Don’t be ‘orrid; don’t be a twerp

From Edward Poynter, Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, 1890

First off, I ought to give credit where credit rightly and deservedly belongs. I was inspired to write the following from a much more concise (and, to be honest, much better-tempered) Facebook post by Teena Blackburn of Eastern Kentucky University.

The scientific facts are as stands: a healthy man from any ‘race’ of people, is capable of having natural and fertile offspring without any aid of technology, with a healthy woman from his own or any other ‘race’ of people. Without the aid of technology, no two men are capable of having natural and fertile offspring together. Without the aid of technology, no two women are capable of having natural and fertile offspring together. Regardless of the ethical implications, there is therefore one factual conclusion to be drawn. Race is a fiction, at least insofar as it regards genetic viability. Biological sex, on the other hand, is not a fiction.

Well, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? I hear you cry.

Though they may not agree on anything else, the recent exchange of petitions and missives from Orthodoxy in Dialogue and the Traditional Workers’ Party proves that they do share one belief in common: that there are only two sides and one must be forced to choose. The problem? The OriD side apparently believes that you can dispense with traditional Orthodox anthropology on the nature of the human body whilst still somehow maintaining that races are equal. And the TWorPs believe that you can dispense with traditional Orthodox teachings on racial equity without also undercutting a sexual ethic that favours the family. They both grasp at what they see as the one bedrock truth without seeing that those two truths are connected.

Both the OriDs and the TWorPs, for all their mutual grandstanding about how they (and only they) stand within the main of the Orthodox tradition, miss a key element of the larger picture. Just as the heresiarchs of our early days as a Church overreacted to one another and lost sight of the larger divine-human image of Christ in the process, so too it seems the heresiarchs of our day are overreacting to one another and losing sight of the larger image – not of divine things, but in this case of the merely human.

How about this for a novel solution, then? The ‘races’ are equal and commensurate on the most fundamental possible biological standard – the proven capability of any healthy man of any ‘race’, and any healthy woman of any other ‘race’, to have natural, viable and fertile offspring together. That’s the the reality and duality of biological sex, along with everything else that implies. However much I may disagree with him on other political matters, there is good reason at this juncture in our history to be thankful for someone like Father John Whiteford of ROCOR, who is willing and able to publicly stand up for both realities, and not lose sight of their broader anthropological meaning and purpose. It’s possible – and indeed necessary! – to be neither an OriD nor a TWorP on this question.

An eloquent shepherd’s pipe

Saint Gregory the Theologian

One of the several Orthodox figures cited specifically by the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr as having a particular resonance with modern œcological thought is also one of the three (count them) people gifted by the Holy Orthodox Church with the cognomen of ‘Theologian’, alongside Holy Apostle John and the Venerable Symeon. He is also one of the handful of saints (alongside Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, Saint Ephraim the Syrian, his contemporary Saint John Chrysostom and Saint John of Damascus) whose translated works were available in the vernacular to the people of Kievan Rus’, and contributed to the early depth and breadth of feeling and action in that people’s shared Christian life. I am speaking of Saint Gregory the Theologian, whom we commemorate today.

Saint Gregory was apparently a bit of a character – a ‘gentleman-bishop’, in the words of Lionel Wickham, with a flair for rhetoric; ‘touchy, rather vain, sometimes downright tiresome… waspish and given to self-justification’ – and a friend of mine from church recently compared him to a blustery, stuffy British aristocrat. For all that, however, he loved the Church with a devotion that couldn’t be faked (particularly since that same love bore him up to offices which he resented and duties which he loathed), and brought a truly formidable intellect to bear upon the deepest questions of our existence, expressing those mysteries not only with a finely-honed poetic tongue and pen, but with a reverent awe and humility that apparently didn’t come easily or naturally to his upbringing.

