One Battle, Three Doors

In 1700 the most feared army in northern Europe belonged to a kingdom of perhaps two and a half million people, counting Finland and the Baltic provinces, and the largest state in central Europe belonged to a nobility that could not agree to pay for an army at all. Russia, between them, was a large and backward country with no seaport on the Baltic and an army that had just been routed. On November 19, 1700 (November 30 in the West), at Narva on the Estonian coast, Charles XII of Sweden, eighteen years old, attacked a Russian army roughly three times the size of his own in a snowstorm and destroyed it. Peter had left the camp the day before.

Twenty-one years later, at Nystad, Sweden signed away the Baltic coast from Riga to Vyborg, and Peter took the title of Emperor. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was by then a state whose army was capped at a figure agreed with the Tsar. And the Cossack Hetmanate on the Dnieper, which had chosen the tsar's protection in 1654, was a year away from being handed to a board of Russian officials. The hinge of all three changes is a single morning: June 27, 1709 (July 8 in the West), at Poltava.

Three rooms, one corridor

The Great Northern War began as a coalition against a boy king. In 1699 Peter, Augustus II (Elector of Saxony and, by election, King of Poland), and Frederick IV of Denmark agreed to carve up Sweden's Baltic empire while its new monarch was young. It went wrong at once. Charles knocked Denmark out of the war in a matter of weeks, crossed the Baltic, and destroyed Peter's army at Narva. Then he made the decision that shaped the next eight years: instead of following the Russians into their own country, he turned on Augustus.

From 1701 to 1706 Charles campaigned through Poland-Lithuania, which was not formally at war with him, because its king was. He took Warsaw and Kraków, had a Swedish-backed confederation depose Augustus, and in 1704 had his own candidate, Stanisław Leszczyński, elected king. In 1706 he marched into Saxony itself and forced Augustus, at Altranstädt, to renounce the Polish crown. Poland had become the arena in which two foreign armies fought over who would be its king. The Commonwealth's own nobility split between them, and its own army barely appeared.

Peter used the time. He took the mouth of the Neva and in May 1703 founded St. Petersburg on a swamp at the edge of Swedish territory. He took Narva and Dorpat in 1704. He rebuilt the army from the ground: regular recruit levies from 1705, one man from every twenty households; foreign officers and Russian ones trained against them; cannon cast from church bells; a war economy that consumed most of the state's revenue. When Charles finally turned east in 1708, the army waiting for him was not the one he had beaten at Narva.

The year before

Charles invaded Russia from Grodno in the winter of 1707–08 with about 40,000 men, aiming at Moscow. Peter would not offer battle on Charles's terms. He fell back and burned the country behind him. By late summer the Swedes stood near the Russian border at Smolensk in a land stripped bare, and Charles made his second great decision: he turned south, into Ukraine, where the harvest was untouched and where the Hetman of the Cossacks had promised him an ally.

Three blows followed in quick succession, and they are the real story of Poltava.

The supply train. A second Swedish army under General Lewenhaupt was marching from Riga with the munitions, powder, and provisions for the whole campaign. On September 28, 1708, Peter caught it at Lesnaya. Lewenhaupt reached Charles with about half his men and none of the wagons. Peter called Lesnaya "the mother of Poltava," and he was right: the army that fought in June 1709 fought with four guns in action because there was no powder for the rest.

The capital. The Hetman was Ivan Mazepa, who had served Moscow faithfully for twenty years and was now about seventy. He had watched Peter draft Cossacks to dig canals and fight in the Baltic, put them under Russian officers, and refuse to defend Ukraine against a Polish king the Swedes had installed. In October 1708 he went over to Charles. He brought, by most estimates, only about 3,000 men. Peter moved faster than Mazepa's officers could decide. On November 2, Menshikov stormed Baturyn, the Hetman's capital, with its stores of powder and food meant for the Swedes, and killed its garrison and a great many of its inhabitants. Within days Peter had a new hetman, Ivan Skoropadsky, elected under Russian supervision, and the Church had Mazepa anathematized. An effigy of Mazepa was stripped of its decorations and hanged. The lesson to every Cossack colonel was plain: the Tsar could reach Baturyn, and Charles could not protect it.

The frost. The winter of 1708–09 was the coldest in Europe for at least a century; the canals of Venice froze. The Swedes, short of everything Lewenhaupt had lost, wintered in the open steppe towns of Ukraine and lost men by the thousand to cold and frostbite. By spring the army was perhaps 25,000, a long way from home, without reinforcements, without siege artillery, and without the Cossack army Mazepa had promised. The Zaporozhian Cossacks below the rapids did come over in the spring, and Peter's response was to send a force down the Dnieper in May 1709 and destroy the Sich.

It is worth stopping here, because this is where the thesis has to be honest with itself. By the morning of the battle, Sweden could no longer win the war in the sense Charles meant. Even a victory at Poltava would not have taken him to Moscow. What remained to be decided was how badly he would lose.

