Behind the veil of mystery

(Conclusion. For Part I, see The Day, No. 3)

In his [Russian-language] work Maksim Zhelezniak, Volodymyr Holobutsky claims that Maksym Zalizniak was born in the village of Ivkivtsi, which was then part of what was known as the “Polish province,” in today’s Chyhyryn raion, Cherkasy oblast. This is how Holobutsky describes Zalizniak’s life story: “Maksim Zhelezniak was the son of a peasant serf from the village of Ivkovets, Chyhyryn district. Maksim was 13 years old when he became an orphan without any means of subsistence. As a young child, he had heard a lot of stories about the Zaporozhian Sich and the gallant Cossacks. Now that ill luck had befallen him, Maksim decided to set out for Zaporizhia. To tell the truth, many things there differed from what he had been told. Maksim came to experience the hard life full of privations of Zaporozhian wretch.”

The Ivkivtsi version is also confirmed in the following works:

1. Our Native Land, an anthology on the history of the Cherkasy region (p. 176): “One of the leaders was the Zaporozhian Cossack Maksym Zalizniak. He was born in the village of Ivkivtsi, near the large village of Medvedivka (Chyhyryn raion, Cherkasy oblast). In his youth Zalizniak worked as a hired laborer in the Zaporizhia and Ochakiv regions.”

2. The well known ethnographer P. Sosa writes in the article “The People’s Wrath from Kholodnyi Yar”: “He was a man of medium height, with broad shoulders and gray eyes with a ruddy blond oseledets (topknot — Ed.) slung over the right ear. According to the researchers Mordovtsev and Skalkovsky, Zalizniak was born in the hamlet of Ivkivtsi near the village of Medvedivka (now Chyhyryn district) into a peasant family.”

It should be noted that in the 18th century Ivkivtsi enjoyed the status of a village, not a hamlet. A reference dated 1762 states that there is a church in Ivkivtsi, and the priest Prokopiy “did not join the Union.” In the 18th century, before and after the Koliyivshchyna period, Ivkivtsi was part of state-owned lands, the so- called krulevshchyna (“the king’s realm”). For this reason, the claim that Zalizniak was of muzhyk (i.e., peasant serf) origins assumes a somewhat different meaning. Zalizniak came from a peasant (Cossack) family that lived on lands run by the starosta. These lands were not the property of the starosta or any nobleman, but together with the population belonged to the “crown.”

Paradoxically, while the village records in Medvedivka state: “Maksym Zalizniak, national hero, leader of the Koliyivshchyna people’s uprising, was probably born in 1740 in the village of Ivkivtsi,” the staff of the ethnographic museum in the village of Medvedivka continues to claim that Zalizniak was born either in their village or on a farmstead called Kalynivka located between Medvedivka and Ivkivtsi. Yet we have found no documentary proof of any connection between Zalizniak and this farmstead.

Thus, it is clear that there is no consensus on Zalizniak’s birthplace either in Ukrainian and foreign historiography.

A close examination of the sources utilized by the supporters of one version or another clearly indicates that they base their research on two documents: a report by the Tymoshiv battalion otaman Vasyl Korzh, dated July 2, 1768, and the record of Zalizniak’s interrogation at the Karhopil Rifle Regiment, dated July 26, 1768. The originals of these documents are stored in Kyiv’s Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine (TsDIAU).

The otaman’s report appeared for the first time in Holobutsky’s book Maksim Zhelezniak, which was published in Moscow in 1960 in a print run of 30,000 copies. Since this book is a rarity today (there is not even a copy in the Vernadsky National Library), I think it is crucial to re-publish the text of Korzh’a report after checking that it is available at the TsDIAU.

Here is the part of the report that deals with Zalizniak:

“Maksim Zhalizniak, registered at the Tymoshiv battalion, was born in the village of Ivkovets in the Polish province (i.e., in Right-Bank Ukraine — Author). After arriving at the Sich, he was a hired laborer for about five years, and in [1]762, when he left this place, he lived in Ochakiv (outside the Zaporozhian Sich — Author), where he did odd jobs. In his days as a junior artillery man in [1]762, when he left the Sich, he turned up in the lower part among the Cossacks (i.e., he worked in the fishing trade in the Dnipro delta — Author) and then turned up in the Turkish town of Ochakiv in the tavern trade; whether he got by honestly or not, we do not know because of the distance.”

