Mazepa's "Treason": Examining the Myth

The myth

The most widespread thesis: Mazepa “betrayed his country,” betrayed Peter I, by going over to the side of the Swedish king Charles XII during the Great Northern War^[1]. In this telling it is a personal betrayal of an oath — and it is on this that the brand of “Mazepa the traitor,” entrenched as early as the Russian imperial tradition (the anathema of 1708), is built.

First correction: the “treason” is revisited by Russian historians themselves

The paradox is that the one-sidedness of this narrative is refuted not only by the Ukrainian side. The Russian historian Tetiana Tairova-Yakovleva (St. Petersburg University), in her monograph Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire: A History of “Treason” (2011), shows on the basis of Russian archival documents that the history of the “treason” is far more complex than the propaganda cliché^[2]. When the thesis is revisited by a historian from the “accusatory” side, reducing everything to a moral betrayal no longer holds up.

Second correction: the relations were treaty-based

The key thing the myth bypasses is that the Hetmanate was not the unconditional property of the Muscovite tsar. Its relations with Moscow were governed by a series of treaties (“articles”), beginning with the Pereyaslav Articles of 1654. In force in Mazepa’s time were the Kolomak Articles of 1687, concluded upon his election as hetman during the regency of Tsarevna Sophia^[3].

Here precision is needed: the Kolomak Articles declaratively confirmed Cossack rights, but at the same time restricted the hetman’s political rights — that is, they were yet another step by Moscow toward narrowing autonomy, not a guarantee of it. And that is exactly what matters: the relations had a treaty form, which the Muscovite side consistently rewrote in its own favor. “Treason” in relations where one party erodes the terms for years is a concept that is at the very least two-sided.

It is also important that the party to these treaties was a fully fledged state, not a shapeless borderland. As Tairova-Yakovleva stresses, the Hetmanate had all the obligatory attributes of a state: borders, an administrative and a separate judicial system, taxes, and an army — and all this persisted right up to the end of the eighteenth century^[12]. The other matter is that this state lacked full independence because of the problem of legitimacy: in the Europe of the time a sovereign had to be “crowned” by someone (for example, the Pope of Rome), and a self-proclaimed separateness had to be justified by something. That is why Bohdan Khmelnytsky appealed to the times of Volodymyr and Rus’, seeking the historical roots of his state — and geopolitically Ukraine, wedged between three great neighbors (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy, the Ottoman Empire), had to seek an alliance in order to hold its ground^[13]. The alliance with Moscow was one such option — not an act of vassal devotion to the person of the tsar.

Third correction: to whom Mazepa owed his oath

The myth assumes that Mazepa personally belonged to Peter I. In reality his state was the Zaporozhian Host (the Hetmanate), which acted within the bounds of the concluded articles^[5]. The immediate impetus for the break was Peter I’s refusal to defend Ukraine against the Swedes (the well-known episode in which the tsar replied that he could not even spare a few soldiers) and the danger that Ukraine’s status would become a bargaining chip in great politics — to the point of fears that it would be handed over to the allied king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth^[4]. Within the treaty logic, Mazepa’s act was not a betrayal of the country but an attempt to preserve its agency.

To the direct question “who betrayed whom,” Tairova-Yakovleva answers unequivocally: Peter betrayed Mazepa. All the agreements that existed with Ukraine were violated — and violated first precisely by the Muscovite side. Peter set a course toward a centralized system, relying on new advisers (above all Menshikov), broke economic relations, and, in essence, sought to destroy the Hetmanate as a separate state^[14]. When the leading scholar of Mazepa from the “accusatory” side formulates it so directly, the thesis of a single “treason” by the hetman finally loses its footing: the break occurred because the lord destroyed the terms on which the alliance rested.

Fourth correction: the “treason” rested on an unlawful anathema

The brand itself rested not only on politics but also on a church act — the anathema of 1708. But it too was a violation of church rules. In the church, an anathema can be imposed only by a clergyman and only upon a clergyman; it does not apply to a layman. Mazepa — a hetman, a layman — was anathematized only on the direct order of Peter I, contrary to church law^[6]. That is, the instrument with which the “treason” was sanctified was itself applied unlawfully and purely out of the tsar’s political will.

Fifth correction: the right of a vassal to change his lord

The most important thing that demolishes the moral framing of “treason” is the legal context of the era. In the Europe of the time there operated a vassal-seigneurial “ladder” with clearly prescribed mutual obligations. The key rule: if a lord does not take care of his vassal — above all, does not protect him — the vassal has the full right to pass under the authority of another lord. This is a recognized right, not a violation^[7].

