The Cossack Starshyna of Sloboda Ukraine in the Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries: The “Family Clan” and Attainment of Social Status

VOLODYMYR MASLIYCHUK

The prominent Austrian social anthropologist Michael Mitterauer wrote: “No other form of human community reflects the possibilities and boundaries of a historical epoch as directly as the family.”¹ The well-known French historian Fer­nand Braudel, quoting Jean-Louis Frandrin, calls the family “the basic cell that is the mater dolorosa of every society.”² Family relationships are relationships in a microstructure - above all, they depict the problems of the whole society, its changes and transformations.

The process of transforming the Cossack starshyna (officer class) into a separate estate was best reflected at the everyday family level. Many of the most important functions of a family were transferred to society and to social groups. By the first third of the eighteenth century, the officer stratum of the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine had been transformed into a fairly unique, albeit weak, “caste.” Cossack officers passed on their posts to their children.

Moving family relations onto a larger canvas and viewing relations inside the state, class, estate, or any social group in the Middle Ages and early modern era in terms of family relations is a highly productive approach. It helps us to under­stand a number of the ties and stereotypes that united people in communities in the past, which are often incomprehensible to us.⁷

In other words, we perceive the officer stratum as a “family” or rather, a family clan, relations within this stratum as a matter of social stratification, and the at­tainment by the children of the social status of their fathers as a direct part of family functions. The formation of the officer stratum in the Sloboda Ukraine's Cossack regiments represents a direct evolution of the “family” - from its creation headed by the colonel as “father” to its ramified governance structure. Is it ap­propriate to compare the officer stratum to a “family”? Absolutely. From the very beginning of Cossack statehood, a family “clan” formed around Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi.⁸ Quarrels within this clan played a significant role in subsequent Ukrainian history.

The right of inheritance is one of the most important indicators not only of in­ternal family relations but also of the political legitimization of the status of the Cossack elite, and its identification as a separate estate.

The problem of the heritability of rank in the starshyna also emerged by virtue of the existence in a frontier society (in my view, a “marginal society”) - which the Ukrainian communities of the Hetmanate, Sloboda Ukraine, and Zapor- izhzhia were in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries - of the democratic egali­tarian traditions of electing and removing officers from their posts. The German historian Andreas Kappeler noted that the key element in the early modern history of Ukraine was the clash of two principles: the spread to Ukraine of European trends (in particular, the “second serfdom”) and the Cossack traditions of a demo­cratic frontier society.¹⁰ This clash can undoubtedly characterize certain aspects of the entire social history of “Ukrainian Cossack statehood.” Therefore, the in­heritance of officer ranks and the legitimization of the status of a hereditary Cos­sack elite was in contradiction with the principles of the democratic appointment to offices in Cossack forces - that is, a complex dialogue was taking place that re­sulted in the distinct nature of the Ukrainian Cossack elite.

Family, ancestry, and a ramified genealogical tree played virtually a fundamen­tal role for Cossack officers in the eighteenth century in both their careers and their acquisition of wealth. The legitimization of the inheritance of rank in the starshyna was the direct basis for proving the right to “noble status,” as separate from the commoners. The study of officer family ties in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries will help solve a number of questions regarding the transforma­tion of Cossack officers into hereditary landowners and the co-optation of Ukrainian “nobles” into the nobility of Russia as a whole. The hereditability of officer ranks also had a more prosaic side. In a landowner system, the officers held estates and land given them officially for their services. When these were passed down to heirs, to own them legally and lawfully the latter also had to serve. In other words, officers required political power and services bequeathed by in­heritance in order to preserve and accumulate numerous estates.

We will attempt to study the problem of heritability of officer status in relation to the officer stratum of the regiments of Sloboda Ukraine. The formation of these Cossack entities on the territory of the Wild Fields (Dyke Pole), and the social processes inside these Sloboda regiments, are quite poorly researched as compared with those in the Hetmanate. The Sloboda regiments, which were sub­ject to Russia, were very similar to the regiments of the Hetmanate. However, two other neighbors had an influence on their development: the Zaporozhian Sich and the Don Cossack Host. Thus, the social structure of the Sloboda regiments, despite their “frontierness,” depended to a significant degree on the social pro­cesses in the Hetmanate and the southern Russian frontier, and its democratism and insecurity were constantly reinforced by the anarchic elements of Zapor- izhzhia and the Don. From this standpoint, the genesis and transformations of

the local elite were fairly determinative for both the neighboring Hetmanate and “the Cossack republics in the lower reaches of the Dnipro and the Don.” The Slo­boda Ukrainian Cossack elite was under the strong influence of the Muscovite system of service tenure of land (pomistia) and of local Russian senior officials; it was the first to fall under the modernization reforms of the tsarist government, which were aimed at abolishing the Cossack autonomies in order to create a “well- regulated” state.

The Father Looks After the Interests of the Son or the

Father’s Concern for the Son

Under existing Cossack democratic customs, the passing on of an officer’s post from father to son took place while the father was still alive. This process was char­acteristic of the second half of the seventeenth century, when Cossack elections carried at least some illusory weight. With the curtailment of democratism at the beginning of the eighteenth century, these trends became less determinative.

The attitude of fathers to their sons in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Cos­sack Ukraine was of a traditional nature. They were seen as the continuation of the family, and as support in old age.

For bringing up a good person the father deserved an honored place in society, as the well-known poet of the time, Klymentii Zynoviiv, wrote: “For which you will earn fame among people / And the personal praise of God.”¹³ In fact, in Ukrainian tradition, the concern of parents for their children was probably con­sidered more important than the concern of children for their parents.¹⁴

The officer families of both Sloboda Ukraine and the Hetmanate owed their status “to one or two people who as a result of their own energy, abilities, or an accident rose from the depths of the popular masses to the top and pulled behind them their relatives and in-laws.”¹⁵ The inheritance of political power in the second half of the seventeenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century was dealt with in accordance with custom: the son assumed an officer's post while his father was still alive, with the father's assistance. Because of the formidable power of colonels, it is possible to trace examples of this process in the formation of dynasties of colonels in Sloboda regiments in the second half of the seventeenth century.

During his service, a father included his son from childhood in his duties. Thus, according to Jan Ornowski's panegyric, the son of Kharkiv colonel Hryhorii Donets', Fedir, was “in the camp with his father” from the time he was seven years old.¹⁶ After the son reached adulthood, the officer father shared his duties with his son, with the son being his father's helper. The transfer of the “office” took place while the father was still alive and was then confirmed by tsarist officials. The father's achievements during his lifetime were determinative for the son's as­sumption of his father's social niche.

This kind of colonelcy was most vividly exemplified in the Sumy regiment, which from 1659 to 1727, aside from a few twists (like Cossack Leont'iev's “black council” in 1661), was governed by the dynasty of the Kondrat'ievs.¹⁷ The first Sumy colonel was the founder (osadchyi) of the city of Sumy Herasym Kon- drat'iev.¹⁸ However, as early as 1 August 1664, mention is made of another Sumy colonel, Ivan Herasymov (a Muscovite form of ‘Ivan Herasymovych Kondrat'iev' in official correspondence), that is, the son of the founder.¹⁹ In 1678, according to a later mention, the aide to his father Ivan Kondrat'iev “died of his wounds.”²⁰ In 1680, after the death of his son, Colonel Herasym Kondrat'iev petitioned the tsarist government that “he has grown old and lame from wounds and sick and cannot walk or sit on a horse,” and therefore asked that his son Hryhorii be appointed colonel jointly with him.²¹ The tsarist government satisfied his request, and that year the Sumy regiment was divided between Kondrat'iev father and son.²²

However, Hryhorii Kondrat'iev also died in 1683 while his father was still alive. To please Colonel Herasym Kondrat'iev, the Sumy Cossacks and officers sent a petition to the tsarist government asking that Herasym's third son, Andrii, be ap­pointed Sumy colonel jointly with his father.²³ In 1684, a tsarist charter confirmed Andrii Kondrat'iev as Sumy colonel, and he continued to serve as colonel after his father's death in 1701 until his own death in 1708.²⁴ The main thing is that An- drii Kondrat'iev received the colonelcy not for his own abilities but for his father's services. This aspect is quite interesting, because the post of colonel in a Sloboda regiment was not only an expression of political power, but also a means of “making a living,” inasmuch as the costs of maintaining the regiment and artillery were assumed by the colonel.

