Chapter 13 The New Frontiers

The last quarter of the eighteenth century saw a dramatic change in the geopolitics of eastern and central Europe. Its major feature and cause was the rise of the military might and geopolitical influence of the Russian Empire, which the 1709 Battle of Poltava had launched on its career as a European superpower.

These striking changes took place with the active involvement of many Ukrainians. Bezborodko, who played a key role in the formulation of Russian foreign policy in the 1780s and early 1790s, was one of them. The changes Bezborodko helped to introduce affected his compatriots at home. Ukraine found itself at the center of this major geopolitical shift, at once its victim and its beneficiary. At this point the Hetmanate vanished from the map of Europe and the Russian Empire. The two main cultural frontiers of Ukraine — one between Eastern and Western Christianity, the other between Christianity and Islam — also began to shift. The change in imperial Russia’s borders altered cultural spaces as well. In the west, the Russian authorities halted the advance of the Catholic and Uniate churches at the Dnieper and pushed it back; in the south, the “closing” of the steppe frontier gave new impetus to the further Ukrainian advance toward the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

Historians of politics, ideas, and culture know the eighteenth century first and foremost as the Age of Enlightenment, an era extending from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century and defined by the rise, in both philosophy and politics, of the ideas of individualism, skepticism, and reason — hence another term for the period, the Age of Reason.

The ruler’s absolute power, good government, and the application of universal norms to all parts of the empire and all its subjects: these principles informed the thinking and reforms of Catherine II, who ruled the Russian Empire for more than thirty years, from 1762 to 1796. None of these principles boded well for the Hetmanate, an autonomous enclave whose very existence rested on the idea of special status within the empire. The abolition of internal borders and the full incorporation of the Cossack state into the empire became one of the empress’s first priorities in the region. “Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces governed by confirmed privileges,” wrote Catherine in 1764. “These provinces, as well as Smolensk, should be Russified in the easiest way possible so that they cease looking like wolves to the forest.

The first Russian ruler to eliminate the office of hetman was Peter I. He did so after the death of Ivan Skoropadsky in 1722. The revival of the Hetmanate’s autonomy after his death in 1725, with the election of a new hetman two years later, did not last very long. It came to an end in the mid-1730s, when the imperial government barred the election of a new Cossack leader after the death of Hetman Danylo Apostol. The Hetmanate again came under the control of a government body called the Little Russian College. With the hetmancy’s short-lived restoration in 1750, the mace went not to a Cossack colonel or a member of the general staff but to the president of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences. This man of many worlds and talents was the twenty-two-year-old Kyrylo Rozumovsky.

A native of the Hetmanate educated at the University of Göttingen, Rozumovsky was, more than anything, an imperial courtier. The secret of his early and spectacular career lay in his family ties. His elder brother Oleksii, a Cossack youth from the town of Kozelets between Kyiv and Chernihiv, was a talented singer and ended up in the court chorus in St. Petersburg, where he sang, played the bandura, and met a granddaughter of Peter I named Elizabeth, a future empress of Russia. They became lovers and, by some accounts, were secretly married. One way or another, the Cossack Oleksii Rozum became the Russian count Aleksei Razumovsky (Ukrainian: Rozumovsky). And on the advice of the “Emperor of Night,” as some courtiers called Rozumovsky, Empress Elizabeth restored the office of hetman, which went to his younger brother.

If the elder Rozumovsky was instrumental in bringing Elizabeth to the throne (he was running the court at the time of her accession in 1741), the younger one played an important role in the succession of Catherine II.

Some of the Cossack patriots regarded the Hetmanate, which they, too, now called Little Russia, as a polity equal to the imperial core, which they called Great Russia. “I did not submit to you but to your sovereign,” wrote Semen Divovych in his poem “A Conversation Between Great and Little Russia.” With these words, written soon after Catherine’s accession to the throne, a personified Little Russia addresses Great Russia. Divovych continued, “Do not think that you yourself are my master, / But your sovereign and mine is our common ruler.” This vision of a dynastic union of Little and Great Russia harked back to the ideas of the Union of Hadiach. The sovereign in question, Catherine II, had no intention of presiding over a confederation of polities that claimed special rights and privileges. She envisioned a centralized empire divided rationally into administrative units, not enclaves like the Hetmanate.

