Ukraine’s Autonomy and the Russian Empire

With the end of Mazepa’s hetmanship and the failure of his successor, Pylyp Orlyk, to provoke a revolt on the Right Bank in 1711, Ukrainian territories remained divided between three states: Muscovy, Poland, and the Ottoman Empire.

Muscovy becomes the Russian Empire

Peter I’s military ventures at the beginning of the eighteenth century were both extensive and very costly. They did, however, set the stage for the transformation of the tsardom of Muscovy into the Russian Empire. This transformation actually occurred in 1721, when Peter adopted the title emperor, thereby renaming the tsardom of Muscovy (with its recently acquired territories) the Russian Empire. The change in name was more than symbolic since, during the reign of Peter, Muscovy (now Russia) became the leading state in eastern Europe. By the sec­ond decade of the eighteenth century, the formerly powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was becoming a dependency of the Russian Empire, and Sweden’s presence was on the decline. When, in 1721, the second stage of the Great North­ern War came to an end, Russia was firmly established on the Baltic Sea, having acquired northern Latvia, Estonia, and the eastern shores of the Gulf of Finland.

While Sweden effectively had been checked in the north, Peter’s military thrusts

MAP 21

UKRAINE, early 18th CENTURY

Copyright© by Paul Robert Magocsi

against the Ottoman Empire were less decisive, and it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the Russian Empire was finally able to acquire control of the Crimea and the northern shores of the Black Sea. A truce with the Ottoman Empire and peace with Sweden and Poland after 1721, however, pro­vided the Russian imperial government with the respite necessary for it to increase its control over its far-flung domains. Peter I and his successors - among them Anna (reigned 1730-1740) and most especially Catherine II (1762-1796) - set out to create an expanded bureaucracy and administration for a centralized state that was more and more anxious to remove any peculiarities of autonomy or even semi-independence that might have existed within lands under the tsar’s sceptre. Ukrainian territories were a particular object of attention, and the last vestiges of autonomy in Ukraine were to disappear by the second half of the eighteenth century. The process occurred in stages and within three decades. The first terri­tory to be fully incorporated into the Russian imperial governmental structure was Sloboda Ukraine in the 1760s; then followed Zaporozhia in the 1770s; and finally the Hetmanate and the Crimean Khanate in the 1780s.

Sloboda Ukraine

Sloboda Ukraine (Slobids'ka Ukraina) was the first Ukrainian territory to become part of Muscovy. In Kievan times, it was a sparsely settled frontier region, and from the time of the Mongol invasion in the mid-thirteenth century it had remained largely uninhabited.

The newcomers brought with them the Cossack system of joint military and civil administrative organization which they had established on the Left and Right Banks. Already by 1650, four regiments had been formed in parts of Sloboda Ukraine, and in 1685 a fifth was added. They were, from west to east, the Sumy, Okhtyrka, Kharkiv, Izium, and Ostrogozhsk regiments, located on both sides of the present-day northeastern boundary of Ukraine. The Sloboda Ukraine was not only preoccupied with military affairs and the defense of the Russian Empire’s south­ern frontier. Agriculture developed in the free (sloboda) villages and a few towns evolved from the forts that functioned as regimental settlements. The largest of these was Kharkiv (over 8,000 inhabitants in 1732), which eventually became the

MAP 22

SLOBODA UKRAINE

most important economic, educational, and cultural center for the entire Sloboda Ukraine.

As in the Hetmanate, each regiment had its own colonel and staff of officers, the starshyna, who constituted the region’s elite.

In 1732, the number of registered Cossacks was set at 23,000 in four of the Sloboda regiments, although as many as 85,000 troops could be mobilized at any one time to fight along with the Russian armies. The Sloboda Cossacks were employed by Muscovy in the seventeenth century to fight against recalcitrant het­mans (Vyhovs’kyi, Doroshenko, Briukhovets’kyi) and in the eighteenth century to serve in the Russian Empire’s foreign campaigns (against Persia in 1722-1723 and Ottoman Turkey in 1736-1739). They were also used to build fortifications and canals in various parts of the empire.

