22 Sloboda Ukraine in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Sloboda Ukraine (Slobids’ka Ukraϊna) was the first Ukrainian territory to become an integral part of Russian Empire. Located along the upper valleys of the Vorskla, Donets’, and Don rivers, this area in Kievan times was at the very eastern edge of the principality of Pereiaslav, where it bordered on the open steppe.
These lands were always sparsely settled, largely because they were within that part of Kievan Rus’ which felt the first brunt of attacks and raids by nomadic peoples from the east. Following the Mongol invasion of the mid-thirteenth century and the resultant northward recession of the line of permanent settlement, Sloboda Ukraine remained for several centuries largely uninhabited. In the sixteenth century, when the tsardom of Muscovy exended its borders southward, the area fell under its sphere of influence.The resettlement of Sloboda Ukraine began slowly in the early seventeenth century. The newcomers who arrived consisted primarily of Cossacks, peasants, and others who were refugees from the Polish-Cossack conflicts during this period or who simply wanted to escape from the spread of the Polish manorial system and the increasing demands it placed on the peasant serfs. Subsequent larger-scale immigration was connected with the decision of the Muscovite government to build a fortified border line through the heart of Sloboda Ukraine.
The practice of building a protective border made up of a solid wall of felled trees and palisades of sharply pointed logs goes back to Kievan times. This was especially common in the valley of the Ros’ River, which at that time was considered the southern frontier of Kievan Rus’. In the years between 1635 and 1651 the Muscovites constructed what became known as the Belgorod Line, which stretched for more than 480 miles (770 kilometers) from Okhtyrka, which at the time was near Muscovy’s border with Poland, eastward to Ostrogozhsk, and then northward up the valley of the Don River to Voronezh and beyond (see also Map 18).
Interspersed along the line’s solid wooden wall (zasechnaia cherta) were fortified towns, twenty of which were constructed during the decade 1637-1647.
22.1 The fortress at Kharkiv in the 17th century, depicted in a 20th-century painting by Mykola Samokysh.
Into this area came the first large-scale immigration from Cossack Ukraine, an estimated 20,000 people during the decade 1638-1648. Muscovy welcomed the newcomers into its frontier regions and allowed them to establish free settlements, or slobody, from which the region derived its name. The Khmel’nyts’kyi revolt of 1648 and its aftermath prompted a continuing stream of immigrants who brought with them the Cossack system of joint military and civil administration based on the regimental structure that characterized Khmel’nyts’kyi’s Cossack state within Poland (see Chapter 18).
22.2 Reconstructed view of the Kharkiv Collegium, which functioned from 1726 to 1817, when it was transformed into a theological seminary.
By 1650 four regiments existed in Sloboda Ukraine: Sumy, Okhtyrka, Kharkiv, and Izium; a fifth, farther east, based in Ostrogozhsk, was set up in 1685. Political instability in Cossack Ukraine during the Period of Ruin continued to drive refugees eastward into Sloboda Ukraine, whose population grew to 120,000 at the end of the seventeenth century and to 660,000 by 1773. To protect these new settlers a new line was built in the 1730s-1740s along the southern edge of the Sloboda Ukraine. Known as the Ukrainian Line, it began at the Dnieper River, not far from the mouth of the Vorskla River, and ran northeastward along the boundary between Zaporozhia and the Hetmanate for about 177 miles (285 kilometers) to the Donets’ River near the fortress of Izium.
Despite the basic administrative model adopted from the Cossack state (Hetmanate), there were differences in Sloboda Ukraine which reflected the specific policies of the centralized Muscovite government.
While each of the Sloboda regiments had its own colonel and staff of officers, the regiments did not function as a single administrative unit under the direction of an office such as that of the hetman in the neighboring Cossack state. Instead, each Sloboda regiment was responsible directly to the Muscovite government or to the tsar’s representative (voevoda) who resided in Belgorod. Muscovy and later the Russian Empire also used the system of the register to fix the number of Sloboda Cossacks it employed in its military campaigns, often far beyond the borders of the region.The process of fully integrating Sloboda Ukraine into the Russian Empire began in 1732, when the number of registered Cossacks was set at 23,000 and the regiments were placed under the responsibility of an imperial official. Protests by the Sloboda Cossacks delayed the implementation of these reforms, but in the meantime the Russian government stationed troops in the area and created new military formations to compete with the Cossacks.
Finally, in 1765, during the reign of Empress Catherine II (r. 1762-1796), the autonomous status of the Sloboda Ukraine came to an end. All five regiments were abolished and replaced by a single imperial province called Sloboda Ukraine (Slobodsko-ukrainskaia guberniia) administered by a governor-general resident in Kharkiv. Like other provincial governors, he was responsible directly to the Russian imperial government in St Petersburg. As for the fate of Sloboda Ukraine’s various social estates, the registered Cossacks were given the same status as state peasants; the Cossack officers and administrative elite (starshyna) were eventually given a status equivalent to the Russian nobility.
Even before its full integration into the Russian Empire, Sloboda Ukraine’s administrative center of Kharkiv became an important cultural center. From 1726 it was home to a seminary and collegium to train both aspiring Orthodox priests and students preparing for secular careers. Among the collegium’s best known faculty members was the philosopher and poet Hryhorii Skovoroda. Kharkiv’s reputation as an educational center was continued in the following century when, in 1805, at the initiative of local philanthropists and municipal authorities, the first university on Ukrainian lands within the Russian Empire was established.
22.3 Hryhorii Skovoroda (1722-1794), renowned as a moral philosopher, poet, and “wandering scholar.”
MAP 23 ZAPOROZHIA AND NEW RUSSIA
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