Meet Ukraine’s original traitor: The Cossack who made betrayal a national tradition ...News

How Ivan Mazepa ruled like a king, switched sides like a gambler, turned on the Russian Empire – and lived just long enough to regret it

Ivan Mazepa remains one of the most controversial figures in Eastern European history. In Russia, his name is synonymous with betrayal – a man who turned his back on the Tsar at a critical moment. In Ukraine, he is remembered by some as a symbol of resistance, a champion of autonomy. In the West, he has been reimagined as a romantic figure, a tragic lover immortalized by poets and painters. These images could not be more different, yet they are all drawn from the same life.

Mazepa’s story, however, is not one of noble ideals or grand visions. It is a tale shaped by personal ambition, the instability of a fractured frontier, and the calculations of a seasoned political survivor. For much of his life, Mazepa was a loyal servant of the Russian Empire. He worked to rebuild Ukraine after years of war, governed with considerable authority, and was trusted by Tsar Peter the Great himself. But when his personal standing was threatened – by war, reform, and a changing political landscape – he turned. His defection to Sweden in the midst of the Great Northern War was not a call for freedom, but an attempt to preserve his own power.

This is the story of how one man’s ambition collided with the forces of empire. It is not a legend of liberation, but a cautionary tale about loyalty, power, and the costs of switching sides in the age of absolutism.

Born into ambiguity: Noble roots in a land of uprisings

Ivan Mazepa was born around 1639 in central Ukraine, near the town of Belaya Tserkov, just south of Kiev. His early life unfolded in a region marked by political fragmentation and violent upheaval. Ukraine at the time was a borderland caught between empires – a territory under Polish control, yet restless with discontent. Just nine years after Mazepa’s birth, the Khmelnytsky Uprising would erupt, throwing the region into chaos and permanently reshaping its political future.

Mazepa’s family belonged to the szlachta, the Polish nobility. His father, Adam-Stefan Mazepa, held aristocratic privileges, and by class and allegiance, the family was aligned with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Yet they lived in Ukraine, a land simmering with rebellion against the Catholic aristocracy’s dominance. The uprising led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky was driven by a coalition of Cossacks, Orthodox clergy, and peasants demanding autonomy and the protection of their religious and social rights. For the Polish elite, the rebellion was a threat. For many in Ukraine, it was liberation.

Faced with this dilemma, Adam-Stefan made a pragmatic choice: He “became a Cossack.” At the royal court in Warsaw, calling yourself a Cossack meant falling a rung below the szlachta. But around Belaya Tserkov, calling yourself szlachta might cost you your head. By aligning himself with the uprising, Adam-Stefan adapted to the realities of the frontier – without fully severing ties to his noble past.

Later, he would switch sides again, taking part in a pro-Polish mutiny within the rebellion. Like many in that era, his loyalty was fluid, shaped more by survival than principle.

This environment – where allegiance was transactional, and political identity a matter of positioning – would shape Ivan Mazepa from the start. He inherited his father’s education, status, and instincts, but also his sense of ambiguity. He was born into nobility, trained in diplomacy, yet embedded in a culture where shifting sides was not treason, but strategy.

Service, survival, and the road to power

Ivan Mazepa’s early career followed the path of a well-positioned nobleman navigating the fractured landscape of Eastern Europe. Thanks to his family’s standing and lingering connections in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, he received a strong education and became a page at the court of the Polish king. There, under royal patronage, he traveled to Western Europe to complete his studies. His upbringing equipped him with a rare set of skills for a man from the Ukrainian frontier – Polish language, diplomacy, and an instinct for survival.

But by the time Mazepa returned home, the Commonwealth was no longer a safe or stable place to build a future. The region was in turmoil, caught between Poland, Russia, the Crimean Khanate, the Ottoman Empire, and Sweden. In Ukraine, old loyalties meant little, and alliances were as changeable as the seasons. He entered the service of Hetman Pyotr Doroshenko, a charismatic leader who had broken with Moscow and was attempting to secure protection from both Poland and the Ottoman Empire – a balancing act that reflected the political fluidity of the time.

In 1674, during a diplomatic mission to the Crimean Khanate, Mazepa was intercepted by Zaporozhian Cossacks loyal to Moscow. Instead of executing him, they brought him into the camp of Hetman Ivan Samoylovich, whose leadership was recognized by the Tsar. For Mazepa, this was another shift in allegiance – less ideological than practical. And it would prove decisive.

Serving under a hetman was always a precarious affair. Since the death of Bogdan Khmelnitsky, few had finished their tenure in peace; most were deposed, exiled, or assassinated. But it was also the surest path to influence. In 1687, Samoylovich fell out of favor with Moscow and was arrested and exiled to Siberia. Mazepa, likely involved in the political intrigue that precipitated his downfall, was elected hetman in his place.