The morning

Charles laid siege to Poltava, a small fortress on the Vorskla River, in the spring of 1709, partly to draw Peter into battle. In mid-June, on his twenty-seventh birthday (June 17 by the Swedish calendar), he was shot in the foot while reconnoitering, and he went into the battle on a litter. Command in the field passed to Field Marshal Rehnskiöld, who was on poor terms with Lewenhaupt, and the plan was complicated: a night approach, a dash through a line of Russian earthwork redoubts, and an assault on the Russian fortified camp before Peter could form his army.

It went wrong in the dark. Some Swedish columns did not get the order to advance; others became entangled in the redoubts, and six battalions under General Roos were cut off and later forced to surrender. By the time the main Swedish infantry stood in front of the Russian camp, Peter had marched his army out and formed it in two lines. Around nine in the morning roughly 4,000 Swedish infantry advanced against something like 22,000 Russian foot, supported by dozens of guns. They broke the first Russian line in places and were then enveloped. The battle proper took about two hours. Peter rode in the front line; a musket ball went through his hat. Charles's litter was shot apart, and he was lifted onto a horse and taken from the field.

The last line of that table is the one that made Poltava decisive. Battles of the period often cost the loser a third of his army and left the rest to fight again. What destroyed the Swedish army was what happened three days later, at Perevolochna, where the Vorskla meets the Dnieper. The retreating Swedes found the Dnieper too wide to cross with the boats they had. Charles, wounded, and Mazepa, old and sick, were ferried across with a small escort and rode for Ottoman territory. Lewenhaupt, left in command of the rest, surrendered to Menshikov. The Carolean army, the best-drilled infantry in Europe for half a century, ceased to exist in an afternoon, without a battle.

That evening at Poltava, Peter dined with the captured Swedish generals, returned Rehnskiöld's sword, and drank to his "teachers in the art of war." He wrote that day that now, with God's help, the final stone had been laid in the foundation of St. Petersburg. He meant it literally. Until that morning, the city he was building could have been taken back.

The first door: Sweden

Sweden's empire was a fiscal and military achievement out of all proportion to its population, and that was its weakness. It could replace a battle lost; it could not replace an army. After Poltava the Russians took Riga, Reval, and Vyborg in 1710. Augustus returned to the Polish throne. Denmark re-entered the war. Charles spent five years in the Ottoman Empire, at Bender, trying to persuade the Sultan to fight Russia for him. He nearly succeeded: in 1711 the Ottomans trapped Peter's army on the Pruth and he had to give back Azov to get it out. But the Ottomans would not fight Sweden's war again in earnest, and when Charles finally rode home in 1714, the Baltic provinces were gone.

He was killed by a bullet in the head at the siege of Fredriksten in Norway, on November 30, 1718, by the Swedish calendar. The Treaty of Nystad in 1721 confirmed what Poltava had decided: Livonia, Estonia, Ingria, and part of Karelia to Russia, Finland returned to Sweden, and a payment of two million thaler to make the loss look like a sale. At home, the Swedish estates used the king's death to end royal absolutism, and the country entered what it calls its Age of Liberty. Sweden never fought Russia as an equal again. It lost Finland in 1809 and has fought no war at all since 1814. In 1721 the Senate gave Peter the titles of Emperor, Father of the Fatherland, and "the Great." Sweden's loss and Russia's rise are a single event.

The second door: the Hetmanate

Mazepa died in exile at Bender in September 1709. His followers elected his secretary, Pylyp Orlyk, hetman-in-exile, and in April 1710 Orlyk issued a document now usually called the Constitution of Pylyp Orlyk: a set of agreements limiting the hetman's power, guaranteeing the rights of the Cossack officer class and the Zaporozhians, and asserting that Ukraine was a free country with its own compact with its protector. It has a good claim to be one of the earliest written constitutions in Europe. It governed nothing. Orlyk spent the rest of his life in exile.

Inside Ukraine, Poltava ended the Hetmanate's ability to bargain. Before 1709 a hetman could look to Warsaw, Istanbul, or Stockholm, and the possibility of his doing so kept Moscow careful. After 1709 there was no one to look to, and the word mazepintsy, "Mazepa's people," became the Russian state's term for any Ukrainian who wanted more autonomy than he was given. It would still be in use two centuries later. Peter put Russian residents at the hetman's side, moved the capital to Hlukhiv under the eyes of Russian regiments, and sent Cossacks by the thousand to dig the canals of St. Petersburg. In the spring of 1722 Peter set up the Little Russian Collegium, a board of Russian officers, to share the hetman's power, and when Skoropadsky died that summer he did not allow a new election. The acting hetman Pavlo Polubotok, who petitioned for the restoration of Cossack rights, died in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1724.

The Hetmanate was revived briefly after Peter's death and abolished by Catherine in 1764. But the door had closed at Poltava. Everything after was administration.

