What were Russia's imperial policies in Ukraine?
After the disastrous Battle of Poltava, the Russian authorities secured the Hetmanate as part of their state, which Peter I formally proclaimed an empire (thus claiming a great-power status) in 1721, although in reality it had been a multinational empire since at least the mid-sixteenth century.
The tsars never developed a consistent policy toward their national minorities. In the Ukrainian case, however, the fact that they were never considered to be a minority population in the first place was itself a source of oppression.In the early modern period, the ethnicity of the empire's new subjects was not yet an issue for imperial bureaucrats. The “Little Russians” were Orthodox and took an oath of loyalty to the tsar, which was all that mattered. The language they spoke differed from Russian, but with some effort interlocutors could understand the gist of what was being said. Of course, it was the Ukrainians who were expected to learn Russian and not the other way around. Over time, the empire slowly eliminated Ukrainian political and social institutions. The right to conduct autonomous relations with foreign states and to collect taxes was rescinded in 1666, although these measures were initially difficult to enforce. From 1686 the Orthodox Church in the Hetmanate was de facto subordinated to the patriarch of Moscow. After Mazepa's defection, Peter I strictly limited the power of his immediate successor and in 1722 forbade the election of the next hetman. Instead, the tsar created a bureaucratic institution for running the Cossack polity, the Little Russian Collegium, which was staffed with non-Ukrainians. Empress Elizabeth then restored the office of the hetman briefly for her lover's brother, Kyrylo Rozumovsky (1750-1764), but he was more of an eighteenth-century courtier than a Cossack leader. As part of Empress Catherine II's centralizing reforms, the regimental territorial structure of the Hetmanate was replaced by three large provinces in 1782, and Cossack officers were accepted into the Russian nobility, although securing the required paperwork was a long and arduous process.
Shortly before that, the Russian army razed the old Cossack stronghold, the Zaporozhian Host fortress on the lower Dnipro. The Hetmanate was now officially abolished, its lands incorporated directly into the Russian Empire.At approximately the same time, Catherine acquired the Ukrainian lands west of the Dnipro as her share of the recently partitioned Polish state (but not Galicia and two other small adjacent historical regions in the west, which went to the Austrian Habsburgs instead). In the new provinces west of the Dnipro, she began liquidating the Uniate Church, a process that her grandson Nicholas I would complete in 1839. But other than that, assimilating the local Ukrainians was not among the imperial government's concerns. Rather, it was preoccupied with the very substantial Jewish population in these provinces, because historically the Russian Empire had not allowed Jews on its territory. Catherine's solution was to create the “Pale of Settlement” in this region, an area in which Jews could settle but not own land and from which they were barred from leaving, with a few exceptions. Similarly, when Catherine's generals defeated the Ottoman Empire in the 1770s, thereby opening up for settlement the territory of what is now southern Ukraine, she did not pursue resettlement policies favoring Russians. In fact, Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians, German-speaking Mennonites, and other foreigners took the lead in developing the region and its main port, Odesa. Eventually, Ukrainian peasant settlers followed them.
Ethnicity appeared belatedly on the Russian authorities' radar in the 1830s, when Polish nobles rebelled in the provinces west of the Dnipro (as they did in all of the former Polish lands). Suddenly it became important for the tsarist government to demonstrate that this region was “Russian," meaning Little Russian. In a paradoxical turnabout, the learned societies and educational institutions that were established by the imperial authorities produced patriotic Ukrainian intellectuals.
The development of modern Ukrainian literature was spearheaded by a former serf who would become the national bard, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861). By the time of the second Polish rebellion in 1863, the alarmed tsarist officials thought it prudent to adopt measures against the Ukrainian movement as well. They banned educational and religious books in Ukrainian because these could reach the peasants, and in 1876 all publications in Ukrainian were banned. The power of modern nationalism as a mobilizing force was lost on tsarist officials. Instead of teaching Ukrainian peasants (or, indeed, Russian peasants) that they belonged to the Russian ethnic nation, the government preferred to suppress patriotic intellectuals' efforts to enlighten the people.Ukrainian cultural organizations and the press existed legally in the Russian Empire only for a brief period between the 1905 Revolution and the start of World War I. That was just enough time for the educated Ukrainians to reach out to the people, but too short a time to spread the sense of a modern civic Ukrainian identity and link it to the concept of democratic freedoms.