A Little Russian Whodunit, Or the Case of Colonel Kapnist
At noon on a hot August day in 1750, Kyiv’s Governor General Mikhail Leontyev signed an arrest warrant for Vasyl Kapnist, the Colonel of Myrhorod. Kapnist, who was one of the Hetmanate’s top- ranking officers, was accused of no less than planning an attempt on the hetman’s life and plotting a coup d’etat. Troops were urgently dispatched to the empire’s southern frontier. There was a whiff of treason in the air and there was talk of a major war.
The rule of Kyrylo Razumovsky, the last Hetman of the Zaporozhian Sich, is referred to as “the golden autumn” of Ukrainian autonomy. A random person on the Ukrainian political Olympus, he received the mace from a “random empress,” the daughter of Peter the Great. The age of chivalry, as the 18th century is often called, was generally full of all kinds of chance events. A Colonel of the Guards Havryla Vyshnevsky, who was sent from St. Petersburg to Moldavia to replenish the tsar’s wine cellars, dropped by the God- forsaken village of Lemeshi, in the Kozelsk district, where he chanced upon a sweet-voiced boy Oleksiy with the funny nickname of Rozum (“intelligence, reason” in Ukrainian) and took him to the royal court. A bored princess accidentally heard the young man singing in the court choir and promoted him to be manager of her manor. What happened next may be considered natural, although contemporaries called it pure chance. The sun of the tsarina’s grace shone on everything that surrounded the favorite. Ukrainian Cossack officers lost no time in taking advantage of her feminine weakness and formally requested in 1744 that the hetmanate be restored. The empress graciously agreed and pointed a royal finger at her favorite’s 17-year-old brother Kyrylo.
It had taken six years of bureaucratic red-tape before the Cossack Army command and the clergy gathered in Hlukhiv on February 22, 1750, and handed the mace to Kyrylo Razumovsky, a count of the Russian Empire, President of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, and General-Field Marshal, whose only “merit” at the age of 22 was kinship with the empress’s favorite and, as legend has it, her secretly wedded husband. Somewhere in the midst of this elated crowd stood an old colonel, who was a veteran of many wars. What was he thinking, when he passed the mace to the young Paris dandy, who until recently was a village swineherd?
PROGRESS OF THE INVESTIGATION
Tsar Peter I, who was bursting to gain access to the southern seas, invited the Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians to settle in Russia. Approximately in 1711, among those who began arriving in that country was Pyotr Kapnist and his little son Vasiliy. Following an argument and an irreversible rift with his father, Vasiliy (now Vasyl) was adopted by Pavliuk, a captain in Izium, who advised him to enter a military career. In 1726 Pavliuk gave his insignia to his adopted son, who acquitted himself well in battles against the Tatars and Kalmyks. It was the Russian-Turkish War of 1735-1739 that allowed Kapnist to reveal his talents. Under the command of Field Marshal Minikh, he stormed Perekop, defended Ochakiv, and fought near Khotyn. In 1737 Kapnist was appointed Colonel of Myrhorod, in charge of the empire’s imperial frontiers beyond the River Dnipro. He built some fortresses here, drew up a map of the territory, and hunted for brigand Cossacks, the haidamaks (in fact, highwaymen). After a successful raid Colonel Mironov arrested Kapnist and took him to Kyiv.
In late July 1750 Cossack Kolba of the Salkove outpost brought a report from Yakiv Neshchadym, ataman of the Right Bank haidamaks, to the Kyiv gubernatorial chancery, saying that Colonel Vasyl Kapnist of Myrhorod was allegedly plotting a coup d’etat. As proof, the informer attached Kapnist’s letter dated February 28, 1750, and addressed to Chyhyryn commissioner Rudnytsky, which contained telltale signs of an anti-hetman (preparations for a poisoning) and, in broader terms, an anti-Russian conspiracy (negotiations about a military action jointly with the Polish nobility (szlachta) and Crimean murzas). The letter said, in particular, “My wish to be the hetman has not come true because they have elected Kyrylo Razumovsky as hetman, although he does not deserve this. Now, according to our agreement with the szlachta and the Horde, you must force the areas beyond the Dnipro from Arkhangelsk to the mouth of the Tiasmin to pay tribute to the Horde. To this end, I have dispatched Bairak and Potapenko to the trans-Dnipro lands as commanders who will not be objecting to but helping the Horde and the szlachta. I will also do my best to see that none of the Russians get out of there and I myself will be seeking an occasion to poison the hetman with a lethal drink and take over as his successor.”
The Governor General immediately informed the Senate and soon received an order to set up a secret investigative commission in Kyiv, headed by Leontyev and later, on August 19, to issue an imperial decree for the arrest of Colonel Kapnist and ensigns Bairak and Potapenko. Meanwhile, rumors about the Kapnist affair had reached the Zaporozhian Sich and touched off all kinds of fantastic allegations that kish ataman Vasyl Sych had switched sides and kurin ataman Perederiy had been in touch with Kapnist, who promoted him to the rank of colonel. Word also spread that the ataman had allowed the rank-and-file Cossacks to go to Poland and rob landlords there and that “a certain Muscovite, stationed near the Black Wood, also allows them to do so and even pays them money for this;” and that, in general, the Cossacks should be well-armed and ready to commence actions at the first call. The investigation snowballed. On August 21, St. Petersburg ordered a 5,000-strong force to occupy the Trans-Dnipro region. A week later Kapnist was interrogated for the first time and denied the accusations.