The third door: Poland

Poland-Lithuania was not a combatant at Poltava, and that is the point. The Commonwealth had been the great power of eastern Europe a century earlier; its armies had held the Kremlin in 1610–12. By 1709 its fate was being decided by a battle between two foreign armies on what had once been its own territory, and its king was whichever candidate the winner preferred. In October 1709 Peter met Augustus at Toruń and restored him to the throne as a Russian client.

The proof came in 1717. When the Polish nobility rose against Augustus's Saxon troops, Peter offered to mediate, and the settlement was ratified by the "Silent Sejm" of February 1, 1717, so called because it sat for a single day and no one was permitted to speak. Russian troops were in the country while it met. It capped the Commonwealth's army at about 24,000 men, in an age when its neighbors fielded armies several times that size, and it made Russia the de facto guarantor of the arrangement, a role it later claimed formally. From then on, Poland's constitution, its army, and, in 1733, its choice of king were matters on which Russia expected to be consulted, and on which it could enforce its view. Catherine's partitions sixty years later were carried out against a state that had been unable to defend itself since Peter's day.

This is the place to qualify the thesis. Poland's door was not closed by Poltava; it was closing from the inside, through the liberum veto and a nobility that would not tax itself, and it had been badly damaged by the Deluge of the 1650s. What Poltava decided was who would hold the key. Had Charles won, Poland would likely have remained a Swedish client under Stanisław. It was not going to be a free agent either way. The battle settled which foreign power would make its decisions, and the answer lasted, with interruptions, until 1989.

How the battle is remembered

Few battles have been remembered so differently by the peoples who fought in them, and the differences are themselves a piece of history.

The Western romance of Mazepa, oddly, has almost nothing to do with Poltava. Byron's Mazeppa (1819), which Victor Hugo reworked and Liszt then set to music, tells a story Voltaire had passed on: the young Mazepa, a page at the Polish court caught with a nobleman's wife, tied naked to a wild horse and sent off into the steppe. It may be invented. It made him famous in Europe for an episode that ends before his career begins.

So was it one battle?

Yes, in the sense that matters. Each of the three doors was already most of the way closed, and each could in principle have been propped open again. What Poltava did was remove the one thing all three depended on: a field army capable of contesting Russian power in eastern Europe. Sweden had been that army for a century. The Hetmanate's freedom of maneuver and Poland's independence had both rested, in practice, on the existence of a power that could balance Moscow. After Perevolochna there was none in eastern Europe, and the region's politics were rebuilt around that fact.

The broader pattern is the one that runs through this guide. The losers at Poltava did not lack courage. Charles had too few people, and spent them on campaigns that took him further from his base each year. Poland had too little state, and could not keep an army to defend itself. Mazepa had too little time and too few followers, and bet his country on an ally who could not reach Baturyn. Peter had none of those problems. He had numbers, a state that could extract them, and the willingness to spend both.

Further reading: Peter Englund, The Battle That Shook Europe: Poltava and the Birth of the Russian Empire (Swedish 1988; first English edition 1992 as The Battle of Poltava), the standard narrative of the battle; Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great: His Life and World (1980), parts three and four; Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great (1998); Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721 (2000), for why the war was fought the way it was; Serhii Plokhy, ed., Poltava 1709: The Battle and the Myth (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2012), on its memory in all three countries; Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe (2015), on Mazepa and the Hetmanate; Orest Subtelny, Ukraine: A History; Norman Davies, God's Playground, vol. 1, on the Commonwealth; and Alexander Pushkin, Poltava (1829).

A note on certainty: The sequence of the war — Narva, Charles's Polish campaigns and Altranstädt, the founding of St. Petersburg, Lesnaya, Mazepa's defection and the storming of Baturyn, the battle, the surrender at Perevolochna, the Silent Sejm, and Nystad — is documented and agreed. Dates are Old Style, as in the rest of the guide, with the Western date at first mention; to complicate matters, Sweden used its own calendar in these years, a day ahead of the Russian one, so Swedish sources date the battle June 28. A few events that belong to the Swedish story, Charles's wounding and his death in Norway, are given in the Swedish calendar and marked as such. Numbers are uncertain throughout: the strengths of the two armies, the losses on the field, the count at Perevolochna, and above all the dead at Baturyn, where estimates range from a few thousand to many more, are given here in round figures and vary across the literature. Mazepa's motives are debated, and the account here is a summary of the main grievances historians cite, not a settled verdict. The thesis that the battle closed three doors at once is this essay's argument. This piece was drafted with Claude's help from the sources listed. Its dates, names, and figures were then checked by a separate fact-checking pass, but it has not been verified line by line against the books.

Reads alongside The Fourteen Rungs, on the state Peter built to win this war; General Winter, on the frost of 1709 and the cold's other campaigns; and The Habsburg Room, on the part of Ukraine that Peter's victory never reached. One of the Essays & Open Questions in the Russian History guide.