In 1689-93, Sumy Colonel Herasym Kondrat'iev also tried to help his fourth son, Roman, to take up the colonel's post in neighboring Okhtyrka, but Roman's colonelcy (among officers who were “strangers” to him) was unsuccessful and short.²⁵

What is notable is that after the death of his father, as the Sumy colonel (“head of the family”), Andrii Kondrat'iev tried at the beginning of the eighteenth century to restrict the rights of his large family (widows of brothers, nephews, relatives of his father's last wife) to his father's legacy. This colonel concentrated in his own hands the main part of the Sumy regiment's land holdings, which, undoubtedly, served in part as grounds for the assumption of the colonelcy after Andrii Kondrat'iev's sudden death by his son, Ivan.²⁶

Heritable colonelcy developed in similar fashion in the Kharkiv regiment in the i6/os-8os. Kharkiv Colonel Hryhorii Donets''s older son, Kostiantyn, accom­panied his father during the latter's visit to Moscow in 1678, but only a year later, he himself represented the Kharkiv regiment in the Muscovite capital.²⁷ In ac­cordance with the tsar's decree of 1682, the Kharkiv regiment was divided into two entities between father and son: Hryhorii led the Cossacks in the Izium sec­tion, and Kostiantyn Donets' governed in Kharkiv and its environs.²⁸ In this case, as well as in that of the Sumy regiment, there is an interesting correspondence between the Cossack leadership and tsarist officials. In its petition regarding the colonelcy of Kostiantyn Donets', the Cossack officers wrote that if Hryhorii Donets' left to live in Izium, they “could not exist” in Kharkiv without a colonel, and asked the tsar to reward “their Colonel Hryhorii Donets' for his many services and order Hryhorii's son, Kostiantyn, to be their colonel in one regiment in Kharkiv.”²⁹ Colonel Hryhorii Donets' also sent his own petition: “order me, tsar, to live in Izium and order my son, Kostiantyn, to serve in Kharkiv.”³⁰ On 25 Jan­uary 1685, “testimony” that had been submitted by the acting Kharkiv Colonel, Kostiantyn Donets', regarding the fact that he “[was] in charge jointly with [his] father” of the officers and Cossacks in the Kharkiv regiment was considered in Moscow.³¹ That same year, Kostiantyn Donets' received a charter of privilege that he “would be colonel in that regiment jointly with his father Hryhorii,” only not in Kharkiv, but in Izium; a similar charter, only with certain differences, was granted to his father Hryhorii Donets'.³² This division of authorities was what caused the division of the Kharkiv regiment, splitting off the Cosacks in the Izium section into a separate Izium regiment under the leadership of Kostiantyn Donets'. However, father and son, Hryhorii and Kostiantyn Donets', also served together at the end of the 1680s in the city of Novobohorodytsk.³³

It should also be noted that the tsarist government itself seemed to assist the children of colonels to assume high offices. During the crisis in the Okhtyrka reg­iment in connection with the struggle among the parties of officers over the colonelcy in 1691 (turmoil inside the “family,” attempts to control the “father” - Colonel Ivan Perekhrest (or Perechrestov), the regiment starshyna was “ordered that the Okhtyrka regiment’s quartermaster and his comrades choose a colonel from among the children of Sumy Colonel Herasym Kondrat'iev’s son Roman, or Kharkiv Colonel Hryhorii Donets'’s son, Kostiantyn, as colonel of the Okhtyrka regiment.”³⁴ Ultimately, Roman Herasymovych Kondrat'iev was elected colonel by tsarist officials in 1691.³⁵

The division of the regiment between father and son, which served as grounds for the son to inherit his father’s colonelcy, was becoming an unwritten law, a part of the “liberties,” and the hallmark of regimental rule in the Sloboda regiments. In 1693, after the death of the colonel of the Ostrohozk regiment, Ivan Sas, the colonelcy passed to his stepson Petro Bulart.³⁶ In 1702, at the request of the officers of the Okhtyrka regiment, Danylo, the son of Okhtyrka Colonel Ivan Perekhrest, obtained a charter attesting that he was “similar to other Cherkasian (cherkasskich) regiments to be the colonel jointly with his father in that regiment.”³⁷

The examples cited above apply to hereditary colonelcy, a feature that most vividly characterizes the regiments of Sloboda Ukraine as compared with those of the Hetmanate in the second half of the seventeenth century. At the same time, albeit less markedly, a similar heritability aspect can be observed with respect to the rank of captain. In the 1690s, in the Boromlia company of the Okhtyrka regiment, Captain Ian Hrek and his son, acting Captain Petro Hrek, administered the company jointly.³⁸ “After the father,” the captains were Ivan Perekhrest (future colonel) in the Okhtyrka regiment and Ivan Sybirs'kyi in the Ostrohozk regiment.³⁹

The transposing of family relations into the realm of political power, of gov­ernance, is undoubtedly connected with the formation of a separate stratum within Cossackdom as a whole - the Cossack starshyna. Bound by a number of ties, ranging from blood relationships to a sense of social solidarity, the officer “clan-family” began to control the “father”- colonel, dissatisfied with his patri­archal role. The evolution of the heritability of officer ranks resembles the evo­lution of the patriarchal family, in which the father initially has total control over the life of the son (in this case, the son’s career depends completely on the father), but gradually his rights are circumscribed by numerous relatives, the “family council” (the family proper: uncles, brothers-in-law, sons-in-law), which begins to take charge of the son's fate.⁴⁰ The rather archaic system of inheritance, based on blood relationships and customary law, then entered the next phase, in which the heritability of political power was based largely on the existence of hereditary land ownership. Having concentrated in its hands the bulk of land holdings, the Cossack starshyna had by the end of the seventeenth century created the economic foundation for a leading political role and was becoming dissatisfied with the au­thoritarian rule of the colonel (“father” in the Sloboda regiments), and, in turn, the hetman (“father” in the Hetmanate).⁴¹ In other words, socioeconomic pro­cesses exercised a powerful influence on the relations between the “father” and the “children.”

Along with these internal factors, it is hard not to see the interference of the Russian government in the process of the formation of the “family.” On the one hand, the tsarist government was interested in creating officer corporations - these made the “clan” easier to control, because all the members of the “family” were interrelated. On the other hand, and this was much more important, it was undesirable for the “clan” and its political role to grow stronger where the empire was not firmly established, and where there were strong autonomous sentiments. In other words, the central government's policy regarding “clans” was not unam­biguous. One thing is certain, however, and that is that the tsarist government sought to control the “shoots of heritability.” The officer “family” that had begun to form around the Okhtyrka Colonel Ivan Perekhrest was seriously shaken by the arrest and exile of the latter and the change in the administration of the regiment in 1704.⁴² This was the tsarist government's way of seeming to make concessions to the regimental officers' several decades of demands to limit the authoritarian rule of their colonel. The powerful Colonel and Brigadier Fedir Volodymyrovych Shydlovs'kyi, who in 1706 at the request of the starshyna served as the colonel of both the Izium and Kharkiv regiments and passed on these offices to his nephews Mykhailo Kostiantynovych Donets'-Zakharzhevs'kyi and Lavrentii Shydlovs'kyi, was arrested in 1711.⁴³ In 1712, a foreigner, the Moldavian political emigre Prokip Kulykovs'kyi, was appointed the Kharkiv colonel, and in the 1720s, another “foreigner”, the Russian Second Major T. Goriaistov, was named colonel of the Izium regiment.⁴⁴ An unpleasant situation also occurred with respect to the Kondrat'iev “clan” in the Sumy regiment: after the death of Colonel Ivan An- driiovych Kondrat'iev in 1728, the commander of the Sloboda regiments Mikhail Golitsyn gave the post of colonel to Vasyl' Danylovych Perekhrestov-Osypov (grandson of the Okhtyrka colonel), bypassing the members of the Sumy colonel's family.⁴⁵ The colonel's undermined authority strengthened the role of the “officer council.” Although it should be noted that the old patriarchal system of passing on political power to the son while the father was still alive continued to play an important role in the eighteenth century. Okhtyrka Colonel and Brigadier Fedir Osypov passed on his post while he was still alive to his son Maksym in 1711.⁴⁶ In that regiment, an entire Lesevets'kyi dynasty emerged after the death of Fedir Osypov in the 1720s. After the father, Colonel Oleksii Lesevets'kyi, his children governed in turn during the i74os-5os.⁴⁷

Of equal interest was the passing on of the post of captain, as vividly illustrated by the captaincies in the Kharkiv regiment. In 1707, after Mykola Zhuchenko, the post of captain of the Sokolov company was assumed by his son Ivan (Zhukov), the grandson of Captain Demian Zhuchenko in the Kharkiv regiment.⁴⁸ During the “attestations” in the 1730s, Hryhorii Petrovs'kyi, captain of the Liubotyn com­pany, made a request in 1738 to replace him in the post of captain with his son Andrii.⁴⁹ Retired Captain Oleksii Protopopov requested a captaincy for his son in 1737.⁵⁰

Thus, initially the key feature of the heritability of officer ranks and posts was the transfer of political power from father to son during the father's lifetime. Po­litical power was closely tied to the acquisition of “goods” and estates by officers. The heritability of this power was a kind of legitimization of the transfer of nu­merous landholdings through inheritance. Actually, while the history of the Cos­sack officer stratum lasted more than a hundred years, and the inheritance principle stretched across three to four generations, the powerful influence of the first-generation talented father, who acquired the office owing to his “services,” extended only to the second generation; subsequent generations looked for favor and support among a wider circle of relatives.