The local autonomy of Sloboda Ukraine was left undisturbed until 1732. In that year, the imperial government under Empress Anna made the first attempt to dispense with Sloboda Ukraine’s autonomous status. A census was taken; the number of registered Cossacks was fixed at 23,000, with all others being liable to taxes; certain privileges were removed; and all regiments were placed under the responsibility of a Russian official. Protests from Sloboda Ukraine won a tempo­rary cancellation of these reforms, but the Russian government’s long-term inten­tions were clear. Until the reforms were reinstated, imperial troops were stationed in the area.

In its stead was created a unified Russian province called Sloboda Ukraine (Slobodsko-ukrainskaia guberniia), which was ruled by a governor-general resident in Kharkiv. Like other provincial governors in the empire, he was responsible directly to St Petersburg. The Cossacks were stripped of their traditional privileges and given the status of military residents: those who were not in actual military service had to pay taxes. As for the Cossack starshyna (officer elite), it was given a status equal to that of the Russian nobility. Despite some protests, Sloboda Ukraine after 1765 became an integral part of the Russian Empire.

Zaporozhia

The second of Ukraine’s autonomous regions was Zaporozhia. It had a more tur­bulent history than Sloboda Ukraine, but its ultimate fate was the same: full incor­poration into the Russian imperial governmental structure. From the time of the death of Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi in 1657, the Army of Lower Zaporozhia - as the region in question was officially known - followed a course that was independent of, and most often antagonistic toward, the hetmans and registered Cossack elite who ruled the Cossack state on both sides of the Dnieper River and, later, the Left Bank Hetmanate. As part of their anti-hetman policy, the Zaporozhians tradition­ally favored alliances with Muscovy. In the late seventeenth century, however, they began to be displeased with the tsar’s anti-Crimean wars. The Zaporozhians rightly suspected that these wars would lead to an increase in the authority of the central government over all of southern Ukraine and eventually the Crimea, which would mean an end to the source of the Cossack’s freebooting livelihood. Therefore, under their dynamic leader Kost’ Hordiienko, the Zaporozhians broke with Peter I in 1709 and allied themselves instead with Ivan Mazepa and his Swedish protec­tor, King Charles XII.

MAP 23

ZAPOROZHIA AND NEW RUSSIA

Copyright © by Paul Robert Magocsi

Not surprisingly, the independent-minded Zaporozhians soon became dissatis­fied with their new protectors, especially since as subjects of the khan they were cut off from trade with the Hetmanate and were unable to raid their traditional source of booty, the Crimean Khanate. Almost immediately after 1711, individual Zaporozhians began to ask Muscovy to allow them to return home under the tsar’s protection. Their leader, Hordiienko, stood firm in his anti-Muscovite views, how­ever, and nothing changed for the Zaporozhians as a whole until his death in 1733. By that time, Russia was making preparations for a new campaign against the Ottoman Empire and was receptive to negotiating with the Zaporozhians. The result was the Agreement of Lubny, signed in 1734. The Zaporozhian Cossacks regained all their former lands, which came to be known as the Free Lands of the Zaporozhian Host (Vol. 'nosti Viis 'ka Zaporiz ' koho Nyzovoho), and they were permitted to retain their traditional laws and customs. During wartime, they were to serve under the command of the Russian army stationed in the Hetmanate, and they were to receive for their services an annual payment of 20,000 rubles. A new sich, the Nova Sich, was established on the Dnieper River, a little downstream from their old headquarters, which had been destroyed earlier in the century by Peter I. The Nova Sich was under the direct control of the imperial Russian governor-general in Kiev and, for a time after 1750, the hetman in the Hetmanate.

The number of Cossacks who returned from the Ottoman Empire was no more than 20,000. This meant that at least initially they had a vast territory in Zaporo- zhia at their disposal. In an attempt to maintain a measure of control over this territory, they introduced a more formal administrative structure. Eight districts (palanky) were formed in Zaporozhia and near Oleshky. Each district was headed by a colonel appointed by the chief (koshovyi otaman) of the Nova Sich, although these colonels never had the degree of power or number of administrative support staff that their counterparts in the Hetmanate had. In addition to building a state administration, the Zaporozhians, who remained concerned with the demograph­ic and political vacuum in their extensive territory and the potential for inter­ference with their status by the Russian imperial government, began to colonize their lands with peasants. Many of these peasants were refugees from the Polish- controlled Right Bank and the Left Bank Hetmanate who resented the increasing burdens of serfdom. By 1762, there were approximately 33,700 Cossacks and over 150,000 peasants in Zaporozhia.

