Class 11. Ottoman Retreat, Ukrainian Populism (4)
partly because the Cossacks are fighting there,
but they're fighting with the Ukrainian Cossacks,
but they're fighting there
in conditions which are highly unfavorable, right?
So the Cossacks have been fighting for hundreds of years
with and against the Polls,
with and against the Lithuanians,
with and against the Tatars, right?
That's with the Tatars too.
The Khmelnytsky Uprising was with the Tatars
against the Poles, it's a triangle.
You have to lie with pretty much everybody
in different circumstances.
So, but anyway,
that is their home turf down there, right?
With the Tatars, with the Poles, with the Lithuanians.
When they are brought up to fight in Sweden,
in northern Europe, they're facing a modern army
with modern weapons, they're taking huge casualties,
they're far away from home
and they're taking orders from Russian imperial officers,
all of which leads to a great deal of discontent.
Meanwhile, while they're up north,
Poland threatens to invade Ukraine.
And the Hetman, who is the Hetman of the left bank,
the Hetman of the Russian part of Ukraine,
who is a man called Ivan Mazepa,
realizes that we're now in a moment of crisis.
And so Mazepa makes a decision, which is quite fateful.
Mazepa makes the decision in 1708
to switch over to the Swedish side, okay?
So there are operas about this,
there's lots of Russian literature about this.
And it's like, it's the great betrayal by,
it rings down the century,
literally rings down the centuries,
because Russian bells were supposed to ring out
because of Mazepa's betrayal.
Mazepa had been a kind of counselor to Peter, okay?
Mazepa is older than Peter,
Mazepa had this fantastic European education.
He'd been the counselor to the King of Poland.
He'd been educated at the Kyiv Academy.
Then he was educated by Jesuits in Poland,
then he was the counselor to the King of Poland, right?
And so he then became a kind of counselor to Peter
in his turn.
And Peter trusted him.
So in 1708, when Mazepa switches sides,
which he believes he has no choice but to do,
to try to preserve his homeland,
Peter sees this understandably as a huge betrayal.
And it's remembered as a tremendous betrayal,
as a moment where the Ukrainians betrayed the Russians.
So Mazepa switches sides to the Swedes,
right before they lose, right before they lose.
In 1709 at the Battle of Poltava, Russia defeats the Swedes,
reaches the Baltic and becomes a North European power
that is then gonna be followed 1721,
founding of the Russian Empire,
the creation of Petersburg,
new European capital, window on Europe, all of that.
Mazepa dies in 1709.
So this is a turning point for the Cossacks.
I mean, Cossack power probably wasn't gonna persist
much longer anyway, but it's a turning point.
Mazepa dies that same year, 1709.
1719, the Cossacks are banned from selling grain,
not a detail.
They're banned from selling grain on their own.
They can only sell grain through Russian ports.
And since we know that part of the deep history of Ukraine
is that Ukraine has the most fertile soil
in this part of the world,
that ban is a big part of their dependency on Russia.
1722, the Russians create something called
the Little Russian Collegium,
which is going to co-rule or eventually rule
the Cossack lands.
Little Russia, Malorussia
is then a Russian term for which I'll talk more about later
for referring to Ukraine.
So after these turning points, right?
After 1699, Battle of Karlowitz, sorry,
the Treaty of Karlowitz,
and after 1709, the Battle of Poltava,
the Ottomans are down and the Swedes are down,
and the Russians have basically a free hand
with the Cossacks
and they're using the Cossacks to fight the Swedes.
And then they're using the Cossacks
to fight the Crimean Khanate and to fight the Ottomans.
That's the way it goes.
So you can see the Cossack power is being spent northward
and being spent southward.
In the 18th century in a series of battles,
the Russians managed to drive Crimean power
out of what is now southern Ukraine.
And then eventually they manage to conquer Crimea itself.
This happens in a couple of wars, 1735 to 1739,
then 1768 to 1774.
Crimea becomes a protectorate that year, 1774.
1783, its annexed by the Russian Empire.
Now, while this is happening,
while the Cossacks are being played out, right?
Cossack power is being spent in these wars southward,
it's not that it's new that the Cossacks
are fighting the Crimean Tatars,
they've been doing that forever.
What's new is that they're doing it under Russian command.
And when that job is done,
all that remains of their autonomy is taken away, right?
So you're seeing this triangle kind of crushes in
on everyone at the same time.
The Crimean Khanate is being defeated by Ottomans,
but in that defeat, sorry, it's being defeated by Cossacks.
And, but in that defeat,
the Cossacks are also being defeated by Russia, right?
The institutions of the Cossacks are going to disappear
at basically the same time that the institutions
of the Crimean Khanate are going to disappear.
And then they are swept up.
And here's where things get intellectually very interesting.
They are then swept up by Catherine's idea of a new Russia.
