Lord Byron, Pushkin, and Victor Hugo wrote poems about him. Liszt composed a symphonic work in his honor, Tchaikovsky devoted an opera to him, and Gericault painted him tied naked to a horse. In centuries past he was a historical superstar — a poster child for the Romantic era.

His name was Ivan Mazepa, a Ukrainian Cossack chieftain who allied with Sweden’s Charles XII to fight Russia’s Czar Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava, 300 years ago this week.

The swashbuckling subject of Romantic-era adulation is once again attracting attention, this time as the subject of a dispute over history between the leaders of Russia and Ukraine. In the eyes of the Russian state and its propagandists, Mazepa is Public Enemy No. 1 — a turncoat who betrayed Peter the Great, Orthodox Christianity and the unity of Slavic peoples. Most Russian historians have judged Mazepa a traitor. Acting under the instruction of Czar Peter, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him and placed an anathema on him, and still vilifies him in annual Poltava services. In turn, many Ukrainian historians regard Mazepa as an honored fighter for Ukraine’s statehood. President Viktor Yushchenko extols Mazepa as a heroic precursor of Ukraine’s independence and his image is emblazoned on the 10 hryvnia note ($1.30).

Passions over Mazepa have not been as heated in three centuries as this year. In recent days, amid ceremonies, costumed reenactments, conferences and television programs on the Poltava battle, Russian demonstrators have burned him in effigy. Ukrainian patriots rallied in Poltava on June 27 and unfurled a 30-meter by 45-meter Ukrainian flag in his honor. And a security force of nearly 1,000 has been deployed in Poltava and successfully staved off conflicts between the two sides.

On the surface, there is little in Mazepa’s biography that would warrant such intense feelings. He was born to a prosperous and educated family in Polish-occupied Ukraine in 1639 and served in the Polish court until 1665, when he returned to Ukraine, eventually joining the ranks of the Cossacks loyal to the Polish crown. In 1687, Mazepa was elected Hetman, or chieftain, of the Cossack Host in eastern Ukraine that was loyal to the Muscovite Czar. A prosperous magnate, Mazepa built churches and supported the arts and education while pursuing the goal of uniting all Ukrainian lands in a Cossack state. After years of partnership with Peter the Great, Mazepa sensed Russia’s growing ambitions were a threat to Ukraine’s sovereignty. He abruptly turned against Peter and in 1709 joined Sweden’s young king, Charles XII, in a campaign against Russia. The Swedish-Ukrainian alliance suffered a crushing defeat at Poltava. Charles died from a battle wound and Mazepa fled to today’s Moldova, where he also died soon after.

Poltava helped shape Europe’s geopolitics for three centuries.
Russia’s emphatic rout of Sweden and its Cossack allies signaled its emergence as a European superpower and ensured Russian dominion over Eastern Ukraine for the bulk of three centuries. Peter constructed a new narrative for his realm. Instead of being Muscovy, it was to be Russia. As such, he and his state could claim lineage with the Kievan state called Rus that had accepted Christianity in 988 and collapsed in the 13th century. In one simple historical revision that complemented his opening to the West, Peter and his realm would be transformed from Asiatic upstarts to a European empire. Kiev would become the “mother of all Russian cities.”

There was, of course, no place in this scheme for anything resembling an independent or autonomous Ukraine. Indeed, any claim to Kiev’s autonomy or separate nationality, any Ukraine-based opposition to Russian rule, was a direct threat to the Petrine myth and the legitimacy that it helped confer on the Russian state. Mazepa had to go, and has never been allowed to return to historical grace for the same reason. Every Russian ruler has vilified him since the fateful battle at Poltava.

For Russians, Poltava without question was a great historical victory and Russians should be free to memorialize it as such. And there is no question that in the 17th century, national identities were ill-formed and many inhabitants of the territory of Ukraine felt a stronger kinship for the common Orthodox faith they shared with Russians than for any aim of independence. But for contemporary Ukrainians, there can be no similar ambivalence. As a young state that gained independence in 1991, Ukraine must develop its own sense of history, its own heroes and founding fathers. In short, it needs a common historical narrative to bind its citizens.