Having recently read his Five Theological Orations, the depth and subtlety of Saint Gregory’s thinking is instantly remarkable, and even in translation (a poor substitute, I am told, for the original Greek!), the beautiful poetry and parallelism which Saint Gregory deploys in his descriptions and understandings of the nature of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit come through, in some cases, loud and clear. So too, indeed, does the Platonic influence, even though Saint Gregory himself disavows many of Plato’s pagan concepts of the Divine.

And it also becomes clear to see, in the twenty-eighth Oration in particular, why a Sufi Muslim traditionalist like Seyyed Hossein Nasr thought so highly of his writing, and saw in it such deep potentials for an œcological Christian theology. For Saint Gregory, all of natural creation – from the wings of songbirds and the feathers of peacocks; the music of cicadas and the industry of ants, spiders and bees; the petals of flowers, the depths of the seas and the heights of the mountains and heavens – all of it is pregnant with the glory and grace of the Divine, and is stamped with the Creator’s mark. For him, it becomes something of a sign of ingratitude to look on any of these things and not value them rightly – not only for their own sake but for the sake of Him who made them. Although he places this point at the service of a broader theological aim: that of refuting the critics of trinitarianism, the argument is still a firm one standing on its own merits.

Also of interest: at one point Saint Gregory puts paid to the notion that Christ’s sacrifice was an act of legal satisfaction and appeasement of the Father. From the thirtieth Oration, chapter fourteen:

‘Ever living to appeal for us:’

Yes indeed—what deep significance and humanity it expresses! ‘Appealing’ does not imply here, as it does in popular parlance, a desire for legal satisfaction—there is something humiliating in the idea. No, it means representing us in his role of mediator, in the way that the Spirit too is spoken of as ‘appealing’ on our behalf. ‘For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man, Jesus Christ.’ Even at this moment he is, as man, making representation for my salvation, until he makes me divine by the power of his incarnate manhood.

How far a cry from the later distortions of the atonement! In addition, Saint Gregory issues a firm and sterling defence of Orthodox trinitarianism in these Orations. What is worthy of note is that he does it not by appealing to the infallibility or the literal interpretation of Scripture. He notes repeatedly, and with a palpable sense of disgust, that he has little patience for the sorts of semantic games such literalists devise to sow confusion. ‘It is not a hard task to clear away the stumbling block that the literal text of Scripture contains—that is,’ he addresses his interlocutors, ‘if your stumbling is real and not just wilful malice.’ Indeed, at one point he says outright: ‘Some things mentioned in the Bible are not factual; some factual things are not mentioned; some nonfactual things receive no mention there; some things are both factual and mentioned.’ And again: ‘“Believing in” is not the same thing as “believing a fact about”.’

Was Saint Gregory a theological liberal then? No; not at all! Can a man who stood steadfast on the side of the Orthodox, Chalcedonian understanding of the Trinity be truly considered a ‘liberal’, least of all by a presumptuous peanut gallery standing at a sixteen-century remove? It’s only within an anachronistic, early twentieth-century American frame of reference, which empties theology of its content and focusses solely on methods and pragmatics, that he can even be suspected of such. Saint Gregory refers instead, not only to Scripture (though plenty to that!), but also to the sense and the spirit which motivates the Church of Christ as a whole, and not just in any one of its constituent parts. The ‘we’ with which he speaks is the conciliar ‘we’ of the Church, as here:

We shall give fuller grounds when we discuss the question of what is not in the Bible, but for the present it will be sufficient for us to say just this: it is the Spirit in whom we worship and through whom we pray. ‘God,’ it says, ‘is Spirit, and they who worship him must worship him in Spirit and in Truth.’ And again: ‘We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.’ And again: ‘I will pray with the Spirit but I will pray with the mind also’—meaning, in mind and spirit. Worshipping, then, and praying in the Spirit seem to me to be simply the Spirit presenting prayer and worship to himself.

