authored school dramas that celebrated Cossack history and Hetman Ivan Mazepa.
Mazepa himself was a graduate of the Mohyla, as well as of a Jesuit college in
Warsaw; having served at the Polish court, the urbane Mazepa demonstrated his
power and culture in lavish building projects of churches, monastery, and secular
edifices done in a“Mazepa baroque”style. His palace at Baturyn, for example,
featured a gracious hall for entertainment adorned with portraits of contemporary
European rulers and a libraryfilled with books in Latin, German, and Ukrainian
and a collection of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Its Mazepa baroque com-
bined the Italianate design of Vilnius architecture of the time, such as a columned
facade, with local decorative traditions including colorful ceramic rosettes created
by Kyiv artists.
Kyiv continued to be a center of publication reflecting the area’s multi-ethnic
diversity: thirteen printing presses included nine in Ukrainian, three in Polish, and
one in Hebrew. Political identity was greatly contested: David Frick has written of the
fluidly shifting identities of Uniate and Orthodox that some Ukrainian theologians
and polemicists (Lavrentii Zyzanii, Meletii Smotritsky, Kasian Sakovych) navigated
as they traveled between Kyiv, Rome, and Moscow, physically or intellectually.
Iakovenko describes the relative religious tolerance, or at least indifference to theo-
logical quarrels, of high nobility, while Orthodoxy continued to be central to some
ideologues. InSynopsis(1674) Innokentii Gizel, faculty member at the Mohyla
Academy, for example, postulated a unified history of Orthodox Slavs, depicting
the Dnieper region as the heartland of a common Orthodox civilization in the
Russian empire. Others found in Cossackdom and the Hetmanate a defining
identity: secular authors penned“Cossack chronicles”to memorialize the Cossack
wars and the independence of the Hetmanate and Rus’lands defined by Orthodoxy.
The“Eye Witness Chronicle”of the late seventeenth century, attributed to Roman
Rakushka (d. 1703), presents a contemporary’s dramaticfirst-hand account.
In the second half of the seventeenth century Russian rule in the Hetmanate was
relatively light, based on the Treaty of Pereiaslav in 1654. Khmelnytsky and the
Cossacks intended it as a bilateral agreement and military alliance that would allow
them to remain virtually independent; it guaranteed Cossack institutions, tax-free
status, and military autonomies, carving a wide sphere of independence in the
context of the Russian empire. But the hetman and Cossacks had to swear
allegiance in the name of their people to the tsar, and whenever the treaty came
up for renewal, Russia tried to infringe on Cossack autonomies, most tangibly by
stationing Russian governors infive cities with garrisons in 1659 and more
thereafter. Although they were not to intervene in city politics, in practice over
time townsmen often called on the governor to support them in conflicts with the
Cossack administration, and Russian authority grew. Nevertheless, the Hetmanate
experienced what Zenon Kohut calls a renaissance of strong hetman power from
1672 to 1709, after the worst of the warfare had subsided.
Another locus in which Russia tried to control Ukraine was the Orthodox
Church. In 1686 the Moscow patriarchate took oversight of the Kyiv metropolit-
anate from the patriarch of Constantinople. Gradually Moscow shrank the metro-
politan’s jurisdiction to the Hetmanate alone, moving some Belarus’an dioceses to
78 The Russian Empire 1450– 1801