Looking After the Children of the “Family”

The main basis for reaching the top rungs of the social ladder in the Sloboda reg­iments at that time was the service of the ancestor and father, which was un­equivocally deemed by society part of tradition and custom.⁵¹ With respect to the Hetmanate, the beginning of this system of inheritance was very appropri­ately described by the Ukrainian historian Oleksandr Hrushevs'kyi: “Slowly, during the hetmancies of Samoilovych and Mazepa, the generation that was beginning its service could already confidently cite the services to the Host of their fathers [...] At the beginning of service, when they had no important ser­vices of their own, a mention of the father's services warranted a larger grant or confirmation of the father's estates.”⁵² In speaking of the father's diminishing di­rect influence on the career of his son, it should be noted that it was not the father or the grandfather himself but the prestige of the father and grandfather that played an important role in obtaining an officer post at the beginning of the eigh­teenth century.

Listing the services of an ancestor in the absence of one's own was a typical feature of many petitions, reports, requests, and appeals for offices. This is espe­cially evident in the proof of the right of Ivan Ivanovych Kondrat'iev to the colonelcy during his attempts to obtain the post of colonel of the Sumy regi- ment.⁵³ The point is that in 1728, after the death of Colonel Ivan Andriiovych Kondrat'iev, the commander of Russian forces in southern Russia, Mikhail Golit­syn, faced the problem of whom to appoint colonel in the Sumy regiment. The most important among the candidates was the former colonel's son, Mykhailo Andriiovych Kondrat'iev. Golitsyn was perfectly aware that this claimant had the most rights to the colonelcy: “the former Colonel Kondrat'iev's son, Mikhail, should be [the colonel], inasmuch as both his grandfather and father had been colonels in that regiment, but this Mykhailo is a drunkard and stupid.”⁵⁴ In July 1728, after the death of Mykhailo Kondrat'iev (2 May 1728), Golitsyn appointed as Captain (rotmistr) Vasyl' Osypov (Perekhrest), an outsider to the Sumy officers, although he was aware of the significance of his action, “because the new colonel should have been promoted from the ranks of deserving regimental officers or from the families of former colonels.”⁵⁵ Throughout the course of Vasyl' Osypov's colonelcy from 1728 to 1736, a fight was under way to have Captain Ivan Ivanovych Kondrat'iev appointed colonel of the Sumy regiment. The Kondrat'iev clan's rights were championed not only by the “family,” the regimental starshyna, but also by the Okhtyrka Colonel Oleksii Lesevets'kyi, to whom the Kondrat'ievs had once shown great favor, and Ivan Kondrat'iev's uncle, Hetman Danylo Apostol. Regimental officers, in their attempts to help the member of the “family” gain his rightful place, stressed that this place was deserved “by virtue of the loyalty and blood and wounds of his great grandfather, grandfather, and father.”⁵⁶

Equally interesting is the “report” of Ivan Iakovych Kovalevs'kyi, an underage “theology student” (probably of the Kharkiv College), to the Kharkiv regimental office in 1737. The petitioner writes that his grandfather and father (deceased) served “Her Imperial Highness” in the Kharkiv regiment “as regimental and com­pany officers loyally and irreproachably for many years,” and his uncles and brothers serve today as officers, and he, after the death of his father, “because of [his] minority is designated for Latin schools.” This is followed by the most im­portant appeal in “reports” of this kind: “I ask that for the services of my father and relatives I be assigned to one of the regimental chancelleries to [work with] regimental written records.”⁵⁷ We should note that the petitioner was around seventeen years old,⁵⁸ and a year later he was appointed captain of the Vilshana company.⁵⁹ In other words, he owed his officer status mainly to his relatives, al­though to some degree also to his education, which can be seen from the docu­ment, if only cursorily.

Such examples of obtaining officer posts for the services of the family are fairly typical for Ukrainian traditional culture, where the basis for recognizing officership could be “fertility” (rodovytist) in other words, having many relatives. In the Ukrainian worldview a man without kin is an unfortunate man.⁶⁰ Recall, for example, the well-known duma Fedir bezrodnyi, bezdol'nyi (Fedir the man without kin, the unfortunate).

A characteristic feature of occupying starshyna posts during the rule of the “family” was the “child's” rise up the officer ladder. At the beginning of the eigh­teenth century, this ladder was not yet clearly regulated. The son of Kharkiv reg­imental Judge Semen Kvitka, Hryhorii, became regimental chancellor around 1706, regimental aide-de-camp in 1711, and in 1713, the officers (“family”) pro­moted him to colonel.⁶¹ A similar career was followed by the son of the regimental judge, and later Okhtyrka colonel, Oleksii Lesevyts'kyi.⁶² Even the son of the Ostrohozk Colonel Ivan Tev'iashov first became the regiment's flag-bearer in 1719, then aide-de-camp, and after the death of his father in 1725, colonel.⁶³ Thus the tradition of the son serving jointly with his father as his closest assistant and deputy had fundamentally changed.

To legally establish the heritability of officer ranks, a new category was created at the beginning of the eighteenth century - a stratum of “junior ensigns” (pid- praporni) made up mainly of officers' children with no other rank.⁶⁴ At the same time, the rank of “junior ensign” was the lowest officer rank, the first rung in the career of an officer. Almost all the children of officers received this rank, without having any services of their own. The acquisition of the rank of junior ensign is best seen in the later attestations of officers of the Kharkiv regiment. Most of these ranks were given to the children of officers by Colonel Hryhorii Kvitka dur­ing his colonelcy.⁶⁵ The natural growth and ramification of the “family” required a way for people who were unable to obtain one of the clearly designated officer posts to acquire status, and it was for them that the rank of junior ensign existed.

Increased interference by the Russian government and attempts to turn the Sloboda regiments into well-controlled units had a direct effect on the relations between “fathers” and “children.”⁶⁶ To reach the summit of social status, the child had to climb all the rungs of the career ladder. Evidence of this can be found start­ing from the 1720s. The son of the aforementioned Colonel Hryhorii Kvitka, Ivan, despite his father's apparent support, began his service as a junior ensign, then became captain of the Valky company. He finally obtained the closest post to a colonelcy, that of the quartermaster, and was attested by the Russian government in 1737 for the post of colonel, but assumed this office only in 1744, and even then in the Izium regiment, far from his own estates.⁶⁷

Cossack officers sought to send their children to serve as junior ensigns while they were still children. In his memoir, Ivan Osypovych Ostroz'kyi-Lokhvyts'kyi recalled that he was registered to serve as a junior ensign in the Ostrohozk regi­ment at the age of ten, but while he was serving as such, his father sent him to study at the Kharkiv College.⁶⁸ The 1759 census of the Kharkiv regiment provides data about the age of induction into service: on the average, officers began to serve at thirteen to seventeen years old, but there were interesting exceptions. lakiv Kovalevs'kyi, the captain of the Derkachivka company, began his service at the age of six, Captain lakiv Kvitka at three (!!!), as did Pavlo Cherniak, and Cap­tain Protopopov began serving at two.⁶⁹ The census states that “many junior en­signs, being minors, are still in school and do not appear in the regiment.”⁷⁰ The register of the junior ensigns in this report of the Kharkiv regiment clearly shows that the principal basis for holding the post of junior ensign was the designation “from the family of officers,” “from the family of captains,” and by then, even “from the family of junior ensigns.” Of sixty-six junior ensigns, only twenty-four were from “Cossack” and “priestly” families.⁷¹