But incursions from the north proved to be inevitable, since the Russian Empire was determined further to integrate the border regions of its increasingly far-flung realm. St Petersburg’s initial steps toward integration were to build fortifications and settle colonists. In 1735, the government built a fortress near the Nova Sich, and in the 1750s it set up a line of fortifications along Zaporozhia’s western border with the Ottoman Empire (the Southern Buh and Syniukha Rivers). Also dur­ing the 1750s, the imperial government initiated its own colonization program to encourage an influx of new settlers who would be directly dependent on the central authorities. In 1751, St Petersburg invited over 200 Serbian colonists from southern Hungary, who were joined a year later by Bulgarians, Greeks, Romanians, and more Serbs from the Balkans. The settlers were given the northwest region of Zaporozhia between the Dnieper River in the east and the Syniukha River in the west. Organized into a frontier military region, this area became known as New Serbia (Nova Serbiia), with its center at Novomyrhorod (then on the Russian-Polish border).

In 1754, the Russian government coopted more Zaporozhian land all along the southern border of New Serbia to create a Cossack frontier military region made up of over 6,000 Cossacks from Sloboda Ukraine and the Hetmanate. This became known as the Sloboda regiment (Slobids’kyipolk) with its military and administra­tive headquarters at a fortress that in 1775 became the city of lelysavethrad (today Kirovohrad). Finally, beyond the far northeastern corner of Zaporozhia, more Serbs, who were living as refugees in southern Hungary, as well as Bulgarians, Romanians, and Greeks from the Balkans were settled after 1753 by the Russian government. As in New Serbia, the colonists were organized as a frontier military regiment, and the whole region, with its center in Bakhmut (today Artemivs’k), came to be known as Slavic Serbia (Slaviano-Serbiia).

The Zaporozhians resented the imperial Russian colonization of their northern frontier, and they often clashed with the Serb colonists. Nonetheless, the Zaporo- zhians continued to serve faithfully with the imperial army in its wars against the Ottoman Empire between 1735 and 1739, and again between 1768 and 1774. In the context of tsarist Russian policy as a whole, however, the eventual demise of Zaporozhian autonomy was inevitable. That demise was to take place in two stages. In preparation for its war with the Ottomans, the tsarist government in 1764 abol­ished the Serbian and the Sloboda frontier regions and joined them with fifteen southern companies from the Hetmanate to form an imperial province called New Russia (Novorosiiskaia guberniia), with an administrative center at Kremenchuk.

These administrative changes seem not to have disenchanted the Cossacks, who continued to fight loyally and valiantly with tsarist forces in their campaigns against the Ottomans between 1768 and 1774. At the very same time, Russia’s borderlands to the east of Ukraine were rocked by a series of revolts which seri­ously threatened tsarist rule. Sporadic uprisings occurred in Zaporozhia as well, but it was among the Don and Iaik Cossacks just to the east that large-scale revolts took place, culminating in the greatest uprising in eighteenth-century Russia - the Pugachev rebellion of 1773-1775.

Once the Pugachev rebellion was finally put down, Empress Catherine was determined to reorganize all the borderlands so as to impose greater control over their inhabitants. Zaporozhia in particular became an area of concern because it was part of the southern borderland facing the Ottoman Empire. Ironically, although the Zaporozhians had remained staunchly loyal during the Russo- Turkish war (1768-1774), they were among the hardest hit by the new, more strin­gent tsarist policy. Moreover, the very fact that Russia was successful against its Ottoman adversary (from whom it obtained a very favorable peace settlement at Khyhk Kaynarca in 1774) made the protection afforded by the Zaporozhian Cos­sacks seem superfluous.

Accordingly, on 4 June 1775, victorious Russian troops returning from their Ottoman campaigns suddenly attacked and destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich. Some Cossacks were immediately pressed into Russian military service; some were left as free farmers; others sought protection in the Ottoman Empire, where they were allowed to settle near the mouths of the Danube River. That same year, 1775, most of Zaporozhia was annexed to the imperial province of New Russia, which together with two neighboring provinces was from the following year governed by Empress Catherine’s favorite, Prince Grigorii Potemkin.

