Socioeconomic Developments

Just as tsarist Russia between the 1760s and 1780s eliminated the governmental and administrative peculiarities of territories on the fringes of its realm, which included Sloboda Ukraine, Zaporozhia, the Hetmanate, and the Crimean Khanate, so too did it succeed in integrating the social structure and economic life of these lands with those of the rest of the empire.

While the decades following the 1648 Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising witnessed the disappearance of the Polish nobility and the liberation of many peasants from serf status, the eighteenth century saw the rise of a new Cossack gentry, which improved its socioeconomic status by increasing the labor obligations of the peas­ants on its lands and by reducing the rights and privileges of the poorer Cossacks. Nonetheless, whereas peasants made up the vast majority of the population in the rest of Russia and Poland, as late as the 1760s they made up only half (50.6 percent) of the population of the Hetmanate. In effect, the social estates in eight­eenth-century Ukraine remained the same as in the previous century (see page 265) - nobility, Cossacks, clergy, townspeople, and peasants - although their inter­nal composition was altered.

The changing social structure

The eighteenth century witnessed increasing differentiation among the Cossacks, who in the 1760s represented 45 percent of the Hetmanate’s and 25 percent of the Sloboda Ukraine’s population. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the highest level of officers from among the Cossack elite (Distinguished Mili­tary Fellows) had begun moving up the social scale, and later, joining with those hereditary Orthodox Rus’ nobles who had supported the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising, they came to form the newer noble estate which replaced the Polish and polo- nized Rus’-Ukrainian nobility who had been forced to flee.

of the Hetmanate’s population. The new Cossack gentry in particular was anxious to improve its status and even began to call itself by the name given to the hated Polish nobility - the szlachta. Despite this self-designation, the tsarist government was not yet ready to recognize the Cossack gentry as part of the noble estate.

The economic status of the majority of Cossacks - divided into the military rank and file, helpers, and laborers - continually worsened. For instance, the rank and file were expected to serve as soldiers, but in practice they were neither paid nor allowed to obtain booty. They were, however, like the nobility, not liable for taxes. That privilege was not extended to the Cossack helpers. Both the Cossack rank and file and the Cossack helpers were soldier-farmers, and during their long absences in military service they often neglected their lands. The Cossack laborers were worse off still, since they did not even own land. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the members of all three Cossack groups had, with few excep­tions, been reduced to an economic level that was about the same as that of the peasants.

As for the peasants, whether free or proprietary, their status too gradually wors­ened during the eighteenth century. In the previous century, as a result of the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising, the majority of the villages formerly owned by Polish land­lords had come under the authority of the new Cossack state. These so-called free military villages did not stay free for long, however; they were distributed to the Cossack officers and officials as so-called rank estates, in payment for their services to the state. Initially these “rank estates” were not hereditary, but before long they became the possession of the family of the recipient, and the formulaic “customary service” was expected of the peasants toward their new Cossack “landlord” admin­istrators.

The eighteenth century saw an absolute increase in the number of proprietary peasants on secular and church-owned landed estates as well as a quantitative and qualitative increase in the number and kind of duties they were expected to per­form. Two days a week of service to the landlord had become the minimum. At the same time, the tsarist government was granting large tracts of land as rewards to Russian nobles (in particular to generals) for their service to the state. The land grants often included mills and peasants over which - according to a tsarist decree of 1687 - the Cossack government had no control or jurisdiction. Statis­tics available from specific parts of the Hetmanate confirm these general trends. With regard to land tenure, in seven regiments of the Hetmanate, by the 1730s more than half the estates (56 percent) were owned by the church and hereditary nobles; one-third (33 percent) were free peasant villages; and a mere 10 percent were rank estates held by Cossack officers for the duration of their term of office. The number of free homesteads, however, was rapidly declining. For example, in nine regiments of the Hetmanate there were 27,500 free homesteads in 1729, but that number had decreased to only 2,800 by 1752. Thus, by the 1760s, of the 515,000 male peasants living in the Hetmanate, 90 percent resided on pri­vate estates held by the hereditary nobility or the church. A similar process was occurring in the Sloboda Ukraine, where 51 percent of male peasants lived on private estates where they remained impoverished and saddled with an increasing number of labor dues and other obligations.

The status of the other two social estates, the Orthodox Christian clergy and townspeople, continued to differ radically.

