The Battle Of Poltava

And in the wealth of detail in this immensely readable book lies the greater history of the 17th and 18th centuries."--Jacket.

In 2009, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute gathered scholars from around the globe and from various fields of study to mark the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava. This collection of their papers provides a fresh look at this watershed event and sheds new light on the legacies of the battle's major players.

The Swedish Empire, although not comparable with the huge areas and populations that we today associate with such empires as Rome, the Mongols or the Russian and British, was a formidable force to be reckoned with during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Her rise to the imperium can be traced back to the middle of the sixteenth century when, along with Russia, Poland and Denmark, Sweden also took advantage of the vacuum in the Baltic created after the collapse of the Teutonic Knights. The power struggle that resulted netted Sweden Livonia from Poland, West Pomerania and some of East Pomerania, Bremen, Verden and Wismar. She acquired Halland, Jämtland, Härjedalen and the Gotland and Ösel islands from Denmark, together with Skåne, Bohuslän and Blekinge, while Russia ceded Ingria and Lexholm, which effectively cut her off from the Baltic Sea. The Battle of Poltava (8 July 1709) was the decisive and largest battle of the Great Northern War. A Russian army under the command of Tsar Peter I defeated a Swedish army, under the command of Carl Gustaf Rehnskiöld. The battle put an end to the status of the Swedish Empire as a European great power, as well as its eastbound expansion, and marked the beginning of Russian hegemony in Northern Europe.

Ivan Mazepa (1639-1709), hetman of the Zaporozhian Host in what is now Ukraine, is a controversial figure, famous for abandoning his allegiance to Tsar Peter I and joining Charles XII's Swedish army during the Battle of Poltava. Although he is discussed in almost every survey and major book on Russian and Ukrainian history, Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire is the first English-language biography of the hetman in sixty years. A translation and revision of Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva's 2007 Russian-language book, Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire presents an updated perspective. This account is based on many new sources, including Mazepa's archive - thought lost for centuries before it was rediscovered by the author in 2004 - and post-Soviet Russian and Ukrainian historiography. Focusing on this fresh material, Tairova-Yakovleva delivers a more nuanced and balanced account of the polarizing figure who has been simultaneously demonized in Russia as a traitor and revered in Ukraine as the defender of independence. Chapters on economic reform, Mazepa's impact on the rise to power of Peter I, his cultural achievements, and the reasons he switched his allegiance from Peter to Charles integrate a larger array of issues and personalities than have previously been explored. Setting a standard for the next generation of historians, Ivan Mazepa and the Russian Empire reveals an original picture of the Hetmanate during a moment of critical importance for the Russian Empire and Ukraine.

"Aleksei Parshchikov (1954-2009) resembled the images we have of his favorite writer, Aleksandr Pushkin, not only physically in life but also in telling a story brilliantly in meter and rhyme. (This book keeps close to the meter and rhyme of the Russian original.) Here the story concerns Poltava, small city in south-east Ukraine, where in 1709 Peter the Great defeated the army of Charles XII of Sweden. Pushkin himself has a long poem with the same topic and characters, but Parshchikov updates to the mid-1980s when as a very young writer he won with it the Andrei Bely prize. The long, treacherous relations of Russia and Ukraine (U-Kraina, at-the-border, the name contains all the issues) is lifted and ironized in the relations between the two Russian poems. Here Peter and Charles and Cossack leader-and-turncoat Ivan Mazeppa (who sided with Sweden) richly deserve scorn-while the thousands of nameless soldiers who followed the dynasts, and died, are put back in history as heroic. Here the modern writer loves the land soaked with their blood. Parshchikov's logic leaps; his rhymes are often jokes; minutely he notices local places, plants, animals. The poem is fully assured in its speaking "I" and in its technical accomplishment. In the last days of the Soviet era, in the contested space between Russia and Ukraine, it is almost impossible to believe a work of such capaciousness was created"--

Exploring alternatives in East European history. The battle that took place near Konotop in late June 1659 was a continuation of the Muscovite-Cossack war, which began in the fall of 1658, soon after the signing of the Union of Hadiach. Cossack and Tatar detachments trapped a significant portion of the Muscovite army, leading to enormous Russian losses.