Potemkin was eager to impress his sovereign. To do so, he began a dynamic col­onizing program that brought new settlers from various parts of Europe, including especially large numbers of Romanians from nearby Ottoman-ruled Moldavia and smaller groups of Armenians and Greeks from the Crimea, along with Bulgarians, Turks, and Albanians from the Ottoman Empire. From farther afield came Ital­ians, Corsicans, Danzigers, Swedes, and especially Germans. The colonists were attracted to New Russia by the free land and tax-exempt privileges (at least for the first two or three decades of their settlement) they were offered. Germans were especially favored. Besides the aforementioned privileges, they were exempted from military service, granted unlimited duty-free trade across the border, and allowed free sale of salt and spirits. Racked by the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) in central Europe, Catholic and, especially, Protestant Germans, including Men- nonites, took advantage of several Russian imperial decrees (issued in 1763, 1789, and 1790) and immigrated to the Ukrainian steppe. There, in the center of New Russia, they settled on and near Khortytsia Island, a historic center of the Zaporo- zhian Cossacks. These Germans, and others who followed in even greater numbers during the early part of the nineteenth century, founded numerous colonies along the Black Sea littoral between the Southern Buh and Danube Rivers and later became known as Black Sea Germans (Schwarzmeerdeutsche).

With Empress Catherine’s backing and encouragement, Potemkin also suc­ceeded in establishing the basis for several new towns throughout New Russia and the Crimea that grew up around existing or reconstructed fortresses. Among these were lelyzavethrad (today Kirovohrad) and Katerynoslav (today Dnipropetrovs’k) in Zaporozhia; and, from lands acquired from the Ottoman Empire, Sevastopol’ in the Crimea, Mariupol’ on the northern shore of the Sea of Azov, and Mykolaiv and Kherson, both river ports with direct access to the Black Sea. It was after the death of Potemkin, however, that the empire’s most important Black Sea port was estab­lished. In 1794, Catherine provided substantial funds to a Neapolitan-born soldier in the imperial Russian service, Admiral Giuseppe de Ribas, to create a harbor and settlement for a new city to be called Odessa. De Ribas was assisted by several of his own family members and by other Italian merchants and entrepreneurs who provided the otherwise ethnically diverse city with a distinctly Italianate flavor.

Potemkin’s undertakings were often costly and unproductive. His excesses were such that, during Catherine’s trip in 1787 to the recently acquired Crimea, his urge to impress her caused him hastily to set up settlements all along her route through southern Ukraine (i.e., New Russia), many of which were simply facades with nothing behind them. This episode gave rise to the proverbial phrase, “Potemkin village,” meaning an illusory facade designed to cover an undesirable fact or condition. In contrast to Potemkin’s empty facades, Catherine’s policies of administrative integration were quite real. In 1775, her government abolished the autonomy of Zaporozhia, just as it had abolished that of Sloboda Ukraine ten years before. Having transformed territory to its east and south into integral parts of the Russian Empire, Catherine was now ready to turn to the last semi-autonomous Cos­sack region on Ukrainian territory.

The Hetmanate

The Hetmanate had the most highly developed form of autonomous self-govern­ment in Russian-ruled Ukraine. It was the direct successor to Khmel’nyts’kyi’s Cos­sack state, and, at least until the end of Mazepa’s reign, it maintained control over its own internal affairs, even if it was subject to Muscovy with respect to foreign policy and military ventures. The Hetmanate was hardly helped by Mazepa’s defec­tion to the Swedes. The antagonistic tone was set by Peter I, who in 1723 issued a decree declaring that “from the first hetman Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, and even Skoropads’kyi, all hetmans were traitors.”¹ Peter’s ultimate purpose was to end all forms of Cossack autonomy in the Hetmanate; the only question was how best to achieve that goal. The decades from Mazepa’s defection in 1708 until the 1780s witnessed several changes in policy on the part of the tsarist government toward the autonomous status of the Hetmanate, changes which reflected in part the requirements of foreign policy and in part the different attitudes of the Russian Empire’s administrators and internal policy makers.