That is exactly how the situation of 1708 took shape: when Mazepa asked Peter I for help in defending Ukraine against the Swedes, the tsar refused — and this became the reason for the hetman’s transfer from the lord named Peter to the lord named Charles^[7]. In the logic of feudal law this is the exercise of a right, not the breaking of an oath.

This conflict had its roots as far back as the Pereyaslav Council of 1654, where two understandings of a treaty collided. The European one (to which the Ukrainians oriented themselves) — a treaty between equal parties. The Muscovite one — a treaty as “service,” where the tsar is always higher. A telling episode: at the council the boyar Buturlin refused to take a mutual oath on the tsar’s behalf — claiming that the Muscovite autocrat takes an oath to no one, and that only the Ukrainian side can swear^[8]. Already then the relations were built as unequal — and later Moscow consistently interpreted them in its own favor.

”Mazepism” as a Kremlin ideologeme

The brand of “traitor” did not remain in the eighteenth century — it turned into a standing ideologeme that outlived both the Russian Empire and the USSR. In a dialogue between two historians, Oleksandr Naboka and Vitaliy Dribnytsia, its genealogy is set out concisely: Peter I took a personal offense at Mazepa, this offense was church-blessed by Feofan Prokopovych — and from this grew “Mazepism” as a label in Russian ideology, that is, anti-Ukrainian irredentism: the conviction that the Ukrainian lands are “from time immemorial” Russian, and therefore no one but Moscow has the right to lay claim to them^[9].

Paradoxically, the Ukrainian elite for a long time did not perceive the empire as alien. As Tairova-Yakovleva observes, Ukrainians did a great deal to build it up and at first believed they were creating their own empire, being an influential part of it. Disillusionment came later — when the attitude toward them changed; it was out of this resentment that the anonymous “History of the Rus’” (the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) arose — a pamphlet of the aggrieved Cossack elder, which defended the separateness and rights of the “Little Russians”^[15]. That is, even the memory of Mazepa as “one’s own” lived on in the milieu that Moscow had only just integrated — and it was imperial ideology, not contemporaries, that made him a “traitor.”

The figure of Prokopovych here is no accident. Before 1709 he was an apologist for Mazepa — he dedicated his drama Vladimir to the hetman and praised him in sermons; but after the Battle of Poltava (8 July 1709) he abruptly went over to the tsar’s side and already on 24 July delivered a sermon in which he branded the hetman and his followers as traitors, presenting the alliance with Charles XII as a “Judas’s betrayal” of Orthodoxy and tsarist power. Subsequently it was Prokopovych who became the chief ideologist of Peter’s reforms. That is, the “anathema of Mazepa” was from the outset not a theological verdict but a political instrument serving that same project of integrating the Ukrainian church elite into the empire.

Moscow’s subsequent “heatedness” precisely toward the Ukrainian theme is not a chance emotion but a structural feature. Russian irredentism, the interlocutors note, is more radical than Polish or Finnish: Moscow at one time calmly accepted the secession of Finland, but reacts to Ukrainian agency “like a bull to red.” The root is the same as in the myth of the “artificial nation”: since the mid-nineteenth century the empire has been unable to recognize Ukrainians as a separate people with their own history, and this attitude has “sat” within it for over a hundred years^[10]. Within this frame, both Mazepa’s “treason” and the later “treason” of Bandera are phenomena of one kind: any attempt at Ukrainian self-reliance is automatically classified as “treason” against Moscow.

The flip side of this logic exposes a double standard. Russia itself, which so jealously guards “its own” irredentism, denies it to its own indigenous peoples: as Dribnytsia observes, the Tatars, Bashkirs, Yakuts, and Dagestanis are so Russified that no movement toward self-determination is visible — and not by chance: in today’s Russian Federation there is not a single school with the native language of instruction from the first to the tenth or eleventh grade, the mother tongue smolders only in families and small settlements, and the large cities are completely Russified^[11]. A telling contrast: even in Soviet Ukraine, Ukrainian schools, despite the pressure, existed — and it was precisely this that helped preserve the national identity that “Mazepism” in the Russian lexicon to this day presents as “treason”^[11]. In other words, the cliché of “Mazepa the traitor” is not a historical assessment of the event of 1708, but an element of a living doctrine that denies Ukrainians the right to be themselves.

Conclusion

“Mazepa the traitor” is an assessment from a single, imperial perspective, which passes off a treaty conflict as the moral crime of one man. If one keeps both sides in view — the series of articles that Moscow narrowed, the refusal to defend the Hetmanate, and the revisiting of the “treason” even by Russian historiography — the cliché falls apart. What remains is not treason, but a breach of agreements, responsibility for which is at the very least shared.