5th Dec, 2024 18:00
Autograph Letters, Historical Documents and Manuscripts
1425
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 from 1736.
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 consisted of six Russian military officers within the Hetmanate who functioned as a parallel government. It was responsible for 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.
Cossacks were fiercely independent nomads who Peter used to further his military and political objectives in the region. However, Cossacks threw their support to Swedish King Charles XII, Peter’s enemy, at the decisive battle of Poltava in 1709 after their leader, Ivan Mazeppa, discovered he was to be replaced as acting Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host. Sweden’s defeat at Poltava inspired Mazeppa’s supporters to write The Treaties and Resolutions of the Rights and Freedoms of the Zaporizhian Army, considered ´The First Constitution of Ukraine ´. In 1722, Mazepa’s successor, Ivan Skoropadsky, who had supported Czar Peter at Poltava but fought for Ukrainian autonomy died as his country’s largest landowner.
One year later Peter decreed that following Skoropadsky’s death there would be no new elections for Hetman. The acting Ukrainian Hetman, Pavlo Polubotok directed several petitions to the Czar calling for Ukrainian independence, which led to a series of interrogations in September 1723. Peter ordered his spy chief, Count Alexander Ivanovich Rumyantsev, mentioned in the present letter, to investigate the Hetman’s activities and barely two months later, in November 1723, Polubotok was arrested for treason 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 petitions 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.
The content of Peter the Great´s letter has been known to scholars of Russian history. Professor Clarence Manning (1893-1972) who headed Columbia University’s Department of Slavic Studies, notes in his book, The Story of the Ukraine, ´[Peter] also summoned Polubotok to St. Petersburg so that the Acting Hetman could be near the Tsar...[Polubotok had been] sending letters to Ukraine to tell the people how to act under the new investigations... Peter solved all problems by arresting and incarcerating him in the Fortress of Saints Peter and Paul in Petersburg together with Colonels Apostol and Miloradovich, who had been summoned also to the capital´.
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.
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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 from 1736.
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 consisted of six Russian military officers within the Hetmanate who functioned as a parallel government. It was responsible for 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.
Cossacks were fiercely independent nomads who Peter used to further his military and political objectives in the region. However, Cossacks threw their support to Swedish King Charles XII, Peter’s enemy, at the decisive battle of Poltava in 1709 after their leader, Ivan Mazeppa, discovered he was to be replaced as acting Hetman of the Zaporizhian Host. Sweden’s defeat at Poltava inspired Mazeppa’s supporters to write The Treaties and Resolutions of the Rights and Freedoms of the Zaporizhian Army, considered ´The First Constitution of Ukraine ´. In 1722, Mazepa’s successor, Ivan Skoropadsky, who had supported Czar Peter at Poltava but fought for Ukrainian autonomy died as his country’s largest landowner.
One year later Peter decreed that following Skoropadsky’s death there would be no new elections for Hetman. The acting Ukrainian Hetman, Pavlo Polubotok directed several petitions to the Czar calling for Ukrainian independence, which led to a series of interrogations in September 1723. Peter ordered his spy chief, Count Alexander Ivanovich Rumyantsev, mentioned in the present letter, to investigate the Hetman’s activities and barely two months later, in November 1723, Polubotok was arrested for treason 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 petitions 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.
The content of Peter the Great´s letter has been known to scholars of Russian history. Professor Clarence Manning (1893-1972) who headed Columbia University’s Department of Slavic Studies, notes in his book, The Story of the Ukraine, ´[Peter] also summoned Polubotok to St. Petersburg so that the Acting Hetman could be near the Tsar...[Polubotok had been] sending letters to Ukraine to tell the people how to act under the new investigations... Peter solved all problems by arresting and incarcerating him in the Fortress of Saints Peter and Paul in Petersburg together with Colonels Apostol and Miloradovich, who had been summoned also to the capital´.
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.
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Auction: Autograph Letters, Historical Documents and Manuscripts, 5th Dec, 2024
