The early years of the post-Soviet period will always be associated with images of enthusiastic crowds pulling down Soviet monuments, but in recent years the trend has been reversed, with the nation’s growing self-confidence expressed in new statues to national heroes who were demonised or erased altogether from official Soviet history. Pro-Russian groups have responded to this by erecting statues of their own to honour an imperial past of which they remain defiantly proud. The latest round in this battle of the statues will see monuments to Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa and Russian Empress Catherine the Great unveiled in the coming months.
Honouring a controversial Cossack
Poltava City Council officials confirmed last week that they plan to build monuments to Cossack Hetman Ivan Mazepa and Swedish King Charles XII as part of a general overhaul of the 1709 Battle of Poltava site. The addition of these two figures during renovation works is part of an effort to add to the site in line with the coming 300-year anniversary of the historically decisive encounter. It is a move which is sure to anger Russian nationalists, who will regard it as yet another attempt to undermine the Russian legacy in Ukraine.
The traditional Kremlin perspective has been to regard the Poltava victory of Peter the Great as one of the defining moments of Russian history while viewing Mazepa as a traitor who deserved the defeat and ruin which befell him. A former confidant and close friend of Peter the Great, Mazepa’s decision to form a strategic alliance with the invading Swedish army was for centuries routinely portrayed as a classic betrayal.
Historical justice of revisionism?
Since independence this somewhat one-sided and critical position has been increasingly challenged by successive Kyiv administrations and the former Cossack leader has gradually reclaimed a leading place in the mainstream of Ukrainian national heroes.
Mazepa’s portrait is featured on the UAH 10 banknote and numerous streets across the country have been renamed in his honour, but this Poltava statue would be a first for independent Ukraine.
Mazepa occupies a special place in the Pantheon of Ukrainian leaders largely because he was one of the few Cossack leaders to militarily oppose Moscow’s southern encroachment. The fact that he has been so vehemently and consistently condemned by successive Kremlin regimes has only added to his allure and made Mazepa a bold symbol of resistance to domination from the north.
Decisive battle, divided opinion
The Battle of Poltava was the decisive encounter of the Great Northern War, a conflict which straddled the turn of the eighteenth century and saw Russia eclipse Sweden as the preeminent power in the northeast of Europe. The decisive encounter came after over a decade of campaigning and ended with a depleted Swedish army wiped out by the astute tactics and crushing numerically superiority of Peter the Great’s army. Charles XII, who enjoyed a reputation at the time as a military genius, was badly wounded in the foot prior to the onset of battle and could do little to prevent the unfolding disaster. He fled the field with Mazepa and a small retinue, destined to years of exile and frustration, while the Russian victors set about consolidating their gains and punishing what to them was the treachery of the Ukrainian Cossacks. Mazepa’s capital Baturin was sacked and destroyed, with the population put to the sword and legend has it that many Cossack victims were subsequently crucified on wooden crosses which were then floated down the river Dnipro as a warning to other Cossack groups of the treatment they could expect if they also dared to defy the Tsar.
Shattered dreams of independence
At the time of the Poltava battle Ukraine was ruled as a semi-independent Cossack Hetmanate under the nominal dominion of the Russian Tsars, and Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa had attempted to exploit the conflict with the Swedes in order to gain full independence. Cossack troops played no part in the decisive battle itself, but nevertheless the Swedish defeat marked the end for dreams of an early modern Cossack state.
For centuries Mazepa was denounced as a traitor to the dominant Great Russia ideology of the Tsarist empire, with his popular image further besmirched by the condemnation of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had actually excommunicated Mazepa prior to Poltava in a bid to turn his Cossacks against him. Slightly more sympathetic portraits of the Cossack leader have since appeared in the literature of Byron and Pushkin, but it was not until glasnost in the 1980s and independence that the first positive historical accounts of Mazepa began to appear in Ukraine.