Catherine’s recall of the hetman to St. Petersburg and abolition of the hetmancy altogether in the fall of 1764 dashed not just Rozumovsky’s hopes but also those of many Ukrainian patriots in the Hetmanate. The new ruler of the Hetmanate, or whatever was left of it, was General Petr Rumiantsev. An ethnic Russian, he assumed the newly created office of governor-general of Little Russia and took command of the Russian army in the region.

When it came to realizing her vision of a well-ordered imperial state, Catherine clearly took her time. The whole process of assimilating the Hetmanate, from the abolition of the hetman’s office to the administrative integration of the Hetmanate into the empire, took almost twenty years. The transition happened gradually, without new revolts or the creation of new martyrs for the cause of Ukrainian autonomy. It took place with the support of numerous natives of the Hetmanate who believed that imperial incorporation was a godsend. Many of the Hetmanate’s institutions and practices seemed out of date, incapable of responding to the challenges of the Age of Reason. Imperial integration turned auxiliary Cossack detachments into disciplined army units and introduced such public services as a school system and regular mail delivery. It also brought serfdom, but few Cossack officers protested, as they stood to benefit from serf labor.

The Cossack elite ruled in the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine — a region around Kharkiv and Sumy that had remained under direct Russian administration since the seventeenth century — but peasants accounted for most of the population of those two areas. In the course of the eighteenth century, they found themselves increasingly losing not only their land but also their freedom — the great achievement of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. In the second half of the century, close to 90 percent of peasants in the Hetmanate and more than half of those in Sloboda Ukraine lived on estates owned by Cossack officers, now members of the gentry, and by the Orthodox Church.

Some have argued that at least one voice advocated against enserfment in the Hetmanate. That voice belonged to Vasyl Kapnist, a descendant of a Cossack officer family from the Poltava region, who wrote one of the best-known oppositional texts of the Catherinian era, the “Ode on Slavery” (1783). According to some scholars, Kapnist protested the enserfment of the peasantry; others see him as arguing against the liquidation of the Hetmanate’s institutions. In fact, he may have opposed both developments, which coincided closely in time and were enacted by decrees of the same ruler. Kapnist did not hide his disappointment with the consequences of Catherine’s rule for his homeland. With regard to the empress’s treatment of her people, he wrote, “And you burden them: You place chains on the hands that bless you!”

Kapnist was one of many members of the Ukrainian elite who made a good part of their careers in St. Petersburg and contributed to the development not only of Ukrainian but also of Russian literature and culture — his “Ode” became a canonical text of Russian literature. Whereas in Peter’s time Ukrainian clerics moved to Russia and joined the imperial church, the age of Catherine saw the migration to St. Petersburg of the sons of Cossack officers and alumni of the Kyivan Academy who opted for secular professions. Between 1754 and 1768 alone, more than three hundred alumni of the academy chose the imperial service or moved to Russia. Their educations prepared them well to continue their studies abroad and then return to serve the empire. There were twice as many Ukrainian as Russian doctors in the empire, and in the last two decades of the century, more than one-third of the students at the St. Petersburg teachers’ college came from the lands of the Hetmanate. Catherine stopped the recruitment of Ukrainian clergymen for the Russian church (when she took office, most of Russia’s bishops were migrants from Ukraine), but the influx of Ukrainians into the civil service and the military continued apace.

The career of Oleksandr Bezborodko offers a good example of how the new generation of Cossack officers combined loyalty to the Hetmanate with service to the empire. Born in 1747 to the family of the general chancellor of the Hetmanate, Bezborodko received his education at the Kyivan Academy. A few decades earlier, such a background would have been a perfect starting point for a spectacular career in the Hetmanate. But times were changing. Bezborodko attained the rank of colonel by serving not the hetman but the imperial governor of Little Russia, Petr Rumiantsev. The young Bezborodko took part in a war with the Ottomans, showed his bravery in a number of battles, and served with distinction as the head of Rumiantsev’s chancellery. Promoted to colonel in 1774, by the following year he was in St. Petersburg, serving at the pleasure of the empress herself.

