Steppes Ahead

Restoring the Memory of a Cossack Political Pioneer

History generally credits the Frenchman Montesquieu (Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu) for the political theory known as the separation of powers. Montesquieu actually termed it the “distribution of powers,” in his 1748 treatise, The Spirit of the Laws, and his notion was that a society can protect itself from despotism and over-centralization of power by dividing government between legislative, executive, and judicial bodies.

But the first expression of this idea – the tripartite separation of governmental powers – actually appeared in a constitution nearly half a century earlier, in 1710, and not one written by a French noble (or an American Founding Father), but by a Slav – a Ukrainian Cossack chieftain and aide to one of Russian history’s most infamous turncoats.

After Peter I assumed the Russian throne in 1689, Ivan Mazepa, a rich and powerful hetman, or leader, of a band of Ukrainian Cossacks, served as a loyal and useful advisor to the young tsar. His Cossacks were instrumental in Peter’s wars against the Ottomans and Tatars, and a rich friendship grew between the two men, such that Cossack colonels joked that “the tsar would sooner disbelieve an angel than Mazepa.”

But then, in 1708, as Russia’s Northern War against Sweden approached a critical stage, the Polish King Stanislaus Leszczynski, an ally of Sweden, threatened to attack Ukraine. Mazepa asked Peter for reinforcements, but Peter replied by saying “I cannot spare even ten men. Defend yourself as best you can.” Mazepa took this as a personal betrayal and a violation of the 60-year-old pact, the Treaty of Pereyaslav, according to which Russia was to defend Ukraine from Poland. So Mazepa, joined by 3,000 of his Cossacks and later the Zaporizhian Host, switched his allegiance to the tsar’s adversary, Charles XII of Sweden. For his part, Charles agreed to protect Ukraine and not to seek a peace with Russia that did not include the freedom of Ukraine.

As a result of his defection from Peter, to this day Russians revile Mazepa as a traitor, while in other quarters he is ranked as a hero. Indeed, it is still a Russian slur to call someone a “mazepintsy” – meaning an anti-Russian Ukrainian, or one guilty of treachery toward the state and opportunistic separatism.

One year later, in 1709, Peter’s decisive victory in the Battle of Poltava set the course for Sweden’s decline as a continental power while securing the ascendancy of the Russian empire in Northern Europe. The defeated Charles and Mazepa fled south to eastern Moldavia, finally taking refuge in the fortress town of Tighina, which the invading Ottomans had renamed Bender.

Mazepa died in Bender that fall, and his deputy, Pylyp Orlyk, was elected hetman the following spring. He promptly set about writing a charter with a governing structure suitable for the freedom-loving and relatively democratic Cossacks. He also hoped to avenge the loss at Poltava by creating a homeland for the Zaporizhian Host – one that offered an alternative to the heavy hand of tsarist rule. The Orlyk constitution, Pacta et Constitutiones Legum Libertatumque Exercitus Zaporoviensis, was issued April 5, 1710.

“The independence of the new state from Russia was the primary goal of the constitution,” said Karin Borgqvist, a senior archivist at the Swedish National Archives in Marieberg. “The principles were revolutionary, and neither Russia nor other monarchical regimes of Europe could accept Orlyk’s constitution.”

Unlike its American counterpart, Orlyk’s constitution is not on prominent public display. What is more, the site of the document’s creation, Bender, is today in the heart of one of the most undemocratic places in the world. Thus was the hetman Orlyk, who might have gotten credit for making a major contribution to the canon of individual freedom and limited government, consigned to oblivion.

Orlyk’s constitution contains a lengthy preamble to its 16 articles. [bit.ly/orlykconstitution] The preamble waxes eloquent on the Cossack destiny to live as a free people, a task that Orlyk’s predecessors nobly initiated but were unable to finish because of Muscovite treachery. Indeed, the list of Cossack grievances lodged against the tsars reads much like George III’s “abuses and usurpations” cited in the US Declaration of Independence.

The preamble, which alternately refers to the Zaporizhian Host as Ukrainians and Little Russians, also proclaims the host independent from both Russia and Poland and enjoins the hetman to preserve Zaporizhian self-rule. In addition, it stresses that the agreement set forth in the subsequent articles is binding on Orlyk and all his successors as hetman, thus making it a constitution rather than a simple contract between Orlyk and his fellows.

Article 2 declares the need for the host to form an alliance with the khan of Crimea, for the peninsula held strategic significance for the fulfillment of their political aims. The following year, Orlyk formed that alliance, and with the Ottoman and Crimean Tatar leaders attacked Russians in Ukraine. Despite initial successes, the campaign failed.

The separation of powers is outlined in Articles 6-10. These establish limits on the rule of the hetman (the executive), and set up a Cossack parliament (legislature) that was to meet three times a year. In addition, an independent court (judiciary) was established, where, should anyone violate the laws of the host:

His Highness the Hetman shall not himself punish such a defendant with his personal revenge and power, but shall refer such a criminal or civil case to the general court, where justice will be administered to everyone without favoritism or hypocrisy.