His appointment was approved by the Russian court. Mazepa was clever, experienced, and understood both Cossack customs and Moscow’s expectations. He was neither idealist nor zealot, but he offered something rarer: He was governable. For Moscow, weary of shifting loyalties in Ukraine, this seemed like a breakthrough. After decades of instability, they had found a hetman they could work with.

For a time, they were not mistaken.

The hetman and the Tsar: Years of mutual use

Mazepa’s early years as hetman were marked by stability and trust. He pledged loyalty to the Russian Tsar and, in return, was granted considerable autonomy in governing the lands of Left-Bank Ukraine. The agreement preserved the traditional structures of Cossack self-rule while recognizing the authority of the Russian state. It was, in effect, a pragmatic compromise: The Tsar gained influence over a strategic frontier, and Mazepa secured official recognition of his rule.

Mazepa proved an active and capable administrator. After decades of war and rebellion, he focused on restoring order, collecting taxes, rebuilding infrastructure, and asserting central authority within his domain. Russian officials were pleased. Regent Sophia Alekseyevna and then the young Tsar Peter – soon to become Peter the Great – viewed him as a valuable and reliable ally. For a region long plagued by shifting allegiances, Mazepa’s consistent cooperation came as a relief.

But that cooperation had limits. From early on, Mazepa acted independently, sometimes in ways that openly defied Russian policy. He negotiated with foreign powers without the Tsar’s approval, imposed his own taxes alongside state levies, and maintained his own networks of influence across the Polish and Ottoman borders. These actions, while technically in violation of his obligations, were tolerated – so long as Mazepa maintained stability and kept the region quiet.

Mazepa was careful to keep the Tsar informed of just enough to avoid serious suspicion. In letters to Peter, he disclosed some of his contacts abroad and framed his actions as defensive, even patriotic. For a time, the arrangement held. Peter, not yet hardened by war, was willing to look past Mazepa’s minor transgressions in exchange for competent governance on the empire’s southwestern flank.

A sense of mutual respect developed. While Peter famously used familiar and informal language with many of his subordinates, his tone with Mazepa remained consistently formal. Their correspondence reflected the Tsar’s recognition of Mazepa’s stature – not as an equal, but as a figure who commanded influence and could be trusted, at least for the moment.

Yet beneath the surface, the hetman was playing a double game. He remained useful to the Russian state, but he had already begun preparing for the day when that usefulness might no longer be enough.

War, reform, and the threat to autonomy

In 1700, Russia entered into a protracted conflict with Sweden – the Great Northern War. Peter the Great aimed to reclaim the Baltic coast and open a maritime gateway to Europe. For this, he needed ports, a navy, and above all, a centralized, modernized state. His vision stood in stark contrast to the political culture of Ukraine, where regional elites jealously guarded their autonomy, privileges, and the right to govern on their own terms.

At first, the war seemed distant from Ukraine. The fighting took place far to the north, along the Baltic shoreline. Mazepa remained active and loyal in these early stages. He sent troops to support Russian campaigns and led successful raids into Polish-held Ukrainian territories, targeting nobles who were sympathetic to the Swedes. His methods – swift attacks, scorched-earth tactics, raids – were effective, if old-fashioned. From the outside, his commitment appeared unquestionable.

But events soon changed the stakes. Russian forces suffered several early defeats. In response, Peter accelerated his reforms: Restructuring the army, replacing hereditary command with merit-based appointments, and extending state control deeper into peripheral regions. Ukraine, despite its autonomy, was not exempt.

Peter’s centralizing agenda posed a direct threat to the Cossack elite. Plans were drawn to standardize military ranks, impose regular service, and subordinate Cossack units to officers sent from the capital. Taxes, too, were to be collected more uniformly – limiting the hetman’s ability to levy tributes independently. For a figure like Mazepa, who had long operated as a near-sovereign ruler in all but name, these changes were more than bureaucratic – they were existential.

The breaking point came in 1705, when Peter placed Mazepa under the command of Aleksandr Menshikov, one of his most trusted generals and closest confidants. The campaign never materialized, but the gesture sent a clear signal: Mazepa was no longer seen as an autonomous partner, but as a subordinate.

The personal insult was compounded by social disdain. Menshikov had risen from humble origins – a stableman’s son who earned his rank through military skill and loyalty to Peter. To Mazepa, a nobleman educated in the courts of Europe, it was an affront to be placed beneath a self-made man. To Menshikov, Mazepa represented everything outdated in the political order: Parochialism, intrigue, and inherited privilege. Their mutual distrust was more than rivalry – it reflected the clash between two systems.