The 1768–1774 Russo-Turkish War, which propelled Bezborodko’s career and moved him from the former Hetmanate to the imperial capital, had a major impact not only on the Hetmanate but also on the Ukrainian lands in general. A revolt that began in Right-Bank Ukraine in the spring of 1768 triggered the conflict.

In fact, two revolts happened at the same time. The first was an uprising or, in the language of that time and place, a “confederation” of the Catholic (Polish and Polonized) nobility against the decisions of the Diet of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that gave religious dissidents, especially the Orthodox, equal rights with Catholics. Catherine forced the decision of the Diet on its Catholic deputies through her envoy, who threatened to use the Russian troops at his disposal to achieve his goal. For Catherine, this was a way of demonstrating her Russian and Orthodox credentials. The rebels refused to obey the Diet resolution, which they interpreted as a Russian ploy to undermine not only their religion but also the sovereignty of their state. This noble uprising became known as the Confederation of Bar after the name of the Podolian town where it broke out.

As the members of the confederation went after the remaining Orthodox believers in Right-Bank Ukraine, their actions provoked a different kind of revolt. This one involved the Orthodox Cossacks, townspeople, and peasants who, encouraged by Russian government and church officials, rebelled against the Catholic nobles, prompting fears of a massacre on the scale of 1648 — the first year of the Khmelnytsky Revolt. Once again, the Zaporozhian Cossacks joined forces with those Cossacks who served the authorities. The first group was led by Maksym Zalizniak, the second by Ivan Gonta — two future heroes of Ukrainian populist and later Soviet historical narratives. As in 1648, the victims were Polish nobles, Catholic and Uniate priests, and Jews. The Jews had returned to the region in the eighteenth century and reestablished their economic, religious, and cultural life in Right-Bank Ukraine. Many of them were the followers of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, who in the 1740s began teaching Hassidism in the Podolian city of Madzhybizh. The Catholic rebels wanted a Catholic state without Russian interference, while the Orthodox wanted a Cossack state under the jurisdiction of Russia. The Jews wanted to be left alone. None of the groups got what it wanted.

In the summer of 1768, the Russian army crossed the Dnieper border with the commonwealth, attacking both the Catholic confederates and the Orthodox Cossacks and peasants. This took the latter in particular by surprise, since they regarded the tsarist troops as their liberators. The empire, however, had its own logic. Both revolts threatened stability in the region, and both were crushed — but not before a detachment of Ukrainian Cossacks claiming to be in the Russian service crossed the Polish border at the town of Balta and entered the territory of the Crimean Khanate, apparently in pursuit of members of the Confederation of Bar. The Ottomans, concerned, along with the French, about growing Russian influence in the region, exploited the incident to declare war on the Russian Empire. Russia accepted the challenge.

Governor-General Petr Rumiantsev led one of the imperial armies, along with a Cossack detachment, into Moldavia and Wallachia. After a number of successful battles (Bezborodko distinguished himself in those fought at Larga and Kagul), the Russians took control of those two principalities, including their capitals, Jassy and Bucharest. Also captured were the Ottoman fortresses of Izmail and Kiliia on the Danube, which are now in Ukraine. Russian forces also took the Crimea, and most of southern Ukraine came under Russian control. The Ottomans were on the run. In the Mediterranean, the Russian fleet destroyed the Ottoman navy with the help of British advisers.

The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarjae, signed in 1774, looked like a setback for Russian aspirations in the Black Sea region. Imperial troops had to leave the Danube principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. St. Petersburg also had to remove its troops from the Crimea. The reason was simple: a number of European powers were unhappy with the sudden growth of Russian influence in the region. But the treaty benefited the Russian Empire in other ways. It effectively expelled the Ottomans from the northern Black Sea region and the Crimea. Russia established its outposts on the Azov and Black Seas. The Crimean Khanate was now declared an independent state. That was a one-sided description: while the peninsula became independent of Istanbul, it now depended on St. Petersburg.

