In the course of the eighteenth century, as a result of successful wars with its western and southern neighbors, the Russian Empire was increasingly becoming a multiethnic and multicultural polity.
The dramatic expansion of its territory brought millions of new subjects under the rule of St Petersburg and greatly changed the ethnic balance of the population. If at the time of Peter I ethnic Russians constituted roughly 70 per cent of the entire population of the state, by the time of the third partition of Poland they had been reduced to little more than 50 per cent, with ethnic Ukrainians increasing from 13 to 22 per cent and Belarusians constituting 8 per cent of the population of the empire in 1795.1
Ukrainians emerged as the most active builders of the imperial ideology, institutions, and state apparatus, but they were also among the principal victims of the new imperial project.
When it comes to dominant trends in philosophy and scholarship, the Age of Enlightenment was first and foremost an age of reason. Whether they governed small principalities or multiethnic empires, eighteenth-century rulers attempted to turn their realms into well-ordered states. The ideas of cameralism, which, like the vision of the well-ordered state, were products of post-1648 development, set rulers of Central and Eastern Europe on the road of cooperation with existing social estates, cities, and regions, which jealously guarded their rights and privileges and were in no hurry to sacrifice them for the greater glory of advancing absolutism. The Russian Empire, a self-styled 'European state,' was no exception to that general rule. The ideas of the well-ordered state and cameralism came to Russia from Germany, and, unsurprisingly, it was westwardlooking Kyivan intellectuals who helped prepare the empire for the acceptance of the new political culture. 'Its philosophical underpinning,' writes Marc Raeff, 'was natural law and neo-stoicism, its intellectual foundation the rationalism of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, and its institutional implementation was to be found in the policies of absolute monarchies and territorial sovereignties. The rhetoric, logic and neo-scholastic metaphysics taught at the Kyivan Academy served as indispensable mental preparation for the reception of the intellectual presuppositions of European political culture, while information on institutional practices was provided by foreign residents and Russian envoys abroad.'2Throughout the eighteenth century, the alumni of the Kyivan Academy continued to transmit Western ideas and play an important part in the affairs of state and church - roles they had assumed under Peter I. Between 1754 and 1768 alone, more than three hundred students and alumni of the Kyivan Academy moved to Russia. The Latin that they learned at the academy prepared them well for classes in medicine. Thus, in the eighteenth century there were twice as many Ukrainian doctors in the empire as Russian ones. In the last two decades of the century, more than one third of the students at the St Petersburg teachers' college came from Ukraine.3 By some estimates, Ukrainians accounted for half the non-noble intelligentsia in the eighteenth-century Russian Empire.4
The peak of Ukrainian influence in the empire occurred during the rule of Elizabeth, when Oleksii Rozumovsky, the son of a rank-and-file Cossack from the Hetmanate, became the empress's husband. At that time, all Russian eparchies except one were administered by Kyivans.5 And the office of hetman, abolished under Anna Ioannovna, was restored, with Oleksii's younger brother, Kyrylo Rozumovsky, assuming the new position. Despite the spectacular achievements of Ukrainians in the imperial capital, the administrative, economic, and military decline of the Hetmanate in the second half of the eighteenth century undermined the Cossack elite's power base and its ability to weather unfavourable turns of imperial policy. Such a turn came with the enthronement of Catherine II. In her pursuit of enlightened forms of government and rationalization of the empire's administrative and economic system, she resolved to abolish Cossack autonomy and the traditional rights and privileges of the Cossack institutions.6 In 1763, the office of hetman was abolished once and for all.
In 1775, the imperial authorities liquidated the Zaporozhian Host in the lower Dnipro region. That Cossack polity had outlived its usefulness to the empire after the decisive victories over the Crimean Tatars and Ottomans in the first Russo-Turkish War (1768-74), while its lands were needed for the imperial province of New Russia, which was to be settled by foreign colonists. The Cossack Hetmanate became history in 1782: its administrative structure was replaced with imperial provincial administrations.7What was the impact, if any, of these developments on the selfawareness of the Cossack elites of the Hetmanate? Did they manage to preserve their unique political, social, and cultural identity despite the incorporation of their homeland into the empire, or did they modify it to fit new circumstances, or even abandon it altogether? This chapter sketches the development of Ukrainian identity in the second half of the eighteenth century, paying special attention to the role of history in the political and literary discourse of the period.