“Our Hetman, your Emperor”: the perception of power by ordinary inhabitants of the Hetmanate of the 18th century

Abstract

The documents of political investigation of the Tsardom of Moscow / Russian Empire are valuable sources for the reconstruction of public consciousness of the inhabitants of the Hetmanate of the 18th century. They contain materials of the investigation into the so-called ‘words and deeds’, which concerned insults of majesty are mostly obscene remarks against monarchs. All these statements are extremely interesting in the context of everyday, informal, non-sacred perception of power, evidence of the awareness of ordinary residents of Ukrainian autonomy in political events, phenomena, private life of the court. In addition, they clearly show a kind of insinuation of power, its division into ‘yours’ – who the power of the emperor is, the metropolis, and ‘our’ – that the hetman and autonomous institutions are. This division clearly shows the awareness of the collective ‘we’, that is one of the markers of constructing one’s own identity.