What Was the Battle of Poltava?
At about eleven on the morning of 8 July 1709, the Swedish king Charles XII led the charge of his right wing, three squadrons of his Household Cavalry, against the centre of the Russian line of redoubts outside the city of Poltava in present-day Ukraine. He was wounded in the foot as he dismounted to remount — his horse was killed under him, and a stray bullet broke his leg — and the rest of the day was a continuous disaster. By evening the Swedish army had lost 6,900 dead and 2,760 wounded, against the Russian 1,345 dead and 3,290 wounded, and the cream of the Swedish army was in Russian captivity. Charles fled south to Ottoman Bender; the Russian empire was born on the field (see Hughes, Peter the Great, 2010).
The campaign of 1708-1709
The battle was the climax of a campaign that had begun in 1700. Russia, Saxony-Poland, and Denmark-Norway had formed an alliance against Sweden at the start of the Great Northern War. The alliance’s opening campaign was a disaster: at Narva on 20 November 1700, Charles XII destroyed the Russian army of about 35,000 and the Russian artillery in a single morning. The next eight years were the slow reconstruction of the Russian army by Peter the Great, and a series of Swedish campaigns in Poland, Saxony, and the Baltic.
The Swedish king invaded Russian territory in 1708, with a force of about 44,000 men, the largest field army the Swedish Empire had ever raised. Peter’s strategy was the same one he had used at Narva — Fabian withdrawal, attrition, denial of supplies — but this time the army was not in the field. The Russian strategy was decided in February 1708 at the Zhovti Vody conference; its first fruits were the destruction of the Swedish supply convoy of Lewenhaupt at Lesnaya on 28 September 1708. The Swedish position in Russia became untenable.
The defection of Mazepa and the march south
In October 1708 the Cossack hetman of the Zaporozhian Host, Ivan Mazepa, defected to Charles, bringing with him about 4,000 Cossacks and the small store of supplies the Swedes had hoped to draw from Ukraine. The defection forced Charles to march south to meet the supplies and forage that Mazepa promised. By the spring of 1709 the Swedish army, now reduced to about 25,000 effectives, was in a fortified camp at Vorskla outside Poltava, with the Russian army of about 45,000 under Peter directly across the river.
The Russian position was strong. The Russian army had been reinforced in April 1709 by the corps of General Adam Menshikov and the Kalmyk cavalry of Khan Ayuka; the Russian fleet, built in the Baltic, had bottled up the Swedish transport of reinforcements from Pomerania; the Russian supply situation, fed by the Volga and the Oka, was comparatively comfortable. Peter’s order of battle, on 27 June 1709, called for a frontal advance across the Vorskla in the morning, an assault on the Swedish redoubts, and a general engagement (Massie, Peter the Great, 1980).
The battle
The Russian army crossed the Vorskla in the early hours of 8 July and the Swedish outposts in the six redoubts were overrun in the morning’s fighting. At 9 am the main Swedish army advanced from its camp: 10,500 infantry, 7,000 cavalry, 4 cannon — half the numbers of the Russians. Charles, on horseback despite his wounded foot, led the first charge of the right wing against the Russian centre; the Swedish left wing under Field Marshal Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld failed to take the Russian redoubts; the Russian counter-attack routed the Swedish centre.
By 11 am the Swedish army was in rout. Rehnskiöld and the surviving Swedish generals were taken prisoner; Charles fled the field. The 14,000 Swedish troops trapped at Perevolochna on the Dnieper surrendered on 1 July 1709, three days later. About 16,000 Swedish soldiers were taken prisoner; the rest were dead, wounded, or scattered. The Russian army had destroyed the field force of the Swedish Empire in a single day (Hughes, 2010).
The aftermath
The battle of Poltava was the first major Russian military victory in the western style, and the first time a Russian army had defeated a European great power in a pitched field engagement. The European press, and Peter himself, treated it as the moment when the Tsardom of Russia joined the European great-power system. The new Senate heraldic medal of 1709 — inscribed Poltava 1709, Near-Neighbour of the Golden Horde — was struck in celebration.
The battle did not end the war; that was the work of the 1714 Battle of Hangö and the Treaty of Nystad of 1721. It did end the Swedish Empire. The Swedish Great Power era, which had begun in 1611 with the death of Charles IX and the accession of Gustav Adolf, ended in 1709 on the fields outside Poltava. Russia was the new great power in northern Europe (Hughes, 2010).
The cultural afterlife
The battle was celebrated in literature, in art, and in imperial pageantry. Pushkin’s long poem Poltava (1828-1829) is the Russian literary treatment; the more critical Mazepa is treated in Byron’s Mazeppa (1819), in Hugo’s Mazeppa (1829), and in Liszt’s Mazeppa (1851). The 200th anniversary of the battle in 1909 was a major imperial event, marked by a new monument in Poltava unveiled by Tsar Nicholas II, a new cathedral, and a Polish delegation led by a British journalist (the Russian Empire was careful to celebrate the Ukrainian victory while keeping the Polish and Ukrainian intelligentsia in their place).