Such efforts are at best benign and should excite from Russia no more than a firmly agnostic ambivalence. But the vehemence of Russian polemics over events and personalities three centuries old speaks to the Russian state’s interest in keeping alive the idea of the eventual reunification of the two states. It also helps perpetuate a cultural divide between Ukraine’s Ukrainian-speaking west and the Russophone east.

In this context, there are several reasons why Poltava resonates.
First, Mazepa and the Cossacks represent a political force that sought autonomy and independence from Russian dominion. Second, Mazepa not only turned against Russia, he made common cause with Sweden, i.e.
with Europe and the West. Third, for politicians like Vladimir Putin who lionize the Russian empire and lament the disintegration of the Soviet Union, branding Mazepa a traitor sends a not-so-subtle message that proponents of Ukraine’s statehood today are also betraying the cause of Slavic unity.

With Russia adamantly opposed to Ukraine’s integration into European structures and with Mr. Putin on record as questioning the permanence of Ukraine’s statehood, Russia is investing significant resources on challenging Ukraine’s shaping of a separate national identity and history. These efforts include film documentaries challenging Ukraine’s effort to commemorate Stalin’s famine as a national genocide, and financing “Taras Bulba,” a big-budget epic film that depicts the Cossacks as loyal supporters of the Russian empire and adds scenes — absent in Gogol’s 19th century novel on which the movie is based — of Poles as murderous barbarians engaged in pillaging and rape.

While this Russian effort to upend Ukrainian national identity is not likely to succeed, over the short term it can help perpetuate Ukraine’s east-west divide, promoting instability and increasing Russia’s opportunities to reassert hegemony over its weak neighbor.

Until Ukraine can shape its historiography calmly and professionally without external interference, its polity will continue to be plagued by divisions and its society by lack of cohesion. This is why the contemporary battle over the meaning of Poltava is as significant as the Battle of Poltava was three centuries ago.

Mr. Karatnycky is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council of the U.S. Mr. Motyl is professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Russian report from Novosti:

http://news.km.ru/gosduma_rf_prinyala_zayavlenie_k

New York Review of Books 56, number 12 (July 16, 2009)
Holocaust: The Ignored Reality
by Timothy Snyder (Yale University)
Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with
death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and
1940s are the reference of today’s confused discussions of memory, and
the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share…
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22875

BBC, Kyiv:
Ukraine wary of KGB terror files
Ukraine is opening up part of its old KGB archive, declassifying hundreds of thousands of documents spanning the entire Soviet period.

But the move to expose Soviet-era abuses is dividing Ukrainians, the BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse reports from Kiev.

Deep in the bowels of Ukraine’s former KGB headquarters there is a deathly silence. Thousands of boxes, piled floor to ceiling, line the walls. Each box is carefully numbered and each one contains hundreds of documents: case notes on enemies of the former Soviet state.

Behind each number, there is a story of personal tragedy.

Volodymyr Viatrovych, the chief archivist, pulled out a brown cardboard folder stuffed full of documents: case number 4076. At the centre of the case is a letter, dated 1940 and addressed to “Comrade Stalin, the Kremlin, Moscow”.

“Dear Iosif Vissarionovich,” the letter starts. Nikolai Reva wanted Stalin to know the facts about the great famine of 1932-33, when millions died as a result of the Soviet policy of forced collectivisation.

Like many at the time, Mr Reva believed that Stalin was being kept in the dark, and that if only he knew what was happening, he would surely put a stop to it.

But his letter landed him in the Gulag. He was eventually rehabilitated - 25 years later.

Many met a harsher fate.

