1.It seems that some hold to the view that the desire for Cossack independence has something to do with the expansion of Turkish power in the Balkans and southern Russia. However, I will remind those people that the entire purpose of the Cossack host was to attack and destroy the Ottoman presence from southeastern Russia. Their primary purpose was to interrupt Turkish trade and rescue Christian slaves from southern Russia. The problem both for the Poles and the Russians was that they were at peace with the Porte as long as they were at war with them, and it was important for both powers that peace be kept with the Turks so the two Slavic powers could fight one another. The Cossacks never listened to these sort of instructions and hence, needed to be disavowed by both Powers. The entire point of “registering” Cossack units was to keep them under state control, use them against the Turks when needed, but keep them in their place while Russia or Poland fought elsewhere.

2.Why did the Cossacks seek independence from Russia? Cossackdom was independent by its very nature, and normally did its own thing. Nevertheless, after the massive peasant uprisings under Alexis led by the Cossack forces and Stenka Razin against the Russian state was put down, the Moscow (and later Petrogradian) state needed to seal the southern border. Hence, starting with Sophia and going straight through the 18th century, the policy of the Russian state was to eliminate Cossack independence by the imposition of serfdom and the movement of settlers, both civilian and military, into Cossack territory. A free people was being brought under the yoke of the Petrine state, which meant constant warfare, high taxes, an increasing foreign presence (especially German) in the military and the extension and intensification of serfdom where it had not been known before. Even more, thousands of Cossacks were worked to death in the Ural mines and the White Sea canal, both products of Peter the Great.

3.All of these policies made the Petrograd state utterly odious to the Cossack and Ukrainian population. Therefore, there was a strong anti-Russian streak among the Cossacks, and the pro-Russian faction was normally controlled by the elders, those with landholdings guaranteed by the Tsar in exchange for loyalty. In addition, after the terms of Pereslavl were consistently violated by the Tsar, the terms of the agreement had been made void. This treaty was a treaty between two independent powers, and the Russians needed translators to speak with Cossack leaders. The Cossack hetmanate came under the Russian foreign office and was, for a brief time, considered an independent state under Russian protection, not an integral part of the Russian empire. The former made sense, the latter did not.

4.The point is that the Cossacks were not going to fight Polish tyranny to accept a Russian one. Even worse, the 18th century saw a strong of non-Russian rulers over the state itself: Catherine I was a German serf girl, the two Annas were Germans and dominated by Lord Byron, Catherine II did not speak Russian (or spoke it haltingly), and took control after securing the overthrow of her husband, the equally anti-Russian Peter III. Only Elizabeth in this era was actually of Russian background. I'm willing to say that this German domination over the Russian crown is what led the French to be the main investors in Russian industry, seeing Russia as a means of controlling German pretensions. So not only were taxes raised to the breaking point, but the crown who raised them was not even Slav.

5.What those who oppose Mazepa are unwilling to see is that an independent Ukraine would have been very large, stretching from the Carpathians to the Caucuses, and very wealthy, especially from grain exports to the west. Furthermore, since the communal tradition never took hold in Ukraine, the state would have been run by a strong yeomanry rather than bureaucrats.

6.It seems to be further that Russia also would have been better off. Russia would have been what it was prior to Sophia – a strong, Orthodox nation, rather than a European empire with, by 1850, a Russian population of just over 50%. In other words, the Turks would have been facing three large Christian powers rather than two empires (of course, I include Austria here, a consistent enemy of the Russian crown). It is my view that nations are stronger than empires, since they have a cohesion that the Russian bureaucratic state lacked.

7.Russian wars in the south had nothing to do with Turkey. Turkey was never a threat to the Russian state. Turkey crumbled under its own weight: a non-coherent ruling class, substantial military divisions, constant nationalist rebellion in Europe as well as in Africa, and a medieval economy that could not keep up with the west. The Turks would have crumbled far earlier than they did had they not been propped up by Britain. Of course, World War I saw Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey and Germany all fighting on the same side. Whatever western technology that was used by the Turks during that war came from Germany. Prior to that, it was Britain. To hold that it was merely the Russian emprie that fought Turkey is idiotic. Austria, Poland and the Cossacks all fought Turkey at one time or another. It would have died long before had not the British used the porte to control Russian expansion southward.