In November 1708, immediately after learning of Mazepa’s defection, Peter arranged for the election of a new hetman, Ivan Skoropads’kyi. As a personality, Skoropads’kyi was easy to manipulate, and he proved to be no real hindrance to Peter’s plans. The tsar did not reassert the articles of the Agreement of Pereiaslav or negotiate any other agreement with the Cossacks as had previously been done whenever a new hetman was elected. Rather, he chose to confirm a more limited number of traditional rights by tsarist decree. At the same time, he transferred the capital of the Hetmanate from Baturyn farther north to Hlukhiv, near the Muscovite border, and a representative of the tsar was assigned there to oversee the hetman’s activity. Peter also began to appoint colonels directly to the Cossack regiments, and he and his successors made large land grants in Hetmanate terri­tory to imperial administrators, most of whom were former generals of German background (B.C. Weissbach, J.B. Munnich). As loyal tsarist subjects with no local roots, these men had little concern for Cossack autonomy. The Cossack forces were more frequently than before used by the imperial government for non-mili­tary purposes: to build canals in Russia (at Tsaritsyn in 1716 and at Lake Ladoga in 1721), and to construct fortifications, as in the Caucasus (along the Terek River, in 1718) and along the southeastern border of the Hetmanate (1731-1735).

With the close of the Great Northern War in 1721, Peter had an even greater opportunity to address Ukrainian affairs. The following year, as part of a gener­al restructuring of the Russian imperial government, responsibility for the Het- manate was changed in 1722 from the College of Foreign Affairs to the Senate, which was concerned with the empire’s internal affairs. That same year, the Lit­tle Russian Collegium was established. The Russian government justified these actions on three grounds: that the Cossack system of administration and justice had broken down in the Hetmanate; that the central government had received numerous complaints of illegal Cossack enserfment of the peasantry; and that the tsar’s treasury had received an inadequate share of taxes and revenue from the Hetmanate.

It was to expedite further complaints, which since the Agreement of Pereiaslav all Cossacks had a right to make directly to the tsar, that in 1722 the imperial Russian government established the Little Russian Collegium, composed of six Russian military officers stationed in the Hetmanate. As a body, the officers were commissioned with the following tasks: (1) to hear complaints lodged against local Cossack courts and, if necessary, decide controversial cases; (2) to control finan­cial affairs; and (3) to intervene against starshyna oppression of the rank-and-file Cossacks and peasantry. The Little Russian Collegium became, in effect, a parallel government in the Hetmanate. Even the malleable Hetman Skoropads’kyi pro­tested this incursion against Cossack autonomy.

But Skoropads’kyi’s complaints had no impact and, in any case, he died two months after the Collegium was established, in July 1722. As his successor, the Cos­sacks chose Pavlo Polubotok, a more dynamic leader who from the outset protest­ed against the activity of the Little Russian Collegium. The tsar never confirmed Polubotok’s election, however. Instead, he was arrested in St Petersburg, where he died in prison in 1724.

The Hetmanate continued to be ruled exclusively by the Little Russian Colle­gium, although in 1726, under the new ruler Empress Catherine I (reigned 1725­1727), plans were made to restore the office of hetman. The change in attitude reflected the government’s desire to avoid any difficulties in its southern regions during preparations for a new war with the Ottoman Empire and, in part, the influence of Catherine’s political ally Aleksandr Menshikov, who had large land­holdings in the Hetmanate and was opposed to the Collegium’s introduction of direct taxation. Accordingly, in 1727 the Little Russian Collegium was abolished, and with Menshikov’s intervention the Russian government arranged to have a new hetman, Danylo Apostol, elected. Soon after, a code consisting of twenty-eight articles was drawn up to regulate Russia’s relationship with the Hetmanate. This was, in effect, the first single document to cover all aspects of the Hetmanate, and it remained in force until the demise of the region’s autonomy.

The document, which was issued in 1728, came to be known as the 28 Con­firmed Articles. According to its provisions, the Hetmanate could not conduct any foreign relations, although it could deal with Poland, the Crimean Khanate, and the Ottoman Empire about purely border problems, provided that any agree­ments with these countries received the prior approval of the Russian imperial government. While the Hetmanate continued to maintain ten regiments, it was allowed only three regiments of mercenary troops. Moreover, in time of war the Cossacks were required to serve under the resident imperial Russian commander. With regard to judicial and administrative matters, a general court was established to consist of three Cossacks and three governmental appointees; a commission was set in place to create a new law code; duties on foreign goods were to revert to the imperial treasury; and Russian and other non-local landlords were permitted to retain their landholdings, although no new peasants from the north could be brought in.