The formal annexation of the Crimea to the Russian Empire took place in 1783, with the Russian army entering the peninsula and sending the last Crimean khan into exile in central Russia. Bezborodko, by then a leading architect of Russian foreign policy, played an important role in this development. He was also an author of the so-called Greek Project, a plan to destroy the Ottoman Empire and establish a new Byzantium under Russian control, as well as to create Dacia, a new country on the Danube consisting of Moldavia and Wallachia. The project never came to fruition, but its echoes still resonate in the Greek names given by the imperial authorities to the Crimean towns, including Simferopol, Yevpatoria, and the most famous of them, Sevastopol — the Russian naval base established on the peninsula two years after its annexation.

Alarmed by Catherine’s trip to the Crimea in 1787 and rumors of the Greek Project, the Ottomans began a new war for control of the northern Black Sea coast. They lost once again, this time to allied Russian and Austrian troops. According to the peace treaty signed at Jassy in 1792 by Oleksandr Bezborodko, the Russian Empire extended its control to all of southern Ukraine. The Ottomans now recognized both the Crimea and the Kuban region across the Strait of Kerch as Russian territories. With a stroke of Bezborodko’s pen, the Russian Empire had closed the Ukrainian steppe frontier. The cultural frontier, however, remained in place, simply becoming an internal one.

The military closure of the steppe frontier opened it for colonization, encouraged and directed by the imperial government. The Cossacks were no longer needed in the area. In fact, the imperial authorities wanted them out, considering them liable to cause revolts, skirmishes, and conflicts with neighboring powers. The government got one more confirmation of that in the participation of the Russian Cossacks in the 1773–1774 Pugachev Uprising. The following year, Russian imperial troops returning from the Moldavian front surrounded the Zaporozhian Host and dispersed the Cossacks. Some of them were recruited into new Cossack formations, including the Black Sea Cossacks, who were eventually shipped to the Kuban Peninsula, bordering on the turbulent North Caucasus. Others stayed, but no longer as an organized force. Grigorii Potemkin, the favorite of Catherine II, showed their settlements to the empress during her trip to the Crimea in 1787. The presentation that gave birth to the expression “Potemkin village” was false in the sense not that the villages did not exist but that they were hardly the result of Potemkin’s efforts: they had been there before.

The mass colonization of the steppes of southern Ukraine began while they were still under Cossack control. The Zaporozhians themselves invited peasant refugees to the region, and the government subsequently established new settlements of its own on the lands taken from the Cossacks. Serbian refugees from Ottoman rule settled north of Yelysavethrad (present-day Kirovohrad) and Bakhmut (present-day Artemivsk in Donetsk oblast) in districts called, respectively, New Serbia and Slavo-Serbia. As the line of Russian fortresses moved south and the empire absorbed new lands as a result of the Russo-Turkish wars and the annexation of the Crimea, all Zaporozhian lands became part of an imperial province called New Russia. (Its borders changed over time, including or excluding the Donets River region and the Crimea, but it never included the Kharkiv region of Sloboda Ukraine, as claimed by the Russian idealogues of the partition of Ukraine in 2014.) Centered on the former lands of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, New Russia became the primary destination of domestic and foreign migration in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

From 1789 to 1790, the first Mennonites moved into the region from Prussia in an attempt to avoid obligatory military service and settled on the Cossack island of Khortytsia immediately beyond the Dnieper rapids. More coreligionists from their old homeland, as well as German Protestant and Catholic colonists from central Europe, would soon join them. Most of the “foreigners,” however, came from the Ottoman Empire: Greeks, Bulgarians, and Moldavians. The imperial authorities, seeking farmers and artisans with a proven record, encouraged their immigration and provided the settlers with land, tax breaks, and benefits that Russian subjects could only dream of.

The imperial elites celebrated the settlers’ multiethnic composition, which they saw as proof of the greatness of the empire and its ruler. “The Moldavian, the Armenian, the Indian, and the Hellene or the black Ethiopian — whatever the sky beneath which he came into the world, Catherine is the mother of all,” wrote late-eighteenth-century poet V. P. Petrov. By the end of the century, “foreigners” constituted up to 20 percent of the region’s overall male population of approximately half a million. The rest were Eastern Slavs. Some of the latter were Russian religious dissenters exiled to the borderlands, but most of them were runaway Ukrainian peasants, more often than not from Right-Bank Ukraine. Despite its imperial origins and multiethnic bent, the province of New Russia was largely Ukrainian in ethnic composition.