The record of Zalizniak’s interrogation at the Karhopil Rifle Regiment, dated July 26, 1768, was published in the collection of documents The Haidamak Movement in Ukraine in the XVI-XVII Centuries. According to number 207 on p. 359, “In the year 1768 on the 26 day of June, the named colonel Zelezniak, among those captured near the town of U[man] by the Zaporozhian Cossacks, testified as follows during an interrogation:

Question: ‘What is your name, whose son are you [and what is your] nickname, what faith are you and your title, and where is your residence?’

Answer: ‘I am Maksym, son of Iyevl, Zalizniak, of the Greek faith, from the peasantry, earlier my residence was in the Polish province of Chyhyryn gubernia in the village of Medvedivka, and later, after the death of my father, I went to the Zaporozhian Sich fifteen years ago, and then I settled in Motronynskyi Monastery last year in the month of November’.”

In the opinion of P. Mirchuk, most researchers question the information that the Russian investigators recorded from Zalizniak’s deposition: “There is no doubt that Zalizniak tried, like other captives generally did, to furnish the Russian interrogators with false information about his roots and his past.” Zalizniak knew that if the Poles got hold of this record, all of his relatives would be killed.

Interestingly, some researchers of the Koliyivshchyna period tend to draw on both documents without mentioning the village of Ivkivtsi, as the following extract shows: “The leader of the Koliyivshchyna, the Haidamak uprising in 1768, was born in the village of Medvedivka in the Cherkasy region. After the death of his father, the 13-year-old boy went to Zaporozhia, where he was registered in the Tymoshiv battalion. He worked in the Dnipro fishing trade and was a hired laborer in Ochakiv for some time.” It is not clear why part of the information from the report of the battalion otaman is constantly acknowledged while the other is deliberately ignored.

There are also different interpretations of Zalizniak’s age. For example, the record of his interrogation says (in the page margins) that he is 28 years old, i.e., he was born in. 1740. Panteleimon Kulish, however, claimed that “he was not so old a man, about forty or, maybe, more.” Veronica Krebs, daughter of Mladanovych, the governor of Uman, mentions Zalizniak: “Zhelezniak stared at us for a few minutes. I slightly remember his physiognomy: by all accounts, he was a common brigand.” I have concluded that the record of Zalizniak’s interrogation is reliable and that Maksym was about 30 years old, although owing to the difficult circumstances of his life, he may have looked like a 40-year-old man.

Because historians and authors of reference publications and school textbooks have repeatedly and uncritically claimed that Zalizniak was born in Medvedivka, this is now an established fact. In other words, the term “resided” was replaced by “was born” without proper substantiation confirmation. This led to the single- minded support of the “Medvedivka version,” and the general public now believes that Zalizniak was really born in Medvedivka.

In our view, the search for Zalizniak’s birthplace should only be based on an analysis of primary sources, i.e., archival documents, namely, the report about Zalizniak by the Tymoshiv battalion’s otaman, dated July 2, 1768, and the record of Zalizniak’s interrogation at the Karhopil Rifle Regiment, dated July 26, 1768. On the basis of these documents we can claim that Zalizniak’s birthplace is Ivkivtsi in Chyhyryn raion, although he later “had his residence” in Medvedivka. This problem merits objective study, and fitting tribute must be paid to the birthplace of the man who was the last of the Ukrainian Cossacks to stand up for “Cossack liberties and the Greek faith.” I therefore suggest a revision of the excursion itinerary of the Kholodnyi Yar museum and acknowledgement of the village of Ivkivtsi as the birthplace of Maksym Zalizniak.

N.B.

The editors of the Universalnyi slovnyk-entsyklopediia [Universal Encyclopedic Dictionary] (Kyiv, Iryna Publishers, 1999, 551 pp.) failed to devote even a few lines to Maksym Zalizniak in this “respectable” publication.

I dedicate this study to the blessed memory of Yakiv Nimchenko, a dedicated ethnographer and true son of Ukraine.