The recognition of the services of the father or grandfather and belonging to the “family” served as an indicator of social and political status. The circle of of­ficers, the “family,” looked after not only the interests of the heir while the father was still alive but also those of widows and orphans. The Cossack administration not only safeguarded his estates but also made provision for his service. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was a stratum of widows and orphans of landowners, which meant that to occupy a certain place in society it was nec­essary to have a notable ancestor and belong to the “family,” but not necessarily hold a leading post.⁷² A large percentage of the estates in the Sloboda regiments, as evidenced by the 1713, 1722, and 1723 censuses of the Kharkiv regiment, was owned by widows and orphans.⁷³ The recognized “services of the father” were the basis for belonging to the privileged class but not for occupying the same, es­pecially high, office after his death. It is here that the power of the “family” and the interference of the Russian government made themselves felt. Increased pres­sure by the Russian government and the reforms of the 1730s that introduced the attestation of officers in order to obtain posts significantly weakened the influence of the starshyna on appointments to various posts.⁷⁴ Although the tsarist govern­ment still adhered to tradition, it perceptibly sought to control the situation. Ev­idence of this was the rotation of colonels in i73os-4os, when a “regimental son” from one Sloboda regiment was appointed colonel into another regiment, further away from his estates and “family.” In 1734, a representative of the Ostrohozk colonel's family, Stepan Tev'iashov, became colonel of the Kharkiv regiment; in 1743, the Kharkiv colonel's son, Ivan Hryhorovych Kvitka, became colonel of the Izium regiment; and in 1748, the Izium colonel's son, Mykhailo Mykhailovych Donets'-Zakharzhevs'kyi, was appointed colonel of the Sumy regiment.⁷⁵

In the eighteenth century, the recognition of individual merits of the children was a more decisive factor in obtaining starshyna posts than the backing of father's authority. In 1713, the officers of the Kharkiv regiment refused to hand back the post of colonel to Lavrentii Ivanovych Shydlovs'kyi, which he had occupied while his uncle held the post.⁷⁶ The peripeties in the Sumy regiment in the 1740s were even more interesting. In 1737, Dmytro Kondrat'iev, who had been appointed colonel of Sumy regiment, immediately decided, quite naturally, to look after the interests of his son, and in 1740, the officers of the Sumy regiment certified his son Heorhii “to the post of his father... while he is alive.” But it was not until 1743, when Dmytro Kondrat'iev died, that “the regimental starshyna in [1]743 chose as colonel” not the attested son, but Andrii Vasyl'ovych Kondrat'iev, the regimental judge.⁷⁷ What is more, they even refused the colonel's son the post of the regimental judge (“unreliable,” “doesn't know the job,” “does not write well,” “was never in this administration”).⁷⁸

Attempts to bypass the “family” and the local Russian command were unsuc­cessful. The Okhtyrka regiment's Aide-de-Camp Vasyl' Smakovs'kyi directed his request to be appointed quartermaster, and his son Hryhorii to be appointed to his post of aide-de-camp, not through the command but through the Russian Senate. His petition was returned “so that he ask for that position for himself and his children through the command.”⁷⁹

Thus, the third and fourth generation of Sloboda officers inherited their rank with the help of the “family,” the signatures on the petitions and attestations of almost all members of the “family.” This already signaled the existence of a ram­ified estate of the “new gentry.”

“The Bad Aspects of the Old Cossack Way of Life”⁸⁰

A defining aspect of the officer “families” of the Sloboda regiments was their weakness, that is, their weak clan solidarity.

Above all, this weakness was due to the way that the officer families were formed. Democratic access to the “family” was still open in the eighteenth century, when the starshyna corporation was seemingly fully formed. For example, in the Ostrohozk regiment, judging from the attestations of officers, it was not at all dif­ficult to attain “notable” rank; it was easily gained by wealthy Cossacks and im­portant foreigners.⁸¹ In the Izium regiment, after climbing all the rungs of the of­ficer career ladder, starting from common Cossack, Fedir Khomych Krasnokut- s'kyi became colonel in 1751.⁸² We know of several officers in the Kharkiv regiment in the 1760s who rose from the “masses” (Judge Andrii Holovashych,⁸³ Aide-de­Camp Ivan Nesterov,⁸⁴ Captain Hryhorii Rovnenko [Rovnev]).⁸⁵

The formation of the estate of the Cossack starshyna was significantly influ­enced by the Russian social structure, which was undergoing important changes in the eighteenth century. “Familial” and “clan” interests among eighteenth-cen­tury Russian nobility (which, incidentally, was only taking shape) were not long- lasting. To gain a certain status, a nobleman looked for support among patrons and clients and not in family ties.⁸⁶ This was clearly reflected in the structure of the officer clans in the Sloboda regiments, which constantly clashed with the Rus­sian authorities.

The starshyna corporation was also prevented from strengthening by the per­sonnel policy of the tsarist government, which ostensibly permitted the “clan” to form in accordance with its own laws, but, at the same time, confronted it with great difficulties. The government often appointed foreigners as officers to the Sloboda regiments. As of 1711, representatives of the Moldavian political emigra­tion were given estates in the Sloboda Ukraine and a bitter power struggle broke out in 1712, when the Moldavian Prokip Kulykovs'kyi was appointed colonel of the Kharkiv regiment.⁸⁷ The officer “clan” of the Kharkiv regiment reacted very adversely to anything foreign, to the “Wallachian outrage.” The Moldavian for­eigners who settled in the Sloboda regiments were united, had a much greater sense of “clan identity” than the Cossack officers, greater cooperativeness, and, finally, the support of the tsarist government. Despite Prokip Kulykovs'kyi's sud­den death in 1735, the Moldavian immigrants remained in the Sloboda regiments as a foreign irritant in the starshyna corporation. In addition, according to a decree of 1735, the Moldavians had to be awarded officer ranks.⁸⁸

The tsarist government often appointed Russians, who were outsiders with re­spect to the starshyna “family,” as officers in the Sloboda regiments: the Tev'iashovs in the Ostrohozk regiment, the Chornohlazovs and Kartavis in the Kharkiv reg­iment.⁸⁹ After several decades, these individuals usually became “Ukrainianized,” and their families became part of the “family.” In fact, a diverse ethnic background is characteristic of most representatives of the elite of any country, but the con­stant “infusion” of foreign elements could not be conducive to a more or less reg­ulated corporatization and served as grounds for numerous quarrels between “insider” and “outsider” officers.

These quarrels were effectively used by the tsarist government to destroy the Cossack social order, and to co-opt the local elite into imperial structures. By the 1750s, long-lasting conflicts were flaring up in each Sloboda regiment (except the Okhtyrka regiment), both inside the “family” and with officers who were outsiders with respect to the “family.”

Numerous appeals to the tsarist government from the officers of the Sumy regiment in the 1750s not to appoint the son of Romanov, a convert to Chris­tianity, as their colonel ended in the appointment of precisely that odious figure as colonel.⁹⁰

At the end of the 1740s, the “families” experienced a severe crisis in internal relations. It was due in no small measure to the interference of the tsarist gov­ernment into the cases of attestation for officer posts. In 1745, the quartermaster of the Okhtyrka regiment, T. Boiars'kyi, decided to retire and leave his post to his son. However, Colonel Ivan Lesevyts'kyi contested the attestation of the younger Boiars'kyi on the grounds that not only had Junior Ensign Boiars'kyi not served in any post but he was not even registered as a common Cossack and is a self-proclaimed junior ensign, who illegally produced his attestation “through the diligence of his father.”⁹¹ The government settled the scandal in­volving the attestation and the “internal family” quarrels in its own best interests, increasing its control over the appointment of officers and inheritance of offices (the main functions of the “family”), “so that henceforth they not use trickery to produce attestations.”⁹²

The conflicts over attestations extended to the Kharkiv regiment. After the re­tirement of Colonel Stepan Tev'iashov in 1756, the officers sought to make the regimental Judge Ivan Hryhorovych Kovalevs'kyi (a “classic” representative of the “family,” because his father, grandfather, and great grandfather had been officers in the regiment) their colonel. But the tsarist government did not support his candidacy and even tried to punish the officers for this attestation.⁹³ In addition, at the end of the 1750s, conflicts over the “officership” flared up in the Kharkiv regiment between Captain (rotmistr) Ivan Nesterov and the Aides-de-Camp Maksym Horlyns'kyi and Ivan Zembors'kyi.⁹⁴ Against this backdrop, the tsarist government appointed as the colonel of the Kharkiv regiment Matvii Proko- povych Kulykovs'kyi, the son of the notorious “Wallachian” Prokip Kulykovs'kyi, who had served as colonel in 1712-13. Notably, the new colonel did not immedi­ately find common ground with the officers, especially captains Kostiantyn Pro­topopov, Hryhorii Rovenko, and Hryhorii Kvitka, and was notorious for his abuses and violence. However, at the beginning of the 1760s, the majority of of­ficers came to terms with this individual, and only the company Chancellor Petro Nepyshnyi remained staunchly opposed to him.⁹⁵ Nepyshnyi's complaints about the abuses of Matvii Kulykovs'kyi were one of the reasons for a lengthy investi­gation by the Russian government of irregularities in the Sloboda regiments, which ended with the abolishment of the Cossack social order.