Whereas New Russia was largely Ukrainian, the province of Taurida, which included the Crimean Peninsula, was predominantly Crimean Tatar. St. Petersburg did its best to smooth the incorporation of the peninsula into the empire, offering Crimean nobles Russian noble status along with the lands that had once belonged to the khans. The other social arrangements of the khanate, as well as the dominant role of Islam, remained intact. The empire was taking its time. As with the Hetmanate, the incorporation of the Crimean Khanate would take more than a generation. Caution was necessary for several reasons. One was outmigration: before the end of the eighteenth century, close to 100,000 former subjects of the Crimean khan had left the peninsula and the Black Sea steppes to its north for the Ottoman Empire. The desire to live under an Islamic ruler was one explanation for this migration; the decline of economic opportunity with the closing of the steppe frontier — the slave trade and war booty had completely dried up — was another.

In 1793, a year after Bezborodko signed the Jassy agreement, which legalized Russian possession of the Crimea and southern Ukraine under international law, another dramatic event took place on the western borders of the former Hetmanate. The long-established Russo-Polish border along the Dnieper, which had divided Ukraine for more than 120 years, suddenly ceased to exist. Russian troops, some of them led by former Cossack officers who now held high rank in the imperial Russian army, crossed the Dnieper and began to advance westward. They occupied Eastern Podolia, including the fortress of Kamianets-Podilskyi, and part of Volhynia, including the town of Zhytomyr. In the north, the Russian army occupied the Belarusian towns of Minsk and Slutsk.

The development that put an end to the existence of the Dnieper boundary and realized the age-old Ukrainian Cossack dream of uniting Right- and Left-Bank Ukraine was the second partition of Poland. The first partition had taken place in 1772, when three great European powers — Russia, Austria, and Prussia — took over parts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Prussia’s share included Danzig (Gdańsk), connecting its core possessions with East Prussia; Russia took eastern Belarus; and Austria claimed Galicia. For the Russian Empire, which had controlled the entire commonwealth for most of the eighteenth century through its Diets, which were vulnerable to military and political pressure, and more recently through a loyal king, the partition was more of a loss than a gain. In fact, it was a way of avoiding military conflict, for which St. Petersburg was unprepared. Alarmed by Russian victories in the 1768–1774 Russo-Turkish War, Austria had sided with the Ottomans, threatening to attack Russia. By agreeing to the first partition, Russia was in fact bribing Austria to stay out of the Ottoman-Russian conflict.

The Austrians took the bait. They wanted Silesia, a province centered on present-day Wrocław (Breslau), but were offered Galicia. The Austrian (Habsburg) empress Maria Theresa detested the term “partition,” which in her opinion implied the unlawful character of the whole enterprise, and sought historical justification for the new acquisition. She found it in the historical claims of the Hungarian kings to the medieval Galician-Volhynian principality, and so the new territory became known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. The Austrians took their invented Galician-Volhynian connection very seriously. In 1774, claiming the right of the Galician princes to Bukovyna, the Habsburgs annexed that territory from Moldavia. As the entire province of Transcarpathia (the westernmost region of today’s Ukraine) had been under Vienna’s control since 1699, the Habsburgs united under their scepter three future Ukrainian provinces — a development with major implications for modern Ukraine and eastern Europe in general.

The first partition added no Ukrainian lands to the Russian Empire — all its territorial gains were in Belarus and Lithuania. But the situation changed in 1793, during the second partition of Poland, triggered by events in Warsaw. In May 1791, the delegates to the Polish Diet had adopted a new constitution that promised to put the commonwealth back on its feet. A product of the Enlightenment and the ideas of the French Revolution, the new constitution promoted centralization, good governance, and education; it also made progress in the realm of religious toleration. More importantly from the perspective of the partitioning powers, it promised to make the Polish government workable again by strengthening the authority of the king and removing the requirement to pass all Diet resolutions by unanimous vote — the famous, or rather infamous, liberum veto.