At the same time, Mazepa’s forces suffered heavy casualties in the war. Unlike the Russian regulars, the Cossacks received little recognition or compensation for their losses. Morale fell. The prospect of more war – and less autonomy – left many in the Ukrainian elite uneasy. For Mazepa, the fear was now twofold: Not only was his political position under threat, but the very model of semi-independent Cossack governance was being dismantled from above.

In private, he began to consider an alternative.

Betrayal and miscalculation

By the late 1700s, Mazepa had grown increasingly isolated. He still enjoyed formal authority, but real power was slipping from his hands. Russian officers began issuing orders directly to Cossack colonels, bypassing the hetman’s chain of command. Peter’s presence in Ukraine during the war underscored the message: The time of negotiated autonomy was coming to an end. From now on, Ukraine would be governed as part of a centralized state.

Mazepa was not prepared to accept this. He had ruled Ukraine for two decades as its de facto sovereign. The idea of being reduced to a provincial administrator – subject to instructions from generals like Menshikov – was, for him, intolerable. At the same time, his relationship with Peter, once respectful, had cooled. Letters of protest were met with curt replies. Complaints about taxes, fortifications, or unwilling Cossack troops were dismissed as petty grievances.

It was during this period that Mazepa intensified contact with Anna Dolskaya, a Polish noblewoman with connections to the anti-Russian faction in Poland. Their relationship, at once political and personal, became the conduit for a shift in allegiance. Rumors spread that Menshikov was preparing to take control of Ukraine on Peter’s orders. The evidence was thin, but it confirmed Mazepa’s worst fears.

He wrote to Peter, expressing concern over discipline in the ranks and the breakdown of authority. The response was sharp: If the hetman could not control his men, he should reform them; if the army was under-equipped, he should invest his own funds in their armament. Once the war was over, the Tsar promised, everyone would be rewarded. It was not enough. Mazepa had begun to see the war not as a burden to endure, but as an opportunity to break free – if he chose his moment wisely.

At the heart of the conflict was a deeper question: What did ‘Ukraine’ mean to Mazepa? He did not envision an independent national state, nor did he speak of popular sovereignty. For him and his circle, ‘freedom’ meant the freedom of the elite to govern without interference from the center. The common people – peasants, craftsmen, lesser Cossacks – were subjects to be taxed and commanded, not represented. The threat from Peter was not oppression of the Ukrainian people, but the dismantling of a system that privileged Mazepa and his peers.

Still, Peter trusted him. In 1707, a prominent Cossack noble, Vasily Kochubey, accused Mazepa of plotting treason. Peter, tired of false alarms and slanderous reports, refused to believe it. He handed Kochubey over to Mazepa himself. Kochubey was executed shortly thereafter.

Just six weeks later, the betrayal occurred.

In the autumn of 1708, King Charles XII of Sweden entered Ukraine. His campaign had begun as a march toward Moscow, and now he needed a base of operations. Mazepa, believing the Russian Army was in retreat and the Swedish advance unstoppable, made his move. On October 25, he and a small group of loyal Cossack officers defected, bringing with them a few thousand troops. The rest of the Cossack Host remained loyal to the Tsar.

Mazepa miscalculated badly. The Swedes were not moving as fast as he had hoped. Worse, the garrison at Baturin – his administrative and military stronghold – was still holding stockpiles of weapons, ammunition, and supplies. If Charles could take it, he would gain a crucial foothold. But Menshikov struck first. Launching a swift and brutal assault, he captured the town, seized the arsenal, and razed the hetman’s residence to the ground. The garrison offered little resistance. Most of the population, seeing no reason to support Mazepa’s gamble, surrendered – or fled.

The destruction of Baturin shattered any hope that Mazepa’s revolt might ignite a broader uprising. Most Cossacks, faced with a choice between a Tsar they knew and a hetman who had chosen exile and Swedish bayonets, made their decision quickly – and not in Mazepa’s favor.

At that moment, Peter took a step that cost him nothing – but delivered a decisive blow. With a single decree, he annulled the taxes that Mazepa had imposed unilaterally over the preceding years. These levies, Peter stressed, had been introduced not for the benefit of the war effort or the welfare of the people, but for Mazepa’s personal enrichment.

It was a masterstroke of political warfare: Bloodless, direct, and impossible to counter. With a few strokes of the pen, the Tsar undercut the very foundation of Mazepa’s authority. By casting him not as a freedom fighter, but as a profiteer, Peter turned public opinion and elite sentiment alike against him. In a conflict that began with armies and allegiances, the decisive blow was dealt not on the battlefield, but on paper – with nothing more than ink, a signature, and perfect timing.