Also in Article 6, the document makes clear where the Cossacks stood on absolutism:

Some hetmans of the Zaporozhian Host, having unjustly or illegally usurped absolute power, established through their own authority this law: ‘I wish so, and so I order.’ This despotic law, unbecoming to the hetman’s office, has resulted in the introduction into our fatherland and into the Zaporozhian Host of many abuses, violations of rights and liberties, public burdens, arbitrary and venal dispositions of military offices, and a low regard for general officers, colonels, and our distinguished comrades-in-arms.

Indeed, throughout the text various forms of corruption are condemned. By one estimate, fully one-third of the main text addresses this topic.

With Charles XII’s endorsement of their new constitution, the Cossacks under Orlyk expected to be masters in their own home for generations. But it was not to be. Orlyk’s failure to win other Cossacks back to his anti-Russian cause, the failure of his military campaign, and mounting misfortunes over the next four years led to mass desertion, leaving Orlyk only one option. In 1715 he fled with his family (and about 40 other Cossacks) and Charles XII to Sweden. He lived there until 1720, then spent the next two decades as a nomad throughout Europe, alternately trying to return to Ukrainian land and to organize an anti-Russian alliance in foreign courts.

In the words of the annals of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US: “Steadily and consistently his politics revealed themselves as anti-Muscovite in the last period of his life – in the years 1729-1742. He felt Moscow’s threat in general to European and especially to East European standards. Russia’s aspiration for conquest in the West he imagined as some kind of advance of barbarians against European culture. Under certain conditions all Europe, in his opinion, remained under the threat of Muscovite expansion.”

Each passing year nurtured in Orlyk the faint possibility that he could find a power willing to launch a war with Russia, thereby helping him revive the dream that had died after Poltava. His best chance was with Ottoman Turkey. That possibility ended, though, in 1739, when, to his great disappointment, the war between Russia and Turkey ended. For his fidelity to what proved an unattainable ideal, Orlyk was later christened the Ukrainian Don Quixote.

In adulthood, Orlyk’s son Hryhir (in French, Gregoire) entered the service of the French king and tried to salvage his father’s struggle amid a career of diplomacy and espionage. Hryhir married a French noblewoman and gained an estate, the Chateau de Dinteville. In one interesting twist, he proposed to King Louis XV that Cossacks be resettled to a region of the Rhine, under French protection, but Turkish objections scuttled the idea. Hryhir died without any heirs.

Two decades after Hryhir’s death, in 1775, Catherine the Great abolished what remained of the Zaporizhian Cossack polity, and incorporated them into a province called Novorossia. A proclamation declared that the mere mention of the Zaporizhian Host “will be considered no less than an affront to our Imperial Majesty.” Many of the Zaporizhian Cossacks were relocated to the Kuban region, while others headed west and established a community called the Danubian Sich, which lasted until the late 1820s. Some remnants of this Host can be found in persons with Zaporizhian roots living in the Dobrudja region of Romania and other settlements near the Danube delta.

Of all the historical ironies in this tale, none is more striking than what the passage of time has brought about in Bender.

The city was under the control of the Ottoman Empire in Orlyk’s day. Today, it is part of an unrecognized, breakaway Moldovan statelet known as Transdniester, the only place in the world where a flag with the Soviet hammer and sickle still flies.

In 1990, the region’s predominantly Russian-speaking territory declared its independence from Moldova, fearing that the newly independent nation had designs on reincorporating with Romania. Two years later, separatists joined detachments of Russian troops in armed resistance to the Moldovan government. Then Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoy gave a speech in Transdniester in support of independence, and Cossacks from various parts of Russia also jumped into the fray on the separatist side.

A cease-fire has held for 26 years, but the conflict has not been settled. About 1,500 Russian soldiers remain in Transdniester, in what the Kremlin calls a peacekeeping capacity. In fact, the region became the first of many “frozen conflicts” in the former Soviet space, from South Ossetia and Abkhazia, to Nagorno-Karabakh and Crimea.

This uneasy peace has meant that, as neighboring Ukraine and Moldova steered a course toward the West, Transdniester sealed itself into a time warp of totalitarianism. One of the main thoroughfares in Bender is Communism Street. There are also streets named after Lenin and Dzerzhinsky.

“Starting with the early ’90s,” said Sergei, a former resident of Bender who has immigrated to the US (and asked that his name be changed to protect his anonymity), “Russians engaged in sponsoring different cultural projects,  [such as] building cultural centers… building monuments of Russian historical figures related to the region. Overall, Russia has a very pronounced presence in Bender.”

“I think the residents of Bender are generally unaware of the 1710 constitution,” he added. “Given the strong presence and influence of Russia, the part of history related to Ukraine is left unnoticed and neglected.”

The only trace of Orlyk’s constitution in Bender today is a monument built in 2010, on the occasion of the document’s 300th anniversary. It stands outside the city’s primary attraction: its fortress.  The actual document, which had an Old Ukrainian version and a Latin version, is now just a shadow of its former self. The Ukrainian original is in Moscow’s Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents. The Swedish National Archives in Stockholm house a partial reproduction of the Latin version. 

According to Borgkvist, the archivist in Marieberg, the Latin original disappeared somewhere in France during World War II. The copy in the Swedish Archives, she says, “is considered to be ‘the original,’ as there is no better copy to be found” in Latin.