Empress of the Little Russians
Mazepa’s fateful alliance with Charles XII may represent the collapse of Ukrainian Cossack hopes of a homeland free of foreign interference, but it wasn’t until Russian Empress Catherine the Great’s campaigns in Ukraine 60 years later that the final embers of Cossack resistance to rule from Moscow were finally snuffed out. Catherine’s conquests of the southern Ukrainian steppe opened the way for large scale Russian colonisation of the region, a process which continues to have political repercussions today.
It is perhaps not surprising to find that politicians and local officials sympathetic to the Russian past have begun erecting monuments to the Russian Empress in the south and east of the country as part of a bid to reassert their own identity. Ukraine’s Russophile minority has been in retreat since the Orange Revolution, but they remain largely defiant in the face of what they perceive as Ukrainian historical revisionism. The latest development will be a new Catherine the Great monument in Sevastopol, which is due to be unveiled in June 2008. This latest Catherine will be the second unveiled in Ukraine in a matter of months following the October erection of a monument in Odessa, one of the southern capitals of Catherine’s New Russian empire.
Colonial crimes revisited
The Odessa statue provoked a storm of protest which rumbled on throughout the summer and early autumn of 2007, with Ukrainian nationalists and Cossack formations denouncing the city council’s plans and picketing the site of the future monument. They argued that the brutality with which the Russian army harried the Cossacks, which saw imperial troops raze the Zaporozhya Sich stronghold to the ground and kill thousands, rendered Catherine an enemy of Ukraine. Prior to the opening ceremony in Odessa there were numerous clashes between protesters and state security officials.
This was not the first time that local officials in Odessa had attempted to underline the regional loyalties of the city by honouring the woman under whose reign the Black Sea port was founded. In the 1990s President Kuchma actually banned the erection of a similar monument to her. Despite perceptions that Kuchma’s rule was one of accommodation with the country’s imperial Russian past and acceptance of Ukraine’s junior role in the two country’s partnership, the former president recognised the dangers of allowing new symbols of Russian dominance to be built in the wake of independence.
However, within the context of the broader democratisation of Ukrainian society the central government appears unwilling to prevent regional councils from taking such devisive steps, and the Odessa Catherine the Great monument looks set to be joined by a counterpart in Sevastopol this summer.
Crimean Tatar leader Mustapha Djemilev led protests in 2007 to a monument in Crimea, when he threatened to march on Moscow and demand the erection on Red Square of a monument to Tatar leader Girey Khan, who sacked the Russian capital on several occasions in the early modern period. For the Crimean Tatars Catherine is a figure closely associated with the oppression of foreign colonial rule and the new Sevastopol monument is expected to irritate already frayed inter-ethnic tensions on the peninsula between Russian nationalists and Crimean Tatars if the project goes ahead.
The last battle of WWII
Western Ukraine, long a bastion of Ukrainian nationalist sentiment, has taken an active role in the country’s monument politics, and a golden Stepan Bandera statue is the most recent high-profile monument to be erected in Lviv. Bandera has long been a towering figure in Ukrainian nationalist circles, while as the leader of the WWII-era Ukrainian insurgent army resistance movement that fought both Nazi and Red Army invaders he was a leading hate figure during the Soviet era. Like Mazepa, Bandera has also enjoyed a renaissance of public appreciation in recent years, although in eastern Ukraine he remains a controversial figure whose name continues to serve as the root of the derogatory term Banderivtsi used to refer to those suspected of harbouring Ukrainian nationalist views.
Regardless of the controversy surrounding his historical legacy Bandera continues to be lauded in his native western Ukraine. One of Lviv’s main streets was renamed Bandera Street in his honour following independence, and the Bandera monument erected in September 2007 will eventually form the centrepiece of an ensemble designed to glorify the role of the Ukrainian resistance during and immediately after WWII. Russia’s President Putin cited attempts by the Kyiv government and local officials to rehabilitate the villains of Soviet WWII propaganda as a potential cause of deteriorating bilateral relations in a strongly worded recent missive to his Ukrainian counterpart, illustrating how deeply this ideological divide still runs.