The status of the townspeople was in great contrast to that of the clergy. The vast majority (artisans and workers) remained in the same dependent situation during the eighteenth century as during the second half of the seventeenth century. This was because the Cossack administration continued to extract as much profit from urban areas as possible. The number of towns enjoying self-government (Magde­burg Law) increased, yet most of these had fewer than 5,000 inhabitants. Since townspeople, like peasants, had to pay taxes, there was nothing to attract new set­tlers to urban areas. Artisans continued to operate within the framework of their guilds. The rich patricians of the towns, however, who because of their wealth and status could hold administrative offices in the Hetmanate, became indistinguish­able from the privileged Cossack st.arshyna - neither group being liable for taxes. Within urban areas, a special category of inhabitants was the foreign merchants, especially Greeks and Russians, who also enjoyed tax-free status and who came to dominate commerce, especially international trade. In Nizhyn, for instance, the Greeks had their own brotherhood in the 1680s, whose wealthy merchants by the eighteenth century were sponsoring the largest trade fairs on Ukrainian territory.

The leading positions in Ukrainian towns within the Russian Empire were thus in the hands of a group of urban patricians, Cossacks, and foreign merchants. The generally dismissive view of the townspeople as a social estate was reflected in the Cossack censuses, which did not even have a rubric for them. According to esti­mates from the 1760s, townspeople comprised only 3.3 percent of the population of the Hetmanate. In neighboring Sloboda Ukraine (1773), they represented a mere 2.5 percent of the population.

The population also included Russian peasants, Jews, and settlers who had been invited from abroad. The Russian peasants generally accompanied former impe­rial military officers, who as nobles were allowed to bring with them peasant-serfs to serve on their new estates in the Hetmanate. The number of Jews in the Het- manate remained minuscule - about 600 in the eighteenth century - as a result of decrees (1717, 1731, 1740, 1742, 1744) issued by the imperial government, usually over the protests of Cossack leaders, banning Jewish settlement on the Left Bank. The majority of the Jews had fled or been exiled westward to the Polish- ruled Right Bank, but a few who remained converted to Orthodoxy. From that small group, there were some (from the Hertsyk, Markovych, and Kryzhanivs’kyi families) who attained high-ranking positions in the Cossack administrative struc­ture. Of the settlers invited from abroad by the imperial government, most were settled in Zaporozhia, which after 1775 was incorporated into the province of New Russia. They included Serbs, Bulgarians, and Romanians, who, because of their peasant social status and Orthodox faith integrated easily - and in some cases assimilated - with their ethnic Ukrainian and Russian neighbors. Other newcom­ers like the Germans, who began to arrive in the last decades of the eighteenth century, maintained their distinct language and religion and remained isolated in their farming communities from the rest of the population.

Economic developments

Agriculture continued to be the main economic activity on Ukrainian territories throughout the eighteenth century. These same decades also witnessed, at least in Ukrainian lands within the Russian Empire, the growth of a small but vibrant domestic industry as well as the continuation of the pattern whereby Ukrainian trade with Poland and the Ottoman Empire decreased and was replaced by greater integration into the Russian Empire’s economic framework.

In agriculture, wheat continued to be the predominant product. Barley, buck­wheat, oats, millet, hemp, flax, and hops were also cultivated. After the mid-eight­eenth century, with the arrival of Bulgarian and Romanian colonists as part of the settlement of New Serbia and Slavic Serbia, corn was introduced; and after 1783 and the incorporation of the Crimean lands, clover and tobacco became wide­spread. The potato, which later became the staple of the Ukrainian domestic agri­cultural economy as it did in many other agricultural economies in Europe, was not introduced until the late eighteenth century and was not produced in quantity until the nineteenth century.

Hunting, fishing, and livestock continued to have economic importance. Hors­es and cattle were a particularly important commodity in frontier areas, especially in Zaporozhia. Besides meeting the needs of local consumption, the fishing indus­try expanded to the point that nobles and rich Cossacks operated fish ponds, espe­cially in the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine.

Industrial development took the form of small enterprises, usually of a domes­tic cottage-industry type, which grew steadily in number especially during the rule of Hetman Mazepa. Also under Mazepa, the Hetmanate was able to revive its iron mines and iron processing industry, which had been largely destroyed during the Khme nyts’kyi era. By the eighteenth century, several establishments, some owned by religious orders (in Kiev, Chernihiv, Novhorod-Sivers’kyi, Nizhyn, Hadiach) and some by secular entrepreneurs (in Sheptakiv, Pochep), were in operation. The iron industry flourished because of a growing demand for military hardware, church bells, tools, farm implements, and household goods.

