Honesty and honor of the historian

Hundreds, if not thousands, volumes have been written about the life of Ukraine’s legendary Hetman Ivan Mazepa. Even if we leave aside the fact that the figure of Mazepa has always interested, attracted or antagonized fiction writers (Byron, Hugo, Slowacki, and Pushkin), the amount of scholarly publications on Mazepa, his followers, and his era cannot but strike us. This also applies to research by modern-day Ukrainian historians, such as Taras Chukhlib, Viktor Brekhunenko, Serhii Pavlenko, Viktor Horobets, and many others, who have made a joint effort to clear the figure of the famous Ukrainian “educated ruler,” statesman, diplomat, and art patron of imperial mythologemes, politically motivated fables, and tendentious claims. Yet the bulk of the work to publish a documentary source corpus and popular literature is undoubtedly still to be done.

As for the current Russian Mazepiana and Mazepa-era historiography, we must, first of all, mention the works of Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva, Doctor of Sciences (History), chief of the Ukrainian History Research Center at St. Petersburg University (the only establishment of this kind in Russia). Her unbiased and honest books that organically combine profound research, a broad source base, as well as a brilliant and easy-to-grasp form of exposition, have earned Ms. Yakovleva the respect of Ukrainian academics and our public (it is about, particularly, the monographs Ivan Mazepa of the “Life of Remarkable People” series, Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire, etc.).

Last week Ms. Yakovleva presented a new Ukrainian-language publication, Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire: a History of “Treason” (translated from the Russian by Prof. Yurii Mytsyk, Doctor of Sciences in History), at the Institute of the History of Ukraine. It is an expanded and essentially updated version of the aforesaid monograph Mazepa and the Russian Empire. The author says that this book, published by Clio Publishers, sets a major goal to explain convincingly why the 70-year-old powerful and successful hetman suddenly sided with the Swedish king.

A quite vivid illustration of Yakovleva’s position is the inverted commas in the word “treason” in the title of the book on Mazepa. The Russian historian is convinced that the entire context of Mazerpa’s life and time, his enormous state-building and cultural efforts, prove the absurdity of any allegations that the hetman “betrayed” the tsar. As Valerii Smolii, director of the Institute of the History of Ukraine, full member of the National Academy of Sciences, said at the presentation ceremony, Yakovleva’s book is a synthesis of some of her earlier works – moreover, Ms. Yakovleva’s view on the hero of her book remains the same as before. She thinks we will never understand the sense and causes of Mazepa’s actions if we regard his personality out of the historical context and look upon him as an “exceptional” and entirely “solitary” hero. In reality, as the author convincingly shows, Mazepa was not as solitary as he is sometimes depicted, for he had the essential support of society. The problem is why, for what reasons, he failed to achieve his goal.

To prevent the reader from gaining the impression that Yakovleva, as a researcher, exclusively focuses on studying the personality of Mazepa (although this can be called, without an exaggeration, her life’s work), let us note at least two more high-profile projects in which she participates. One of them, a collaborative effort with the Institute of the History of Ukraine, is publication of the famous Chronicle by Samiilo Velychko, a major monument of the early 18th-century Ukrainian historiography and literature, in three volumes, furnished with scholarly comments and checked against the source material. It is the idea of Ms. Yakovleva. The other project, being carried out by St. Petersburg University’s Ukrainian History Research Center of which Ms. Yakovleva is the director, is of paramount importance for Ukrainian and Russian historians and for all those interested in our Fatherland’s past. It is publication of An Inventory of Documents of the Little Russia Department (17th – first half of the 18th centuries), a collection of documentary sources on the history of Ukraine, including petitions, orders, reports, etc., drawn up at the Muscovite Little Russia Department through which the tsarist administration exercised “operational control” of Ukraine. Among these documents are 150 absolutely new ones hitherto unknown to historians. The first volume of the Inventory has already been published, and the second is in the pipeline. An online version of both volumes will have been prepared by the end of this year. It is perhaps only professional historians who will duly appreciate the importance of this project of Ms. Yakovleva for the development of Ukrainian liberal arts.