The subtlety of Saint Gregory’s thinking, and the foundational respect it deserves particularly within the Orthodox tradition, is on full display in the Theological Orations. Even if he was, for many of his contemporaries, a grouchy, reticent, stubborn and stuffy personality to deal with – can there be any better proof that the Church has needed such difficult people than the example of Saint Gregory, and the corpus of theological writings which he bequeathed to us? Holy Father Gregory of Nazianzus, pray to God the Father, to God the Son and to God the Holy Spirit – whose eternal and beautiful mysteries you came so much the nearer than any of us to glimpsing – for us!

The sweet-sounding shepherd’s pipe of your theology
Overpowered the trumpeting of the orators;
For having searched the depths of the Spirit
Eloquence was also bestowed upon you.
Pray to Christ God, Father Gregory,
That our souls may be saved!

Of Christian Arabs and Arab nationalism

I do realise that I will be opening myself up to charges of hypocrisy on this topic, after all my numerous blog posts denouncing nationalism as a modernist turn away from the old, multivalent political forms that prevailed under Byzantine rule and more broadly in the mediæval world. To these critiques I still hold somewhat. I still believe nationalism links people to state structures far too easily and far too glibly for it to be a comfortable social position, even for a Church which has developed sympathies for it. However, this is a topic which is never as simple as it first appears, and nowhere is the reality of that messier than in the former lands of Byzantium itself.

Arab nationalism is a tricky thing, not least because so many of its early proponents and theorists were Christians, educated in Catholic and Presbyterian colleges in Syria. Dr Nasif and his son Ibrahim al-Yâzijî were Melkites. Butrus al-Bustânî was born Maronite but became a Presbyterian later in life. Dr Faris Nimr Pasha and Nagîb ‘Âzûrî were Orthodox Christians. As with other Christian subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire – the Bulgarians and the Greeks most noticeably – nationalism had a strong attraction to Christian Arabs. The liberation of their people, on a mass basis, from the Ottoman yoke would yield a chance for dignity that the previous subjugation had never offered. There is, I grant, good reason for sympathy here, although it’s something I refer to as a ‘historical accident’: a moment in the relations between Church and state which is passing.

But with Arab Christians there has always been an additional difficulty. Unlike Bulgarians and Greeks in their own homelands, they were always minorities – and always minorities, at that, among potentially-hostile neighbours. Paul Eedle put it best: ‘to be an Arab and a Christian provoked an identity crisis for many long before the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and many sought to take refuge in radical revolutionary movements where religion was not an issue.’ It’s not an accident that an Arab national consciousness began to grow at around the same time as the fundamentalist revival movement led by Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhâb was taking shape elsewhere in the Arab world. The national movement, at least, was non-sectarian. The Muslims who joined and led nationalist circles – figures like al-Kawâkibî – were notably friendlier with and more sympathetic to Christians and Jews than their contemporaries were, and abhorred sectarian prejudice and violence. Is it any wonder that Arab Christians, faced with the choices between the loss of their culture and language from the Turks on the one hand, and with the loss of their faith from the ‘revivalists’ on the other, would seek refuge in a third way that could make room for them, as Christians and as Arabs? Is it any wonder that Christians could be driven to support ‘tyrants’ and ‘dictators’, where those same political leaders offer them the one meagre protection they might lay claim to, the one chance at having a voice of their own?

It’s an option that too many Arabs, in too many corners of their own world, have been actively denied by the machinations of the great powers. The irony should not be lost that the Arab nationalist moment – the rising against the Ottomans in 1916 – could not have occurred, as a ‘moment’, without the interference and support of great power politics. In the aftermath, even the strongest and most charismatic Arab nationalist leaders who, like Nasser, tried their damnedest to break free of great power politics, could not manage it.

So, yes, I do have a soft spot in my heart for Arab nationalism – a soft spot which is denied to the more ‘successful’ forms of nationalism like those found in Bulgaria and Greece (or certain Slavic countries further north). The ‘successful’ nationalisms are that much more likely to take the triumphalist road, as they have done. They are that much more likely to deny any king but Cæsar and to cry out for Barabbas. They are that much more likely to rewrite history to suit themselves, to embrace power at the expense of truth. On the other hand, a civic nationalism which has been broken against the shoals of history, which was cast into despair and confusion by the passing of historical events: now that is a nationalism which is capable of coming before the tomb, and weeping there.

