not only ignored the hetman’s warning and disobeyed the court order but also left without permission the Cossack camp mobilized by Skoropadsky’s decree. Hetman Skoropadsky could do nothing but issue the intractable descendant of a Cossack “the last one hundred and first Chinese-style warning... Mr. Svichka, we can only be taken aback by your stupid and ill-considered behavior, when you visited us for the first time in the past eighteen months, having a good time here for two or three days, and then folded up your standards and secretly left for home without our knowledge.” Skopopadsky also recalled other faults of Lukyan, especially, his noncompliance with court orders. The hetman noted in conclusion that “your light-mindedness has caused too much chagrin in us, for it is high time you abandoned your silliness and lived up to your high rank. We therefore have no choice but declare that we will confiscate not only your mills but also your estates.”
Oddly enough, this time, too, the unmanageable Pyriatyn overlord got off scot-free. This is proved by “the last one hundred and second Chinese- style warning” Skoropadsky had to resort to a year later, on August 29, 1716. The beginning is worth quoting: “You are unwise, Svichka. It is nothing but light-mindedness and extreme ill-judgment that cause you to turn a deaf ear to and ignore our decrees. For you not only refuse to tear down the mills which you built illegally in Krucha and continue to operate to the detriment of the old Pyriatyn dam and which lead to the flooding of older dams but also nurture plans to do still more harm to the Pyriatyn dam by building a storehouse atop it.” It can thus be concluded from the hetman’s message that Lukyan Svichka not only refused to fulfill his superior’s will and tear down the mills his father had illegally built but also set about building new ones.
Then Hetman Skoropadsky, showing good knowledge of the details of the mill war on the River Udai, retold all the circumstances under which the rights of the Pyriatyn community were abused first by Colonel Leonty Svichka and later by his son Lukyan. He threatened to the latter in the decree’s concluding part, “If you still continue to be stubborn as a mule and fail to tear down the mills or dare build new ones, then, to suppress your endless haughtiness, we will summon you to Hlukhiv, where a proper punishment will be meted out to you, and allow the local Cossack commanders to demolish and scatter the mills you dared to build. We hereby sternly order you to refrain from restoring or keeping those mills, for if you still persist in doing so, be sure you will be left without not only the mills but also without your estates.”
It is not known whether this strongly-worded hetman’s decree put an end to the war of mills on the Udai and the Pyriatyn millers celebrated their long-awaited victory. In all probability, they did not. For prominent researcher of the Left Bank Ukraine’s Cossack past M. Storozhenko, who visited Lubny in the late 1880s, noted that while there was not a single milling wheel on the Pyriatyn dike, there were as many as four in perfect condition on the Krucha dike! Apparently, it is Leonty Svichka’s descendants rather than the Pyriatyn community who won a victory in this long war.