Even more alarming trends were seen in the “family” of the Izium regiment. Izium Colonel Fedir Krasnokuts'kyi quarreled with the brigadier of the Sloboda regiments Vasyl' P. Kapnist (representative of the Moldavian emigration of 1711), who had himself begun his career in the Izium regiment.⁹⁶ The brigadier made every effort to drive a wedge between the officers and the colonel, exploiting of­ficers Mykhailo Myloradovych and Stepan Fedorov as “foreigners,” as well as the starshyna’s old quarrels with the colonel.⁹⁷ It is interesting to note that the in fact “legitimate” colonel was opposed by representatives of the “family,” members of old officer clans: Judge Ivan Kapustians'kyi, Quartermaster Andrii Sambors'kyi, and even the colonel's son-in-law, Captain Hryhorii Tymoshenko.⁹⁸ At the be­ginning of the 1760s, eight officers of the Izium regiment (all members of the “family”) were under arrest in connection with the conflict (including Colonel Fedir Krasnokuts'kyi).⁹⁹ The regiment was governed by other starshyna members and Russian officers.¹⁰⁰

It is in the Izium regiment that we come across an important fact in the life of the “family” - the recognition of seniority, a principle similar to the old Muscovite “order of precedence” (mestnichestvo). Thus, the officers of the Izium regiment complained in 1758 that Colonel Krasnokuts'kyi had sent the aide-de-camp Ivan Soshals'kyi to deliver money to the capital, bypassing more deserving officers; moreover, to resolve this matter, he had gathered the officers at his home (“he prefers his home despite [the existence of] the regimental chancellery”). The no­table officers regarded all of this as degrading.¹⁰¹

Problems in the “family” were also brought to the fore in the Ostrohozk regi­ment at the end of the 1750s and the beginning of the 1760s. In fact, they served as grounds for a government investigation of abuses in the Sloboda regiments. We have in mind the famous case of Prokip Konevyts'kyi.¹⁰²

Prokip Konevyts'kyi, a native of the city of Zolochiv of the Kharkiv regiment, was attested in 1749 as captain,¹⁰³ but since there were no vacancies in the com­panies of the Kharkiv regiment, he was transferred in 1754 to the Ostrohozk regiment.¹⁰⁴ This officer, even though he was given the Kalach [Kalachivs’ka] com­pany, was an outsider to the “family” of the Ostrohozk regiment and was imme­diately sent on the Prussian campaign. Upon his return from the campaign, Prokip Konevyts'kyi failed to give a bribe to Colonel Stepan Tev'iashov and quar­reled with Quartermaster Ivan Hozlubyn. The captain attempted to lodge a com­plaint about “family” relations, charging that the colonel and officers in starshyna posts were appointed “not on the basis of sworn qualifications but only on the basis of cronyism,” “in the interests of that cronyism.”¹⁰⁵ The lengthy excesses in the case of Prokip Konevyts'kyi are quite interesting and instructive, but they ended with an investigatory commission from St Petersburg, whose conclusions proved fatal for the existence of the Sloboda regiments.

The facts cited above clearly demonstrate the assertion about the unformed nature and weakness of the starshyna “family.” Despite the fact that “clanship,” collective responsibility, and heritability of officer posts were fairly characteristic of officers in the Sloboda regiments, the officer stratum did not unite to defend their rights and liberties in the face of the threat of the abolition of their ambigu­ous status quo. The special features and weakness of the “family” were ably ex­ploited by the Russian government to subjugate the autonomous borderland, and to fit it into the imperial model.

Conclusions

Our study does not in any way exhaust the problem of “clanship”; rather, it raises this problem in early modern Ukraine. It stands to reason that a number of ques­tions that still require study (the size of a Cossack officer's family, the “nucleariza­tion” of families, the role of the younger son with respect to the inheritance and division of property and power) have been left outside our purview, but we need to take into consideration those specific characteristics of the “familial clan” that are reflected in some ways in our own time. The evolution of the family of the Cossack starshyna largely replicated the evolution of the patriarchal family, with the initial role of the “father” and the subsequent significant limitation of his powers. Officer posts were obtained “based on cronyism” and “based on kinship.”

The formation of the officer stratum, the officer family-clans, in the Sloboda regiments was closely linked with the formation of the Russian nobility. Neither the starshyna family nor the Russian nobility were “organizations” of the com­munal (directly familial) type. However, these structures did bear certain features of a community: the equalizing distribution of service duties among its members, collective responsibility, the election of officials whom the members of the family vouched for to the state.¹⁰⁶ Tsarism, of course, was not interested in the strength of the starshyna family, or in the corporatization of the frontier elite. Through clever maneuvering, the tsarist government used the family to subordinate Cos­sack autonomy to the empire. Nonetheless, the officer clan existed, and family relationships in achieving one's social niche during the decline of “Cossack state­hood” significantly outweighed those of clientelism.

The history of Ukraine until the end of the eighteenth century is the history of a moving frontier. If we accept Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis re­garding the United States, a similar theory can be applied to Ukraine.¹⁰⁷ En­trepreneurship, democratically egalitarian social relations, small families, and in­dividualism developed on the frontier. In one way or another, this also applies to Ukrainian history, but this movable frontier was fought over by various countries, in fact, various civilizations. In the case of Ukraine, the winner was not a demo­cratic but an integrated system, which subjugated the democratic movable fron­tier with a “carrot and stick” approach, initially recognizing all the special features and liberties of the frontier and only gradually subjugating the local elite and subordinating its functioning to imperial norms. That system was Russia.¹⁰⁸ In other words, the “democratism of the familial clan” played a negative role in the political aspirations of the Cossack elite.

The weakness of the family was due not only to the interference of the tsarist government but undoubtedly to the quite strongly manifested traditions of the frontier. The system of ordered heritability on the frontier vied with the special features of the transfer of power among nomadic peoples, where “whatever power the ruler had, his successor, even if he obtained his office on a legal basis, most often was forced to start everything anew.”¹⁰⁹ The extensive room for action in a “marginal society” contributed to the division of families and elimination of respect for relatives. Moral factors of mutual assistance within the family circle played a weak role. Could this not have been the source of the “Little Russian” propensity for “litigation,” and constant quarrels over details among close rela­tives? The files of local courts in the second half of the eighteenth to beginning of the nineteenth century are replete with such cases. Could this not be the rea­son why the Ukrainian clanship of the frontier did not survive the test and yielded its political rights and liberties in order to preserve its altered social sta­tus? Sociology distinguishes two types of social interaction: Gemeinschaft (com­munity) and Gesellschaft (society). In the first type (community), social ties that are based on neighborliness, family, friendship, and respect reign; in the com­munity, there is a reliance on tradition and moral factors play a role. At the same time, in a society, social relations, based on the rational exchange of services and goods, dominate. The modernization of Russia, which was intensively under way in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, in one way or another undermined the annals of the community, gradually forming new relations among people (society). The modern Russian historian Boris Mironov described the process of the modernization of Russia in the eighteenth to the beginning of the nine­teenth centuries as a transition “from community to society.”¹¹⁰ The Ukrainian frontier lands were part of this general process, and the yet-not-fully-formed es­tate of the Ukrainian nobility fell under the influence of new forms of mutual assistance and unity, which were based not on the classic models of the Cossack family with the recognition of the services of relatives but on the principle of quid pro quo. Assertions about the estate order of the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine require certain clarifications and explanations of their distinctive fea­tures. The ambiguousness of the evolution of social microstructures on the fron­tier - the combining, synthesis, of various forms of family and clan relations - are, in fact, the challenges in the treatments of Ukrainian history and of relations in the frontier society of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Translated from the Ukrainian by Marta Skorupsky

NOTES

Originally published as: V. Masliichuk, “Kozats'ka starshyna slobids'kykh polkiv XVII-XVIII st.: ‘rodynnyi klan' ta dosiahnennia sotsial'noho statusu,” Kyivs’ka starovyna, i (2003): 42-58. Copyright 2003 by Volodymyr Masliichuk. Translated and reprinted with permission.

