PETER I: (1672-1725) One day after receiving word of Ukrainian ´ treason´ , Peter the Great orders the arrest of ...

PETER I: (1672-1725) One day after receiving word of Ukrainian ´ treason´ , Peter the Great orders the arrest of two of its leaders

PETER I: (1672-1725) Peter the Great. Tsar of all Russia 1682-1721 and Emperor of Russia 1721-25. A remarkable L.S., Peter, in Cyrillic, one page, slim 4to, St. Petersburg, 11th November 1723, to Count Andrei Ivanovich Ushakov. The Emperor demonstrates his autocracy and sends instructions to his correspondent (translated) ´After having heard about the case from Rumyantsev, call up Colonel Apostol, and Miloradovich as well, give them the letter (the copy is enclosed), and send them with it to St. Petersburg. To not let them escape, send some officers as if on some duty, so that they would come across them on the road. If it seems impossible [to organise] arrest them to not let them go...´. Annotated at the foot of the page, possibly in the hand of Ushakov, confirming receipt of the letter on 29th November 1723. An extraordinary letter by the Emperor, an absolute monarch who remained the ultimate authority and oversaw a well organised police state. Some light creasing and age wear, a vertical strip of dust staining to the right edge, only very slightly affecting the text and signature (which remain perfectly legible), some minimal stains to the margins and a few minor restorations to the corners, G

Count Andrei Ivanovich Ushakov (1672-1747) Russian General and politician, a companion of Peter the Great who served as General-in-Chief and head of the Secret Chancellery of the Russian Empire 1736-51.

Count Alexander Ivanovich Rumyantsev (1677-1749) Russian nobleman who served as an assistant to Peter the Great, acting as his spy chief and undertaking various diplomatic errands.

Danylo Pavlovych Apostol (1654-1734) Russian military leader and the Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host from 1727-34. A prominent polkovnyk (colonel) with the Myrhorod Regiment, Apostol participated in the Russian campaigns against the Ottoman Empire. In the 1723-25 Cossack starshyna, Apostol was accused of being involved in the alleged mutiny plot of Hetman Pavlo Polubotok.

Mykhailo Miloradovich (c.1650-1726) Russian nobleman and colonel who had been recruited by Peter the Great to incite rebellion in Herzegovina against the Ottomans in 1710–11 during the Pruth River Campaign.

In 1722, Peter the Great established the Collegium of Little Russia, an administrative body of the Russian Empire in the Cossack Hetmanate, officially known as the Zaporizhian Host, which today corresponds to parts of central and southern Ukraine. Similar to Russia’s current rationalisation and goals for invading Ukraine, the Collegium was made up of six Russian military officers in the Hetmanate who functioned as a parallel government. It was assigned the responsibility of securing the rights of local Cossack peasants against repression by Cossack officers. Peter introduced and enforced Russian laws and administration, mobilized the region's material resources for his Imperial needs, and structured the local judicial and financial systems to eradicate the region’s autonomy.

From the beginning of its history, Cossacks had been fiercely independent nomads, who Peter used to further his military and political objectives in the region. At the battle of Poltava in 1709, Cossacks supported the Swedish Army under Ivan Mazeppa who, after discovering he was to be replaced as acting Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host, threw his loyalty and soldiers behind Sweden’s King Charles XII. Following Sweden’s defeat at Poltava, Cossack leaders who had sided with King Charles XII met in 1710 and wrote The Treaties and Resolutions of the Rights and Freedoms of the Zaporizhian Army, considered ´The First Constitution of Ukraine´. In June 1722, Mazepa’s successor, Ivan Skoropadsky, who had supported Czar Peter at Poltava and continued to fight for Hetmanate rights and Ukrainian autonomy died as his country’s largest landowner.

One year later Peter I decreed that, following Skoropadsky’s death, there would be no new elections for hetman. The acting Ukrainian hetman, Pavlo Polubotok (who had also joined with Peter I to fight Mazepa) wrote several petitions to the Tsar calling for Ukrainian self-rule that led to a series of interrogations in September 1723. Peter ordered his spy chief, Count Alexander Ivanovich Rumyantsev, to investigate the hetman’s activities. Polubotok was arrested on accusations of treason in November 1723 and imprisoned in the Petropavlovsk fortress, St. Petersburg’s citadel, where he died a year later on 29th December 1724.

One of Polubotok’s closest collaborators and a highly respected colonel, Danylo Apostol, was aware of Polubotok’s fruitless attempts to restore Hetmanate’s rights in Ukraine. Around October 1723, a month before the present letter, he initiated the so-called Kolomak Petitions while encamped above the Kolomak River, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, during a campaign against the Tatars. The authors demanded the right to elect a new hetman of Ukraine and to liquidate ´the martial law established in Ukraine by Peter I after his victory at the Battle of Poltava, the rule of the Collegium of Little Russia, and other restrictions on Ukrainian autonomy´. It was Apostol’s Kolomak Petition, supported by Polubotok, that led to the latter’s arrest.

In The Little Ukrainian Encyclopedia (1959) the scholar Yevhen Onatsky wrote ´For the petition, Apostol collected many signatures from the starshynas and Cossacks and sent them to the General Chancellery, but the Collegium of Little Russia issued a secret order not to allow any more [Ukrainian] ambassadors in St. Petersburg.....Then General Zhurakovsky secretly from the Collegium sent chancellor Iv. Romanovych with the Kolomak Petition to St. Petersburg. On 10th November 1723 he presented them to the Tsar when he was leaving the Church of St. Trinity. After reading those pages and seeing a large number of signatures, Peter I, with great anger and fury, ordered General Ushakov to immediately arrest and put Polubotok in the Peter and Paul Fortress, [with Apostol] and other Ukrainians who allied with Polubotok.....in the defense of Ukrainian rights and who seemed dangerous to Moscow´.

Apostol and Mykhailo Miloradovich, a colonel in the Hadiach regiment from 1715 until his death, who had also signed the Kolomak Petition, were imprisoned early in 1724, but after the Emperor´s death in 1725 they were quickly released. Peter II reviewed the political course of the Collegium of Little Russia and temporarily suspended it in 1727. Apostol was elected a hetman of the Zaporizhian Host (known as ´left bank Ukraine´) in 1727–34. Later, during the 18th century, the Cossack Hetmanate gradually lost its political and economic autonomy. In 1764, by order of the Russian Empress Catherine II, the institution of hetmanship was abolished, and a year later the Hetmanate was re-formed into the Little Russian province.

A remarkable letter illustrating Russia’s early and historic intervention into Ukrainian affairs, repeated nearly exactly 300 years later by Vladimir Putin, whose heroic inspiration he has often proclaimed to the world is Peter the Great.