It appeared that despite (or because of) the shock of the first partition, the commonwealth would lift itself out of the chaos of infighting between aristocratic clans and reemerge as a strong state in the center of Europe. To prevent this, Prussia and Austria annexed even more Polish territory. Russia did likewise under the pretext of protecting the old Polish rights and liberties, including the liberum veto. The Dnieper frontier in Ukraine had to go; the new one was established in Volhynia and Podolia. It made the Habsburgs and the Romanovs neighbors, as the Russians had moved the imperial border all the way to the eastern boundary of Austrian Galicia. Like Empress Maria Theresa, Catherine cared about legitimacy. After the second partition, Russian imperial authorities issued a medal with a map showing the new boundaries and bearing the inscription “I have restored what was torn away” — a reference to the lands that had once belonged to Kyivan Rus’.

The Russian borders soon moved even farther west. This had nothing to do with a reexamination of maps of Kyivan Rus’ but stemmed from an uprising in the commonwealth caused by the second partition. It was led by Tadeusz Kościuszko, a native of Belarus, veteran of the Confederation of Bar, and participant in the American War of Independence, during which he constructed fortifications at West Point and was promoted to the rank of brigadier general by the Continental Congress. In 1784 he returned to the commonwealth, where he served as a major general in the Polish army. In 1794 he began the uprising in Cracow, assuming command of all the commonwealth armed forces. All three partitioning powers — Russia, Prussia, and Austria — sent their troops across the Polish borders to crush the revolt. The outcome was the complete destruction of the Polish state.

The enlightened despots now divided up whatever remained of the commonwealth after the second partition. Austria competed with Russia for the acquisition of Volhynia (“Lodomeria”) but lost the claim and took part of Poland with Cracow instead. To make the acquisition look legitimate, Austria treated the territory as part of Galicia. Prussia extended its possessions south of the Baltic Sea, reaching Warsaw. But the greatest beneficiary was Russia, whose share of the loot included the Baltic provinces, Lithuania, western Belarus, and, in Ukraine, Volhynia with the towns of Rivne and Lutsk.

Some regard the partitions of Poland as reunifications of Ukraine — that was certainly the line taken by Soviet historiography. In fact, they resulted in the reunification of some of the Ukrainian lands and the division or partitioning of others. If before the partitions the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Russian Empire divided up most of the Ukrainian lands, now the division was between the Russian and Habsburg empires. When it comes to the Ukrainian lands, Russia turned from a minority into a majority “stakeholder,” controlling most of Ukrainian ethnic territory. As a result of the partitions, the share of ethnic Ukrainians in the Russian Empire increased from 13 to 22 percent, while the share of ethnic Russians decreased from 70 to 50 percent. More than 10 percent of the population of the newly acquired Ukrainian territories was Jewish, while roughly 5 percent consisted of Poles and Polonized Catholics. It was an ethnic mosaic on a par with or even greater than the one the empire promoted and celebrated in southern Ukraine. But the loyalty to the empire of its new Polish, Jewish, or even Ukrainian (in the parlance of the time, Little Russian) subjects was anything but a given. The multiethnic inhabitants were not newcomers to the area; the state that claimed them was. It embraced some of its new subjects but not the others. As early as 1791, the imperial government introduced the Pale of Settlement, limiting the areas open to the Jewish settlement to the former provinces of the commonwealth and later adding to them newly acquired territories in the south. Most of Ukraine became part of the Pale.

The key figure in the negotiations that led to the major shift of Ukrainian frontiers in the second half of the eighteenth century was none other than the “Cossack prince” Oleksandr Bezborodko. We know that in St. Petersburg he remained a loyal patriot of his Cossack homeland, which he called his fatherland. He helped publish a Cossack chronicle and himself wrote the history of the Hetmanate from the death of Hetman Danylo Apostol in 1734 to the start of the Russo-Turkish War of 1768. The chronicle was filled with descriptions of Cossack wars and battles with the Ottomans, Crimean Tatars, and Poles. We do not know, however, whether in his proposals to annex the Crimea, in his negotiations in Jassy over the fate of the northern Black Sea region, or, finally, in his talks with the Austrians and Prussians over the partitions of the commonwealth, Bezborodko ever felt the influence of his “Little Russian” upbringing and identity. By the time he helped erase the Crimea and the commonwealth from the map of Europe, his own fatherland had ceased to exist on that map as well. The eighteenth century was not only an age of enlightenment and reason. More than anything else, it was an age of empire.