Tale of Hetman Polubotka
The first myth of his biography begins with the title - hetman: he was not hetman.
He was an order hetman, and this is something else. A punishment officer is an acting one either before the election of a new hetman, or in the case of a long absence of a permanent hetman. As a rule, orders were put in place if elections could not be held immediately for one reason or another, and these were deeply compromising figures, and not particularly proactive - temporary is temporary.
Polubotok himself became an order hetman in 1722 after the death of Skoropadsky. And it happened in difficult conditions - the betrayal of Mazepa by Peter had not yet been forgotten, and to control Little Russia, a Little Russian Collegium was created, headed by Brigadier Velyaminov, in order to suppress all sorts of outrages and prevent treason. And Peter did not approve Polubotka, until his death he did not. And there were reasons for this, far from the ones given.
Biography
Polubotok, unlike the same Mazepa, is a man of a new formation who was born after the War of Independence, in 1660. The Commonwealth for him was an abstraction, hardly even his father remembered it normally, Polubotkov had no connections with it, and where did it come from?
Surname - nickname (in Russian - half boots). The grandfather, with whom the family began, rose to the rank of centurion (battalion commander in a modern way, at most a colonel in modern Russia). And my father became already a colonel, but only thanks to family ties. With this, the then centurion Leonty was lucky - he became related with the hetman Samoilovich, which is why his career shot up: colonel, then general esaul.
Why?
So, too, it seems clear - the hetman's court was still a ball of snakes. And to bring a native of the lower classes closer to you, tying them to the family - is a completely normal personnel decision in those conditions.
So our hero was born into a fairly well-to-do family and received an excellent education: the Kiev-Mohyla Collegium was practically a university at that time. And he began his service in a privileged position in the Chernigov regiment. He survived the clan and fall of his patron, Samoilovich, whom Mazepa slandered in front of Moscow (he slandered exactly in time: Sophia needed an extreme one for the failure of the Crimean campaigns, it was not her lover who was to blame).
Pavel Leontyevich will show this talent to be on the side of the winner more than once.
True, in 1692 Mazepa accused Polubotkov of conspiring with the Samoilovichs against his beloved and deprived him of all his estates.
Morals, I repeat, at the hetman's court were the most Byzantine: writing denunciations against each other in Moscow, conspiring secretly with Poland and Sweden, intrigue against both our own and others - it was the norm. Now it is no longer clear whether Polubotkov was framed or Mazepa was simply cleaning up the hetman's team of the past. In principle, both are possible, but the fact is the fact: Leonty did not survive the shame and died, but his son did not give up.
In 1703 his estates were returned to him, and two years later he was made a Chernigov colonel, in fact, the governor of a considerable and wealthy region.
What should have been done to the disgraced Cossack, in addition to the distant relatives of the Samoilovichs, in addition to being married to Samoilovich's niece, in order to rise again?
Big mystery. Especially considering the paranoid suspicion of Mazepa and his gentry manners. It was necessary to show not just loyalty, but something more.
Again, there are no documents and you can assume anything, including bad ones, such as denunciations or dark deeds. But these are just assumptions. Maybe Mazepa, who corrupted his goddaughter and betrayed his oath, was tortured by conscience? Or, there, Pavel Leontyevich was an administrative genius, without whom there is nothing at all?
But in 1708 Polubotok showed his gift - and did not follow Mazepa, who had benefited him five years earlier. He did not follow him, but went to Glukhov to the Cossack Council called by Peter, where he ran for hetmans.
Undoubtedly, who knows that the prehistory, that the Little Russian proverb "God forbid from Ivan Pan", Peter did not like him, but for the right choice of side Polubotok received the estates of Mazepa Obidovsky's nephew, Pylyp Orlik and a piece of Mazepa's own property - only 2 households , including the city of Lyubech.
That is, in fact, Pavel Polubotok became an oligarch, surpassing both his father and his grandfather by an order of magnitude. He is credited with the phrase thrown in the face of Peter:
“... You do not hesitate to send him to hard and humiliating work, forcing the Cossacks, like slaves, to dig canals in your possessions, and what is most insulting to us - deprive us of our most precious right to elect hetmans and other chiefs by free votes; instead of leaving the judges from our people the power to judge your compatriots, you have appointed us Great Russians as judges who do not know or pretend not to know our rights and privileges and do not cease to rape and insult us in every way ... "
He himself owned, like cattle, two thousand families (10-15 thousand people) and profited from them at all. However, he did not say this phrase.
Half-work at that time was not up to eloquence - alcohol, tobacco, flour trade will not do themselves, you need a look at the flaps. Well, and ambitions - Pavel Leontyevich seriously saw himself as a hetman and, having colossal money, seriously worked on it.
His dreams came true only after the death of Skoropadsky in 1722.
