Part of Mazepa's archive, thought to have been destroyed, is discovered in St. Petersburg (08/08/04)

Part of Mazepa's archive, thought to have been destroyed, is discovered in St. Petersburg

by Serhii Plokhii

EDMONTON - A portion of Ivan Mazepa's archive, which was thought to have been lost during the destruction of Baturyn by the armies of Peter I in 1708, has been found in St. Petersburg. The report on this fascinating discovery was made by Dr. Tatiana Yakovleva of St. Petersburg University at an international scholarly conference held in St. Petersburg.

The conference, "Ukraine and its Neighbors in the 17th Century," was sponsored by the Peter Jacyk Center for Ukrainian Historical Research and the Kowalsky Program for the Study of Eastern Ukraine, both part of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). Other sponsors of the conference, held on May 27-29, included St. Petersburg University and the Consulate General of Poland in St. Petersburg. The conference featured presentations by scholars from Canada, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Sweden and Austria. Three CIUS scholars, Drs. Zenon Kohut, Frank Sysyn and Serhii Plokhii, attended the conference and presented papers.

The discovery of the papers from Mazepa's archive was made earlier this year by Dr. Yakovleva during her research on Kozak-era documents in the archive of Aleksandr Menshikov - Peter I's right-hand man and the commander of the Russian troops that captured and burned Hetman Mazepa's capital, Baturyn.

The discovery of unknown letters by and to the Ukrainian hetman led Dr. Yakovleva to conclude that Mazepa's archive was not burned in Baturyn, but was appropriated by Menshikov. She also believes that Menshikov, a notoriously greedy man, took not only Mazepa's papers but also his valuable library.

Dr. Yakovleva and her students will continue their search for new documents from Mazepa's archive and will be on the lookout for the books from his library.

Dr. Yakovleva recently published a ground-breaking article on Mazepa in one of Russia's leading historical journals, in which she urged her colleagues in Russia to re-evaluate the historical importance of Mazepa in Ukrainian and Russian history and abandon the stereotypes imposed on the field by imperial and Soviet historiographies. She is now writing a book on Mazepa commissioned by a leading Moscow publishing house for the popular series "The Life of Remarkable People."

The St. Petersburg conference featured 14 presentations, organized into five panels: historical sources for the study of Russian-Ukrainian relations; Church history; Ukraine's relations with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Crimea; cultural identities; and the history of the Hetmanate. Each presentation was followed by a discussion, while the final panel of the conference was devoted to the discussion of the issues related to terminology and the periodization of Ukrainian history.

Dr. Kohut chaired the opening panel of the conference and read his paper "From Japhet to Moscow: Narrating Biblical and Ethnic Origins in Early Modern Polish, Ukrainian and Russian Historiography." Frank Sysyn chaired the panel on Ukraine's relations with the Lithuanian Commonwealth and Crimea, and served as a discussant on three other panels.

Dr. Plokhii delivered a paper on "Ukrainian Kozakdom and the Assignment of National Identity in the First Third of the 17th Century" and also served as a discussant at the panel on Church history.

Other participants in the conference included well-known scholars Dr. Boris Floria of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who spoke on "The Ukrainian Question at the Vilnius Negotiations (1656)," and Dr. Andreas Kappeler of the University of Vienna, who delivered a paper on "The Cossacks [Kozaks] in Foreign Accounts up to 1648."

Ukraine was represented at the conference by the Rev. Dr. Yurij Mytsyk of the National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy; Viktor Horobets of the Institute of History (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine); and Viktor Brekhunenko of the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Institute of Ukrainian Archeography (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). The Rev. Dr. Mytsyk will take up a CIUS John Kolasky Fellowship this fall, while Messrs. Brekhunenko and Viktor Horobets are CIUS grant recipients. Conference papers and discussion materials will be published in St. Petersburg with financial support from the CIUS.

The St. Petersburg conference helped to open a new page in Ukrainian studies in Russia, where leading scholars had been reluctant to meet with their Ukrainian colleagues and engage in common initiatives related to the study of Ukrainian history. Nowhere is this new spirit of cooperation more apparent than at St. Petersburg University, the former academic home of Mykola Kostomarov, and the only university in Russia where during Soviet times Ukrainian history was taught as a separate subject.

That tradition was interrupted after 1991, but Dr. Yakovleva has successfully revived it. She now teaches a course in Ukrainian history in addition to organizing research and conferences on Ukraine. Her efforts have been met with understanding and support from scholars in Ukraine and Canada. In 1991 she was a visiting scholar at the CIUS and is a recent recipient of a CIUS research grant.

The Kowalsky Program will co-sponsor further efforts by Dr. Yakovleva and her colleagues to search for and reconstruct Mazepa's archive and library. Those interested in supporting this endeavor or other projects of the CIUS are encouraged to contact the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

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