Leafing through one of many macabre photo albums, Mr Viatrovych pointed to a picture of Ivan Severin, shot in the head by the Soviet security services. Under the picture, in very neat handwriting, is written: “Liquidated, 3 April 1947“.

Criminal prosecution

Mr Viatrovych and his team are helping people to find out what happened to relatives and loved ones, often decades after they disappeared.

But the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), now in charge of the files, is declassifying them selectively.

They are concentrating on older cases, like that of the “liquidated” Mr Severin, who was part of a guerrilla campaign against Soviet rule in western Ukraine after World War II.

The authorities are preparing to mount a criminal prosecution in relation to the famine, or Holodomor , as it is known in Ukraine, though it is doubtful whether there is anyone still alive to stand in the dock.

But SBU head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko hopes this is just the beginning.

“As soon as Russia starts to open and uncover its archives, there will be more and more truth about the real history,” he said. At the moment, he added, Russia is not being especially co-operative.

But there is another obstacle to complete disclosure, and that is the Ukrainian Security Service itself. They are the ones deciding which files to declassify.

I put it to Mr Nalyvaichenko that the SBU is, after all, a successor to the KGB. He came out on the defensive.

“First and most important for me - we are not a successor to the KGB. That’s according to the law,” he said.

Could he state categorically that no-one working for the SBU today had formerly worked for the KGB?

He could not, admitting that 20% of his employees were former KGB officers. Some analysts in Ukraine believe that is a conservative figure.

It seems unlikely that SBU officers who worked for the Soviet KGB in the 1970s and 80s will be enthusiastic about declassifying documents that could incriminate them. Even if, as Mr Nalyvaichenko pointed out, the SBU is trying to recruit younger staff.

‘Not worth it’

But not all young Ukrainians have an exclusively negative view of their 20th-Century history.

“ To start a process of lustration after 18 years of independence would lead society to the brink of civil war ”
Dmytro Tabachnyk Historian and opposition MP
In Kiev, there is a vast monument to the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany: a sprawling bronze relief of soldiers bearing guns and bayonets.

“We love our history,” said Svitlana, a young schoolteacher from the southern city of Odessa, on an outing with her class.

She was not keen for the children in her charge to be forced to examine the darker chapters of Soviet history.

“The past is the past,” she said. “The history of the famine, the killings, all the things Stalin did. I don’t think we should bring them up. There’s enough violence today as it is. If we start blaming each other… It’s just not worth it.”

‘Witch hunt’

The idea of airing the past as part of a healing process, and excluding members of the former regime from positions of authority - a process known as “lustration” - is being actively promoted by some in the Ukrainian administration.

But it is highly controversial. Dmytro Tabachnyk, a historian and opposition lawmaker, thinks the notion is absurd.

“It’s a witch hunt,” he said. “To start a process of lustration after 18 years of independence would lead society to the brink of civil war.”

In a forest just outside Kiev, the tree trunks are tied with thousands of white scarves.

The scarves are embroidered in the traditional Ukrainian way, with red-and-black geometric patterns, and each one symbolically represents a life lost to Soviet oppression.

Under Stalin, the Soviet secret police would bury executed political prisoners at Bykivnia. No-one knows exactly how many bodies lie buried in this wood, but some estimates put the figure at more than 200,000.

But, says Nico Lange, the German director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Kiev, Ukrainians must stop blaming the Russians for their past, and start looking inward.

“Ukrainians have a tendency to perceive themselves as only victims of those historical processes,” he says.

“But coming to terms with the past really starts when you start uncovering also your own involvement: the oppressions by your own state, the offenders who are from your own people. If you do this work, this very painful work, the truth will finally set you free. And you will not invite new dictators to oppress you again.”

The Germans have experience of confronting their own past, both following World War II, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But it will take a lot of united political will for such a process to get under way in Ukraine.

And it may be that, for the moment, there are still too many people alive and in positions of power, who were involved with the Soviet regime in one way or another.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/8119320.stm

Published: 2009/06/29 00:51:16 GMT

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