The Incorporation of the Hetmanate
In late 1763 and early 1764, obviously misreading signals coming from St Petersburg, Rozumovsky augmented the Hlukhiv petition with his own request for the establishment of a hereditary hetmancy - a project that aroused controversy in Ukraine itself.
It was rejected by the local Orthodox hierarchy and supported only by a fairly limited number of the hetman's clients. His enemies at court made the most of this project, potentially threatening to the imperial power, in order to discredit Rozumovsky in the eyes of the empress. Even his allies, such as his former tutor and assistant Grigorii Teplov, changed sides as soon as Rozumovsky fell out of favour. As a result, Rozumovsky was summoned to St Petersburg and forced to resign from the hetmancy, with no new hetman elected or appointed in his stead. Another blow to Rozumovsky's standing at court came from a direction that he could hardly have expected. The ghost of Hetman Ivan Mazepa entered the higher realms of Russian politics when Vasyl Myrovych, the son of one of Mazepa's supporters, made an abortive attempt to liberate Tsar Ivan VI, imprisoned since the enthronement of Elizabeth in 1741, and install him as tsar. The tsar-prisoner was killed by the guards, and Myrovych was investigated and executed, but not before he testified that Rozumovsky had encouraged his act. The charge was groundless and did not stick, but a shadow of suspicion fell on Rozumovsky and Ukrainians in general.17While the timing of Catherine's decision to abolish the office of hetman might be attributed to bad luck, such a decision would probably have been made sooner or later in any event. Even as Rozumovsky formulated a plan for the extension of Ukrainian autonomy and cherished his dynastic dreams, Catherine began the realization of her own plan for strengthening central control over the imperial periphery and introducing a number of programs to promote her vision of a well- regulated state.
In December 1763, Catherine signed a decree that rationalized the imperial bureaucratic system and doubled the number of government officials. Even earlier, she interfered directly in Ukrainian affairs by issuing a decree to put an end to the Hetmanate's appropriation of imperial lands. Measures were taken to prepare a new census of Little Russia. The reason behind the new policies emerges from Catherine's letter of 1764 to Prince A.A. Viazemsky: 'Little Russia, Livonia, and Finland are provinces which are governed by confirmed privileges and it would be improper to violate them by abolishing them all at once. However, to call them foreign and to deal with them on that basis is more than a mistake; it would be sheer stupidity. These provinces as well as Smolensk should be Russified in the easiest way possible, so that they should cease looking like wolves to the forest. The approach is easy if wise men are chosen as governors of the provinces. When the hetmans are gone from Little Russia every effort should be made to eradicate from memory the period and the hetmans, let alone promote anyone to that office.'18The empress clearly regarded the autonomous territories as a nuisance that she was obliged to tolerate but whose privileges she was determined to abolish. What she meant by 'Russification' was a series of political, administrative, and judicial reforms. At stake were the region's rights and privileges, as well as its historical identity. The historical argument appeared in Grigorii Teplov's memorandum of June 1763, which laid the groundwork for the removal of Rozumovsky. Entitled 'A Note on the Disorders in Little Russia,' the memorandum asserted that 'Little Russia, not only the land but the very people, are Russian from ancient times, and consequently belong under Your Majesty's suzerainty as the possessor of the all-Russian state.'19 Teplov thus invoked the idea of the Kyivan origins of the Russian nation and state, which was well entrenched in Russian political and historical thought, and turned it against the Ukrainian elites. He considered Little Russian privileges a remnant of the Polish era and saw them as an obstacle to the development of the Hetmanate and the empire as a whole.
By this logic, 'Russification' meant cleansing the region of Polish- era rights and privileges.Instead of an extension of traditional rights, the Little Russians were confronted with a drastic reduction of their privileges, beginning with Rozumovsky's forced resignation and the abolition of the hetmancy. It was the Russian governor-general, not the Ukrainian hetman, who became the top official in the Hetmanate. After the abolition of the het- mancy by Catherine II, the gentry of the Hetmanate continued its fight for ancient Cossack rights and privileges. At the Legislative Commission in Moscow, the cause of the Hetmanate's gentry was championed by a St Petersburg Ukrainian, Hryhorii Poletyka, who criticized the historical role of the Ukrainian hetmans but insisted on the preservation of the gentry's traditional rights and privileges and advocated the creation of a Little Russian Diet. Catherine II dissolved the Legislative Commission in 1768, not only ending her brief flirtation with parliamentarism but also denying the Ukrainian gentry a tribune for the defence of its prerogatives.20
The liquidation of the hetmancy and the establishment of the Little Russian College as the Hetmanate's ruling body was only the first step towards the abolition of the Hetmanate and its institutions. That process culminated in 1782 with the extension to the Hetmanate of the imperial system of provincial administration: it was divided into the provinces (namestnichestva) of Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Novhorod-Siverskyi. Catherine had finally fashioned an administrative structure applicable not only to the core regions of the empire but also to the Little Russian 'wolves looking to the forest.' It was an important milestone in her creation of a well-ordered unitary state: the centre gained full administrative and economic control of the Hetmanate, while its inhabitants could take full advantage of the empress's enlightened policies.
The incorporation of the Hetmanate into the Russian Empire was accompanied by the integration of the Ukrainian gentry into the Russian nobility.
As Andreas Kappeler has shown, such elite co-option was standard practice in Moscow's and, later, St Petersburg's establishment of control over new territories. Ukraine was no exception to the rule. In the Ukrainian case, however, the standard exchange of regional autonomy for estate rights encountered a serious problem. The ratio of gentry to the population of Ukraine was at least twice as great as in Russia proper. That ratio was greater still in the lands of the partitioned Commonwealth. Consequently, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the imperial authorities rescinded the recognition of the noble status of thousands of the Hetmanate's gentry. The former Cossack officers would now have to supply proof of their noble status. Not all those recognized as nobles between 1782 and 1785 retained their status, as the two lowest Ukrainian ranks were excluded from consideration. A much larger section of the Ukrainian gentry was threatened with a similar fate, which resulted in the spread of oppositionist sentiment among the Ukrainian elites of the period.21