Duds in al-Quds

A certain former Indiana state governor’s recent visit to the Holy City may have gone over well with Likud and their American and British supporters. It didn’t go over well with anyone else.

Pope Tawadros II of the Coptic Church, no doubt remembering what it was like when his countrymen were visited by another American neoconservative statesman and unceremoniously thrown under the bus, refused to meet with the veep. Wise move on their part. The Copts have long shown excellent judgement on these issues. They have to; that’s how they’ve managed to survive this long.

As for the Palestinians themselves, they’re having none of it. The Christians of Palestine, notably Archimandrite Theodosios (Hanna) of Sebastē, have already registered their great displeasure with the diplomatic move to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. None of them welcomed the Hoosier. In fact, Fatah called for a general strike today; most Palestinian businesses closed up shop for the duration of the state visit, according to the Quartz article.

Meanwhile, sixteen-year-old Ahed Tamimi, along with her mother and cousin, is still in indefinite military detention, awaiting what’s sure to be a kangaroo trial for defending her fifteen-year-old cousin, who was shot in the head by an IDF soldier. The well-oiled machinery of collective punishment as it applies to Palestinians is still, it seems, running smoothly in the State of Israel. Hardly a Christian – or, rightly speaking, even a Jewish – principle.

So much for the ‘realist’ at 1600 Pennsylvania. The fact that America is no longer considered a trustworthy broker in the peace process in the Levant is now apparent to Israel’s liberals. If for nothing else, we may have the current administration to thank – or, more likely, blame – for tearing off even the veneer of objectivity and civility we may have had previously. Our now open and blatant hostility to a two-state solution loses our government further ground in the Middle East, and jeopardises some of our true national interests.

I honestly pray for my Palestinian brothers and sisters, both Muslim and Christian. I pray that our nation’s short-sighted and foolish policies toward them will be short-lived. I pray that we come out of this with a stronger appreciation for the patience of the Palestinian people.

Living to Some Purpose

Dr Adnan al-Pachachi

I recently finished reading the memoirs of Iraqi elder statesman and diplomat Dr Adnan al-Pachachi: Living to Some Purpose.

More nonagenarians should write memoirs, I feel. It struck me on reading this book that anyone who has lived through and witnessed first-hand the devastation of the second world war, the existential anxieties of the postwar era, the social upheavals of the Sixties and everything afterward probably has more than one or two interesting things to say about them. Also, in general, the experience and the wisdom of the elderly is far too often undervalued in our day. Would that more folks like Dr Pachachi put pen to paper! They’d find a willing reader in me.

As it is, though, Adnan al-Pachachi is no ordinary ninety-year-old. He served under four different Iraqi governments with distinction. He was a peer and (sometimes grudging) admirer of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was an earnest and unflagging advocate for the rights and dignity of Palestine at the United Nations. He was the man behind the scenes who did as much as anyone else to forge the Trucial States into the United Arab Emirates. He was active in Iraqi opposition politics, but he adamantly and steadfastly opposed American policy, from the prosecution of the First Gulf War, through sanctions and no-fly, through the decision to declare the Second Gulf War. And then he reluctantly came out of retirement to serve as a political figure in the centrist, non-sectarian political formations in the new Iraqi republic. The Iraqiya List of the present day was the vehicle constructed by Pachachi and his peers.

If there is one weakness in Dr Pachachi’s narrative, it appears to be his insistence of inserting praise for himself in the form of commendations, letters and articles written to or about him by other high-ranking and prominent figures in the world of international diplomacy and politics. In the best and most piquant of these cases this can be a little bit underhanded – he delights in being considered a formidable foe by his adversaries. He justifiably revels in being labelled a troublemaker and an intransigent thwart to British interests in the Middle East, for example. I actually don’t mind that much reading what other people thought of his actions in the context of the geopolitical situations he found himself in: they serve a useful purpose and illuminate Dr Pachachi’s own rôle in events. But sometimes they could interrupt the flow, and I feel these might have been better served as entries in the appendices.