Among other industries in the first half of the eighteenth century were distill­ing and brewing, tobacco pressing, potash and tar production, glass and ceramic making, and textile production and leather working. The textile industry became particularly well developed. In 1726, a linen factory was founded at Pochep, which soon employed 221 workers at 63 benches. In 1756, Hetman Rozumovs’kyi erect­ed a textile factory at Baturyn that initially had 12 machines. By 1800, that number had grown to 76 machines and 100 workers.

Rozumovs’kyi’s venture in Baturyn reflects the degree to which he and other hetmans were under the influence of mercantilist economic theory. This theory, which prevailed in western Europe at the time, argued that the state should take the lead in developing its own economy by promoting agriculture and manufac­turing. The goal was to obtain a favorable balance of trade. Whereas in older, feudal and manorial-based economic systems development was left at the whim of individual landlords or petty princes, each of whom imposed his own tariff system and taxes, the mercantilist theorists called for the unification and standardization of economic life within a given territory. Cossack hetmans beginning with Maz­epa believed in the feasibility of mercantilist economic theory for the Hetmanate. It was in this context that Mazepa passed a whole series of decrees (universaly) during his tenure which regularized the duties of the peasants and townspeople, thus protecting both these groups from the whims of the increasingly gentrified Cossack landlords. Hetmans Skoropads’kyi, Apostol, and Rozumovs’kyi continued Mazepa’s mercantilist initiatives, since all realized that a regularized economic structure would bring prosperity to the realm and, especially, an increase in tax and tariff revenues.

International trade and commerce

It was the desire of the Hetmanate to increase its income from tariffs that prompt­ed it to encourage trade and commerce. Until 1648, parts of the Right Bank func­tioned primarily as a source of grain for Poland’s lucrative trade from its Baltic Sea ports. After the Khmel’nyts’kyi uprising, the Polish orientation in Cossack Ukrain­ian trade was weakened, and although it was to be revived by the beginning of the eighteenth century, it never again reached its pre-1648 strength. Instead, trade between Cossack Ukraine and Muscovy, the Ottoman Empire, and the Crimean Khanate increased after 1648. Ukraine’s Cossack lands exported cattle, horses, hemp, flax, tobacco, alcohol, wax, saltpeter, textiles, and potash to Muscovy in exchange for furs of varying kinds and some linen, textiles, and leather. Meat, grain, and wax were sold to the Ottomans in exchange for luxury items like silk, rugs, velvet, belts, Persian textiles, citrus fruits, rice, and tobacco. With the Crimea, Cossack traders exchanged grain for horses, cattle, and sheep. In the late seven­teenth century, the grain trade with Poland was renewed. The efforts at expanding international trade brought in badly needed revenue in the form of tariffs for the Hetmanate and contributed to the development of a distinct Cossack economy within the framework of eastern Europe. The mercantilist practices of the het­mans clashed, however, with the similar practices of the Russian government.

Russia, especially under the dynamic Peter I, was anxious to strengthen the empire by integrating its economy under the direction of the central government in St Petersburg. From the Russian imperial standpoint, all Cossack territories - whether the Hetmanate, Sloboda Ukraine, or Zaporozhia - were part of one imperial realm. Consequently, they should be economically as well as politically integrated within the imperial system. Starting from this premise, as early as 1701 Peter I issued a decree forbidding Ukrainian merchants to ship certain products (hemp, flax, potash, leather, wax, salt pork) along the traditional westward routes to Poland and, via Danzig (today, Gdan sk), Konigsberg (today Kaliningrad), or Breslau (today Wroclaw), to western Europe. Instead, Ukrainian products were required to pass through Russia, to that country’s cold water port of Arkhangelsk, on the White Sea. This decree effectively cut off Cossack trade with western Europe, because the Arkhangel’sk-White Sea route - generally frozen and therefore acces­sible only a few months of the year - would make Ukrainian products prohibitively expensive. Both Ukraine’s merchants and Hetman Mazepa protested this decree, and it was temporarily rescinded in 1711. It was issued again in 1714, however, and new products were placed on the list, with the result that the Hetmanate’s international trade became an adjunct of Russia’s. Finally, in 1755 the tariff border between Ukrainian lands and the rest of the empire was permanently abolished. Thus, in the course of the eighteenth century the economy of Left Bank Ukraine, like its political and social structure, became progressively isolated from that of the rest of Europe and integrated into the framework of that of the Russian Empire.