8.Going back to the era under consideration, it should be noted that the purpose of the Russian wars in the south (and that includes those against Poland) did not concern Turkey, but concerned the control over Ukraine. The Russian economy, relative to the west, was relatively weak without the exploitation of Ukrainian grain. Ukraine needed to be joined to the Russian state and the Cossacks destroyed so Russian can take advantage of her substantial economic resources. The Soviet policy in this regard was identical. By 1800, over 50% of Russian food came from Ukraine, as did a disproportionate number of her military officers and bureaucrats. Turkey was incapable of taking Ukraine of southern Russia under the best of circumstances. What Russia needed was an empire, and Ukraine was a key to that. Unfortunately, as Ukraine became Russia's Ireland, it also became her undoing.

9.After Mazepa was defeated, Ukraine was razed to the ground. She was depopulated, and settlers of Russian and German background came to take over this land. Defenses against Turkey were radically weakened by Peter's policy, yet the far more important thing to him was taxes, serfdom and cheap labor in the south. The toughest and most experienced of Cossack warriors against Turkey were sent to the four corners of the empire. The entire rotten system came tumbling down at the largest peasant uprising in European history, that of Pugachev under Catherine II. Russian policy, as the Pugachev rebellion took almost all of southern Russia, was proven a failure. Serfdom, the arrogance of newly arrived Russian nobles, and the tyranny of the Petrine state all conspired to permanently alienate the south from the Russian crown, as the Pugachev uprising proves. Its funny how the Russian White forces made the same mistake as Peter I and Catherine II, refusing to countenance Ukrainian independence or even autonomy, they alienated a huge number of Ukrainians from their cause. The Germans in both World Wars did the same thing.

10.Of course, all of this could have been avoided had the Petrogradian state merely treated the Ukrainians as brothers in the same fight and maintained a strong, Ukrainian power to the south loyal to Russia. This would not have been hard, but Peter and his successors knew only one thing: violence and centralization. The state and the state alone mattered. Needless to say, this attitude also caused Nicholas I to recognize and defend the Turkish crown against her own nationalist attacks from Egypt, considering the Porte the only legitimate ruler of the empire.

11. It is a pro-Russian position in that a strong, integral Ukraine would have served Russian interests far better than the imposition of the settler life on a depopulated and destroyed Ukraine after Mazepa, not to mention Russian policies in the area that forced Mazepa to make the difficult decision he did in siding with Charles.

12. When I wrote The Third Rome, I really struggled with the chapter on Peter I. On the one hand, I was sympathetic with the argument that Russia needed to modernize if she was not to go the road of Turkey. She needed to defend herself against multiple opponents, and hence, her modernization was essential. On the other hand, the form that the modernization of Peter took was a huge price to pay for an empire that could barely hold itself together. The state was permanently alienated from the population, and Russian nationalists from Kierevskii to Solzhenitsyn agree on that point. The repression of the Cossacks, Old Believers, the Streltsii, formerly free peasants, Ukrainian nationalists, many monasteries (the repository of Russian culture), and the church as a whole (which lost its independence under Peter I), was a massive price to pay for Russia to become “European.” Ukraine was the key to this and hence, needed to be subjugated at all costs.

13. I hold that there is a middle ground here between the legitimate claims of Ukrainians relative to Petersburg and (later) communist Moscow, as well as the undeniable good that comes from cooperation among Orthodox powers. This latter good need not be achieved by the violence that Peter and the Moscow state represented long before Mazepa came around. Petersburg created its own Ukrainian problem through its own repressive policies on the frontier and, of course, in the 19th century, found itself needed to repress the Ukrainian language and its culture from the Ems Decree onward. All of this could have been avoided.