From the standpoint of the imperial government, the 28 Confirmed Articles were a step backward in what seemed to have been Russia’s determined effort since Peter I to abolish the Hetmanate’s autonomous status. It was not long, however, before St Petersburg returned to more restrictive policies. Hetman Apostol died in 1734, and in his stead a Governing Council of the Hetman’s Office was created that consisted of three governmental appointees and three Cossacks. Together, the six members were to rule the Hetmanate and to work on codifying a body of law for the region. In practice, the head of the Governing Council, or “Second Little Russian Collegium” as some historians (D. Doroshenko, N. Polons’ka-Vasylenko) call it, administered the country single-handedly, especially during the costly wars against the Ottomans, in which the Cossacks participated between 1735 and 1739. The only concrete result of these conflicts was that the Ottoman Empire agreed to renounce its protectorate over the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who in any case had already returned to Russian control, in 1734.

In the 1740s, the imperial Russian government once more backed away from its anti-Hetmanate policy. Again, this development was largely owing to the role played by certain individuals. The court favorite - and eventually the husband - of the new empress Elizabeth (reigned 1741-1762) was Oleksii Rozumovs’kyi, the son of a registered Cossack, who because of his musical talent (he was a singer in the imperial choir) and good looks came to her attention. Rozumovs’kyi managed to interest Elizabeth in his homeland. In 1743, he succeeded in winning the res­toration of the office of the metropolitan of Kiev, which had been downgraded by Peter I in 1721 to an ordinary archbishopric. Then, in 1747, he pushed through plans for the election of a new hetman. The choice fell on his younger brother, Kyrylo Rozumovs’kyi, a remarkably well educated youth who, as a result of his brother’s connections, had been made president of the Imperial Academy of Sci­ences in St Petersburg at the age of eighteen. In 1750, Kyrylo was elected hetman in Hlukhiv.

Kyrylo Rozumovs’kyi was an eighteenth-century intellectual dilettante par excel­lence. Educated in France, Italy, and Germany, he displayed the typical imperial Russian aristocratic predilection for western culture, and he tried to impose this outlook on the Hetmanate’s capital in Hlukhiv. In that otherwise small provincial town, he established an Italian opera, opened coffeehouses, introduced French­language schools and Parisian fashions, and erected a Versailles-like hetman’s pal­ace. He even had elaborate plans to return to Mazepa’s old capital at Baturyn, which had became his personal property in 1760, and to build there an even more elegant cultural complex.

But despite these “improvements,” Rozumovs’kyi preferred the imperial capital of St Petersburg to provincial Hlukhiv. During his long absences, the Cossack star- shyna ran the Hetmanate and held periodic congresses somewhat like noble diets. They succeeded in limiting the rights of the peasants even further (1760), and they introduced a new system of justice whereby local judges could be chosen only from the starshyna. It seemed that the Cossack elite, left to its own devices, was on the verge of introducing a Polish-style administrative system in which all social and legal power rested in the hands of the nobility.

The Cossack starshyna was helped in its efforts by the imperial Russian govern­ment. Beginning in the 1730s and especially during the rule of Empress Anna (reigned 1730-1740) and Tsar Peter III (reigned 1761-1762), the nobility was granted several privileges, including permanent exemption from state service. The hope was that, following such improvements in their status, the nobles would pay more attention to the economic well-being of their landed estates. In the end, members of the Hetmanate’s Cossack starshyna proved themselves quite willing to go along with a system that guaranteed them so many privileges.

Having laid the groundwork to attract the Hetmanate’s elite into Russia’s social structure, the imperial government could once again return to its policy of cen­tralization. Centralization became the dominant goal of Catherine II. Influenced in part by the ideas of the European Enlightenment, which argued that a single territory with a rational system of unified central government could be run more efficiently and manageably than could a variety of regions with antiquated social systems and specific forms of self-government or autonomy, Catherine turned her attention primarily to the Baltic provinces and Finland in the north (a portion of which had been obtained by Russia in 1743) and to the Ukrainian lands in the south. Her attitude toward these regions was summed up in 1764 in instructions to the empire’s new prosecutor-general: “To call [these lands] foreign and to treat them on that basis is more than a mistake; it would be sheer stupidity. These prov­inces... 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.”² Catherine had already done away with the autono­mous features of Sloboda Ukraine in 1765 and of Zaporozhia in 1775. Now she was ready to turn to the Hetmanate.