In the words of Doctor of Sciences (History) Viktor Brekhunenko, Ms. Yakovleva’s book offers us a fresh and interesting interpretation of such topics as Mazepa’s economic activity (it is shown, incidentally, in what way Mazepa got rid of his expansive Ukrainian estates and, what is also rather interesting, the fact that he did so in May 1708, on the eve of decisive and tragic events), and Mazepa and Right-Bank Ukraine (in the light of the hetman’s political concepts). Ms. Yakovleva added to this: “There were and still are historians in Russia, who categorically reject the idea of Ukraine, as the Hetman’s state, being an economically developed entity. But I, on the contrary, think that it was.”

And, in conclusion, a few interesting comments from Ms. Yakovleva, which quite vividly illustrate her human features and scholarly principles: “General Varennikov of the 1991 abortive coup fame came to hate me for the book on Mazepa. I know and am proud of this.” Or this: “St. Petersburg University, where I studied, had long been distinguished for free thinking. My teacher, Prof. Morgulis, who was the first to get me interested in the history of Ukraine, was also a ‘dissident’ to some extent.” And, finally: “Interest in the history of Ukraine is not a family affair for me. What I can call family affair is interest in history as in science as a whole. But I have been keen on military adventure subjects since I was a child – and I read about Ivan Bohun. This figure really struck a chord with me, which caused, to a large extent, the further events.”

I wish Tatiana Yakovleva, a talented scholar, an honest historian, and a true citizen of Russia, to write and publish dozens more books which will be avidly read by all those interested in the history of Ukraine and Russia and for whom good-neighborly relations between the two nations are important.

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Tatiana Yakovleva kindly agreed to answer a few questions from The Day’s correspondent.

Ms. Yakovleva, you have devoted much more than one year to studying the political and spiritual heritage of Ukraine’s Hetman Ivan Mazepa. What is your idea of him in purely human terms?

“For me, Mazepa is, above all, a true intellectual (it is his distinguishing feature), a brilliant diplomat, a person who had a rare gift of being able to wait, endure, and conceal his thoughts (he knew Machiavelli’s works very well). He was a true patriot, which does not mean that his patriotism was free of some estate-related drawbacks of that era. It is important to remember that Mazepa was in power for 20 years, and even an ‘angel’ would have got spoiled at least a little in so many years…”

Do you think Mazepa could achieve success by entering into a military-political alliance with the Swedes? Was his situation hopeless?

“I personally do not think that Mazepa stood any chances of success due to a correlation of forces in that period. Naturally, I am also prepared to hear arguments in support of a different viewpoint.”

A number of historians in the Ukrainian diaspora (for example, Orest Subtelny in the book The Mazepists) believe that Mazepa was not and could not be a traitor for the simple reason that the suzerain – Peter I – failed to meet the conditions of the vassalage “treaty” the monarchs had concluded with the subordinated princes: the latter pledged to recognize supremacy of “their own” monarch, but he also in turn pledged to offer them protection and support. As Peter I did not fulfill his pledges to Mazepa (“Defend yourself from the Poles as you can – I am not in a position to give you even a dozen of soldiers”), the hetman had every right to consider himself free of all the commitments to the tsar. Do you share this view?

“I fully share it. It is interesting to recall that, declaring war on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1653 and also before that, Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich used the following argument: Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky cannot be considered ‘traitor,’ as the Polish government called him, because King John II Casimir failed to meet his commitments to Bohdan. The same approaches and arguments were applied to the ‘Mazepa case.’ Incidentally, I write about this in an article on the 17th-18th-century citizenship system printed in Rossiyskiy istoricheskiy zhurnal.”

You head St. Petersburg University’s Ukrainian History Research Center. A few words, please, about the work of this center.

“This center was founded in 2004. Its main (but not the only) function is to publish and scientifically process sources from the history of Ukraine (especially the early modern period of the 17th-18th centuries). Naturally, we maintain as close ties as possible with Ukrainian historians, the Institute of the History of Ukraine, and universities. Like any other chief, I am always looking for money, and once I’ve found some we carry out substantial projects, such as publication of Velychko’s Chronicle or the abovementioned Little Russia Department’s documents. We are a closely-knit team in the center, and several dissertations on the history of Ukraine have been successfully defended. We are striving to popularize figures and events in the history of Ukraine as well as to dispel tendentious myths. Besides, there is a host of still-to-be-researched Ukrainian history sources in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, and we want to put them into scholarly circulation.”