1 M. Mitterauer, “Vorindustrielle Familienformen. Zur Funtionsentslastun des “ganzen Hauses” im 17 und 18 Jahrehundert,” in ed. F. Engel-Janosi et al., Fürst, Bürger, Mensch: Untersuchungen zu politischen und soziokulturellen Wandlungsprozessen im vorrevolutionären Europa (Wiener Beiträge zur Geschichte der Neuzeit) 2 (Vienna, 1975): 123.

2 Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France, trans. Sian Reynolds, vol. 1 (London: Collins, 1988), 103.

3 In this context, the following works are the exceptions: A.L. Perkovs'kyi, “Evoliutsiia sim'i i hospodarstva na Ukraini v XVII—pershii polovyni XIX st.,” Demohrafichni doslidzhennia 4 (Kyiv, 1979): 37-46; Iu. H. Hoshko, Nase- lennia ukrains’kykh KarpatXV-XVIIIst. Zaselennia. Mihratsii. Pobut (Kyiv, 1976). At the same time there appeared in Ukraine a critical review of the views of Western anthropologists and ethnographers: V. Iu. Kelembetov, Suchasna burzhuazna sotsiokul 'turna antropolohiia: Krytyko-etnohrafichne doslidzhennia (Kyiv, 1980). The last work by the abovementioned Iu. H. Hoshko is very interesting: Zvychaieve pravo naselennia ukra'ins kykh Karpat i Prykarpattia XIV-XIX st. (Lviv, 1999), 227-42, on family law, see 243-325. Most recent interesting publications: R. Chmelyk, Mala ukrains 'ka sim 'ia druhoipolovyny XIX-pochatku XX st. (struktura i funktsii) (Lviv, 1999); V.P. Marochkin, “Ukrains'ka mishchans'ka rodyna v svitli pravnychykh, moral'no- etychnykh i zvychaievykh norm zhyttia,” in idem, Ukra'ins ke misto vid XV do ser. XVII st. Zvychaievo-pravova atrybutyka iak istorychne dzherelo (Toronto, 1999), 36-41; N. Starchenko, “Shliubna stratehiia vdiv i kil'ka problem navkolo nei,” Kyivs’ka starovyna 1 (2001): 42-62.

4 lu. A. Poliakov, “Chelovek v povsednevnosti (Istoricheskie aspekty),” Otech- estvennaia istoriia 3 (2000): 126.

5 Above all, we have in mind the studies in the history of family relations in Ukraine by Orest Levyts'kyi (see this scholar's bibliography: “Bibliohrafiia prats' O. Levyts'koho,” Zapysky sotsial’no-ekonomichnoho viddilu Vseukrain- s’koi Akademii Nauk 1 (1923), XCIX-CVI [nos. 117, 119, 126, 148, 168, 172, 175, 190, 196, 198, 204].

6 Compare Jean Sigmann's description of the elite of Burgundy. See Jean Sigmann, La Revolution de Maupeon en Bourgogne 1771-1775 (Dijon, 1935), 30. Quoted from Braudel, The Identity of France, 1:82-3.

7 It should be noted that in the majority of medieval communities, the role of the “family” was much broader; it was viewed more as a symbol to designate a macrostructure: state, community, city, etc. (for example, the Father Tsar [TsarBatiushka] in Russia). Old Rus' was perceived as the Riuryk family. See O.P. Tolochko, Rus’: derzhava i obraz derzhavy (Kyiv, 1994), 4. In the case of

a frontier society, a frontier estate, which the Cossacks were, this was even more perceptible. The Cossacks clearly regarded themselves as a large family headed by a “father” (captain, otaman, hetman), whence the instances of blood brotherhood, mutual assistance, and Cossack rhetoric about “brother­hood.” For their part, the hetmans addressed the Cossacks as their “children.” Incidentally, this is clearly seen in Hetman Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi's relations with the Cossacks: “And the hetman came to the Cossacks, bowed three times to the ground before them, ordered that they be given a barrel of mead, and said to them: my children, drink, and serve me some.” T.H. Iakovleva, “Bo­hdan Khmel'nyts'kyi i riadove kozatstvo,” Ukrains 'kyi istorychnyi zhurnal 4 [1995]: 60. We believe that this matter requires separate study.

8 A rather interesting definition of the “Khmel'nyts'kyi clan” is given by Iaroslav Dashkevych: “a union of the representatives of the family, related by blood; second, indirectly related representatives of other families, [...] third (this is an exclusively Ukrainian feature), united by ritual relations (in Ukraine, especially Eastern Ukraine, relations through godparents, godfa­thers, godmothers, children), plus, fourth [...] united by heraldic ties: Iaroslav Dashkevych, “Klan Khmel'nyts'koho - lehenda chy diisnist',” in Ukraina v mynulomu 2 (Kyiv-Lviv, 1992): 80. However, the definition of “clan” as it applies to the Cossack starshyna in the regiments of both the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine can be substantially broadened to include, in addition to godparents, ordinary friends (sometimes former hired hands and servants), members of the clergy with ties to officers, and others.

9 Zenon E. Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy: Imperial Ab­sorption of the Hetmanate, ry6os-i83os (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1988), 8-9; O.A. Gant- skaia, “Sem'ia: struktura, funktsii, tipy,” Sovetskaia etnografiia 6 (1984): 23.

10 A. Kappeler, Kleine Geschichte der Ukraine (Munich, 1994), 80.

11 M. Hrushevs'kyi, Iliustrovana istoriia Ukrainy (Kyiv, 1992), 389.

12 The colonel's great power in Sloboda regiments was noticed in the Het- manate. Later, in the early nineteenth century, the talented author of Istoriia Rusiv (History of the Rus’ People), in trying to demonstrate the oneness of the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine noted incorrectly, but interestingly, that up to 1668 the Sloboda regiments were under the command of the Hetman and Little Russian authorities, but “the colonels there, each wanting to be a little self-proclaimed hetman,” succeeded in obtaining a special system of gover­nance from the Russian government (Istoriia Rusiv, trans. I. Drach [Kyiv, 1991], 154). In other words, the patriot stressed the great power of the colonels in the Sloboda regiments. Equally interesting is that this feature of the Slo­boda regiments appealed to the Hetmanate's colonels; thus, in 1676, Colonel Petro Roslavets' of the Starodub regiment tried to separate his regiment from the Hetmanate and govern it in the manner of the Sloboda regiments. See A.M. Lazarevskii, Opisanie staroi Malorossii, vol. 1. Polk Starodubskii (Kyiv, 1888), 17.

13 K. Zynoviiv, Virshi. Prypovisti pospolyti (Kyiv, 1971), 126.

14 Mykhailo Maksymovych, in examining the question of family relations among Ukrainians, cites an interesting folk tale: “A crow was flying from the south and was carrying his young under his wings. Along the way, he asked one of his young: will he carry his father when he grows old; receiving a posi­tive answer, the crow cast the young bird to earth. He received the same an­swer from the second chick and did with him as he had with the first. The third answered: ‘I will, father, but only my own children.' The father carried this chick where necessary, because he saw truth in him.” (M. Maksymovych, Ukrainets [Kyiv, 1864], 12. Quoted from S.I. Siavavko, Ukrains’ka etnopedaho- hika v ii istorychnomu rozvytku [Kyiv, 1974], 63.)

15 V.H. (Vasyl' Horlenko), “Z rodynnykh vidnosyn na Het'manshchyni v druhii polovyni XVIII stolittia,” in Ukrains’kyi naukovyizbirnyk 2 (Moscow, 1916): 88.

16 Jan Ornowski, Bogaty w parantele, slawp y honory wirydarz herbownemi Ich Mosciow Panow P Zacharzewskich pozornie po swych kwaterach zasadzony rozami [...] W S. cudotworney wielkiey Lawrze Kijowo Pieczarskiey (Kyiv, 1705), ark. 59.