Okay, so this is fascinating because what Catherine does,
educated woman, German, by the way, her real name is Sophie.
And there's nothing Russian about her
except the husbands who had to be murdered
so she could rule, that's it.
So Catherine has this idea, which is very elegant.
It's also a classically colonial idea
that these lands that have just been conquered,
there wasn't anybody there, right?
These are virgin territories.
So the place is renamed what's now Southern Ukraine
where the Cossacks had had power and the Crimean Peninsula
where the Crimean Khanate had had power,
these places are renamed New Russia, okay?
Now that word new is magical, right?
Like with New England or New South Wales or New Caledonia,
that word new is magical because it suggests
this is our new Russia.
It's powerful, right?
It's powerful.
More than 200, you know, 200 years later, 300 years later,
people are gonna be still drawn by this notion
of New Russia.
But when you say something is new,
you're not saying it's yours,
you're saying that we want it to be ours, right?
That's the whole point.
So Novorossiya does not mean something which is Russian,
it means something that we're gonna make Russia,
we're gonna pretend that nothing else is there.
And how do you do that?
Well, you send multiple, and the Russians did this,
they sent four expeditions of the
Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences to Crimea
to name everything, find all the species,
map everything, right?
Because science is one of the tools
by which you gather imperial knowledge.
And then the naming, I mean, this is,
one has to admit this is quite brilliant
on Catherine's part, they rename everything.
So all the Turkic names, the Muslim names,
the Crimean Tatar names are replaced.
And what are they replaced with?
Greek names or names that sound Greek,
like Kherson, okay?
Like Kherson,
that city that's being fought over right now.
Kherson, completely invented name, right?
Or it comes from the Greek city of Kherson,
which is in Crimea.
Mariupol, sounds Greek sorta, right?
That's the whole idea.
They took the old names
and then they replaced 'em with Greek names.
And when they founded new places,
those two examples I gave are new places,
Kherson and Mariupol,
they gave them Greek or Greek-ish, Greek sounding,
Greco whatever names.
And the point of this is to say
Russia is connected with the classical world, right?
And in that we're European, right?
We're in the enlightenment.
Connecting Russia with the classical world,
going back all the way 2000 years,
means that you obliterative
everything that happens in between.
So the Crimeans don't matter, the Ukrainians don't matter,
it's Russia here alone with its historical destiny,
which goes all the way back to Greece.
And so it's new Russia, but it's justified
by this connection to the classical world.
Okay, that brings us to where we need to be.
The Crimean Tatars themselves
are going to be physically displaced.
About a third of them, roughly 300,000 of them
are going to immigrate
while Russia takes control of the peninsula,
most (indistinct) Ottoman Empire.
During the Crimean War of the 1850s,
another 140,000 Crimean Tatars are going to leave.
Jumping ahead a bit,
the remainder of the Crimean Tatar population
is going to be deported every man, woman and child
in 1944 under Soviet rule,
so that the entire peninsula is deprived
of its indigenous population.
The Ukrainians, and this is the very last thing,
when this is all over, when the Cossacks have been disbanded,
when the territories have been integrated
into new Russia districts, as soon as that happens,
in the spirit of romanticism,
the Ukrainians from a new university in today's Kharkiv,
what was called Kharkov in Russian back then,
from a new university, which is founded in 1805,
the first move is going to be
classical traditional European style romanticism,
where they start looking back to the Cossack past
and start writing about Cossack state continuities.
And in the 19th century, they will move into a mode
where they turn their own past into something like
a usable national story, which we're gonna talk more about
in the weeks to come.
For the Crimean Tatars, for various reasons,
this wasn't possible.
The Crimean Tatars aren't gonna be able
to make a move like this.
They're going to be largely dispersed
and they're gonna be treated as alien
and their domination is gonna be much more complete.
I'm gonna talk more about that
when we get to the 20th century,
'cause it's really interesting in itself
and it's very important
for the way that the war is being fought.
Just one closing thought.
People find it easier to think that Crimea is really Russia
than Ukraine is really Russia, right?
Today.
And why is that?
I mean, it's because the history of Crimea has been,
although the history of Ukraine
has been pretty successfully obliterated,
the history of Crimea
has been very successfully obliterated.
And so the idea that Ukraine is always Russia,
maybe like, you know, you might ask a question,
but Crimea is always Russia?
People are more likely to believe that, right?
And so part of the work that we have to do in history
is to fill in the gaps
and get things where they were in the past
and make these always claims, whatever they might be,
seem unbelievable.
And in that way, prepare ourselves for the exam.
Good luck.
1699, 1699 is definitely gonna be on this exam, 100%, 1699.
Okay, thank you everybody, thanks for listening.
The 18th century is tough work
and I appreciate that you're here with me.
(soft music)