One is struck as one reads, with the remarkable breadth and depth of Pachachi’s understanding, his erudition and his strategic sensibility – but more than that, with the subtle turns of his political ideas. He is a man of conviction, but does not fit comfortably into any ideological box (unless one is willing to speak broadly of Arab nationalism). I don’t pretend I would agree with him on every particular, but the man speaks with consideration, integrity and authority. He blends a certain earnestness when it comes to human rights and democratic procedure, with a deep-seated and emotional attachment to the Hashemite monarchy and the generation of civil servants which it fostered. He blends Third World sensibilities – including advocacy for Palestine, a certain limited admiration for Nasser and a certain gratitude toward some Soviet leaders (particularly Khrushchev) – with a palpable Anglophilia.

These may seem incongruous, but Dr Pachachi points out that this is not a contradiction: what he loves in Britain pertains to what is permanent to Britain, whereas what caused him to rail bitterly against British actions at the UN and later as an elder of the Iraqi opposition was the imperialist legacy which he felt to be a betrayal of the British spirit. He is a self-proclaimed centrist and an admirer of American sæcularism, convinced of the failures of both planned œconomy and religious-fundamentalist sectarian politics. And yet he had no truck with the American ‘centrism’ of the neoconservatives and the liberal interventionists when it came to how they treated his own home country, believing them to be serving Zionist goals. The two words he uses most to describe himself are ‘nationalist’ and ‘democrat’, and yet each of these descriptors has its limits. I have no way of knowing how he’d take the comparison, but in many ways he reminds me somewhat of an old-fashioned, moderate-tempered Whig in the mould of Edmund Burke.

I appreciated and enjoyed reading of his own insights into the situation in Iraq from 1990 onward. The fact that he had opposed, from positions of conscience and long experience, all of: the invasion of Kuwait, the American reprisal, the sanctions régime, the open lies (which he doesn’t hesitate to call out as such) on which the younger Bush based his intervention in 2003, the prosecution of the war itself, the destruction of the country he loved and its recomposition on a sectarian basis, renders his account that much more valuable.

Again, much of what makes this political autobiography so interesting, is how Dr Pachachi is able to foreground his take on current events in the Arab world against a context of the past hundred years of history in the Levant and on the Arabian Peninsula – events which he himself witnessed as they were happening and analysed directly in their own aftermaths. Over a career spanning the better part of seven decades, the man has plenty worthwhile to say.

Don’t be a sucker

I denied the ‘bromance’ in 2016, and I still deny it now. In fact, I’d say there’s more evidence of a bromance between the White House and a certain Slovenian Marxo-Freudian pop ‘philosopher’ than there ever was of one between the White House and the Kremlin.

The problem is, of course, that there’s never been that much ‘there’ there, when it comes to any sort of sub rosa relationship between the Russian and the American heads of state, and subsequent events have long since proven it. Trump’s surrogates have been attacking Russian interests in Syria and the Ukraine more actively than Obama’s had done, and just recently Tillerson has announced that the United States will be keeping a military presence in Syria, one committed to the removal of Assad, indefinitely. Obama’s one foreign policy initiative to have drawn praise and support from Putin, has been the one foreign policy initiative Trump has been the most assiduous about wanting to undo (to Putin’s chagrin).

The thing is, all of this was foreseeable, if one knew where to look. Trump did not offer substantive change, only a change of style. He was friendly with the NED; he was friendly with the big banks; he was friendly with the military contractors. What it boils down to is this: if Putin were for a moment to have believed that Trump was a trustworthy or useful surrogate in Washington, he would have to have been an idiot of colossal proportions.

And whatever else you may think of Russia’s President, an idiot he is not.