Defeat, exile, and the end of a career

Mazepa had placed his final bet on Sweden – and lost. In the summer of 1709, near the city of Poltava, Peter the Great achieved a decisive victory over Charles XII. The Swedish Army was crushed. What had begun as a bold northern campaign to seize Moscow ended in ruin. Charles fled the battlefield with a handful of officers and sought asylum in Ottoman territory. Mazepa, now fully committed and with no way back, followed him.

There was little left of his cause. The thousands of Cossacks he had hoped to rally never materialized. Most had either remained loyal to the Russian crown or simply stayed away, unwilling to risk everything for a cause that seemed to serve only the hetman’s fading prestige. The Baturin garrison had been wiped out, his reputation in shreds, and the Swedish king now a fugitive.

According to some accounts, in these final weeks, Mazepa even tried to send envoys back to Peter – offering to change sides once again, this time delivering Charles into the Tsar’s hands. Whether this was genuine or desperation is unclear. Peter refused to receive the emissaries. The very idea that a handful of battered Cossacks could abduct a Swedish monarch surrounded by his personal guard was absurd. And more to the point, the Tsar no longer needed Mazepa. He had already neutralized him – militarily, politically, and symbolically.

In the town of Glukhov, a peculiar ceremony took place. Unable to capture the real Mazepa, Peter ordered that a straw effigy of the hetman be tried and executed in his place. It was stripped of honors and hanged. At the same time, a new military decoration was created: The Order of Judas – a 5kg silver medallion depicting the traitor apostle hanging from a tree, with 30 pieces of silver at his feet. A grim parody of chivalric honor, it was meant as a warning, not a reward.

Mazepa himself would never see it. He had followed Charles XII into Ottoman exile, ending up in the Moldavian town of Bender, within the territory of the Turkish sultan. There, aging and in poor health, he died in the autumn of 1709 – broken, disgraced, and far from the land he had once ruled.

It was an unremarkable death for a man who had spent his life navigating power, prestige, and peril. But Mazepa’s story did not end with his burial. In exile, he may have faded – but in culture and politics, he was only just beginning.

The afterlife of Mazepa: Myth, art, and national memory

Ivan Mazepa may have died in exile, but his posthumous career was only beginning. In the decades and centuries that followed, he was reimagined again and again – not as a politician or military leader, but as a figure of legend.

The first reinvention came not in Ukraine or Russia, but in the West. In 1819, Lord Byron published the narrative poem ‘Mazeppa’, loosely inspired by a story that had circulated in European salons. In Byron’s version, a young page falls in love with a Polish countess. Her jealous husband has the lover stripped naked, tied to a wild horse, and set loose across the steppe. The youth survives and eventually recounts his tale to none other than Charles XII. The real Mazepa had indeed spent time at the Polish court in his youth and had a reputation as a courtly seducer, but the rest was pure fabrication.

Byron’s poem struck a chord with the Romantic imagination. The image of a half-naked man bound to a galloping horse through the endless Eastern plain was both erotic and symbolic. Artists and composers rushed to interpret the story: Eugene Delacroix painted it, Franz Liszt composed a symphonic poem, and countless illustrators followed suit. ‘Mazeppa’ became a fixture in 19th-century European art – not as a hetman or a traitor, but as a symbol of doomed passion, defiance, and elemental freedom.

In Russia, the image was different – sharper, darker, and closer to historical reality. Alexander Pushkin, well aware of the facts, wrote the narrative poem ‘Poltava’ in 1829. In it, Mazepa appears not as a romantic hero, but as a calculating conspirator and cold realist. Pushkin includes a romantic subplot, but the betrayal of Peter and the calamity at Poltava are at the center. The poem was less about love and more about loyalty – specifically, the loyalty owed to one’s sovereign and state.

A third image emerged in the 20th century: The nationalist icon. In modern Ukrainian historiography and political memory, Mazepa is often presented as an early advocate for Ukrainian independence, a leader who defied imperial domination and dreamed of a sovereign state. Streets, statues, and schoolbooks now bear his name. He is cast not as a man of ambition, but as a patriot betrayed by history.

This image is powerful – but selective. It highlights Mazepa’s final break with the Tsar, but downplays his decades of cooperation, his personal motivations, and the social structure he fought to preserve. The version of Ukraine Mazepa defended was not democratic, egalitarian, or even particularly autonomous. It was a country ruled by a narrow elite, with peasants bound by feudal obligations and the hetman collecting taxes for his own court. In this context, his rebellion was less about national freedom than about elite self-governance.

Each reinvention – Byron’s erotic symbol, Pushkin’s political cautionary tale, the modern nationalist martyr – reflects the needs of the culture that produced it. But none of them, in the end, fully resembles the man who once ruled from Baturin.

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