Conflict with Peter the Great
The main thing that happened then between the collegium and the foreman was the fact that the collegium, on the order of the sovereign, notified the general throughout Little Russia that everyone who had any displeasure against the foremen and any bosses in Little Russia should file complaints with the collegium. , established by the sovereign for the purpose of defending the poor against the rich and, in general, the common people against the Little Russian authorities.
Best of all, the reasons for this conflict are set out in Kostomarov, however, in general, Polubotka, a member of the separatist Cyril-Methodius brotherhood, extolled, but this passage speaks volumes.
The collegium really began to understand, the foreman really violated all possible and impossible laws, long ago becoming not an elected government, but a vulgar oligarchy, and attempts to cut off the oligarchs from either side of these oligarchs terribly enraged. They pissed off to the point that the foreman, led by Polubotok, began to oppose Velyaminov, and then, she realized that denunciations to Peter did not work - he trusted his people, but those who regularly pledged each other and continually intrigued, shoving gold in foreign banks (nothing not new under the moon), for some reason not.
And then Polubotok and his comrades went to Petersburg personally, hoping to demonstrate the unity of the Cossack position on Velyaminov, to put pressure on Peter in the issue of canceling the Little Russian Collegium and the election of the hetman. Absolute power is very useful for business.
In the end, it all ended in the Peter and Paul Fortress, where Polubotka was interrogated about purely economic matters, without a drop of politics.
I can't resist citing one fragment:
- The city of Lyubech, the Church of the Nativity of the Virgin, priest Gavrilo complained that Polubotok made an attack on the church land and other areas and took them by force, not paying attention to the acts of serfdom.
Polubotok against this charge gave this answer:
- I did not forcibly take away the property and lands of the church, and, perhaps, my clerk Semyon Kalmykov did so.
Polubotok against this charge gave this answer:
- I did not forcibly take away the property and lands of the church, and, perhaps, my clerk Semyon Kalmykov did so.
So lovely, it's all a switchman ...
As a result, after spending a year in prison, Polubotok died there in 1724.
His companions were released by Catherine I, who (more precisely, the bribe taker and the thief Menshikov) was clearly not up to the extermination of her own kind. So the name and would have disappeared into obscurity. O. hetman and corrupt businessman of the XNUMXth century, but a legend intervened.
The myth of gold
Did Polubotok have money?
Yes, of course, and a lot. I think Menshikov has less than six million in gold, but he knocked out a million or two in 15 years.
Did he hide them in England?
I think, after all, yes, the fashion was then in the Russian Empire, the joke about Londongrad is also suitable for that era.
Did he bequeathed them to an independent Ukraine?
Of course not. The mistake of many is that they are looking for fighters for Ukraine in the hetmans, and they were fighters for personal well-being and personal wealth and comfort.
What is Ukraine like?
Those Little Russians whom he actually enslaved and exploited, or that foreman who intrigued against him, and he against her?
This myth surfaced in the XX century:
“Alexander Ivanovich Rubets, a former professor of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, considers it his duty to inform people who are close or distant relatives to Pavel Leontyevich Polubotko, who served as hetman of Little Russia in 1722–1724, that after the death of the named hetman Polubotko, significant capital remained in London State Treasury, which he put there on demand.
This capital was not claimed by P.L. Polubotko's heirs, and has now increased to 80 million pounds sterling, or 800 million rubles.
Believing that the heirs have not lost the right to reclaim the said contribution in view of its indefinite term ("on demand") and, perhaps, realizing that one person cannot afford it, I most respectfully and diligently ask everyone with the surnames named below to come to the city of Starodub in the Chernigov province January 15, 1908 for a joint and comprehensive discussion of measures to legally reclaim Polubotka's capital from the London State Treasury ...
A. Rubets "
This capital was not claimed by P.L. Polubotko's heirs, and has now increased to 80 million pounds sterling, or 800 million rubles.
Believing that the heirs have not lost the right to reclaim the said contribution in view of its indefinite term ("on demand") and, perhaps, realizing that one person cannot afford it, I most respectfully and diligently ask everyone with the surnames named below to come to the city of Starodub in the Chernigov province January 15, 1908 for a joint and comprehensive discussion of measures to legally reclaim Polubotka's capital from the London State Treasury ...
A. Rubets "
With the light hand of a not quite adequate music teacher, Rubts, in 1907, this myth ended in nothing.
The second time it was used for the collapse of the USSR:
"In May 1990, the Ukrainian poet Volodymyr Tsybulko announced that if the gold is returned, then 38 kilograms will be needed for every citizen of independent Ukraine."
And as expected, they did not find anything.
And they could not find it. For deposits of this kind are clearly tied to the depositor and his direct (by will) heirs. Well, no one canceled the statute of limitations.
However, the passion for gratis is ineradicable. And I think about the mythical gold of the oligarch, who pretended to be a Cossack and hetman, we will hear more than once. It's just funny that in him someone manages to see a democrat and a freedom fighter.
Information