My advice to my fellows on the left would be to stop baying after the Russian collusion red-herrings, and start looking at what Trump actually does in office, whom his policies are actually meant to benefit. If you want to beat him, get a sense of strategy. Start looking at the big picture. Be as innocent as doves, but as wise as serpents. Don’t be blinkered by ideological blather from the American think-tank industrial complex. Trump’s closest friends on the international stage are decidedly not in Moscow and still less in Beijing, but in Riyadh and Tel Aviv. The more astute observers of American foreign policy, those with the best track record, have already seen ample enough evidence of this to draw that conclusion, and deplore it.

If we want to get serious about rebuilding an equitable, just, prosperous and respected America again, then we need to get back to basics. Liberal bromides from the Cold War – followed by people across the political board – need to be checked at the door. We need to look further back, to the éminences grises of great power politics in the past: specifically Metternich and Pobedonostsev. We need to focus on our domestic problems – particularly those related to healthcare, jobs, infrastructure, education and local government – and in so doing we need to rid ourselves, as the Federalists and British Tories of days past did, of the illusion that we have either permanent friends or permanent enemies on the international stage.

I say we’d do well to follow Dr Bacevich’s lead.

The promise of Pereyaslavl

Vasiliy Buturlin at Kiev

In my series before on the invaluable work of Gyorgi Fedotov, in detailing a believer’s-eye view of Russian spirituality and revealing the inner content of Russia’s religious ‘folk-history’ from a sympathetic view in The Russian Religious Mind, I noted in the context of his discussion on Russia’s tradition of attempting to approximate a just-war praxis in the absence of a hard-and-fast doxa that the early radical, kenotic and humble spirituality of the early Kievan Rus’ degenerated in several ways.

Fedotov describes it thus: the first places where this degeneration took place were in Galich and Kiev themselves. Their spirituality was infected, from their long contacts with Poland-Lithuania and polities further west, by a certain kind of upper-class pride – an emphasis on honour and revenge. Nextly, Vladimir and Moscow. The spiritual authorities in Vladimir and Moscow did not succumb to this emphasis on honour and revenge, and outwardly they still condemned even their own princes for pride, cruelty and violence. But instead they took refuge in a kind of self-protective political cynicism. The religious genius and political expediency became too narrowly conflated. Only in Novgorod did Fedotov comprehend a safe haven, at least temporarily, for the old caritative and kenotic spiritual values of Old Rus’.

The 18^th of January, an important date in the history of early-modern Russia under the early Romanovs, marks the conclusion of the Rada of Pereyaslavl between the Cossack hetman Senovi Bogdan Khmelnitskiy and Tsar Alexis the Quiet. Bogdan Khmelnitskiy was the leader of the bloody, messy Cossack uprising against Poland, and he drew his support not from the nobility but from the lower classes. (Even Rusin peasantry, some of the poorest people in Europe long-oppressed under the Polish państwo, joined in the uprising.) As with Tsar Alexis himself, Bogdan’s legacy is mixed. I am not talking merely about his shameful treatment of the Jews or of the kholops (a servile institution which, to his credit, Tsar Alexis did abolish).

I’m talking more about the contradictory spiritual principles which Bogdan Khmelnitskiy’s uprising represented. As a Polish-educated nobleman, Bogdan had of course inherited in full the Galician-Kievan distortion of Christian ethics. He had a haughty and high-handed character, quick to anger and revenge. Much of his motivation in warring with the Poles came from his personal enmity with the overbearing Polish lordling Daniel Czapliński, who murdered his son and kidnapped his wife during one of Bogdan’s absences. His campaign was as much about offended honour and personal revenge as it was about justice for the people of Ruthenia in any broader sense. The transformation of the Zaporizhian Cossacks from a quasi-democratic steppe league into a more Westernised hereditary noble warrior caste was, in fact, largely Khmelnitskiy’s doing. And yet, by the lights of the time he did acquit himself with regard to the common people. Khmelnitskiy did have a sense of noblesse oblige toward the poor which he could exercise… when it suited him. To the poorer Ruthenians who joined his campaign, he was their ‘Moses’, their ‘redeemer and liberator’.