17 Akty Moskovskogo gosudarstva (hereinafter - amg), vol. 3 (St Petersburg, 1901), 436.

18 V. Iurkevych, Emigratsiia na skhid i zaliudnennia Slobozhanshchyny za B. Khmel 'nyts ’koho (Kyiv, 1932), 133; V.E. Danilevich, “Vremia obrazovaniia sloboskikh cherkaskikh polkov, in Sbornik stateiposviashchennykh V.O. Kliuchevskomu (Moscow, 1909), 637.

amg, 3: 578.

Filaret, Istoriko-statisticheskoe opisanie Khar’kovskoi eparkhii (hereinafter - Filaret), vol. 3 (Moscow, 1857), 321.

Instytut rukopysu Natsional’noi biblioteky Ukrainy (Manuscript Institute of the National Library of Ukraine; hereinafter - ir nbu), f. 29, spr. 151, ark. 280 zv.

Opisanie dokumentov i bumag, khraniashchikhsia v moskovskom otdelenii arkhiva ministerstva iustitsii (hereinafter - Opisanie v AMIu), vol. 13 (Moscow, 1903), 345; iR nbu, f. XXIX, spr. 151, ark. 277.

Ibid., ark. 304.

Filaret, 3: 325; “Krest'ianskie i natsional'nye dvizheniia nakanune obrazovaniia Rossiskoi imperii. Bulavinskoe vosstanie,” Trudy istoriko-arkheologicheskogo instytuta 12 (Moscow, 1935): 262.

E. Al'bovskii, Khar’kovskie kazaki (vtoraia polovina XVII v.) (St Petersburg, 1914), 180.

Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv Ukrainy v m. Kyievi (Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine in Kyiv; hereinafter - tsdiauk), f. 1717, spr. 334, 337-40, 348.

Al'bovskii, Khar’kovskie kazaki, 198; D.I. Bagalei, Materialy dlia istorii goroda Khar’kova vXVII v. (Kharkiv, 1905), 80.

Ibid., 83.

Ibid.

Ibid., 85.

Ibid., 89.

Filaret, 5: 18.

Opisanie v AMIu, 14: 10.

IR NBU, f. 29, spr. 152, copy 434.

Ibid.; tsdiauk, f. 1721, spr. 1H.

V. Danilevich, Iz istorii upravleniia Slobodskoi Ukrainy v XVII st. (K biografii ostrogozhskogo cherkaskogo polkovnika I.S. Sasa), (n.d.), 3, 9.

Filaret, 3: 80. Cherkasian (cherkasskie) regiments was a name of the Sloboda regiments used in the Muscovite formal correspondence.

ir nbu, f. 29, spr. 151, ark. 15 zv.-i6.

Ibid., spr. 152, ark. 3; spr. 151, ark. 147 zv.

On this, see M. Kovalevskii, Ocherk proiskhozhdeniia i razvitiia sem 'i i sobstvennosti. Lektsii chitannye v Stokhol ’mskom universitete, trans. from the French by M. Iolshin (St Petersburg, 1895), 90-1.

41 O. Ohloblyn, Het’man Ivan Mazepa ta ioho doba (New York-Paris-Toronto, i960), 85.

42 On this, see Filaret, 3: 45-6; Pis’ma i bumagi imperatora Petra Velikogo (here­inafter - Pis’ma Petra Velikogo) 8, no. 2 (Moscow, 1951): 759; tsdiauk, f. 1638, op. 2, spr. 34.

43 D.I. Bagalei, Materialy dlia istorii kolonizatsii i byta stepnoi okrainy Moskov- skogo gosudarstva (Khar’kovskoi i otchasti Kurskoi i Voronezhskoi gubernii) v XVI-XVIII st., sobrannye v raznykh arkhivakh i redaktirovannye D.I. Bagaleem (Kharkiv, 1886), 1:179; tsdiauk, f. 1722, spr. 1, ark. 55; Materialy dlia ocherka sluzhebnoi deiatel’nosti Shidlovskikh v Slobodskoi Ukraine 1696-1727gg., so­brannye i izdannye S. I. Shidlovskim (St Petersburg, 1896) (hereinafter - Mate­rialy Shidlovskikh), 246. On the arrest of Shydlovskii and the reason for it, see Materialy Shidlovskikh, 131; Pis’ma i bumagi Petra Velikogo, vol. 10 (Moscow, 1956), 748; vol. 11 (Moscow, 1962), 193.

44 Materialy Shidlovskikh, 219; “Protokoly, zhurnaly i ukazy Verkhovnogo Tainogo soveta 1726-1730 gg., no. 8 (June 1729 - March 1730)” (hereinafter - “Protokoly”), in Sbornik Imperatorskogo Russkogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva (hereinafter - sirio) 101 (St Petersburg, 1898): 61.

45 “Protokoly, no. 6 (July-December 1728),” in Sbornik Imperatorskogo Russkogo Istoricheskogo Obshchestva 84 (St Petersburg, 1893): 33. Mikhail Mikhailovich Golitsyn described the representatives of this clan in very harsh terms.

46 Materialy Shidlovskikh, 127 (signed by Okhtyrka colonel Maksym Osypov, while his father was regarded as Sloboda regiment's brigadier. Ibid., 126).

47 The Lesevyts'kyi family inherited the colonel's office while Oleksii Leseveyt- s'kyi, the colonel of the Okhtyrka regiment in 1724-34, was still alive. In 1735, he was appointed brigadier of the Sloboda regiments, and his post of colonel was assumed by his son Ivan (Filaret, 3:52), who remained in this post until his death in 1751. He was replaced by his brother Kostiantyn, and after the lat­ter's death in 1756, the Military Collegium appointed Oleksii Leseveyts'kyi's third son, Iurii, to the office of Okhtyrka colonel. (ir nbu, f. 29, spr. 8, ark. 108 zv. and 109).

48 See the report about the Zhukov-Zhuchenko family tree in 1760 in tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 507, ark. 9. In 1739, I.M. Zhukov himself asked the government to appoint his son Iosyp captain of the Sokolov company (tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 29, ark. 122 and 122 zv.). The request was granted. Hence, the Zhukovs were captains of the Sokolov company from 1707 to 1764.

49 tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 29, ark. 83-84. The hereditary captaincy of the Petrovs'kyi's was confirmed in 1738. (ark. 77).

50 Ibid., ark. 55. Oleksiy Protopopov asked that his son be appointed to any vacant position, but his request was refused.

This tradition of assuming officer posts was depicted satirically by Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnov'ianenko, himself a descendant of a notable officer family, in his novel Konotops’ka vid'ma (The Witch of Konotop): “Captain Ulasovych was from an honest and important family. Was there anyone who did not know that the Zabr'iokhas had always been company officers; and Mykyta's grand­fathers and great grandfathers were always captains in the company's town of Konotop; the captaincy was passed down from father to son. And so when old Ulas Zabriokha, the captain of Konotop, died [...] he was very much mourned by the Cossacks! When they had marked the fortieth day [after death], and the community gathered at a conference to decide whom to ap­point captain, all shouted in unison: “Who else? Ulasovych, Zabr'oshchenko, who better can we find?” (H.F. Kvitka-Osnov'ianenko, Zibrannia tvoriv u semy tomakh, vol. 3 [Kyiv, 1970], 131-2.)

O. Hrushevs'kyi, “Z pobutu starshyny XVIII v.,” in Zapysky Ukrains ’koho naukovoho tovarystva u Kyivi. Naukovyi zbirnyk 21 (Kyiv, 1926): 125, 126. For greater detail on this, see A. Tverdokhlebov, “Nasledstvennoe polkovnich- estvo,” Kievskaia starina 5 (1887): 152-70.

“Protokoly, no. 5 (January-June 1728),” in sirio 79 (St Petersburg, 1891): 286. “Protokoly, no. 6,” in sirio 84 (St Petersburg, 1893): 33. Tverdokhlebov, “Nasledstvennoe polkovnichestvo,” 166.

tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 29, ark. 106.

The Genealogical Table of the Nobility of the Kharkiv Vicegerency, which was compiled in 1785-88, notes that Ivan lakovych Kovalevs'kyi was 66 years old, see Rukopysnyi viddil Kharkivs 'koi tsentral ’not naukovoi biblioteky (Manuscript Department of the Kharkiv Central Scientific Library), Rodoslovnaia dvorianstva knyha Khar’kovskogo namestnichestva, part 6, ark. 66, 135.

tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 29, ark. 114.

