32.3 Europe: a.d. 1701 to 1800  (Page 27/28)

This brought up again the thorny question of the shif ting allegiances of the various Cossack and Ukranian peoples. The Hetman of one large group of Cossacks was Ivan Stepanovich Mazeppa, born in the then Polish sector of the Ukraine, well educated in Jesuit academies but orthodox in religion and at one time a page at the court of King Jan Casimir of Poland. Mazeppa had mixed loyalties, part to the new czar and part to his people, who had wanted full Ukrainian independence in order to avoid Russian taxes, conscription and requisitions. Finally the Hetman did betray Peter and went over to the side of the invading Swedes, whom he thought would win. But while Mazeppa was gone, Peter's forces slipped into the former's home city of Baturin and completely destroyed it, slaughtering 7,000 inhabitants, soldiers and civilians alike. Most of the Ukrainians then stood by the czar and the worst winter of history, which followed, dealt a devastating blow to the invading Swedes, with sentries freezing to death at their posts and overall, some 3,000 Swedes freezing to death, with many more seriously incapacitated by frost-bite. Still Karl XII would not give up, hoping to receive reinforcements and supplies from Poland and the Turks and/or the Crimean Tatars. None of this materialized although he did gain support through the dealings of Mazeppa, of the wild Zaporozhsky Cossacks, who lived on 13 fortified islands below the rapids of the vast Dnieper River, under their Hetman Gordeenko. These Cossacks had sufficient boats to transport 3,000 men across the great river in a single trip, but once again Peter got there first and destroyed all the boats and razed their island base.

As noted in previous sections, the decisive battle of the Great Northern War was fought in the summer of 1709 at Poltava in the Ukraine, in which an original army of 19,000 Swedes left 6,900 dead and wounded and had 2,760 taken prisoner, including some 560 officers in both groups. Russian losses were light. In that single battle, the Swedish invasion of Russia was terminated and the political axis of Europe was shifted, with a new balance of power, which carried over for the next three centuries. The last of the Swedish army was caught and surrendered some days later as it attempted a southern escape and Czar Peter then had 17,000 Scandinavian prisoners. They were treated well, with the officers given the same rank in the Russian army, where some served Russia on other fronts. Of the regular soldier prisoners, in time some 1,000 became painters, goldsmiths, tailors, shoemakers, woodsmen and teachers. When the final peace came in 1721, only 5,000 Swedes could be found who wanted to return to Sweden. In the meantime, King Karl XII escaped to Turkey.

St Petersburg continued to flourish, with Italian, French and German architects all leaving their marks, but it never escaped entirely from the sea, from which it was snatched, suffering complete flooding in 1715 and again in 1775. The common people in and about St. Petersburg were chief ly Finnish and while the women were chambermaids or cooks, the men were sledge drivers or snow and ice shovelers and ice-breakers on the Neva. Ice blocks supplied ice-houses on the ground floor of every large home. Even the lowest servant spoke Russian, German and Finnish, while the educated often spoke 8 or 9 languages. There were endless supply problems. While fish could be obtained from lakes Ladoga and Onega, sheep and cattle had to be brought from the Ukraine, the Don and the Volga regions or even from Turkey. (Ref. 260 )