Khmelnitskiy wasn’t perfect – he was prideful, and held an immense capacity in his high-born heart for spite, revenge and cruelty. But he could also embody some of the best tendencies of Rus’ caritative spirituality. The reunion of the lands under the Cossack hetmanate with the Great Russian Tsardom was also accomplished through a council of accord on 18^th January 1654: the Rada of Pereyaslavl, during which the Cossacks met with Vasiliy Vasil’evich Buturlin, the representative of Tsar Alexis, and came unanimously to the decision to place themselves under Russian military protection with a number of guarantees of their autonomy. That council represented the humane traditions of the Cossacks and the Russians both, the spirit of sobornost’ that characterised even the zemsky sobor which chose Alexis’s father Michael Fedorovich as the Tsar of Moscow. The later abrogation of that treaty which united the lands of the Cossacks with those of Great Russia, however, was largely a result of the wanton, unilateral treachery of the later Cossack hetman Ivan Mazepa.

Mazepa represents the other side of the coin from Khmelnitskiy, even though they occupy a similar position in nationalist mythology in the country which claims them both. The two of them had similar educations and upbringings. Khmelnitskiy may have established the Cossacks as a class of landowning nobles; Mazepa exploited this system to his own benefit, amassing vast swathes of land for himself and becoming a ‘patron of the arts’ at a time when such things were an ostentatious affect. He was a masterful manipulator, a schemer and, if the legends Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, Franz Liszt et al. spread so salaciously are to be believed, a seducer. He made his name as a loyalist to the Russian Tsar, particularly in his early career. However, he quickly saw that the winds were blowing in another direction, made plans to defect as early as 1706, and indeed so did, to the Swedish king Charles XII when the opportunity presented itself in 1708.

Whereas Khmelnitskiy had at least some sense of noblesse oblige, Mazepa had none, unless it burnished his own reputation. Khmelnitskiy saw fit to consult with his fellow-Cossacks before and at the Rada of Pereyaslavl. Mazepa did no such thing. No council was called; no consultation with the other Cossacks took place. His sudden defection from Tsar Peter I came as a shock to those Cossacks not under his direct command. It’s telling that even though Peter’s reaction to the betrayal was swift, brutal and deliberately-galling, executing over 5,000 Cossacks at one stroke at Mazepa’s home base of Baturlin, most of the remaining Cossacks still flocked to his banner – and not out of fear or cowardice. After all, Mazepa had not consulted them first. He had not only betrayed the Tsar, he had betrayed them. The campaign Mazepa led against his own former comrades was every bit as brutal as Peter’s reprisal; the Swedes he supported were indiscriminate in their violence against civilians, and the lands of the hetmanate were laid waste with a fury born of the Thirty Years’ War to which the Swedes had also been party. The diminishment under later Tsars of the liberties and autonomy Tsar Alexis promised them at Pereyaslavl, is to be attributed as much to the civil war between them as it is to the policies of Tsar Peter the Great.

As if to prove Dr Samuel Johnson’s maxim that ‘(false) patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’, one of the first things that Mazepa did upon his defection was to defend himself as a ‘true son of the Fatherland’ to his second-hand man Ivan Il’ich Skoropadskiy, and urge him to attack the Muscovites. Skoropadskiy was taken aback by this, but not for long. The civil war among the Cossacks was accompanied by a ‘war of manifestos’ between Mazepa and Skoropadskiy, with each of them attempting to rally support by proto-nationalistic references to the ‘fatherland’.

As to the Treaty of Pereyaslavl itself, it went into decline from there, as noted above. The substance of the Treaty, the sobornyy-conciliar openness with which it was concluded, the willingness of Vasiliy Buturlin and the Cossacks to come to a peaceful and even-handed accord between them, stands in stark contrast to its later furtive, unilateral abrogation. But it did, for a time, represent a high-water mark in the relationship between the successor-countries to Kievan Rus’. God willing something similar may one day happen again.