Al. Markevich, Istoriia mestnichestva v Moskovskom gosudarstve v XV-XVII veke (Odesa, 1888), 109.

Bagalei, Materialy, 1:179; Materialy Shydlovskikh, 178, 180, 197, 216; Filaret, 1:50. Filaret, 3:52.

ir nbu, f. 29, spr. 2, ark. 63.

The formation of the stratum of junior ensigns is examined in detail in my monograph “Kozats'ka starshyna slobids'kykh polkiv druhoi polovyny XVII- pershoi tretyny XVIII st.” (Kharkiv, 2009) which we expect to appear as a monograph in 2002.

tsdiauk, f., 1725, spr. 126, ark. 19, 23, 40, 46, 47, 54.

Rapid reforms in the Ukrainian autonomies were connected with the cre­ation of a “well-regulated state,” with Russian reforms. Zenon Kohut has expressed interesting views regarding this, see Kohut, Russian Centralism and Ukrainian Autonomy, 20-1.

67 A. Metlinskii, “Materialy k istorii Malorossii,” in Pribavlenie kKhar’kovskim gubernskim vedomostiam 9 (1840): 94; D.I. Bagalei and D.P. Miller, Istoriia goroda Khar’kova za 250 let ego sushchestvovaniia (Kharkiv, 1905), 65; ir nbu, f. 29, spr. 8, ark. 66, 66 zv.

68 “Zapiski novooskol'skogo dvorianina I.O. Ostrozhskogo-Lokhvitskogo,” Kievskaia starina 2 (1886): 356.

69tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 467, ark. 53.

70Ibid., ark. 67.

71Ibid., ark. 3 zv - 7 (addenda on ark. 13).

72 The first such “landowners” without service that we know of were the chil­dren of the Izium colonel Kostiantyn Donets' in 1693 (Bagalei, Materialy, 1:170).

73 Doklady i prigovory sostoiavshiesia v pravitelestvuiushchem Senate v tsarstvo- vanie Petra Velikogo, izdanie imperatorskoiu Akademieiu nauk, vol. 4, no. 2 (July-December 1714): 919, 920; tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 12, ark. 259-76; spr. 22, ark. 880 zv., 916, 1398, and others.

74 On attestation, see Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, vol. 9 (St Petersburg, 1830), no. 6430, 159; no. 6619, 404; ir nbu, f. 29, spr. 8, ark. 35-7, and others.

75 E. Al'bovskii, Istoriia khar’kovskogo slobodskogo kozach’egopolka (Kharkiv, 1895), 183; ir nbu, f. xxix, spr. 8, ark. 66. I. H. Kvitka complained that they had no estates in the Izium regiment, not even a “residence.” tsdiauk, f. 1717, spr. 786, ark. 1-2. The Sumy officers wanted the quartermaster T. Krasovs'kyi to be colonel.

76Materialy Shydlovskikh, 219.

77ir nbu, f. XXIX, spr. 8, ark. 47 zv-98; see also tsdiauk, f. 1717, spr. 1221, ark. 1.

78ir nbu, f. XXIX, spr. 8, ark. 57.

79 “Zhurnaly i opredeleniia pravitel'stvuiushchego Senata za iiun', avgust i sentiabr 1741,” Senatskii Arkhiv 4 (St Petersburg, 1891): 37.

80 That is how the historian of the Sloboda regiments Petro Holovyns'kyi characterized the quarrels between the officers of the Izium regiment in the 1750s. P. Holovinskii, Slobodskie kazach'ipolka (St Petersburg, 1864), 180.

81tsdiauk, f. 1723, spr. 3, 6, 7, 10, 23, 31, 34, 36, 47.

82ir nbu, f. xxix, spr. 8, ark. 67 zv.-68.

83tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 22, ark. 279; spr. 29, ark. 95; spr. 188, ark. 1 zv.

84tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 188, ark. 1 and zv., 7.

85tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 467, ark. 3 zv.

86 B.N. Mironov, Sotsialnaia istoriia Rossii (St Petersburg, 1999), 1:512.

87 Materialy Shidlovskikh, 216-19. For greater details, see V.L. Masliichuk, “Mate­rial·/ do slovnyka ‘Kozats'ka starshyna Kharkivs'koho slobids'koho polku' (polkovnyky 1706-1713 rr. Shydlovs'ki, P. Kulykovs'kyi),” in Henealohichni za- pysky Ukrains’koho heral’dychnoho tovarystva 2 (Bila Tserkva, 2001): 69-75.

88 Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, vol. 9 (St Petersburg), no. 6729, 514.

89 ir nbu, f. 29, spr. 2, ark. 64-5; tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 126, ark. 50; Bumagi kabi- neta ministrov imperatritsy Anny loanovny 1731-1740, ed. A.N. Filippov, vol. 11 (1740 ianvar'-mai), in sirio, 138 (lur'ev [Tartu], 1912): 238-30. 1723. Russian Second Major Tymofii Goriaistov was appointed in the same way to the Izium regiment, where for several years he “oppressed” the officers. “Pro- tokoly, vol. 8,” in sirio 101 (St Petersburg, 1898): 61.

90 tsdiauk, f. 1717, spr. 1221, ark. 1 zv-3.

91 tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 174, ark. 42.

92 Ibid., ark. 42 zv-46.

93 Al'bovskii, Istoriia khar’kovskogo slobodskogo kozach 'ego polka, 183.

94 tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 188.

95 tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 514; spr. 518, ark. 1-3, 59 zv., 126-28 and zv.; spr. 451; f. 1819, op. 1, spr. 150, ark. 4-9, 48; Al'bovskii, Istoriia khar’kovskogo slobodskogo kozach’ego polka, 196-203. See also ir nbu, f. 29, spr. 8, ark. 144.

96 ir nbu, f. 2, spr. 1840.

97 Holovinskii, Slobodskie kazach'ipolka, 181-82; tsdiauk, f. 1710, spr. 94, ark. 4 zv.-3o; spr. 95, ark. 63-74; IR nbu, f. 29, spr. 8, ark. 3 and zv., 86-90.

98 “Ukazy i poveleniia imperatritsy Ekateriny II za 1765 g.,” in Senatskii arkhiv 15 (St Petersburg, 1913), 942-8.

99 tsdiauk, f. 1817, op. 1, spr. 144, ark. 1 and zv.

100 ir nbu, f. 29, spr. 8, art. 7; tsdiauk, f. 1710, op. 2, spr. 95, ark. 69 zv-70.

101 tsdiauk, f. 1710, op. 2, spr. 94, ark. 30.

102 S.M. Solov'ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen (Moscow, 1965), 25-6: 141.

103 Prokip Konevyts'kyi’s father was a Cossack in the Okhtyrka regiment, and Prokip Konevyts'kyi himself was given the rank of junior ensign in 1745 for his services (tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 205, ark. 6). After becoming a captain in 1749, Konevyts'kyi began quarreling with the regimental administration of the Kharkiv regiment. See “Opisistoricheskogo arkhiva,” in Sbornik Khar’kovskogo istoriko-filologicheskogo obshchestva (Kharkiv, 1999), 12:140-2.

104 tsdiauk, f. 1725, spr. 483, ark. 25.

105 tsdiauk, f. 1723, spr. 29, ark. 30-6; f. 1725, spr. 483, ark. 24-5; SenatskiiArkhiv, 15 (St Petersburg, 1913), no. 195, 399.

106 B.N. Mironov, Sotsialnaia istoriia Rossii (St Petersburg, 1999), 1:150.

107 Ivan L. Rudnytsky, Essays in Modern Ukrainian History (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1987), 4-5.

108 For important thoughts on this see B. Krupnyts'kyi, Federalizm na Skhodi Evropy (Rozdumuvannia z pryvodu pratsi H.F. Ravkha “Rosiia, derzhavna iednisti natsional'na svoieridnist”’) (Paris, 1956), 7.

109 N.N. Kradin, “Struktura vlasti v gosudarstvennykh obrazovaniiakh kochevnikov,” in Fenomen vostochnogo despotizma (Moscow, 1993), 208. Quoted from M.N. Afanas'ev, “Klientalizm: istoriko-sotsiologicheskii ocherk,” Politicheskie issledovaniia 6 (1996): 103.

110 Mironov, Sotsial 'naia istoriia Rossii, 1:423.