First came the office of the hetman. It was permanently abolished in 1764, after Rozumovs’kyi unsuccessfully tried to have it become the hereditary property of his family. Rozumovs’kyi, who never much cared for ruling in the Hetmanate, was eas­ily placated with a new imperial title and the equivalent of a lavish pension, includ­ing large estates in Baturyn, where he finally settled in 1775 and lived comfortably until his death in 1803. In his stead, a new Little Russian Collegium was created, this time composed of four imperial appointees and four Cossacks and headed by a president, Count Petr Rumiantsev. Rumiantsev proceeded cautiously but firmly. While he curbed the excesses of the Cossack gentry in accumulating more land, he also legalized the landlords’ control over their peasants, and thus contributed further to the eventual enserfment of the peasantry in the Hetmanate.

Rumiantsev’s reforms were interrupted for a while in 1769, when Russia renewed its war with the Ottoman Empire. The war lasted five years, but this time the Russians finally won lasting success. According to the provisions of the Treaty of Kuyuk Kaynarca, signed in 1774, Russia received from the Ottoman Empire an enormous financial indemnity (4,500,000 rubles). It also acquired a slice of territory between the Dnieper and Southern Buh Rivers; parts of the Crimean Khanate around Mariupol’ and Kerch, the former neutral zone south of Azov; and Istanbul’s recognition of independence for the Crimean Khanate under Russian protection. This increase in the Russian presence along the Black Sea after 1774 was followed by the destruction of the sich and an end to Zaporozhian autonomy a year later.

Once the southern fringe of Ukrainian lands had been secured, the further integration of the Hetmanate into the Russian Empire could proceed. In 1781, the Cossack regimental system of administration was dismantled. At the same time, the Little Russian Collegium was once again - and for the last time - abolished and the Hetmanate divided into three imperial provinces (namestnichestva): Novhorod- Sivers’kyi, Chernihiv, and Kiev, which were no different from other provinces in the empire. Next, in 1783, the peasantry’s freedom of movement was restricted, and the process of their enserfment thereby completed. That same year, the Cos­sack military system of regiments was abolished and replaced by ten cavalry units of the imperial army.

The Crimean Khanate

In contrast to Sloboda Ukraine, Zaporozhia, and the Hetmanate, which were part of the Muscovite/Russian state since at least the mid-seventeenth century, the Crimean Khanate was a sovereign political entity in vassalage to the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, any Russian advance on the Crimea would first have to address the reality of Ottoman rule over much of the steppe lands north of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

Even before Russia gained the upper hand in this region, the status of the Crimean Khanate had changed. By the outset of the seventeenth century, the Otto­mans were playing an increasingly influential role in Crimean politics, including the selection and deposition of the state’s ruling khans. No longer was the Crimea able to refuse what now became Ottoman orders to supply the sultan with military forces. Even more problematic, however, was the recompense, or lack of it, that the Crimean Khanate got from its increasing outlay of troops. As the fortunes of the Ottoman Empire itself declined, so too did income for the Crimea in the form of war booty, which at best declined or dried up entirely. Finally, Muscovy stopped its annual tribute payments to the khans by 1700, and subsequent Russian military victories and international treaties put an effective end to the export of captives from its lands, thereby undermining the slave trade which had been the mainstay of the Crimea’s economy.

By the 1730s, the balance of military power had permanently shifted. Russian armies were able to invade at will Crimean territory, even capturing the capital of Bahyesaray and destroying the khan’s palace in 1736. But it was the Russian- Ottoman war of 1768-1774 that really changed everything. Early in the conflict the Russians managed to gain the allegiance of the Nogay Tatars, and that meant the effective loss to the khanate of lands beyond the Crimean peninsula. In 1770 the khan himself and the Crimea’s most powerful clan, the §irin, decided to aban­don their association with the Ottomans and instead to pledge their loyalty to the sovereign of Russia. This resulted in the Treaty of Karasubazar, signed in 1772, which created an independent Crimean state. The Crimea was still headed by the Giray dynasty, but it was now under the protection of the Russian Empire. The Ottomans finally accepted the loss of the Crimean Khanate (including their own Kefe province along the peninsula’s Black Sea littoral) as part of the provisions of the Treaty of Kuyuk Kaynarca (1774).

