PUBLISHED DOCUMENTS FROM A. D. MENSHIKOV'S CAMPAIGN CHANCELLERY DURING THE UPRISING OF I. S. MAZEPA: POLEMICAL REMARKS

This article focuses on an anthology of documents from Alexander Menshikov's campaign chancellery that have been published and edited by Tatiana Tairova-Yakovleva, a St Petersburg historian and doctor of history. The author examines the publication of letters from between 1704 and 1708 sent by Hetman Ivan Mazepa to the Russian statesman Alexander Menshikov. Some of them have been revised using the original documents from the Scientific and Historical Archive of the St Petersburg Institute of History. After analysing the material in question, the author makes several critical remarks concerning numerous inaccuracies in the reproduction of the original sources, some mistakes in source dating, the absence of classification of the sources according to their form (letter, post scriptum, note, or cedula), and the lack of any scholarly commentary. Using other publications and archive collections of the epoch makes it possible to correct some of the dates of the documents, clarify the circumstances of their appearance, and reconstruct the original text of the sources. The author also challenges the title of the book (The Baturin Archive) as a name for the sources published because the book only contains a few documents from the Ukrainian hetman's chancellery proper.