What occurred at the same time is significant in the light of the preceding events and totally inexplicable in the light of subsequent ones. In the Trans-Dnipro region, the Myrhorod regimental aide-de-camp Tykhon Kalnytsky began to retreat from the Russian troops. The quick-witted Colonel Mironov immediately arrested him and dispatched two more regiments of land militia to the south. One can well imagine the tensions that pervaded the top echelons: the country was on the brink of a new, all-out war. While the authorities were looking for Kapnist’s accomplices, the Cossack kish ataman (who was not arrested because the rumors of his liaison with the haidamaky proved to be unfounded) was prowling around the steppes in search of ataman Yakiv Neshchadym, who had whipped up this concoction.
The search produced totally unexpected results. On October 15, viyskovy tovarysh (lieutenant) Vasyl Zvenyhorodsky was arrested and confessed to having written the denunciation. A priest named Antony Vasyliev, from the village of Yeremiyivka, had fabricated the letter and a Kyiv-based artist Dmytro Vasyliev (Bazylevych) had made brass matrixes with Kapnist’s engraved signature. They were all arrested, and a matrix was sent to the empress. Kapnist was released from custody in late 1750, and in January 1751 the empress issued a decree rewarding the innocent victims Kapnist and his associates. The former Colonel of Myrhorod was promoted to brigadier, given 1,000 gold rubles, and appointed commander of the Slobodian regiments. Bairak and Potapenko each received 500 rubles and were allowed to serve as captains in Little Russia.
THE RIDDLES OF THE INVESTIGATION
At first glance, everything ended on a generally happy note: the loyal servants were rewarded and the wrongdoers were punished. Yet, too many riddles remain in this story. Firstly, by all accounts, there really was a conflict between Kapnist and Razumovsky because the Cossacks of the Myrhorod regiment were denied the customary right to elect their children to vacant positions, while the colonel himself was prudently transferred to Slobodian Ukraine. Secondly, for some reason Kapnist’s enemies were kept in a Kyiv jail until 1759. Finally, there is the question of the inexplicable movements of the Myrhorod aide-de-camp. But the main riddle is who was working behind the scenes of this story. In reality, it may have been the haidamaks who masterminded “the Kapnist affair” for they suffered from the colonel’s steppe raids; the hetman, who tried to neutralize a dangerous opponent; the Russian authorities, who sowed the seeds of mistrust in the hetman’s leadership; and finally, Kapnist himself, if, of course, the letter was really written by him and the “wrongdoers” were ordinary scapegoats of big politics.
However, it is impossible to verify these theories, which are full of glaring loose ends. According to the investigators, ataman Yakiv Neshchadym was a fictitious figure, so the “haidamak connection” is not valid. It is difficult to imagine that it took the young hetman six months not only to understand the situation but also to design a gross provocation, unless he was advised by someone from his entourage (e.g., in the view of Ukrainian historians, the hetman’s “evil genius,” his mentor H. N. Teplov?). As for the Russian authorities, Kapnist had, as it turned out later, some highly placed patrons, including Chancellor A. P. Bestuzhev himself. All this looked too cumbersome. If we accept the fact of Kapnist’s treason, then there should have been a reaction from the Polish Kingdom and the Ottoman Empire, which is not known.
By the force of his own character, Kapnist held his last office as commander of the Slobodian regiments only for a short time. In 1754 he was dismissed for abuse of power but was reinstated in 1757, when Russia entered the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). On August 19 (a fatal date!), 1757, Brigadier Kapnist was killed in one of the most glorious war actions of that epoch, the Battle of Gross Egersdorf, and the mystery of “the Colonel Kapnist case” was forever lost.
The late brigadier’s sons, raised without a father, were well known for their extraordinary abilities. One of them, an officer of the guards, fled to England because he did not want to be the lover of an empress past her prime, while another son raised a glass to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812. A third son went to Berlin in 1790 on behalf of the Little Russian opposition to conclude an anti- Russian military alliance with Prussia. Although these details have nothing to do with “the Kapnist affair” as such, they still offer a brilliant illustration of the customs that reigned in his family.
A farce turns into a tragedy when the first blood spills. But where is the line that demarcates the line between a concept and a crime? Or perhaps it never existed and the innocent victims are no more than eternal extras on the bloody stage of history? “The Kapnist affair,” which rocked the Hetmanate 250 years ago, lasted a mere six months. Leather whips swished and a stroke of the pen restored justice. Yet, this story leaves a somewhat unpleasant aftertaste, for it strongly resembles the methods of big politics that are accepted in our society today. It seems to challenge a truth as old as the hills: as times change, so do we.