The first years of independent Crimea were characterized by an internal strug­gle among Tatar supporters of Russia versus those who hoped for the return of Ottoman overlordship. Tsarist military intervention ended those controversies, however, and allowed for the installation in 1776 of the pro-Russian gahin Giray as khan. The new khan set out to reform the governing structure of the Crimea, but his efforts at centralization alienated most clan leaders who were reluctant to give up their traditionally dominant role in Crimean political and socioeconom­ic life. When it became clear that Khan gahin was unable to contain the revolts against his regime, and when the Russian government got tired of supporting an unpopular ruler, Empress Catherine II issued a manifesto in 1783 that unilaterally put an end to the short-lived independent Crimean state and annexed it to the Russian Empire. The khanate’s lands in the peninsula and north of the Sea of Azov (i.e., the Nogay but not Kuban steppe) were made part of a Russian administrative entity (guberniia) called Taurida.

The transformation of the Crimean Khanate from an Ottoman to a Russian territory took place during the reign of Empress Catherine II. She was, therefore, credited with the annexation of 1783, which made an enormously positive impres­sion on the Russian public and the empire’s allies abroad. After all, it was Cather­ine II who finally fulfilled the age-old dream of the Muscovite and Russian rulers, and it was she who achieved something which even the dynamic Peter I had failed to realize: the acquisition of the Crimean Peninsula and most of the coastal region north of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

Transformation under Russian rule

The efforts of Russia’s rulers to entice the political and social elite of the empire’s various lands - both older and recently acquired ones - was a long process that reached its apogee under Catherine II. In 1785 she issued a Charter of Nobil­ity reconfirming all previous rights and, most importantly, recognizing all land already held by nobles as their legal property. The result was indeed what the imperial authorities had hoped: that many landlords serving the government in St Petersburg or in other urban centers would go back to their landholdings. While it is true that Russia’s nobles may have had few political rights, they did have many social and economic privileges.

Catherine’s 1785 Charter of Nobility was also applied to the formerly autono­mous lands in Ukraine. Responding to a request made to Catherine II a decade earlier by the uppermost echelon of the Cossack elite, the imperial government agreed to recognize most of the Distinguished Military Fellows (there was still some question about the regimental-level Fellows of the Banner) as members of the Rus­sian nobility (dvorianstvo). This recognition assured the Distinguished Military Fel­lows of full rights to their hereditary estates and exemption from compulsory state service. With this act, the leading stratum of the Hetmanate and Sloboda Ukraine was coopted fully and, for its part, enthusiastically into the Russian imperial social structure. In contrast, the corporate strength of the other leading social estate, the Orthodox clergy, was reduced when, in 1786, as had been the practice in the rest of the Russian Empire, most of the church’s monastic landholdings were secular­ized and eventually distributed among gentry landlords. In effect, although the Orthodox hierarchs continued to retain extensive privileges and access to funds, they did so as functionaries of the state who were dependent on the imperial treas­ury and not on income from their own landed wealth.

In the Crimea, the hereditary Tatar nobles (mirza) were considered the equiva­lent of the Russian nobility (dvorianstvo) and therefore they were offered all the privileges of Catherine’s 1785 Charter. To encourage them to function within the Russian imperial order, they were made members of a newly established Crimean Assembly of the Nobility. Crimea’s Muslim clergy, many of whom held high posi­tions in the religious hierarchy of the former khanate, also fared well in the new order and were actually given more privileges than their Orthodox Christian cleri­cal counterparts. Aside from a state salary, Muslim clergy were allowed to keep their vast landholdings (representing an estimated 30 percent of Crimea’s produc­tive land), they could own serfs, and they were exempt from taxation.

While the process of abolishing autonomy and self-rule may have taken somewhat longer in the Hetmanate and in the Crimean Khanate than in Sloboda Ukraine and in Zaporozhia, the result was the same. One decade after another, Sloboda Ukraine (1760s), Zaporozhia (1770s), and finally the Hetmanate and the Crimea (1780s) were transformed with the result that autonomy on Ukrainian territory located within the Russian Empire was eliminated. A system of administrative divi­sion into imperial provinces, each directly responsible to St Petersburg, was put in place instead. By the end of the eighteenth century, the government of Empress Catherine II had succeeded in making all Ukrainian lands under her rule an inte­gral part of the Russian Empire.